Do you, or do you not believe this event happened as described?

Rep. Barbara Lee: “I was walking to the Capitol and a man stopped me, a white guy, and told me I could not get into the members’ elevator…He told me it was for members only. I said, 'Sir, I’m a member of Congress' and showed him my pin. And he said, 'Whose pin did you steal?'" pic.twitter.com/RGhOpfTMjM

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) January 19, 2024

If you believe the event happened as described, you are an idiot.

No Capitol Security officer would treat even a potential Member of Congress in this manner, and if they did so, they would be fired on the spot. Members of Congress are given deference to the extent that they don’t even have to go through security, and security officers are encouraged to memorize the faces of members for this reason.

Further, if a security pin were stolen it would be reported quickly for this reason–they are meaningless if there are lost ones in the wild. And if the Security guy thought it was stolen he would have detained her.

Blah blah blah. You can come up with a million reasons not to believe that this happened, but two stand out: 1) it is inconceivable that such an event happened and the American public didn’t hear about it, especially from Barbara Lee, who is a race-baiter extraordinaire; and 2), most examples of shocking racial incidents turn out to be hoaxes. It is almost axiomatic these days.

That’s not to say that racism has disappeared in America, or anywhere else for that matter. People are tribal by nature, and race is one of many things that can trigger a negative tribal reaction, just as it can trigger an unreasonable positive reaction in some people. The celebration of “people of color” these days as some special group is just as absurd as thinking that having less melanin in your skin makes you special.

But people are people. In my family, the prejudice is aimed more at Southerners than racial groups–my father freely admits, now that I have pounded him for it, that he has an instinctive bias against Southerners. A lot of Black people distrust Whites, and vice-versa. And all reasonable people are prejudiced against the French.

But events like the one Barbara Lee described don’t happen in modern America. Overt racism is so taboo that, generally speaking, you can only exhibit it against White people. You can hate Whites for being Whites all you want, but otherwise, you are socially punished (and legally, often) for disparaging others’ races.

This is not secret knowledge. It pervades our society, and in an environment where a door pull can become a noose at the whim of a Black man, no Capitol Police officer is going to insult a Black congresswoman like that.

In the annals of things that never happened, this is the one that happened the least.

Verdict: she is a bald-faced liar.