I would encourage you to think about that when you consider how to respond to the sad case of Jussie Smollett.

It’s hard to believe but I’m told that faking cancer is actually not that uncommon. People do it, I suppose, for attention and sympathy and as a means to receive the support in their lives that they are not receiving. As such I’m inclined to be sympathetic to these people, without fully exonerating them. Here’s what I don’t do, and what I surely hope you wouldn’t do: I don’t respond to these rare cases by letting them change my fundamental attitude towards cancer patients. I don’t start treating people who say they have cancer with suspicion. I don’t make sweeping claims about the nature of those who say they have cancer. I don’t withhold sympathy until I “get all the facts” and I don’t begin from a position of total neutrality. I begin from a position of sympathy and listening regardless of the fact that some people fake cancer. If a moment arises when my credulousness is revealed to be gullibility, then I can live with that. Because you’d have to be a sociopath to assume deception when you learn someone has cancer. It is far worse to live as someone who is too suspicious of cancer patients than it is to live as one who’s not suspicious enough.

I would, however, pay attention when I learn that someone has faked cancer. I would not forget that in the future. I would not make the mistake of thinking that “believe cancer patients” is the same as “believe all claims that someone has cancer.” And if enough evidence arose that a particular claim of having cancer was phony I would be willing to say so publicly.

As with cancer, so with hate crimes.

I am not at all interested in the legal or moral culpability of Jussie Smollett. But I am interested in the way that someone could be brought to the point where he would try to commit this kind of deception. There are many broken people out there. I should know; I’m one of them. And broken people do broken things. Unpredictable things. Things that seem to have no rational justification. Things that sometimes cut against the narratives of social justice. Whenever you say, “no one would ever do X,” you are wrong, regardless of what X is. Because we’re a fucked up species. That’s human life.

Current progressive mores do not permit a frank discussion of this brokenness. They insist that, if a person making a claim occupies a particular sociopolitical niche, we must assume the best of them in all ways, including in their rationality. This dictate ends up hurting deluded people themselves. Someone was so badly broken that she falsely accused Conor Oberst of rape. If you looked into it a little bit you could easily see that this was a person who was suffering, and that this suffering was causing her to act in an erratic way. But rather than try to understand this person in the fullness of her humanity, which necessarily includes human irrationality and human deception and human desperation, she was simply capital-B Believed. She was not helped, organically and in sympathy to what she actually needed as a human. Instead her story was taken from her and used to advance an agenda. She was instrumentalized. And when her deception came out, and we were able to fully understand her brokenness, she was swiftly abandoned by the self-same people who had championed her story. Her brokenness no longer served the interests of a cause.

We live in a world that’s more sympathetic to those with mental illness than ever before, and yet there remains constant insensitivity and misunderstanding about the subject. Some of the people who have said the absolute worst, most unenlightened and bigoted things to and about me and my illness have been the kind of people to drop the word “ableist” like a comma. Their sympathy is only for those whose mental illness fits in a certain idealized conception, where the mentally ill are beautiful dreamers or raving in a sanitarium. That’s what happens when you weaponize believing in people; you care about their suffering only when it serves some greater philosophy. My disease has never been photogenic enough.

One last thing. There’s this very bad movie that I love called Incognito. The movie’s about a master art forger. He gets commissioned to make a fake Rembrandt. When he’s done with an exquisite forgery, his patrons demand that he sign it, so that they can be sure of selling it as a lost Rembrandt for millions. The forger resists. Rembrandt did not sign all of his work; to sign this one would be too perfect, too pat, to on-the-nose. But they insist. And sure enough, one of the experts called to authenticate the “Rembrandt” spots it as a forgery, precisely because of the signature. Because it was just a little too much.

“You’re in MAGA country” is signing the Rembrandt.