“I don’t give a rip about this guy, and I think it’s a source of national embarrassment that we didn’t tar and feather his dumb a** and move on.”

So said one of our esteemed colleagues here at The Patriot Post, and we couldn’t agree more. Jussie Smollett — or, if you prefer Dave Chappelle’s pronunciation, Juicy Smool-YAY — epitomizes the very worst of woke America, and he and his fellow hate-crime hoaxers should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We have a column to write, though, so we’ll make the best of it.

Let’s start with what we know — what all of us know — courtesy of National Review’s Kyle Smith, who was among the very first journalists to smell a rat in all this: “[Jussie Smollett] was attacked by the world’s least likely lynch mob — a duo of black MAGA-heads who just happened to have bleach and a noose on them in case Jussie Smollett should walk by. At two o'clock in the morning. On an exceptionally cold Chicago night. Then walked away after 30 seconds without robbing their victim or doing him more than superficial harm.”

Oh, and those Trumpers? Those two MAGA men? Their names are Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo. They’re brothers, they’re Nigerian bodybuilders, and they’re acquaintances of Smollett. If they were just waiting around in the wee hours on the coldest night of the year in order to put a whupping on their gay bad actor friend, as Smollett implausibly insists, they certainly did a poor job of it. And the $3,500 check Smollett had written to the brothers as advance payment? That, says Jussie, was merely for nutritional advice, even though the amount was $3,400 more than the brothers had ever received for their nutritional advice. Must have been another one of those Nigerian scams, except this time the scammer was the American.

Smollett testified that this was a homophobic attack. But it turns out that his “attackers” once marched in a gay pride parade and worked at a gay bar. One of them even frequented a gay bathhouse with their “victim.” As Smith rightly asks: “If the brothers were looking to attack a random gay person and had an irrepressible 2 a.m. urge to do so, why didn’t they just go to the gay neighborhood where one of them had worked? And why stay up till 2 a.m. on a bitterly cold night hoping a gay black fellow might come strolling along? If they specifically and only hated Smollett, how could they have been so confident that Smollett was going to come walking into their path that they prepared in advance by carrying a noose and filling a hot-sauce bottle with bleach?”

Yesterday, under cross-examination, prosecutor Daniel Webb asked Smollett, who’s charged with six counts of disorderly conduct and making false reports to police, “Did you think by saying that the people that attacked you were white, it would lend credibility to a fake hate crime?”

To which Smollett replied dismissively, “You’d have to ask someone that did a fake hate crime.”

If Smollett didn’t stage a fake hate crime, that’d be news to CNN’s Don Lemon, who’s getting rightly ripped for having covered his buddy Jussie’s trial without ever mentioning his own central role in tipping off Smollett that Chicago’s finest were already investigating his preposterous story. As the New York Post reports, “Smollett, 39, had told the court that he first knew that police doubted his race-hate attack was real after getting a text message from Lemon, saying that was key in his decision not to hand his phone records over to cops.”

What is it about CNN news anchors behaving unethically by sticking their noses into high-profile criminal investigations?

And what is it about the smugness of our “protected” classes? As conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza notes, “Jussie Smollett’s pathological lying, even after being caught red-handed, tells you a lot about the sense of immunity that he feels, as a ‘twofer’ who is both black and gay, from the normal standards of moral accountability. The Left creates these monsters!” Indeed, they do.

Closing arguments are scheduled for today, and then the case goes to the jury — a jury that must be thoroughly entertained by now. A conviction would seem like a foregone conclusion, but one never knows, especially in a racially charged case involving a black celebrity defendant. After all, if O.J. Simpson can get away with murder, perhaps Jussie Smollett can get away with faking a hate crime.