And you thought we were finished with Pride Month.

One of the defining characteristics of the Rainbow Mafia is narcissism, and it takes many forms.

One of those forms, which we might call the “Celebrate Us or Else!” form, is the reason why we’ve been bullied into setting aside June as Pride Month in addition to having set aside October as LGBTQ History Month. Any hint of a suggestion that just maybe possibly perhaps we might be overdoing it just a bit carries with it the risk of being labeled a homophobe.

Another of those forms, outrageous behavior, is embodied in the antics of one Dylan Mulvaney and has so far cost Anheuser-Busch nearly $27 billion in market cap and will likely cost its U.S. CEO, Brendan Whitworth, his job, if for nothing else than having failed to manfully own up to the company’s disastrous decision to trot out a transgender brand ambassador to a red-blooded American male customer base that finds him repulsive.

Still another form might be called persecution or victimitis, and one of its primary manifestations are the stories, occasionally real but mostly imaginary, of violence being done to members of the Roy G Biv community. Indeed, what better way to attract attention to oneself than by cooking up a story about having been victimized by homophobic bigots?

The ultimate example of this, of course, is that of the gay racial arsonist known as Jussie Smollett, or Juicy Smoolyay, as comedian Dave Chappelle refers to him in this most tear-jerkingly funny (albeit crude) takedown. Thankfully, this guy was ultimately mugged by reality, but not before having smeared Trump supporters and white males generally. What we have in this case is a twofer: Smollett is not only black but gay. If only he’d been a lesbian, he’d have hit the trifecta of victimhood. Regardless, it’s interesting to note that most of us saw the Smollett hoax as a fake white-on-black crime rather than a fake straight-on-gay crime, and perhaps this reveals one of the roots of this narcissistic pathology: a feeling of inferiority, or at least of insufficient attention-getting.

A recent example of Rainbow-induced fake-hate-crimery took place in San Diego, where, as the Police Tribune reports, “Investigators have determined that a gay man who had claimed to be set on fire by people yelling gay slurs on a San Diego sidewalk last month was actually set ablaze by a pregnant woman he was attacking.” The Tribune continues:

Scott Rowin, 39, told police and media that he was walking home just after 8 p.m. on June 12 when he heard people yelling anti-gay slurs he believed were directed at him, KGTV reported.

Rowin claimed to have yelled back at his harassers and then they threw some kind of liquid on him. … “Immediately after that, I went up like coals on a barbecue,” Rowin said in an interview as he showcased the bandages covering his badly-burned torso.

The truth, though, was revealed by an inconvenient video that captured the incident. “The video,” said the San Diego PD, “shows the initial physical assault by the man on the pregnant woman and the subsequent use of fire as a weapon by the pregnant woman on the man.”

Intrepid indy journalist Andy Ngo, himself a gay man, sums it up: “HATE HOAX EXPOSED: Antifa, leftists and media have been spreading claims that a gay San Diego man was set on fire by homophobes. Scott Rowin says he was called a f****t by two men before being set aflame in Hillcrest, San Diego’s gay neighborhood.”

According to KGTV, charges have yet to be brought against Rowin, and that’s bad news. A failure to hold this guy accountable will only encourage more of this poisonous behavior. Hate crime hoaxers deserve the stocks. They deserve widespread public ridicule. They deserve to be pelted with rotten fruit by Major League pitchers. Fake hate crimes hurt real victims because they inoculate the rest of us against believing them on the relatively rare instances when they really do occur.

Yet these narcissistic hoaxers persist. Why? To put it in economic terms, they do so because the demand for hate crimes far outstrips the actual supply.

And that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

Updated with additional analysis of this fake hate crime and its aftermath.