You have to watch PBS’s “Breaking the Deadlock” next Tuesday (check local listings), because I’m on it. (In the sense of being a participant, not in the sense of then-Gov. Kristi Noem’s slogan for South Dakota’s methamphetamine awareness campaign: “Meth — I’m on it.”) (Yes, that really was the slogan.)

The idea of the show is that people of wildly different political beliefs — e.g., Stephanie Ruhle, Rick Wilson, me — are assigned roles, then presented with an imaginary situation to debate. In my episode, the “situation” is: We pretend that a conservative did something terrible, then we make-believe that the bad thing we’re pretending the conservative did really happened, then we debate, without mentioning any real-world facts.

Coming a few weeks after the public assassination of Charlie Kirk and the giddy celebrations of his murder by a not-insignificant portion of the left, I suppose anything that puts liberals and conservatives in the same room for any reason — doing macrame, dwarf tossing, anything — is a good idea.

But I noticed that the show’s ban on mentioning real-world events is a huge advantage for liberals, allowing them to just make stuff up. If they were smart, Democrats would insist on this “no facts” ground rule all the time.

It does not give away the show’s storyline to say that a key part of the hypothetical was this: At a protest/counter-protest, a symbol liked by conservatives is burned, suggesting that liberal protesters lit the match. Later, we find out that it was actually the son of a conservative activist who started the fire in order to smear liberals.

I submit that this is the exact, 180-degree opposite of any real-life situation. (But it does make PBS’s title for my episode, “Truth Under Fire,” unintentionally perfect.)

Specifically:

1) When a hate crime turns out to be a hoax (always), the odds are 1 million-to-1 that a liberal did it.

Just a few weeks ago, a Brunswick, Virginia, police officer’s bodycam footage had to be released to disprove yet another fake racist incident that had gone viral. Dawn Hilton-Williams had posted an 11-minute video to Facebook, claiming she’d been “bullied by a racist cop, who threatened to pull [her] out of the car.” She said she feared being shot, adding, “this is where we got lynched. This is where we got lynched, even in today’s day.”

The bodycam footage proved that the officer was almost comically polite to this lunatic. On that particular day, she was lying through her teeth.

But liberals don’t read the news, so here are a few of the blockbuster hoax hate crimes even they couldn’t have missed:

– Jussie Smollett’s near-lynching during a polar vortex in a city that went 12% for Donald Trump, by two white guys yelling “This is MAGA country!” after unaccountably recognizing the actor from “Empire,” while they happened to be carrying a noose and bleach past a Subway sandwich shop at 2 a.m.

– NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace being terrified of a piece of string, requiring 15 FBI agents to be dispatched to Talladega, Alabama, where their investigation eventually revealed that the alleged “noose” was, in fact, a garage door pull.

– In fact, any noose showing up, ever, on any college campus.

– The endless stream of black drivers, including a Princeton professor, falsely accusing police officers of racist traffic stops, spurring international outrage, then quietly skulking away when the officers’ dashcams prove they were lying.

– The easily disproved slander, repeated ceaselessly in the media and forming the entire basis for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, that Trump called neo-Nazis “very fine people” — finally confirmed to be a lie by Snopes in 2024.

– Covington Catholic kid Nicholas Sandman’s villainous smirk at noble Indigenous elder (and fake Vietnam vet) Nathan Phillips.

– Muslim women claiming their hijabs were torn off by (in their telling, handsome and muscular) Trump supporters after the 2016 election.

– The Duke lacrosse fake gang-rape case.

– A fraternity’s brutal gang rape of “Jackie,” who was escorted to the University of Virginia frat house by her imaginary boyfriend, “Haven Monahan.”

– Mattress Girl, Emma Sulkowicz, accusing a fellow Columbia University student of a violent rape, garnering fame and adulation, including a front-page interview in The New York Times and an invitation to the State of the Union address from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. After the alleged rapist had been dragged through the mud for three years, Columbia announced that it had cleared him of the rape and settled his lawsuit.

The only fake hate crime concocted by a conservative that I can remember was back in 2008, when a lowly John McCain volunteer claimed to have been attacked by two black Obama supporters in Pittsburgh. But instead of months of soul-searching and awareness-raising, the fantasist confessed within two days.

That’s one. Assuming you can think of another, we’re looking for a conservative’s hoax hate crime that was treated with the same deadly seriousness as Smollett’s — by the likes of former Vice President Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Gillibrand (duh), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as a variety of celebrities, like Rob Reiner and Olivia Munn, among many others.

2) If something is set on fire at a protest, the odds are 1,000-to-1 that a liberal did it. (Also the vandalism and looting.) For some reason, they enjoy pointlessly destroying stuff.

Even when we almost lost our democracy on Jan. 6 in the most violent attack EVER in our nation’s history, nothing was burned. If any part of our historic Capitol had been trashed, I would have been the first one calling for the death penalty, but the protesters didn’t lay a finger on the portraits, busts, statues or museum-quality furniture. (Cut to: This week, liberal activists protesting climate change or something throwing red paint on an 1892 mural of Christopher Columbus in Madrid.)

In fact, Democrats had to invent a claim about the Jan. 6 protesters leaving feces on the floor — an act that was so shocking, so repulsive, so indicative of the reptilian nature of Trump supporters … that no one bothered to take a picture.

You will recall (unless you’re on “Breaking the Deadlock,” where recalling facts is prohibited) that this unrivaled “attack on our democracy” came after a year of BLM “peaceful protests” that did $2 billion in property damage and killed dozens, beginning in Minneapolis where, in a matter of days, liberals torched 164 buildings, including a police precinct that was burned to the ground.

Come to think of it, merely burning a symbol probably would be a “peaceful protest” for liberals.

But in PBS’s format, we were supposed to take seriously the idea that a conservative faked a hate crime that involved burning a revered symbol.

With the Democrats floundering, PBS may have hit on a perfect strategy. Liberals would win a lot more debates if we could all just abide by the simple, commonsense guideline that the entire proceedings be conducted in the absence of anything remotely resembling a fact.

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