Am I the only one out there seeing it? Because it seems as if I am.

In all his years in auto racing, NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace said Tuesday night, he has never seen anything like what he described as a “straight-up noose” that was being used as a door pull in the garage he was assigned last week at Talladega Speedway in Alabama.

“I’ve been racing all of my life,” Wallace told CNN’s Don Lemon. “We’ve raced out of hundreds of garages that never had garage pulls like that. So people that want to call it a garage pull and put out all the videos and photos of knots being as their evidence, go ahead, but from the evidence that we have – and I have – it’s a straight-up noose.”

No reason it couldn’t be both, of course: a little in-joke arranged by crews working in one of the most hazardous of sports-entertainment endeavors. Gallows humor, shall we say. But when a hopelessly infantalized ethnic minority has had its already-too-sensitive prejudice-radar dialed up way past eleven—stuck there for decades by a political party intent on manipulating them for its own malignant purposes—any and every noose, any and everywhere, can be perceived as but one thing: a direct, personal threat.

Sorry, “Bubba,” but I’m afraid you just don’t really matter that much. To anybody.

He said he hadn’t seen the noose himself but had seen photos of it.

Prior to the FBI’s findings, fellow NASCAR drivers participated Monday in a show of support for Wallace, a 26-year-old native of Alabama who is the only African-American full-time driver on the NASCAR circuit.

Wallace told Lemon he found out about the noose’s presence in his garage Sunday, when NASCAR President Steve Phelps told him about it.

“The look that he had on his face alerted me in a way that I’ll never forget,” he said.

So here’s what nobody else seems to be getting: the whole thing—entire, end to end, lock stock and barrel, to emphatically include the less-than-stellar career of a decidedly mediocre competitor cleverly christened “Bubba Wallace,” is nothing more than a calculated PR stunt intended to glom some badly needed attention for a grossly mismanaged sports establishment that’s been circling the drain for years.

Think about it: the Wallace name has been legend in NASCAR circles for many years. And really, now: “Bubba”? Too cute by way more than half, particularly for a “black” guy who isn’t actually black at all but mulatto, with a white father and wife both. Makes me wonder what this “Bubba” person’s actual name might be, before he was remanufactured as some kind of savior for a declining business that’s been seeking to distance itself from its traditional base of support for quite a while now.

NOOSCAR has struggled badly in recent years; their attempt to shift stock-car racing’s focus northward to appeal to a new, more upscale demographic fell flat on its face, as did the lavishly-expensive but almost entirely ignored NASCAR museum in downtown Charlotte. Then this half-assed “controversy” crops up and suddenly all anybody can talk about is NASCAR, for days on end. It stinks as bad as the coronavirus shamdemic, and for all the same reasons. They’re both fake, and have both been used for ends that aren’t immediately obvious.

In the case of NOOSCAR-gate, coming right on the heels of nationwide angst over black this, black that, blackity-black-black-black, it’s hard to see how the timing could’ve been more perfect. Yeah, “Bubba”—a second- or third-rate driver whose career trajectory closely resembles that of another mouthy also-ran, Colin Kopperdink—might suffer some from the fallout of this embarrassing episode, sure. Certainly his name will forever be mud with true NASCAR diehards, assuming any are left after being given the back of the racing establishment’s hand for so long.

But so what? For the bigwigs at NOOSCAR, it’s extremely difficult to see a downside: they get to piously denounce all those icky, beer-swilling rednecks and their disgusting Rebel flags, suck up to their anticipated new audience of Nee-grows and the white SJWs who take a knee for them, and establish their PC bona-fides without breaking a real sweat. For that, they’ll gladly throw a nonentity like “Bubba” onto the pyre, strike a match, and send his ass floating off downriver.

Nice try and all, but it’s not going to work. And that serves ’em right, far as I’m concerned.

Misdirection update! There IS a fairly serious scandal here, right enough. As is nearly always the case, though, it ain’t the one TPTB wish to direct your attention towards.

Fifteen FBI special agents? The government sent fifteen people to investigate a rope “fashioned like a noose” in a garage. What were they all doing? I imagine it takes one guy to look at the rope and observe that it is attached to the door. Perhaps one other guy to go check the security tapes. What task are the other thirteen performing? Did they need a separate person to Google “what is a noose”? Did they have someone dusting for finger prints or taking DNA samples? I simply can’t imagine how fifteen federal agents managed to occupy themselves with a garage door for two days.

This would be almost funny if not for the fact that there is something else of a rather more pressing nature they could be doing. As we speak, violent insurrections are wreaking havoc across the country. Buildings are being burned, police are attacked, statues toppled, innocent bystanders assaulted, whole city blocks occupied. And behind this chaos lies well funded organizations like Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Could those fifteen agents not have been sent to investigate this coordinated attempt to undermine law and order? Apparently not. As it stands right now, not much is being done about this anarchy. The anarchists are largely being allowed to commit crimes, even federal crimes, and those backing and funding and encouraging them are permitted to continue in those efforts unmolested. Instead, our government is committing significant resources to fighting the scourge of racist garage doors.

As a nation, we have descended into full on parody. Things seem like they can’t possibly get any dumber or more outrageous. But then again, tomorrow is a new day.

That’s the REALLY scary part.