If you've ever wished Curt Schilling would just delete his Twitter account, today is your lucky day.
The former Red Sox pitcher apparently did just that Wednesday morning, as his account no longer exists. It's unclear exactly what the last straw was, but one of his reported final tweets foolishly compared the Bubba Wallace situation to that of Jussie Smollett.
According to Newsweek, Schilling retweeted a tweet from ESPN's SportsCenter account about the FBI finding that NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace was not the victim of a federal crime and added the following commentary:
"So we have @JussieSmollett v 2.0? Where is the media recanting their idiocy?"
In a follow-up tweet, Schilling added: "It was all a lie."
On Sunday, a rope that was fashioned like a noose was found in the Talladega Superspeedway garage of Wallace, the only full-time black driver in NASCAR. The FBI investigated the incident and found that the noose was actually a garage door pull rope that had been there since at least October and that "no federal crime was committed."
Wallace never saw the rope himself, nor was he the one who reported it or went public with it. It was discovered by a crew member, who then reported it to NASCAR. NASCAR alerted the FBI and released the first statement confirming the incident.
Smollett is an actor who was indicted in Feb. 2019 for staging a fake hate crime in Chicago following an incident in which he said he was attacked by two men who used racist and homophobic slurs, said "This is MAGA country," and put a noose around his neck.
The implication in comparing the Wallace incident to Smollett is that this, too, was a staged hoax. Obviously it wasn't, as the FBI's investigation makes clear. The rope, which the FBI itself called a "noose," was there long before Wallace and his team were, so it's clear they didn't plant it there.
A misunderstanding, which is what this incident seems to be, is much different than a staged hoax.
Schilling's tweet was met with swift backlash and his account was gone a short time later. A post on his Facebook page suggests he has moved to another social media platform called Parler, which is known as a haven for Donald Trump supporters with little moderation and a high tolerance for offensive posts.
Schilling, of course, is no stranger to foolish social media posts. In 2015, ESPN suspended him after he shared a meme that drew inaccurate parallels between Muslims and Nazi Germany. Then in 2016, the network fired him following an anti-transgender post he shared on Facebook.
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