On October 25,
1994, a frantic young South Carolina mother named Susan Smith told police that
her car had been carjacked by a black man who drove away with her two boys,
aged three years old and 14 months. For nine days, with a nationwide search
underway, she made tearful pleas on television for their safe return. “I wanna
say to my babies,” she sobbed with her distraught husband by her side, “your mama
loves you so much.” Finally her story unraveled and she confessed to intentionally
sending her Mazda into a nearby lake with her two young sons strapped inside.
Apart from the unconscionable
drowning of her own helpless children, Susan Smith’s story contained a racial
dimension that tore at the nation’s social fabric: her false accusation that a
black man had victimized a young white mother and murdered her innocent babies.
It was an ugly but shrewd lie that exploited bigotry for sympathy in order to
conceal her own evil.
On January 29,
2019, Jussie Smollett, a 36-year-old, gay black actor on the Fox drama series Empire,
told police he had been assaulted outside his apartment building at 2 a.m. on a
snowy Chicago night by two men in ski masks who identified him as the Empire
actor, hurled racial and anti-gay slurs at him, draped a makeshift noose around
his neck, and tossed some bleach on him before disappearing. TMZ
reported that sources claimed the attackers had boasted to Smollett, “This is
MAGA country”; he confirmed this in a follow-up interview with the police.
The story
instantly made big news, but anyone not consumed by hatred for President Trump
and his supporters immediately suspected a hoax because Smollett’s narrative
lacked any credibility whatsoever. A pair of Trump supporters were walking the icy
streets of Chicago at 2 a.m. with a noose and bleach (which inexplicably did
not freeze in the literally sub-zero weather) when they recognized a
little-known (to anyone but Empire fans) actor from a cable show that no
white supremacist would watch, assaulted him without causing any more physical
damage than a scratch on his cheek but managed to get a noose around his neck, and
then made sure to announce that “This is MAGA country”? Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago
is “Make America Great Again” country? Who knew?
The Progressive media,
also predictably, rushed to judgment as well because that’s what they do when they
see an opportunity to demonize Trump and/or his supporters (recall the hysterics
over the Covington Catholic high school students?). ABC’s Good Morning America granted Smollett the kind of lengthy sit-down
interview usually reserved for presidents (more on that below). Joshua Rivera at GQ,
ostensibly a men’s style magazine but actually a leftist propaganda rag, race-baited
that “Whiteness in 21st century America has an endgame,” and that Smollett’s
attack proved “racist homophobes [are] stalking the streets of your
city, who want you to know that they could lynch you if they really wanted to,
and maybe get away with it too.” Kevin Fallon, a senior
entertainment reporter for the Daily Beast, tweeted, “People in MAGA hats
recognized and then beat and poured bleach on Jussie Smollett, calling him that
‘faggot’ from Empire. Anyone who thinks supporting You Know Who isn’t
tantamount to providing artillery for weaponized bigotry needs to take a hard
look in the mirror.” In light of new developments, it looks like Fallon is the
one who needs to take a hard look in the mirror – but he won’t. Neither will
Rivera or ABC or anyone else who wasted no time slamming white conservatives.
Hollywood leftists,
of course, had to chime in because they’re all virtue-signaling posturers who live
in walled estates and travel with armed bodyguards. Jussie’s co-star Grace Byers
wrote that “hatred, inequality, racism and discrimination continue to course
through our country's veins.” Actor Nico Tortorella said the “red hat is the
white hood. No ifs ands or buts. If you wear it, you attacked Jussie.” Another purported
entertainer who is light-years away from being a household name, Billy Eichner,
tweeted, “I want Trump and all MAGA lunatics to burn in Hell.” The
insufferable, anti-Christian bigot/actress Ellen Page declared tearfully on
Stephen Colbert’s late night talk show that Vice President Mike Pence was
somehow to blame. And on and on. Too many celebrities-in-their-own-minds to
count.
Smollett, who is
also a singer, went on to perform at the Troubadour in Los Angeles only a few
nights after the incident, where he greeted the crowd by saying he felt
compelled to perform because he refused to “let the m*th*rf*ck*ers win.” So
brave. The crowd roared in support.
He went on to participate
in a (seemingly) emotional Good Morning America interview with Robin Roberts,
who asked why he thought he was targeted. Smollett replied, “I come
really, really hard against 45 [President Trump]. I come really, really hard
against his administration, and I don’t hold my tongue.” Except when it comes to telling the truth,
apparently. He also expressed frustration at not being believed. “It feels like
if I had said it was a Muslim or a Mexican or someone black I feel like the
doubters would have supported me a lot much more,” he told Roberts. “And that
says a lot about the place where we are as a country right now.”
Actually, what
says a lot about the country right now is that the leftist media uncritically
accepts and disseminates reports of hate crimes that time and again prove to be
hoaxes perpetrated to stoke racial hatred of white conservatives. When exposed,
the hoaxers are rarely taken to task, and the media simply moves on to the next
fake incident that supports The Narrative. It says a lot about the country
right now that long before the Smollett investigation was complete, and on the
basis of a story that had less credibility than what I tell my kids about the
tooth fairy, a professed Trump-hater can get an interview on network television,
rally the national support of celebrities and power-mad leftist politicos, and become
the face of identity politics resistance to “hate.”
No Trump
supporters victimized by leftist Antifa thugs – truly victimized, with
actual evidence such as video footage captured in broad daylight – have ever
secured an interview with Robin Roberts on GMA and asked why they
believe they were targeted. (Yes, Nicholas Sandmann, the teenager at the
center of the Covington controversy, was interviewed on Today by Savannah Guthrie, but the interview’s angle was that
Sandmann was guilty. “Do you feel from this experience that you owe anybody an
apology?” Guthrie prodded. “Do you see your own fault in any way?” This would
never be asked of someone from one of the left’s Official Victim Categories.)
Police had initially
found a grainy surveillance camera image of two persons of interest but no
footage of Smollett being attacked. Neither he nor his manager would allow authorities
to examine their phones – potentially a critical source of evidence because the
two were reportedly in mid-conversation with each other when the attack
occurred. The manager said he actually heard the attack, including the phrase “MAGA
country” and a racial slur. Eventually Smollett turned over phone records too heavily
redacted to be of any assistance in the investigation.
Then Smollett’s
story began to unravel. On February 13, police raided the home of the two
persons of interest in the surveillance photo. Turns out they weren’t white Trumpsters
who get their kicks from sub-zero lynchings, but Nigerian bodybuilders and
brothers who, curiously, both know Smollett. One has acted as an extra on Empire.
Police found bleach in the residence and evidence that the rope found around
Smollett’s neck was purchased at a nearby hardware store. The two men had left
the country for Nigeria the day after the incident and were arrested after
arriving on a return flight February 13. Sources
say that the two are cooperating fully with police and admitted to
being paid $3,500 by Smollett to stage the attack before leaving for Nigeria
and promised an additional $500 upon their return. As for Smollett, he has hired
a criminal defense attorney team.
The whole story
has yet to be pieced together. As of this writing, Smollett has neither
confessed nor been found guilty of anything. Indeed, he claimed
through an attorneys’ statement that he is “angered” and “devastated” by
insinuations that he orchestrated the incident. If further investigation confirms that the
actor was indeed assaulted by two white, racist Trump supporters, then I will
do what practically no one in the mainstream media or the entertainment
industry who accepted his story unquestioningly is doing now: publicly
apologize. But at this moment, everything points to Smollett having concocted a
hate crime, weaponized it in service to the left’s hateful ideology, and milked
it for nationwide sympathy and possibly a career boost (a rumor has circulated
that Smollett was about to be written off his show).
How will all those
who rushed to condemn white people, Trump supporters, Mike Pence, America in
general, etc. respond if and when Jussie Smollett proves to have staged the
attack? Good Morning America and the rest of the mainstream media
won’t follow up with an apology. Neither will any of the Democrat politicians
who exploited it. Neither will any of the holier-than-thou moral paragons in
the cesspool of decadence that is Hollywood. They will find a way to spin the narrative.
They will claim that being morally right supersedes being factually correct (as
if the two are not inextricably linked), and say that Smollett’s tale, while
perhaps not entirely truthful in a few of its details, sparked a necessary conversation
in this country about our corrosive legacy of slavery, about the rising white cisgender
supremacism in the country, blah blah blah. They will not take responsibility,
much less question their own ideological fundamentalism.
Unlike Susan
Smith, Jussie Smollett didn’t commit a monstrous crime. But like Susan Smith’s
lie, Jussie Smollett’s ratcheted up racial tensions in America and drove the
wedge deeper between the political left and right. In addition to wasting police
resources that could have gone toward legitimate criminal investigations in
crime-rotted Chicago, Smollett has betrayed the minority communities that he
supposedly championed. He has made things more difficult for actual victims of
bigotry. And he has fueled the ongoing demonization of white conservatives in
America as the fount of all racism, oppression, and hatred. That’s the real
hate crime here.
But this isn’t all
on Smollett; Hollywood, the news media, and Democrat Party bigwigs were all
complicit. They weren’t taken in by him, because to them it was irrelevant whether
his claims were true or not. All that mattered, and all that will matter to
them henceforth, was to keep on the offensive, to keep up the pressure on evil President
Trump and white America.
* Thanks to
Quillete editor Andy
Ngo for collating
these responses and many more from figures who rushed to judgment about the
purported assault.
From FrontPage Mag, 2/17/2019
