What Jussie Smollett Really Teaches Us
The "Empire" Actor's Guilty Verdict Is Just One of An Endless Cascade of Leftist Gaslighting and Projection. Their Relationship to the Truth is Socially Distant
Many people have already moved on from the celebrated trial of “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett for staging a 2 a.m. attack on himself on a frigid Chicago night in 2019. You know the story. He was found guilty by a unanimous vote of a 12-person jury. Chicago Police diverted many resources - time, money, and people - to investigate his alleged attack. Chicago has other, more pressing issues.
And we shouldn’t let go of it or similar ones that preceded it. They’re a package. Stick with me here.
Confession: I hadn’t heard of “Empire” or Jussie before the “attack.”
As a former newspaper reporter and editor, I was immediately suspicious of Smollett’s claim. Others were, too, but dared not speak up about it. Racist, you know, or homophobic for bonus points (Smollett is gay). But it was too convenient not to be used by a cavalcade of leading Democratic partisans looking to drive a narrative, not just about Donald Trump but his deplorable, MAGA-hat-wearing supporters. Sure, the MAGA crowd loves to cruise frigid downtown Chicago streets at night, looking for gay black actors to accost with bleach and nooses while the poor actor was just out for a late-night Subway sandwich (I didn’t know any Subway restaurants were open at 2 a.m.).
You remember the reactions, all from the usual suspects. Twitter is sometimes helpful. Never let a crisis go to waste, even a manufactured one.
John Kass, until recently, was a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, the primary reason I subscribed digitally to the regional media outlet. His views mirror my own.
Forgive me, but I’d rather not shut up about Jussie right now. Instead, I think we should thank him. Because by telling and retelling his lies in court, by perjuring himself before the jury and the judge, he’s actually done America a great service.
He exposes he fetid alchemy between the dying corporate legacy media and elite Democrats who used his mewing to stoke racial division for votes. These are the high priests of the new religion, and it sanctifies victimization for profit and power.
They falsely seized on Kyle Rittenhouse as a racist (he wasn’t) and Nicholas Sandman as a racist (he wasn’t) and many others. Without stoking racial strife, how would they motivate their voters?
Are there horrible people among us who are homophobes and racists? Yes, of course. Should they be punished if they violate another’s rights? Yes, of course.
Should the politicians and media that stoked this have known better than to buy his story and regurgitate it, screaming on media platform after media platform with their hair on fire? A reasonable person might think so.
But they didn’t care if they regurgitated a lie. They wanted to use Smollett. They didn’t care if he was lying. They weren’t worried about the damage it could cause, whether his fantastic story may have sparked racial violence in Chicago and elsewhere across the country.
They had their politics to worry about. They wanted outrage. They wanted votes. So, they used him. And he used them.
That isn’t just the story of Jussie Smollett. His fraud is one of many such instances of politically-motivated gaslighting seized by propagandists on The Left for several years now, with very little media pushback. Perhaps you’ll remember these fine folks.
All of these people either concocted an unbelievable story or staged a photo that partisans used to gaslight Americans with narratives that those tethered to reality always questioned. Much of the major media was happy to parrot it, and gullible sheep bought it all. At least Jussie was found guilty of his crimes and will soon be sentenced for it. We’ll see about Alec Baldwin’s. That investigation is ongoing. The truth does, eventually, get its boots on.
The real victims of Smollett’s fakery are the real victims of actual hate crimes, like Ahmaud Abery, as were victims of sexual assaults from Christine Blasey Ford’s uncorroborated Senate testimony against now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Examples are piling up. While rare, they tragically happen. Fortunately, as with the Smollett and Rittenhouse juries, justice was served in Arbery’s senseless murder, despite efforts at jury intimidation in the case of Rittenhouse’s trial. The Left stops at nothing.
The latest gaslighting attempt comes courtesy of The Atlantic. This lefty magazine infamously hired and fired conservative writer Kevin Williamson within two weeks because he was, well, conservative. Sample this turgid morsel for yourself. Have Pepto Bismol handy:
For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.
Any Republican might benefit from these machinations, but let’s not pretend there’s any suspense. Unless biology intercedes, Donald Trump will seek and win the Republican nomination for president in 2024. The party is in his thrall. No opponent can break it and few will try. Neither will a setback outside politics—indictment, say, or a disastrous turn in business—prevent Trump from running. If anything, it will redouble his will to power.
This is also a form of projection, gaslighting’s cousin. Like satire, projection presents a veneer of truth stuffed with a lie. Biden won the 2020 election. Donald Trump may run in 2024. But the massive push to institute mail voting and fund largely Democratic communities with private cash (Zuck Bucks) in 2020 under the guise of a heavily politicized pandemic, all the while keeping voters rolls polluted with thousands of dead and relocated voters, is undeniable. It undermined confidence in our elections. Polls show that, too, and it began in 2004 and repeated in 2016 when Democrats claimed elections were stolen.
Voters are quite aware of ballots, often voted by mail, suddenly appearing in wee morning hours or subsequent recounts. It happened in a Minnesota US Senate race in 2008 when just enough ballots from Democratic precincts were discovered in the trunk of a car and elsewhere to overturn the election-day results with a big assist from the Democratic Secretary of State. It didn’t happen in Virginia last month because early and absentee ballots were counted prior to election day votes, reducing the potential for fraud with magically late-arriving mail ballots from questionable sources.
How? Because as the “theory” goes, sleazy operatives wait to see how many votes are needed from the results of election day voting. Then, they “pad” the results with phony mail or absentee ballots. Allowing early and mail votes to be counted first helps minimize potential fraud. Fraudsters can’t manufacture votes that can’t be counted. Kudos to Virginia election officials. Other states like Pennsylvania and Michigan should take note.
You don’t think this happens?
Now, many Democrats claim Trump and Republicans want to “steal” an election through a “coup.” I know that Democrats are starting to panic over the specter of an electoral bloodbath in the 2022 midterms, but really? New election integrity laws in Georgia and Texas have better ballot access than Joe Biden’s home of Delaware or New York. Among others.
What’s their evidence for a GOP “steal” in 2024? Polls about 2020 election integrity and January 6th a the US Capitol, of course, which was a “rehearsal.” Some evidence. Perry Mason, call your office.
“As we near the anniversary of January 6th, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal,” Atlantic writer Barton Gellman feverishly opines.
Meanwhile, the public could not view the late Senator Bob Dole lying in state last week because the US Capitol has remained closed to the public for almost two years. And that’s after many months of up to 25,000 National Guard troops, concertina wire, and fencing that made the US Capitol grounds resemble Baghdad’s “green zone.” The Washington Post’s Paul Kane noted last week:
On Wednesday night, more than 15,000 fans crowded into Capital One Arena to watch the Washington Wizards secure another early-season victory. On Thursday night, a few thousand concertgoers packed the Anthem to listen to the 80-year-old legend Bob Dylan perform.
And on Sunday evening, President Biden plans to join hundreds of attendees at the annual Kennedy Center Honors to pay tribute to a handful of cultural legends.
Yet Monday and Tuesday, when the Senate and House return for legislative business, respectively, the general public will be forbidden from the galleries above to watch America’s democracy in motion.
Almost 21 months into the coronavirus pandemic, the Capitol remains sealed off from the general public. Even as public venues around Washington and across the nation have moved into a new normal with new safety measures, no one is sure when the public will be back inside the Capitol.
No one knows when the people’s House will be returned to the people.
We still don’t have the whole story of the January 6th violence at the Capitol, but rest assured, people are being punished. Civil rights are apparently taking a back seat. It was terrible, but it is obviously used to drive another narrative that too many Democrats won’t give up. See The Atlantic story for evidence. And many are happy to parrot the Atlantic’s narrative.
If you think that’s a doozy, get a load of this insanity from two-term former US Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO).
Allow me to borrow a phrase from British Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer, who brilliantly ascribed it to Prime Minister Boris Johnson regarding his latest scandal.
The American Left’s relationship to the truth is socially distant. And it looks to stay that way.