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What Jussie Smollett Really Teaches Us
The American Left is socially distanced from the truth.
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.
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 subscribe 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 Americans 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 and will be punished for his indiscretion. 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 jury, justice was served in Arbery’s senseless murder.
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. Read this tasty morsel for yourself.
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 close relative. Like satire, projection presents a veneer of truth stuffed with a lie. Biden won the 2020 election. Donald Trump likely 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 too aware of ballots, often voted by mail, suddenly appearing in early morning hours or 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 result, 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, eliminating the potential for fraud with magically late-arriving mail ballots from questionable sources. Allowing early and mail votes to be counted first helps minimize potential fraud. Kudos to Virginia election officials.
And 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? Polls about 2020 election integrity and January 6th a the US Capitol, of course, which was a “rehearsal.”
“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). 
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Great post!
Actually, he hasn’t, yet. Unless you’ve heard of a sentencing that I missed.
I obviously wasn’t talking about the sentencing. He was found guilty on 5 of 6 counts. That qualifies as punishment, obviously with the consequences to follow (we hope).
Hopefully. But if he just gets probation and/or a fine, that falls short of punishment in my book. Especially considering what he did, and apparently why. As has been noted on other posts/threads, what he did is a worse “hate crime” than most others. Especially those which the Left cries about that really aren’t. “Nooses” at NASCAR, etc.
Kelly D Johnston:
The American Left is socially distanced from the truth.
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 forgot the Subway sandwich. Apparently that was the first clue that something wasn’t on the up and up. The cops figured that no one manages to survive a mugging and hang on to their late nite snack.
Especially by black people, it seems. This was covered pretty well on Gutfeld, last Friday.
He was a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. He left earlier this year. Can now be found here.
Truth is not hate. But the Left hates the truth.
To anger a conservative, tell him a lie. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.
I did not forget the Subway sandwich. His “failure to drop” was not relevant to my post. But thanks for playing.
If you clicked on my link to his comments, you would have noted it was from his blog, not from the Tribune. Thanks.
They really are no better than the verminous David Duke. The Waukesha Christmas SUV rampage? The retired restaurateur who was assassinated in a random attack in Chicago’s Chinatown? The endless subway shovings? The left has blood on its hands.
That list of “Oscar Nominees” should be reason enough for a move to the Main Feed…
Where was that link to his blog? I did not see any links to johnkassnews.com in this post.
Alternative explanations occur to me:
They’re little kids in Imaginationland. (No, not the South Park one. You wish.)
This is the end stage of a critical theory class-project improv play, and the whole universe is a simulation. (No.)
They’re indulging in what appears to them to be the power to make a thing true by their word. (Sssss.)
They’re fascists with a street presence and they’ll burn anything they can reach if they get a chance.
American Progressives were french-kissing European fascists 100 years ago, so why not?
Of course, they have also been chronically unable to see the evils of Communism…
I don’t see how the Arbery incident was a hate crime. I do see two people going too far in taking the law into their own hands. But there were several break-ins and robberies prior to the incident. Arbery did trespass several times prior to the incident. His killers may have had reason to believe Arbery was responsible for the recent crimes, but they did not act in self-defense, and Arbery should not have died. But I don’t see how this is a hate or a racial incident. All I see is further pushing of the narrative that any time there is white on black violence, it must be racism because black people never commit crimes, and if they do it’s allowed because of oppression.
And Georgia is probably going to be worse off in the aftermath as they’ve passed hate crime legislation and repealed and replaced citizen’s arrest laws. As far as hate crimes go, we already have laws against acts of violence and murder, it shouldn’t matter if they’re committed by hate or not. In fact, I’m much more concerned about someone who commits these acts out of indifference. The guy who casually stabs someone on the subway, with no hate, and walks away like nothing happened is a far bigger threat to society than someone with anger issues whose warning signs can be telegraphed. And citizen’s arrests should be lawful in most circumstances. The state owning a monopoly on safety is never a good thing.
What’s the difference between Adam Schiff and Jussie Smollett? (More f’ing autocorrect. )
Quite a few people at NRO and The Bulwark seized on those characterizations as well. NRO famously declaring the Covington kids “spit on the cross.” The Bulwark declared Kyle Rittenhouse “a racist vigilante.”
The demand for racism in the United States far exceeds the supply.
You can’t socially distance from what you think is an imaginary character- the left doesn’t believe in the is truth-only assertions of power- “my truth”. You can see it clearly in David Brooks recent column. He says he isn’t a conservative (a rare burst of honesty from a man of the moderate left)- but that was entirely consistent since he does not believe in a transcendent, eternal moral order-ie the Truth. If their is no Truth-than everything is just an assertion of power & will-the truth is what we make & enforce-hence women can have a penis & men can menstruate.
One of them plays a part on national television and the other one was an actor on Empire.
https://johnkassnews.com/jussie-smollett-lest-we-forget/
Sorry, I meant that I could not find the link in your post–which got me worrying that there was something wrong with my eyesight.
I think Greg Gutfeld made that observation recently too, and when there’s demand not being fulfilled, they create their own.
As far as I can tell, there wasn’t a link until recently.
From my Democrat friends point of view Jussie Smollett ruling was a travesty of Justice and all that think differently show how corrupt, racist the country is.
That’s a good way to put it. I steal it.
Obviously, you’re not watching MSNBC.
P.S. Good for you…
Maybe he meant actual supply, not just the false racism created by MSNBC et al?
It’s always better to wait until you get the facts. “Journalists” should have been taught this. Instead they race to be the first to virtue signal
Great article, good comments, one question. If we’re not allowed to win the next two elections does the country have a future? If we can’t win the next two elections and get rid of 90% of Washington it’s likely to be over. A country as large and diverse as the US can’t be run from the top and remain free and commercially innovative. People point to China as an exception but how would they be doing if they could not extract technology and innovation from the US. We either decentralize, and return to an open innovative bottom up country or we’ll go the direction every country in history has gone but with existing technologies it will be oppressively totalitarian. The alternative is to split up as quickly as possible and the trick is to find a way to defend ourselves from Washington and China. Horrible thought, but it’s real. We better find ways to win the next two election and any Republican who doesn’t embrace this whole heartedly must be replaced.