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Rob Long of National Review Online and Greg Corombos of Radio America applaud Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel for sending Jussie Smollett a bill for more than $130,000 to cover the costs of the police to investigate his hate crime hoax. They also shake their heads as the supposedly moderate “Economist” magazine labels Ben Shapiro a “sage of the alt-right” but then changes it to call him a “radical conservative.” And they have a lot of fun with the news that Illinois State’s Attorney Kim Foxx didn’t really recuse herself from the Smollett case in the legal sense, just in the “colloquial” sense.
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Hey! @roblong is really, really good at conducting the analysis on The Three Martini Lunch.
TTML should have Rob as a guest again.
Didn’t expect
to hear @roblong to say, “Everything’s lit!”
The Economist getting Shapiro’s description wrong and Foxx’s not realizing there would be such fallout from her dropping charges seem to me to derive from the same problem – they live in the liberal/establishment bubble. They think there is just a small portion of the population that does not think like they do, and that portion are just a bunch of brutes. This is one reason they were shocked when Trump was elected.
I haven’t heard any pundit point out that what happened with the Jussie Smollett case in Chicago can be explained by the progressive doctrine, that there are “too many black men in jail“.
Every once in a while, you will hear about a black jury using this doctrine to let off a black defendant, regardless of guilt or innocence. The O.J. Simpson murder case is probably the most notorious instance.
To a collectivist, this sort of thing actually makes sense.
Come to think of it, a second progressive doctrine was also involved.
This is the doctrine that racist attack hoaxes are beneficial, as learning opportunities for whites, and to encourage feelings of racial victimization among blacks.
It may explain why the State’s Attorney didn’t just let off Jussie Smollett, she didn’t even require him to admit to the hoax; so blacks and leftists, at least, can go on believing and claiming that the attack may actually have occurred.
We want Smollett punished to discourage future racial hoaxes. She wants Smollett not punished to encourage future racial hoaxes.