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Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Jussie Smollett and the Thought Police


Marcus Clintonius

The MSM is attributing actor Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax to dissatisfaction with his TV series salary and a desire to raise his profile in the entertainment industry. That’s only part of the story... in fact a small part of the story.

The bigger issue is not Smollett’s clumsy staging of an assault, but the political climate in the country that invites, no—actually demands—hate crime hoaxes. A meme mocking Smollett making the rounds on social media declares that the proliferation of hoaxes is due to the “supply of racism not meeting the demand.”'

This hits the nail on the head. In evidence is the response by media talking heads expressing their outrage at the alleged attack before the hoax was uncovered.

“This is America... in 2019,” CNN’s Brooke Baldwin somberly intoned.

A View harpy sneered, “I’m disgusted by people who wear hats that say MAGA.”

Lesbian actress Ellen Page was almost moved to tears as she lectured Stephen Colbert’s Late Show audience that the attack was caused by Trump and the Vice President:

“... Mike Pence... who like wishes I couldn’t be married. Let’s be clear. Connect the dots. This is what happens if you are in a position of power and you hate people, and you want to cause suffering to them. … you spend your career trying to cause suffering. What do you think is going to happen?”

A vast swath of America wants to believe that Trump’s election spurred a spike in “hate crimes” across the nation perpetrated by MAGA hat-wearing white supremacist Trump supporters. This narrative is pushed by the MSM, social media, Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and fertilized on virtually every college campus by the diversity droids who now call the shots in the Academy.

Why would anyone believe that a video showing a young man in a MAGA hat smiling at a Native American man banging a drum... was really mocking him? Even when the rest of the video surfaced, revealing that the boys had been verbally accosted with racial and sexual epithets by a group of black thugs, and that Nathan Phillips, the Native American, joined the attack... why would reporters and pundits still insist that the boy’s awkward smile was a smirk, an expression of his “white privilege”?

Because Brooke Baldwin got it almost right. This was what they want America to be... in 2019. Demonizing whiteness, and particularly, white masculinity, has become part of the national zeitgeist.

Contrary to the MSM’s slanderous narrative, the behavior of Nicholas Sandmann and the boys from Covington Catholic High School at the pro-life rally in Washington was beyond reproach.

They called us ‘racists,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘white crackers,’ ‘faggots,’ and ‘incest kids’’” Sandmann says in his statement, describing the taunts hurled at them by the self-styled Black Israelites.

The provocations of the Native American group followed:

“You stole our land,” and “Go back to Europe,” were some of their insults. And eventually, Phillips approached Sandmann to get right in his face, banging his drum and chanting.


Here’s how Sandmann describes what it was like and how he responded:

“I never understood why either of the two groups of protesters were engaging with us, or exactly what they were protesting at the Lincoln Memorial. We were simply there to meet a bus, not become central players in a media spectacle. This is the first time in my life I've ever encountered any sort of public protest, let alone this kind of confrontation or demonstration.

“I was not intentionally making faces at the protester. I did smile at one point because I wanted him to know that I was not going to become angry, intimidated or be provoked into a larger confrontation. I am a faithful Christian and practicing Catholic, and I always try to live up to the ideals my faith teaches me -- to remain respectful of others, and to take no action that would lead to conflict or violence.”

Sandmann and the rest of the high schoolers acted with remarkable restraint. It is gratifying that they are now suing several media outlets and personalities for the outrageous libeling of their actions.

* * *

Hate crime hoaxes are legion. The majority of such “hate” incidents are faked by the supposed victims. On the college campus, I’m aware of none that weren’t faked.

The Daily Caller recently published a list of 21 hate crime hoaxes in the “Trump era,”[i] including:

·       the Louisiana Muslim woman who claimed two MAGA-hat wearing white men grabbed her wallet and hijab while yelling racial slurs;

·       the Church organist who spray-painted a swastika and “Heil Trump” on his own church;

·       the Texas man who set fire to his car and spray-painted “n----- lovers” on his garage;

·       the black student who spread racist notes around the campus of St. Olaf College in Minnesota to “draw attention to concerns” about the racist climate on campus;

·       ditto the Kansas State U. black student who placed racist notes on his own car, reading “Go home n----- boy,” and “Whites only”;  

·       the hate crime hoax of Khalil Cavil, a waiter in a Texas restaurant, who posted a picture on Facebook of a racist note calling him a “terrorist” on a bill in lieu of a tip.

* * *

On the heels of the revelations of the Smollett hate crime hoax there’s a rash of calls from conservative pundits to set the penalties for hoaxes equal to those for real hate crimes. This misses the point.

Certainly, bearing false witness to a hate crime should be treated at least as severely as the law prescribes for the actual thing, but there is a larger issue… a greater transgression of our sense of the morality that underlies the laws and customs we in the West have chosen to employ in our self-governance.

The original sin lies in the conception of “hate crimes” in the first place. Anyone with a lick of sense could see where this was going when it first reared its ugly head in the California state legislature (where else?). Most, if not all, violent crimes contain at least the seed of hatred. Adding an extra degree of “hate” to the motivation for the crime has now proven to be a recipe for legal mischief. (Just ask Chicago Police Chief Eddie Johnson.) Who decides the who-what-where-and-how much of this extra hate?

Hate crime mania is a child of identity politics—that branch of political correctness that establishes a hierarchy of groups categorized by oppressors at the bottom and a competing victimhood scale for all the other “oppressed,” “marginalized” and/or “minority” groups. Whites and males are implicitly exempt from the oppression sweepstakes.

On your typical college campus, the adjective most frequently associated with the word “masculinity” is “toxic.”  “White privilege” is now a standard fixture in curricula, and special forums on it are regularly held to reach those students that manage to avoid it in the classroom.

The identity politics commissars aren’t bashful about the double standard. Members of the oppressor groups cannot be victims of discrimination. Case closed.

* * *

Implicit in the prosecution of a “hate crime” is the notion of the aggressor’s state-of-mind. Hatred is an emotion. It requires a thought process. The thinking of the “hater” must be divined, and proven to a jury.

You can see where this is going: George Orwell’s dystopian future, where Thought Police round up citizens guilty of “wrong” thinking. It is not hyperbole to suggest that this is now the reality on the college campus. When a professor runs afoul of the canons of political correctness, it’s not because they have a policy of treating students differently according to their identity. No professor has a policy of grading blacks lower than whites. The notion is absurd. When someone on campus is painted with the Scarlet Letter “R,”  “S,” or “H,” and now “T” (the most common identity politics transgressions) it’s because they are believed to harbor racist, sexist, “homophobic” or ”transphobic” ideas. The Thought Police have arrived. They’ve been patrolling our campuses for years now.

Hate crime hoaxers serve a higher calling. The ends justify the means. It harkens back to Marxists who justify the slaughter of thousands to bring about the perfect proletarian state. It’s the same mind-set as that of radical feminists who pick male student’s names at random and put them on posters declaring them rapists—because all men are potential rapists.

Meanwhile, the true believers dismayed by the revelations of Smollett’s faked hate crime seek plausible deniability in explanations that avoid the larger truth. If Smollett’s hoax can be attributed to greed or “aberrant behavior,” then the “woke” social justice warrior can avoid the unpleasant task of questioning one of their core beliefs: the inherent racism and sexism of America.

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[i] https://dailycaller.com/2019/02/18/hoax-hate-crimes-list/