Comforting The Comfortable, Afflicting The Afflicted

I don’t know about you – but these days, when a accusation of a “hate crime” gets massive, immediate coverage, I’ve started to assume it’s a hoax until proven otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong – hate crimes exist. But the more publicity the unproven allegations get, and the more lurid the charges against someone in a MAGA cap, the more likely it seems the whole story turns out to have all the substance and integrity or a Ryan Winkler presentation on Black History Month.

Jussie Who?:Three weeks ago, I had not heard of Jussie Smollett. I’ve never had occasion to watch Empire, and I doubt I ever will.

But when I heard the story of the “Hate Crime” that reached out and, per his story, caught him a few weeks ago, nothing, even to my rather cursory listening, seemed to add up.

Kyle Smith – not a cop, but rather a writer at National Review – noticed the same things, and has 27 questions for the “journalists” who presumed Smollett’s story – of “MAGA”-screaming rednecks who attacked him without really attacking him – was unassailably true.

8 . How likely do you think it is that attackers would shout, “This is MAGA country” in Chicago, a place that no one thinks is MAGA country?

There are 26 more – the sort of thing “journalists”, ostensibly being the curious sort, should have asked.

13. Don’t you think it strange that his attackers fled without much harming Smollett or robbing him?
14. Related to (13), did it not occur to you that the whole alleged attack looked a bit like the criminal equivalent of a press release, meant to send a message rather than accomplish anything?
15. If you were beaten up, would you somehow remember to pick up your Subway purchase afterward?

Goalposts Moved: Over the weekend, as Smollett’s story began to collapse, the narrative changed; Smollett’s actions weren’t themselves a publicity “hate crime” against deplorables; they were “starting a conversation”:

Don’t let anyone say this latest hate crime hoax was okay because it “started a conversation.”

This episode SHOULD start a conversation – about the outright bigotry of the media and those who hate Trump and his supporters so much they will do things like this.
— Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) February 17, 2019

I don’t know about you, but I think Jussie Smollett, and especially all the #Resitance media sycophants who parroted the story because, if you hate the MAGAs, it’s just too good to fact-check, just made life a lot harder for people who actually do wind up on the wrong side of bigotry.

Other than deplorables, obviously.

Posted

February 20, 2019

Culture War, Ebony And Ivory, PC / “Woke” Culture, Slander Files, The Second Civil War

Mitch Berg

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Winkler

Comments

17 responses to “Comforting The Comfortable, Afflicting The Afflicted”

MacArthur Wheeler

February 20, 2019

Jussie Smollett’s next gig is playing the lead in a biopic titled “The Tawana Brawley Story”
Greg

February 20, 2019

Nick Sandmann, the Covington student who was vilified by the press, is suing the Washington Post for $250 million. If you want to send a message, that is how to do it.
Swiftee Pinochet

February 20, 2019

Mitch, there is no such thing as a “hate crime”.

It’s a nonsense term created as a training aid for reprobates to further corrode the minds of the young and the gullible.

Let’s not use it.
SmithStCrx

February 20, 2019

Don’t forget the goalpost repositioning being done by democrat POTUS candidates. It’s gone from “Modern day Lynching” to “we need to wait for the facts to come out.”
Mammuthus Primigenius

February 20, 2019

There are 350,000,000 people in the US.
The FBI investigates fewer than 6,000 “hate crimes” each year. Most of the victims are Jews, not Muslims or Blacks.
Anyone who tells you that “hate crime” is an important national problem is blowing smoke.
bosshoss429

February 20, 2019

I need to give credit where it’s due.

Perhaps he learned his lesson from his Tawanna debacle, but Al Sharpton was the first left wing black “leader” to state that Jussie should be held accountable for his actions.

There was another black civil rights activist in LA, Najee Ali, publicly stated that he would be arrested for lying. He was absolutely spot on when he stated that “false claims make real incidents easier to dismiss.”
Mammuthus Primigenius

February 20, 2019

When was the last race-based lynching in the US?
1981. That is 38 years ago.
The Klansmen who did it were arrested, tried, and found guilty by local authorities. One was excuted, the other received life in prison.
bikebubba

February 20, 2019

Given that the Chicago Police put a fair amount of effort into investigating this fraud, I think a sensible approach would be to require him to pay that back plus some punitive damages and community service. Let’s be blunt here; there are a lot of real crimes in Chicago that truly ought to be investigated, things like forcible rape and homicide, and every second spent on this guy’s fake case is a second not spent bringing murderers and such to justice.
jdm

February 20, 2019

This Jussie thing is part of a bigger problem. A much bigger problem. As Mollie Hemingway tweeted:

The elephant in the room for media malfeasance discussions is that many reporters are simply not smart. They fall for hoaxes easily. Over and over and over again They are obviously not well read. That this is combined with a completely unwarranted arrogance compounds the problem.

They uncritically accepted “MAGA thugs roving Chicago, attacking celebrities.” People that politically biased and stupid are simply not going to have the appropriate amount of skepticism for an actual $$multi-million info op such as “Trump-Russia!” run by skilled professionals.
Mammuthus Primigenius

February 20, 2019

“The elephant in the room for media malfeasance discussions is that many reporters are simply not smart.”
All of the media has become unusable. They simpy say whatever they have to to make Trump and the people that they imagine are his supporters look bad.
I frequently read a throway line in the papers that illegal aliens commit fewer crimes than the native born. No attribution is given.
It is illegal to work in the United States unless you are a citizen or you’ve got agreen card. Illegal aliens cannot work for wages without committing a crime, either failure to pay the payroll tax or fraudulent use of legal resident’s SSN.
So I looked into this canard about illegal aliens commit fewer crimes than the native born. Who could believe this nonsense? Most illegals are poor, and the poor commit more crimes.
The bad factoid goes back to a crap Cato institute study. It was crap because the Cato people cherry picked their sample, made unwarranted assumptions about who in their sample was an illegal alien, and they did not count all crimes the same. Besides that, Cato is ideologically committed to open borders.
Yet the newsrooms of America seem to be filled with idiotic “journalists” who will ignore basic research skills in order to push their ideology on their readers.
I have never seen it this bad. The newspapers and broadcast journalists have shown that they are utterly useless at informing the public about important happenings in the world.
Prince of Darkness_666

February 20, 2019

I think that like with Covenington the American people have reached a full on breaking point. Assuming it is Trump vs some dem socialisit in 2020 (why it wouldnt be I care not to discuss because I know Id get a visit from the feds) expect it to be close to the 1972 and 1984 election.
bikebubba

February 20, 2019

Regarding illegals and crime, even if their crime rates were below average, crime committed by illegals is by definition crime that did not need to happen if those people were not in the country. That’s the kind of obvious facts that, per MP, reporters these days are either not capable of figuring out, or they are ignoring because they’ve got a face tattoo for Kamala Harris (H/T Babylon Bee).

Stupidity or bias? Well, let’s see whether the media advocate making Jussie pay back the cost of the investigation or not. If they don’t, we might infer that they are in the bag for the left.
Prince of Darkness_666

February 20, 2019

Stupidity or bias?

To quote Grandpa Simpson, A little from column A and a little from column B.
Night Writer

February 20, 2019

To paraphrase A Flack Called Wanda:

Calling reporters “not smart” is an insult to not smart people. There are sheep that can outwit them. AOC has worn dresses with higher IQs.

Now let me correct you on a couple things, okay? Aristotle was not Belgian! The central message of Buddhism is not “Every man for himself!” And the London Underground is not a political movement! Those are all mistakes. I looked ’em up.
Swiftee Pinochet

February 20, 2019

Boss, don’t let him fool you. Sharpton is doing what he always does; let the money set the direction.
Swiftee Pinochet

February 20, 2019

MP, I had a reprobate inform me that border jumpers “pay income and SSI taxes, derp”

Right. They also get drivers licenses and vote…using STOLEN IDENTITIES!
Mammuthus Primigenius

February 20, 2019

Ordinary citizens can be stupid. But if you have chosen a career the involves INFORMING THE PUBLIC, you should know what any American high schooler knows.
About a dozen years ago, Hugh Hewitt wrote a profile of the Columbia School of Journalism (CSJ). He had the cooperation of the school’s administration. CSJ is the most prestigious journalism school in the country. It hands out grad degrees. Some of the takeaways were that tuition was very expensive, as in law school expensive, and the student body did not look like America. The students at CSJ came from middle class or higher households, and were overrepresented by women and the foreign born. They also had wildly inflated ideas about how much journalists were paid.
It is a business that pushes the most aggressive journalists into moving to big coastal cities. That’s how you can make money.
The idea you may have of a journalist being a person with a high school diploma or a BA in English from the state college, learning the craft of journalism covering local school boards and tax commissions is not even close to the truth. The more influential the media position is, the more likely it is that you are dealing a person who has only ever worked in journalism, and got his or her job because they had a MA or a MFA in journalism or creative writing.
Personally I find the current practice of assigning multiple journalists to a single story to be abhorrent. If a story has three people in the by line, why have a by line at all? You can’t hold the writer accountable, they have produced nothing with a unique talent.