Jussie Smolett was convicted of lying about being hate-crimed, three years ago, by a roaming band of Trump supporters. In downtown Chicago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of the lefty commentators who proclaimed the case a damning indictment of American society were – “unexpectedly” – silent over the weekend. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And they may have been the smart ones. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ja’Han Jones – a writer of sorts for MSNBC who is described as a “futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics”, meaning pretty much someone who partied with the right people in college – warned conservatives about what we “should realize before they relish the Jussie Smollett verdict<\/a>“. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Nonetheless, the strange, seemingly ever-changing details in the case have provided nearly three years\u2019 worth of material for comedians and online commentators.\u00a0Some of it has been quite funny<\/a>, in fact.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Of course, there’s not a lot of there<\/em> in the piece, which concludes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even more comical, in my view, was the predictable conservative outrage over Smollett\u2019s allegations. Conservatives took to social media in 2019\u00a0to express outrage over the dropped charges<\/a>. How dare someone make such a heinous claim about followers of their dear leader, they screeched. Violent, masked white guys who shout Trump slogans and use chemical agents to attack victims?\u00a0<\/p> Many on the right shamed those of us who knew such a claim was totally plausible \u2014\u00a0and then the\u00a0Jan. 6 insurrection<\/a>\u00a0happened.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n And that’s it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, Berg’s Seventh Law applies. I’m sure there were conservatives that, after a decade and a half of watching hoax after hoax, and retraction after retraction of narrative-based claims of hate crimes, indulged in a bit of schadenfreud<\/em> at a verdict that, had it not been on a case tried in crazy-blue Chicago, was utterly predicable to anyone with two brain cells to rub together to get some sparks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But Jones is projecting, of course; it was everyone on the left – not just hoi polloi <\/em>in comment sections, but an unbroken phalanx of blue-checks – who were dancing and cavorting about the usual chanting points; gut-shot to white cis-hetero privilege that this “hate crime” represented, the spotlight it still showed on the hatred that, they’d tell us, still roils beneath the surface of every honky. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Berg’s Twentieth Law – <\/a>assume widely-publicized “hate crimes” are hoaxes until proven otherwise, which I obeyed in every particular even before I watched Smollett’s “alibi” crumble like a donut fresh out of a microwave – gave way to Berg’s Seventh Law<\/a>; when the left accuses you fellow conservatives of moral turpitude, it’s almost invariably projecting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Smollett’s verdict brings me no joy; we have a society that actively enables this sort of narcissistic showmanship, and uses it to further tribalize a society that doesn’t need any more. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jussie Smolett was convicted of lying about being hate-crimed, three years ago, by a roaming band of Trump supporters. In downtown Chicago. Most of the lefty commentators who proclaimed the case a damning indictment of American society were – “unexpectedly” – silent over the weekend. And they may have been the smart ones. Ja’Han Jones […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,426],"tags":[375,243],"class_list":["post-80265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-orwell-overestimated-democrats","tag-bergs-20th-law","tag-bergs-7th-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=80265"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80268,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80265\/revisions\/80268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=80265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=80265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}