Silence of the Jussie Smollett defenders

Some people say that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. Nonsense. There is also the certainty that in America circa 2021 anti-black racist events are hoaxes perpetrated by left-wing whites or, more often, by blacks themselves. Right now, the world is mesmerized by the case of Jussie Smollett.

Until he faked the “racist” attack on himself back in 2019, no one you knew had heard of Smollett. Now he is famous, not for being an actor, but for being a race-baiting hate monger.

The fake-news, enemy-of-the-people, Trump-hating media slobbered all over that story. So did the slimy Democratic politicians sup daily on fifty-seven varieties of “racism” because they think it buys votes. Smollett claimed to have been assaulted by two white men who, in the most dramatic telling, wore ski masks, put a rope around his neck and doused him in bleach as they chanted MAGA slogans and yelled racist and anti-homosexual slurs.

You see, America is a bastion of “systemic racism” after all, not to mention that it is a home for anti-homosexual animus and a forcing-bed for pro-Trump, ergo, essentially fascistic sentiments.

Except that it was all lies. Once again, it turns out that “systemic racism” is what you have to rely on when there is no actual racism to be found. In the great game of supply and demand, there is far more demand for racism and other sorts of bigotry than the real thing. Smollett was not attacked by two mask-wearing, MAGA-spouting white men. On the contrary, he paid two black bodybuilders, the brothers Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, to fake the attack. It was, in short, a politicized publicity stunt intended to prop up a sagging career and enhance the profile of a wannabe celebrity actor. This week he was on trial for a host of crimes and was found guilty of five out of six. The consensus is, he is likely to go to jail. Good. He should go to jail, and for a lot longer than the January 6 Washington tourists who were arrested for strolling through the Capitol while the police were shooting unarmed veterans, bludgeoning old ladies and asphyxiating protesters with chemical sprays.

It is always the same story. Did someone scrawl anti-black graffiti on a college dormitory? The administration will lock down the school, call in the FBI, but it will turn out that it the racial slurs were written by blacks, leftists or leftists who also happened to be black.

But what about the people who enabled the racist Narrative about the Jussie Smollett? According to Kamala Harris, former concubine of Willie Brown, what happened to Smollett was “an attempted modern day lynching.” Harris’s fellow day-care resident, Joe Biden (or whoever writes his tweets) went further: “What happened today to @Jussie Smollett,” he wrote, “must never be tolerated in this country. We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts. We are with you, Jussie.” AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of that rancid sorority skirled in similar tones about “racism,” “homophobia,” etc., etc.

Where are their apologies now? How will they be held accountable? Short answer: they won’t. If they had any shame, they would sell their possessions and steal out of Washington in the wee hours in order to take up llama farming in some mountain fastness. But as I have often had occasion to observe, it is a curiosity of English that “shameful” and “shameless” are virtual synonyms. Smollett should go to jail for a long, long time. But those who wantonly collaborated in his malignant lies should also be held to account. The fact that they won’t is part of the fatuous tragedy of our times.