Hoaxes

Friday

Roger Kimball

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.

jussie smollett
Freddy Gray

Jussie Smollett and the rise of American hate hoaxing

From our UK edition

The actor Jussie Smollett has been jailed for 150 days after staging a hate crime against himself. Freddy Gray wrote about the rise of hate hoaxing in December... So Jussie Smollett, the world’s most notorious hate hoaxer, has at last been found guilty of lying to the police.  Smollett, you may remember, was the actor who wanted to get even more famous so badly that he hired two brothers to put on ski masks and pretend to be Trump-supporting racists who spotted him in public. They then fake attacked him with bleach and a noose that they just happened to be carrying around, as racists do. The US vice president and most media outlets breathlessly accepted Smollett’s account.  But it was all rubbish — and the story fits into a bizarre new trend.

Thursday

Henry Hitchings

Are the English exceptionally gullible?

From our UK edition

The word ‘hoax’ did not catch on till the early 19th century. Before that one spoke of a hum, a frump, a prat or a bilk. But 18th-century Britain, even if not rife with talk of ‘hoaxes’, was full of incautious souls at risk of being bilked. James Graham, a Scottish quack, was able to charge infertile couples £50 a night to lounge in his Celestial Bed, which had a mattress lined with hair from stallions’ tails. The artist Ann Jemima Provis and her father, Thomas, caused embarrassment to the Royal Academy by conning its president, Benjamin West, into thinking they had stumbled on a rare manuscript that would allow him to emulate the luminous style of the Venetian masters.

Friday

Jarvis Dupont

OK so the ‘eating babies’ woman may have been a hoax, but is it really such a terrible idea?

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held a town hall congress meeting on Thursday in Corona, New York, at the Queens Public Library, during which an alleged constituent stood up and began by expressing her dismay at the current climate crisis, which ended in her shouting, 'We have to start eating the babies!'At first many of us identified with her anguish as she informed those around her that we only have a few months until the planet is destroyed. This is a very real fear for anyone who admires Greta Thunberg, and so I was fully on board with what she was saying. The woman began by telling Ocasio-Cortez how much she admired her dedication to tackling the climate crisis but declared that limiting the use of fossil fuels isn’t enough.

eating babies

Wednesday

Jesse Longman

The whitewashing of Jussie Smollett

Justice is blind. But, as it turns out, she’s not unwilling to negotiate. If it buys her some silence, she’ll play ball.Yesterday, Jussie Smollett was exonerated by the District Attorney for the state of Chicago. Like Trump, the celebrity victim has been cleared of all charges, though not cleared of wrongdoing. Whatever that means. Dead or alive? It’s Schrödinger’s cat.No one knows what to say exactly because the truth may be too damaging. After all, who knows what happens when you jail a young black gay celebrity? How much abuse would he endure? And if they do kill him, what will happen to our prison system? How much will all of this cost? Oh Jesus, make it go away!Or that’s what I figure happened. Closed doors won’t answer.

jussie smollett