Jussie Smollett, ‘lest we forget
By John Kass
Now that entertainer and Obama White House star Jussie Smollett has been convicted on multiple counts of faking an anti-gay, anti-black, anti-Trump hate crime against himself, what do we hear?
We hear a predictable chorus from Woke Media World:
Let it go. Forget it. Leave it alone. Yes, he’s guilty. And that’s a good thing. But let’s never speak of Jussie again. The mention of his name vexes us. Hush. Please, just let it go.
Really? Let it go? Just forget about it?
I ask you, cui bono, who profits by not speaking of Smollett again? Who profits by pretending this didn’t happen?
The politicians who joined him in screaming about hate crimes and lynching. And media that carried Smollett’s hateful and dangerous hoax. They profit by your forgetting.
But the public doesn’t profit by letting it go. The rule of law does not profit. Confidence in our system of justice isn’t strengthened by forgetting. It is weakened by forgetting.
The high priests of grievances would rather we just let Smollett go away, because he failed in epic, Homeric fashion. And now he embarrasses them.
But not everyone is so gullible. Not everyone wants to stick their idiotic head in the sand.
One woman stood up. And with all the talk and all the voices going round and round the Jussie Smollett saga, and with some telling you to forget it and move on, and others shaking their fists at the wrong clowns in this clown show, it would be a shame if you didn’t remember her:
Retired Judge Sheila O’Brien.
Her dad was a cop. Her mother was a nurse. They raised her to not let things go. O’Brien is the one who heroically pushed for a special prosecutor in the Smollett case, incurring the wrath of the political class. And about an hour after the guilty verdict, after I was done playing talking head on TV, I called her.
“John, it’s not about me,” O’Brien said. “Twelve people did their job and upheld their oaths as jurors, as a testament to our system of justice. It was never about me. It was about our system of justice. The law demanded a special prosecutor. The court did the right thing, and a jury fulfilled their oath”
But she forced the issue. She demanded an accounting. If you care about the criminal justice system, if you don’t think politics should put its greasy thumb on the scales of justice, if you believe half the crap you see on those television courtroom dramas when some actor makes The Big Speech about Big Justice, you won’t forget.
You’ll remember her.
Sheila O’Brien.
Naturally, there are others who desperately want to forget. It’s all been so embarrassing. Although, those who are most acutely mortified by Smollett’s conviction–at least those in media who have half their wits—have the good manners not to tell us to shut up and forget.
Instead, they ignore it and change the subject, hoping Jussie goes away and disappears. Or they pick up some other head to fix on their rattle sticks, and shake it and scream about demons to direct public anger elsewhere.
In this, like that gluttonous little boy ostentatiously ignoring the crumbly remains of the blueberry pie he attacked before dinner.
Forgive me, but I’d rather not shut up about Jussie right now. Instead, I think we should thank him. Because by telling and retelling his lies in court, by perjuring himself before the jury and the judge, he’s actually done America a great service.
He exposes he fetid alchemy between the dying corporate legacy media and elite Democrats who used his mewing to stoke racial division for votes. These are the high priests of the new religion, and it sanctifies victimization for profit and power.
They falsely seized on Kyle Rittenhouse as a racist (he wasn’t) and Nicholas Sandman as a racist (he wasn’t) and many others. Without stoking racial strife, how would they motivate their voters?
Are there horrible people among us who are homophobes and racists? Yes, of course. Should they be punished if they violate another’s rights? Yes, of course.
Should the politicians and media that stoked this have known better than to buy his story and regurgitate it, screaming on media platform after media platform with their hair on fire? A reasonable person might think so.
But they didn’t care if they regurgitated a lie. They wanted to use Smollett. They didn’t care if he was lying. They weren’t worried about the damage it could cause, whether his fantastic story may have sparked racial violence in Chicago and elsewhere across the country.
They had their politics to worry about. They wanted outrage. They wanted votes. So, they used him. And he used them.
And now that Smollett has been exposed as a liar by a jury in Chicago, they’d much rather we move on, before we can explore this destructive alchemy of the media/political elite and the damage it has done.
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