RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272912/jussie-smollett-hoax-and-medias-tribal-war-america-daniel-greenfield

Why did the media fall so swiftly for the Jussie Smollett hoax right after falling for the Covington Catholic hoax? The easy answer is bias. And that might have even been the right answer a generation ago.

These days the media isn’t biased. It’s tribal.

Bias leads us to make mistakes. But the media wasn’t making a mistake when it loudly broadcast false claims with plenty of red flags about Trump supporters wearing red hats. Just as the media wasn’t making a mistake when it spread fake news about attacks on Muslim women by Trump supporters after the election. This wasn’t an error due to prejudice, but an active effort to reinforce tribal prejudices.

The Covington Catholic story in particular was not newsworthy by any rational definition of the term. The media insisted on making it news because it perfectly encapsulated the tribal prejudices of its base of urban and suburban lefties by pitting anti-abortion kids in MAGA hats against saintly minorities.

There’s another example of tribal hatred masquerading as news in the news now.

Prime Time Sports, a small sports memorabilia store in a Colorado Springs mall, announced that it was going out of business. Malls are emptying out across the country and there was no reason why the closing of a mall shop selling Cubs t-shirts and Patriots mini-helmets should have ended up in hundreds of papers around the country. But the reason why its closing ended up in major papers and news networks, including CNN. says a great deal about the malicious nature of political tribalism on the Left.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/why-does-the-msm-keep-falling-for-obvious-hoaxes/

This is just sad:

The national outrage that simmered after actor Jussie Smollett said he was attacked by people shouting racial and anti-gay slurs was fueled in part by celebrities who spoke out loud and strong on social media.

But the outrage has now been replaced by surprise, doubt and bafflement as the singers, actors and politicians who came out in support of the “Empire” star struggle to digest the strange twists the case has taken. Some conservative pundits, meanwhile, have gleefully seized on the moment.

The narrative that just a week ago seemed cut-and-dry has become messy and divisive — and it’s all playing out again on social media.

If there was a “national outrage” over the dubious incident, it was limited to gullible left-wing journalists, celebrities, politicians and activists.

The “narrative” only seemed “cut-and-dry” to people who were looking at the case through lenses clouded by their anti-Trump bias. It seemed made-up to those of us who noticed that Smollett’s allegations were outlandish, implausible and riddled with inconsistencies from the get-go.

Yet even as his story started falling apart (which happened almost immediately), the national media clung to their precious narrative.

https://pjmedia.com/video/how-the-media-failed-again-on-the-jussie-smollett-hoax/

Empire actor Jussie Smollett’s weeks-long reign as (liberal) America’s intersectional sweetheart came to an inglorious end this weekend when it was revealed in multiple reports that he paid his two Nigerian pals to stage a fake hate crime against him last month in Chicago.

Many (perhaps most) Americans from the beginning suspected that Smollett tried to manufacture a hate crime to make Trump supporters look bad. But not the Mainstream media. They fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

You would think that after falling for “tribal elder” Nathan Phillips’ dubious claims, last month — to the point of being legally culpable — the media would be a bit more circumspect.

But no. When presented with another enticing opportunity to demonize Trump supporters, they jumped like Pavlov’s dogs at the chance.

TMZ broke the original version of the story late last month in a report alleging that Smollett was the victim of a vicious hate crime:

https://pjmedia.com/trending/jussie-smollett-lawyers-up-hires-michael-cohens-lawyer-after-persons-of-interest-released/

Jussie Smollett, the “Empire” actor who claims he was assaulted by white supremacists screaming “MAGA COUNTRY” in the middle of a polar vortex in Chicago, just hired the best defense lawyer in town, Michael Monico, after the two persons of interest in the case were released by the Chicago Police Department.The two persons of interest that Smollett claimed were his attackers in an interview on ABC with Robin Roberts turned out to be Nigerian actors who have connections to the “Empire” show.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media-2/2019/02/jussie-

Another day, another example of the national broadcaster’s monocular perspective. This time it involves an apparent ‘race hate’ hoax in Chicago and, tellingly, a blind refusal to publish any reports that might diminish the impression crosses are burning in the dark night of Trump’s America.

THERE is no accounting for taste, but it’s a fair surmise that few Quadrant Online visitors are devoted followers of the TV series Empire, which focuses on the intrigues and power plays of rap ‘music’ impresarios. Lately, however, the series might have registered more widely, as one of its stars, Jussie Smollett, was widely reported, not least by our very own ABC, to have been assaulted in the frigid wee hours of a snowy Chicago night by a pair of — yes, you guessed it — red-hatted white men who were said to have waylaid the young actor on his way home from a sandwich shop and battered him more than somewhat. The mystery biff artists were reported to have concluded the incident by dousing him in bleach, which they just happened to be carrying at 2am, while announcing gay black men aren’t welcome in “Trump country”, also hanging a noose about his neck for good measure.

A curious tale to begin with, it has grown more so as the Chicago Police Department’s efforts to establish the chain of the evening’s events have uncovered a wealth of discordant information. Despite the neighbourhood of the alleged assault being monitored top-to-tail by surveillance cameras, not an inch of footage capturing an attack has come to light.

What has been uncovered rather tends to support the theory that Mr Smollett staged the entire affair, perhaps in a bid to raise his public profile and avoid his character being being written out of Empire‘s plotline. More than a week after the purported attack, for example, investigators found a re-used hot-sauce bottle with traces of bleach still inside, a discovery which raised suspicions that it might well have been planted after the fact to bolster the original and daily more dubious complaint to police.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/06/atlantic-writer-tweets-trump-assassination-fantasy/

Jemelle Hill, staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote a mini fan fiction on Twitter during the State of the Union Tuesday night, about the assassination of President Trump with the help of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Hill tweeted that Ocasio-Cortez should yell, “GETCHO HAND OUT MY POCKET,” during the president’s State of the Union speech. The phrase “Get your hand outta my pocket!” was the same one yelled in the Manhattan Audubon Ballroom in 1965 as a distraction before the murder of Malcolm X. As the room tried to quell the commotion, another man rushed forward and shot Malcolm X in the chest.

The same assassination scene was depicted here:

The Atlantic’s motto since it was founded in 1857 has been “Of no party or clique.” The magazine insists it is a place for ideas across the political spectrum. Yet last year Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg hired then immediately fired conservative writer Kevin Williamson on the grounds that his views on abortion would make other Atlantic employees feel unsafe. Williamson thinks abortion is murder, a standard position for those who affirm that human life begins at conception.

It is hard to see how both of these things can be true: that the Atlantic is “of no party or clique” and that they don’t hire any individuals who make other employees feel unsafe. Hill’s fantasy about the president’s assassination would surely make any employee who supports President Trump feel unsafe — if The Atlantic indeed has any such employees.