Hate-Crime Hoaxes Reflect America’s Sickness

Had Smollett been a woman, would we still be required to believe him no matter what?

National Review

There’s an obvious answer to the question, “Why would Jussie Smollett do something like that?”

"On January 29, tabloid news site TMZ broke the shocking story that Jussie Smollett, a gay black entertainer and progressive activist, had been viciously attacked in Chicago. Two racist white men had fractured his rib, poured bleach on him, and tied a noose around his neck. As they were leaving, they shouted the ominous words: “This is MAGA country” — a reference to President Trump’s campaign slogan. MSNBC reported the rumor that they were even wearing MAGA hats.
"Leaks from the Chicago police over the weekend, however, indicate that Smollett likely paid two Nigerian-American brothers he knew to orchestrate the attack. Smollett denied any wrongdoing through a statement released to the media by his lawyers.
"That the original story broke days just after the Covington narrative fell apart last month didn’t stop it from spreading quicker than a wildfire. Within hours of TMZ’s report, some of America’s most influential politicians and celebrities amplified the story — and the belief that America is a dangerous place for minorities — to millions across the world.
"2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Cory Booker described the attack as “an attempted modern-day lynching.” He used the incident to press for more hate-crime legislation. California senator Kamala Harris, who is leading the polls for the 2020 race, repeated Booker’s words. Speaker Nancy Pelosi described the attack as “an affront to our humanity.” Freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez castigated media for describing the incident as a “possible” hate crime. Her colleague Rashida Tlaib wrote that “the right wing is killing and hurting our people.” . . .

Townhall

Reports: Smollett rehearsed the attack which was staged because hate letter didn’t get enough attention "Law enforcement sources tell TMZ, Abel and Ola Osundairo told cops they got in a car with Jussie and scouted a location, settling on the one right outside the actor’s apartment. The brothers said Jussie chose the spot because he believed a camera would have captured the action.
"Our sources say the brothers told police Jussie said he wanted to make it a “physical thing,” but not to the point he’d be seriously injured."

Two Inconvenient Hate Crimes the Hoax-Addicted Media Refused to Cover  .  . . "Everything the media claim to be motivated by was right there for the taking, and still the story was buried, not covered at all, or rationalized as “not evil” by a CNN that quickly moved on.
"Did you know that on the very same night, January 29, Jussie Smollett faked a hate crime against himself there was an actual hate crime caught on video in Brooklyn, New York?
Watch the video for yourself

Early in January, a Jewish man was attacked by a group of ‘teenage black males’ in the Crown Heights area of New York.The young man, 19, was “violently assaulted,” as Collive reported, the attack is currently under investigation by the New York Police Department in conjunction with the Hate Crimes Task Force.

. . .  "A serious, brewing problem in a major American city; legitimate, racially-motivated hate crimes that have gotten zero attention from the national media…
"But those are inconvenient hate crimes, inconvenient to the media’s narrative that only Trump supporters are racist and violent; inconvenient to a media that is so broken, so evil, such a true enemy of the people, that rather than report the truth, they would prefer to fabricate and advance hoaxes." . . .

Ian Macfarlane. Sign not shown at any of this store's links.

How to know if the news is fake

"These days, if you want to know whether the new is fake, simply check the source. If it's a leftist source, it's almost certainly a lie."

Michael James

"Either Jussie Smollett faked his beating or the two guys he paid $3,500 upfront with 5 C-notes to come later decided to attack him for his generosity.

"On January 29, Cory Booker tweeted, "The vicious attack on actor Jussie Smollett was an attempted modern-day lynching." "Kamala Harris tweeted, "This was an attempted modern day lynching."

"You would think they could at least agree upon whether it was a modern day or modern-day lynching.

"These two scare me as potential presidents because if the Russians launch a space probe, Booker or Harris may rush to the conclusion that the probe is a nuclear weapon and bomb the modern-day world to kingdom come or kingdom-come.

"And they say Trump worries them?

"Nathan Phillips claimed that the Covington Catholic School boys surrounded him threateningly.  He also claimed to be a Vietnam vet. 

" 'You know, I'm from Vietnam times.  I'm what they call a recon ranger," he said.  "That was my role."  Phillips actually served in the Marine Corps Reserve from 1972 to 1976 as a refrigerator technician.  This makes him a stone-cold liar.

"The Washington Post backed up his story until it didn't.  Democracy aches in fakes and dies in lies.

"Elizabeth Warren tweeted, "Omaha elder and Vietnam War veteran Nathan Phillips endured hateful taunts with dignity and strength, then urged us all to do better[.]"

"Does Warren contend that we should all lie with dignity and strength like Phillips and herself?

"For two years, Andrew McCabe lied multiple times to federal investigators." . . .

CBS' Lara Logan Calls Out Media For Propaganda-Like Coverage: 'This Interview Is Professional Suicide For Me'

"We've become political activists, some could argue propagandists." 

Daily Wire  . . . "Logan, currently serving as a chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News and a correspondent for “60 Minutes,” blasted the media for dropping even the pretense of being objective, likening some journalists in the mainstream media to “activists” and “propogandists.”
“ 'This interview is professional suicide for me,” Logan told Ritland at the end of the revealing podcast.
"Logan said she agreed with Ritland for suggesting most outlets are “absurdly left-leaning.”
“ 'The media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just in the U.S. But in this country, 85% of journalists are registered Democrats – that’s just a fact. No one is registering Democrat when they’re really a Republican. So, the facts are on the side that you just stated: most journalists are Left, or liberal, or Democrat, or whatever word you wanna give it,” started in Logan.
“ 'How do you know you’re being lied to? How do you know you’re being manipulated? How do you know there’s something not right with the coverage?” she asked. “When they simplify it all and there’s no gray. There’s no gray. It’s all one way. Well, life isn’t like that. If it doesn’t match real life, it’s probably not — there’s something wrong.”
"Logan continued: “So, for example, all the coverage on Trump all the time is negative. … That’s distortion of the way things go in real life, because although the media has historically always been left-leaning, we’ve abandoned our pretense, or at least the effort, to be objective today.""The journalist then gave an example of former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson admitting as much: “[Abramson] says, we would do dozens of stories about Trump every single day, and every single one of them was negative. She said, we have become the anti-Trump paper of record. Well that’s not our job. ”

. . . ‘[Then] I was targeted by Media Matters for America, which was an organization established by David Brock, who has dedicated himself to the Clintons.
‘It was their known propaganda organization.’ . . .
. . . ‘I made one comment about Benghazi,’ Logan said in Friday’s podcast." . . .

Related update:  The media begins preemptively silencing any criticism of female Dem candidates
. . . "This is the same phenomenon we witnessed in both of Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns, only switching out race for gender. Nearly every criticism of Obama was attributed to racism by at least some liberal reporters, even if it was a strict policy discussion. This discussion isn’t really based on legitimate complaints of sexism. It’s a preemptive defense of the Democratic candidates and an attempt to silence criticism." . . . 

Kamala Harris’ Political Blackface Routine

Frontpage Mag.

Awkward racial stereotypes by a fake black candidate. 

"If Senator Elizabeth Warren wins in 2020, the millionaire class warrior will break the glass ceiling as the first fake American Indian to become the President of the United States. But Senator Kamala Harris is outdoing Warren as the first 2020 fake black candidate who actually is black.

"It’s easy to fake being a member of a minority group that your DNA test says you can lay 1/1,024^th claim to, but what’s really challenging is being a fake member of a minority group you actually do belong to.

"But Kamala Harris is making being fake look easy.

"The other Senator from California decided to tout her racial cred by announcing her candidacy in Oakland on or around Martin Luther King Day. It all went according to plan except that photos showed a sea of white faces in the crowd. Behind her, you could see the sort of unwashed hipsters who haven’t figured out how to shave or cut their hair, but attend every Democrat event anywhere in America.

"Harris had been born in Oakland, but grew up in Berkeley and Montreal. And when the LA Times interviewed African-Americans in Oakland, it found few who thought of her as a native daughter.

"At her rally, Harris waved, alongside her Jewish lawyer husband, Douglas Emhoff.

"Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

"Kamala Devi Harris, who was raised by her Tamil Indian mother Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, and who spent her formative years in Canada, had attended a Hindu temple, and wore a flower garland around her neck at her wedding to represent Indian tradition (while the groom broke a glass), exemplifies diversity." . . .

How the media can keep from beclowning itself

This is a problem that a little actual journalism can fix.

. . . "This was the original report that sold this hoax to America: "Empire star Jussie Smollett was brutally attacked by 2 men who beat him up, put his head in a noose and screamed, "This is MAGA country.'  . . ."
"The Smollett story was Fake Noose.
"Robert Stacy McCain, a fellow ex-newspaperman, believes federal prosecutors may get Smollett.
"Meanwhile, lawyers are putting the New York Times and others Fake News artisans on the meter as the Covington Catholic Kids file their lawsuits. Good luck convincing a judge that a 16-year-old kid is a public figure.
"Journalism is not the problem with the news media today. Ignoring journalism is." . . . 

CBS’s Lara Logan on Media Bias: ‘Unless You Seek Out Breitbart,’ You Won’t See the ‘Other Side’  "Lara Logan, foreign correspondent for CBS’s 60 Minutes, said Breitbart News offers “the other side” of news media relative to what she described as a mostly left-wing and partisan Democrat news landscape in the U.S. and abroad.
"She offered her remarks in an interview published last Friday with the Mike Drop podcast, hosted by retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland."Ritland characterized U.S. news media as “absurdly left-leaning” and supportive of Democrats, further describing the status quo of American news media’s left-wing and partisan Democrat biases as a “huge f**king problem” and “disaster for this country.” . . .

The Southern border; the last time Democrats hated a Republican President this much was when they fired on Fort Sumter.

Aftermath

The President’s Immigration Policy and the Angry Left  "The lawsuits have begun. "Still, the Democrats haven’t yet fired on Fort Sumter, as they did the last time they hated a Republican President this much." . . . (Emphasis mine, TD)

Dangerously undereducated voters and those they choose to govern us

AOC: Amateurs On Committees and what they have wrought.

The walking dead: Our ‘education’ system produces progressive zombies

. . . "They are the walking dead, more aware of gender reassignment surgery and third-wave feminism than the Holocaust." . . . 

Democrats are tearing themselves apart over Amazon "Democrats are fighting mad — at each other. For once, President Trump is not the prime target of their rage.

"Amazon’s decision to scrap plans for an HQ2 campus in New York sent the circular firing squad into action. The blue-on-blue attacks pit the far left against the far, far left in yet another front of the party’s civil war.

"In addition to sharp differences about a Green New Deal, taxes, socialism, Medicare-for-all and open borders, Dems are now split over how and whether government should work with the private sector to create jobs and boost the tax base.

"The more moderates, a very relative term in this showdown, eagerly engaged in a form of crony capitalism. The $3 billion in tax incentives that Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio offered Amazon included $500 million to subsidize the salaries of construction workers." . . .

Morning Joe worried Ocasio-Cortez’s economic ignorance could hand Trump a 2020 win   “I find [her] extremely dangerous at this point.” – Donny Deutsch
. . . 

"The Washington Free Beacon has the story:

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” broke away from its daily grievances with President Donald Trump Friday to accuse Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) of economic illiteracy and helping reelect the president.

For seven minutes Friday morning, the show’s hosts and guests worried that the self-proclaimed Democratic-socialist was flaunting her ignorance and celebrating the loss of American jobs. “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough lamented that New York “was robbed of this Amazon opportunity” at the expense of the most needy.

From the comments to this article: No, Joe. YOUR party has a far worse problem.
Go to this article (I know I know it’s the Washington Compost), sort the comments by ‘most liked’ and just read comments.
The amount of liberals convinced that yes, this was actually GIVING money to Amazon, is disturbing.
AOC is a symptom of the rot in YOUR party, not the cause.

All this was revealed as far back as 2018: Ocasio-Cortez Embarrasses Herself on Firing Line  . . . "Unfortunately, this wasn’t simply the one scar on an otherwise flawless performance. Most of the time Ocasio-Cortez opened her mouth only to change feet." . . .

Dems' long knives unsheathed on Ocasio-Cortez on Meet the Press  . . . "Ignorance and simple-mindedness are no obstacles to a Democrat winning approval from party bosses." . . .

What Kind Of Jobs Should The Government Create For People Who Don’t Want To Work?

De Blasio says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t understand Amazon deal

NY Post

"Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday that US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was wrong to have claimed the collapse of the Amazon deal would free up $3 billion to fix the city’s subways and hire more teachers.

"During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” de Blasio agreed when host Chuck Todd said that the tax breaks offered to Amazon weren’t “money you had over here. And it was going over there.”

“ 'Correct,” de Blasio said.

"He added: “And that $3 billion that would go back in tax incentives was only after we were getting the jobs and getting the revenue.”

" 'To further drive home the point, Todd said, “There’s not $3 billion in money —”

“ 'There’s no money — right,” de Blasio said.

"The exchange came after Todd suggested there was a “factual divide” that kept Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bronx) from understanding “how this deal worked.”

"He also played a video clip that showed her reacting on Thursday to Amazon’s cancellation of plans to build an office complex in Long Island City.

“ 'If we were willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district ourselves, if we wanted to. We could " . . .

Trump's Venezuela policy isn't a case of right versus left. It's a case of right versus wrong.

Cartoons added by TD

NBC News; NBC? No, really!

"As a former Obama-era diplomat, I can and should acknowledge when this president does diplomacy correctly."

"The people of Venezuela are being held hostage by Nicolas Maduro. For years, he has denied them food, medicine and basic supplies. More than three million refugees have fled the country. In 2017, more than 280,000 children were found to be malnourished and at risk of dying. The situation in the country has only declined drastically and the statistics are likely far worse now. Alarmingly, the government denies there are any problems; it doesn’t even allow health statistics to be officially kept.

"Still, we know that newborns in Syria, which is still wracked by war, are more likely to survive than those born to Venezuelan mothers; maternal mortality rose 66 percent from 2015 to 2016. The average person in the nation lost 24 pounds in 2017.Reports indicate that nearly 80 percent of hospitals lack regular access to water, 53 percent of the nation's operating rooms are shuttered and more than 70 percent of emergency rooms cannot regularly provide services to patients.

"Maduro callously refuses to acknowledge, let alone address the suffering of his people. If America allows him to stay the course, the consequences will be catastrophic. This isn’t just a political crisis. There is a humanitarian imperative to act.

"It's true that American hasn't always been a good neighbor; Our relations with Latin America have often oscillated between indifference and ill-advised interventions. And on Wednesday, during a House Foreign Affairs committee hearing on U.S. policy toward Venezuela, many Democrats focused on that past and the possibility that any intervention in Venezuela could turn out as poorly as past efforts in the region.

"But they all but ignored the present perilous predicament of the Venezuelan people. Our past cannot hold us back from doing what is right, and required now. Inaction is not necessarily respect; in this case, it is morally wrong and reprehensible." . . .

By Brett Bruen, president, Global Situation Room, Inc.