So it seems that race-hate faker Jussie Smolett walks away, free and clear. As a three-way protected person – being of color, gay and a C-list celebrity – and one with apparently plenty of pull among the Chicago political overclass, this probably should have been expected. Race-hate fakers generally seem to get away with the proverbial slap on the wrist and a stern warning not to do it again, once the initial outcry dies down and investigators have done a belated job in proving the initial outrage to have been faked. The same-old, same-old for Lil’ Jussie is about par, in the mind of cynics like myself.
But the sheer, brazen ineptitude of his manufactured drama, the unlikelihood of a pair of MAGA-hat-wearing white men out with a noose and a jug of bleach in the middle of one of the coldest winter nights of the year, randomly pouncing on a C-list celeb in the cast of a show of which most of us had never heard … no, just no. As it eventually turned out after extensive investigation by the CPD (during which serious crime continued to crest in a tidal wave, and the supposed victim made the media rounds loudly trumpeting his alleged victimhood) Lil’ Jussie was proved to have bungled six ways from Sunday in hiring a pair of Nigerian body-building brothers to do the deed that he couldn’t get any MAGA-hat wearing white guys to do and paying them with a personal check. This is Three Stooges – Lucy Ricardo – Homer Simpson level of plotting … and as of this week, the right words were whispered in the right ear. Lil Jussie skates; free as a bird, guilty as sin, adorned with an unbecoming smirk, the kind of smirk worn by the grade-school sneak when he has managed to get another kid punished for his own misdeeds.
Not for the first time since I’ve been a blogger – I must agree with Roger Simon; Jussie Smollet is a new O.J. Simpson.
“.. another man getting away with a crime he committed in full public view. That didn’t work out very well for The Juice. In fact, he’s a pariah for life. And it won’t for Smollett either. He will be a despised person for the rest of his days and a symbol of unequal justice. He might as well have gone to jail, served the time, and been forgiven.”
By the grace of our legal system O.J. Simpson – a far more well-known celebrity than Lil Jussie — was found innocent in criminal court of the brutal slaughter of his ex-wife and a restaurant worker who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. O.J.’s good fortune for that, but practically the last time in twenty-five years that anything good happened with regard to his post-sports career as a movie actor, commercial pitchman and all-around celebrity. He was dropped like a hot rock from just about every generously recompensed job as a commercial ‘face’, and I still cringe whenever he appears in a Naked Gun movie. O.J. has a half-life. Jussie may be riding high at this moment – but I think he will have the same kind of half-life, wearing out an existence in the shadows of notoriety as a pariah. Jussie Smollet didn’t murder an ex-spouse and a hapless waiter, but he did break one of the great commandments. He bore false witness against his metaphorical neighbors, deliberately, with malice, and for his own personal aggrandizement – that of getting a pay raise, and perhaps more media visibility. This kind of calumny is not easily overlooked or forgiven. Discuss as you wish.
He’ll be fine. The memory hole will swallow the details, and soon all that will be left is a vague adjective. Somebody’s looking out for him–or else Foxx has no sense of timing whatever. (Just wait a few weeks and you can pocket the 10K without anybody noticing.)
OJ was the beneficiary of some calculation by the then-DA, Gil Garcetti, father of the recent Mayor of LA. Garcetti moved the case from Santa Monica, the normal jurisdiction, to LA on the excuse that the courtrooms were larger in LA. My assumption was that Garcetti wanted some black jurors in the pool. He got his wish with an incompetent team of prosecutors and black jurors who hate white women marrying black men.
The guy who convicted OJ was the civil suit lawyer, Daniel Petrocelli, who found the photo of OJ wearing the “ugly ass shoes” and proved he did it.
Smolett maybe be in trouble with the Postal Inspectors, whop nobody even has heard of but who are not amused by misuse of the mail.
There was even an Alan Ladd movie about postal inspectors.
That just shows how old I am.
The death of shame as a controlling force has been a massive tragedy for society. Of course, shame only works at all when tempered by feelings of community cohesion.
Smolett’s “exoneration” was probably a foregone conclusion. The prosecutors may have chosen to announce it when they did as a “tit for tat” reaction to the Mueller report. It certainly came in handy for the MSM. They were in disarray for a while before the usual Gleichschaltung around a new narrative – Trump really wasn’t exonerated, obstruction is still on the table, there’s still a Russkie under every bed in spite of Mueller, etc. The Smolett affair bought them time. Take CNN for example. It’s as ubiquitous as Orwell’s telescreen in airports and government offices. Virtually every time I happened to glance at the “news” on CNN over the past two years, it’s been a rant against Trump. After the Smolett announcement, it was Jussie Smolett 24/7, at least until the new Trump narrative had time to solidify. And solidify it did. I follow the German media – Spiegel, Focus, FAZ, SDZ, Zurich newspaper, etc. – as well as the English language MSM in places like the UK and Australia, and you could find virtually identical memes about the Mueller report in every one of them. Gleichschaltung indeed! The Smolett affair just gave the global MSM school of fish time to gather around it.
I am unclear as to who has been fingered for the letter, Smollett or the Nigerians? Who ever is defending him goes from passing the blame off on the Nigerians to claiming that Smollett’s initial report and claims were 100% accurate. Maybe, the white MAGA perps levitated in and out of the location of the “attack”.
With the state charges dropped, no doubt CPD will leave no stone unturned in their quest to “bring the real perpetrators to justice” as the Smollett family requested. Those hateful, racist, MAGA-hatted People of Pinkish-Beige Color are still on the run, folks. Let’s be careful out there.
Agree with James. Smolett has friends in high places and he’s no OJ. He’ll be rehabilitated. Perhaps he appreciates how fortunate he is.
Conservatives see hate-crimes hoaxes perpetrated by leftists as part of a pattern of intellectual dishonesty by leftists. Many leftists don’t see the pattern. They see only what to them appear to be unconnected events. That’s one reason why they are leftists.
I just found out that Geragos is his lawyer. If that civil suit goes to trial it will turn into a circus. I was scanning his twitter feed, and it looks like his strategy will be to counterattack with a ‘Black Lives Matter’ defense. He’s already dragging the investigating officers through the mud.
This morning I found out that Smollett is up for an NAACP Image Award at the TV ceremony tomorrow night. Win or lose, it would seem that the fact that he is up for the award after this shows that to what used to be considered a mainstream American Black-oriented group his faking of a racial attack and possible start of race riots is considered commendable. If the NAACP is in favor of fraud and fake racial incidents AND abusing the law to protect them, there is no point in listening to them about anything ever again.
Smollett is and apparently will remain a hero in the Black community for trying to start a race war. Even if he did it so clumsily that he probably could be let off for diminished mental capacity. Paying your accomplices with a check???!!!???
All segments of society are going to have to make a bunch of choices soon, and will find out they carry irrevocable consequences.
This is going to be unpleasant for everybody, and terminal for some.
*sigh*
Subotai Bahadur
An excellent point – that Lil Jussie has powerful local friends, and is just shameless enough to carry on with the charade. He is still riding high — for now.
But I am also thinking of how Roman Polanski was on the verge of coming back, a couple of years ago, when all his pals at the Academy Awards gave him a standing ovation, and it looked as if all would be forgiven and he would return to Hollywood … and then a blogger/commenter (whose name and exact status escapes me) caught fire with an outraged post: “He raped a child!” was her point, and hammered in with a sledgehammer. Never mind about his talent, his friends in high places: he drugged and raped a child. Is that acceptable to you, all you who led the cheering for him?
It was such a fiery essay – It got linked all over, and in the end, I believe it sank his Hollywood rehabilitation, as people who read it began to reconsider.
Lil Jussie (as far as is known) certainly hasn’t raped an underaged anything – but he willfully and deliberately bore a false witness, and did it in such a stupid and easily unraveled fashion … and the icing on the whole rancid cupcake is that he has been rescued from paying any penalty for perpetrating a fake hate crime, because he is privileged, and his friends in high places are also privileged.
The fake hate crime is galling. And escaping anything but a light tap on the wrist for it is doubly galling.
In the long run, I still do believe that Lil Jussie will wind up in the same position as O.J. – a pariah.
I am fascinated at how cloddish and clumsy the resolution was; no finesse at all.
I’d like to say that the stunt was crude from the get go, if it weren’t just a matter of good luck that these clowns didn’t have something on tape.
Maybe a “Smollett” should refer to hoaxes that are just too stupid to believe.
The “R” is silent in Cook County
Sheesh, when you’ve lost the NAACP and SNL…
Admittedly, you’d have to be a blithering idiot to have believed it in the first place.
Bill Brandt
The “R” is silent in Cook County
Having grown up in an area of New England where I heard both the silent and the spoken “r,” for a while I thought you were discussing speech patterns and not politics.
As Exasperated points out, both Chris Rock at the NAACP Image Awards ceremony and SNL recently poked fun at Jussie. Given the reluctance of current comedians to lampoon anyone who is not a “deplorable,” one infers that even in the “woke” community, Jussie Smollett has little credibility. Jussie Smollett is headed towards the pariah condition that Sgt. Mom predicts.
Subotai Bahadur
The link in my previous comment points out that this is the fourth year in a row that Jussie Smollett was nominated for the award. Smollett won the award in 2017. As such, his being nominated this year shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted as a NAACP endorsement of race-hoaxing- or whatever one wants to call it. Jussie Smollett apparently believed that his presence at the ceremony wouldn’t be welcome, as he didn’t attend. Jussie Smollete was correct, as Chris Rock lampooned him at the NAACP Image Award ceremony.
That was my comment.
“…in the middle of one of the coldest Winter nights of the year,…” – technically, one of the coldest Winter nights of the past 25 years. It was completely insane that night and nobody who didn’t have to be out there would have been out there for any reason – unless you were paid to fake beat up a guy. By the way, has anyone seen the size of those dudes? They would have thrashed Smollett within an inch of his life and Smollett would have looked FAR worse than he did. So many holes in the story but we are probably past that part now.
I don’t think this is over yet. If the feds can somehow get involved, they might find the money trail to all of this. The feds are the only chance for any sort of punishment for Smollett as Cook County and the State of IL have been a dumb clown car for a long, long time. It’s unbelievable that people in Chi and IL put up with it.
The only satisfaction I have up to this point with the whole saga is that Smollett is probably out well over six figures for Geragos and company to defend him.
I figured that his lawyer would drag things out for a few months, then he would make a quick, quiet appearance, enter a guilty plea to a missdemenor and end up with some combination of community service, fine and maybe a few weekends in jail. The whole thing wrapped up in two paragraphs on A26. He could have gone on with his life chasing small parts.
Instead, the blatant corruption of this disposition has propelled him to a new height of notoriety and opprobrium that will be far worse for his future prospects. With friends in high places like these he dosen’t need any more enemies.
Of course, none of his “freinds” seem concerned with even the pretense of having his best interests in mind.
The only satisfaction I have up to this point with the whole saga is that Smollett is probably out well over six figures for Geragos and company to defend him.
Geragos might not have time for a thorough defense since he and Avenatti have their own issues.