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We owe Dan Rather a debt of gratitude.  He brought a new term to public consciousness, and made a term long precious to media vermin known as well.  The new term was: fake but accurate.  The precious term: too good to check.

When Jussie Smollett claimed he was attacked by two white, MAGA hat wearing racists at 0200 one far below zero night in Chicago, the media, and the racial grievance/fake hate crime industry was very much in “too good to check” mode.  “Too good to check” means any story that checks every woke/social justice, CRT anti-white, anti/America narrative box must be entirely believed, no investigation—you know: actual journalism–must be done, and any facts, as opposed to the woke truth, must be ruthlessly attacked and suppressed.  You know, like the “believe all women/women never lie” narrative until prominent D/S/Cs started being accused of sexual misconduct by women.  The cognitive dissonance was wonderful to behold. Take this link to a brilliant bit—4:45–by Dave Chappelle that sums up the ridiculous nature of the Smollett hoax.

In February of 2019, I wrote: Jussie Smollett: It’s Hard Being Anti-LGBTQWERTY, White Supremacist, MAGA, Trump Racists!  Enter “Jussie Smollett” in the SMM homepage searchbar to find all of SMM articles on this case.  I wrote the introduction to that article from the perspective of a competent police officer:

Let us pretend, gentle readers, you are experienced police officers.  On January 29, 1019, in the early morning hours, you are sent to the home of a gay, black actor who claims he was beaten by two white Trump MAGA thugs who called him an ‘Empire nigger’ and an ‘Empire faggot,’ splashed him with bleach, and put a noose around his neck.  When he answers the door, he appears upset, but is still wearing the noose.

This, fellow officers, is the primary definition in the police dictionary of ‘suspicious.’  You soon learn he decided, at 0200, on a sub-zero, nasty winter night, to head to the local Subway to grab a sandwich–in downtown Chicago, which is not at all Trump supporter country.  Suspicious X 2.

You discover a friend of his reported the incident some 40 minutes after it happened, and he wore the noose around for an hour or more until you arrived to see it.  He also brought the sandwich home.  Suspicious X 10.

He claims both white attackers wore red MAGA hats.  Suspicious X 20.

He shows no sign of the brutal beating he described. Suspicious X 30.

The ‘victim’ takes you to the scene of the ‘crime,’ points out a video camera, and tells you he’s so glad the attack was on video.  The camera was pointing the wrong way, and why would someone so horribly racially traumatized know where an obscure camera just happened to be in the area? Suspicious X 40.

It’s interesting that Chappelle, who does not, to my knowledge, have police experience, came to the same conclusions.  I continued:

All of this, and your cop sense, tells you this is just another garden variety racialist hoax, and your Sgt. and Lt. and Captain think so too, but it has to be entirely run down as though it were the real thing, so it’s assigned to detectives in the morning.

The detectives quickly review all video surveillance footage and find no evidence of the attack. Suspicious X 50.  They quickly zero in on two Nigerian brothers, one of who was once an extra on the ‘victim’s TV show–Empire–and both of whom left for Nigeria immediately after the “attack.’  Suspicious X 60.

They quickly discover via the FBI that Smollet had, a short time before the ‘attack,’ been sent a letter with the return address of “MAGA, featuring a crude drawing of a stick figure hanging from a tree with a gun pointed at it, and cut and pasted text from magazines–1970’s crime movie style–saying: ‘Smollett Jussie you will die black fag.’  Suspicious X 70.

When the Nigerians brothers return a short time later, the detectives scoop them up and search their home, finding bleach, magazines with removed pages, and a receipt from a local hardware store for rope just like that found around the ‘victim’s’ neck.  The victim, who initially was all for prosecuting the hate criminals that attacked him, decides he’d rather not.  Suspicious X 80.

The detectives want to speak with the ‘victim’ again.  His attorneys–suspicious X 90–say he has every intention of continuing to cooperate with the police, but he’s not available just yet, to do that.

And better yet, the Nigerians roll over on the ‘victim,’ admitting he paid them for their performance and they even rehearsed it.  Suspicious X 100.

The suspicious needle is pegged and has broken.  How about it fellow police officers: real thing or particularly stupid hoax?  Yeah, I think so too.

Chappelle noted that real white supremacists surely would not be watching “Empire.”  Indeed, and who would just happen to be out on foot, carrying bleach and a noose one very, very cold Chicago morning when no one but the police were out and about?

“Fake but accurate” permeates this sort of race hoax.  Even if it is obviously a lie, that doesn’t matter because systemic racism, white supremacy, TRUMP!!!, domestic terrorists, insurrectionists, anti-vaxxers, Emmett Till, etc..  So it’s a lie, so what?  It raises “awareness,” and starts “a national conversation” about how horrible white people and America are, and we’re sure this really would happen any minute if there were any actual white supremacists around and most of all, shut up you racists!

You might, gentle readers, wish to take these links for a brief and incomplete history of recent race hoaxes:

1) Hate Crimes: Sneaky Normals  

2) Hate Crime: A Quick Look In The Mirror

3) No Hate Crimes At all

4) Bubba Wallace: Another National Conversation

 5) Noose Hoaxing: What Passes For Virtue

It would also be a good idea to take this link to a website that catalogs race hoaxes.  There is a great deal of “news” that is fake but accurate, and too good to check.

As I’m sure you know by now gentle readers, Jussie Smollett was convicted on five of the six charges, felonies, and is facing up to three years in prison.  More might be tacked on in light of his perjured testimony in court.  As I’m also sure you recall, Cook County Prosecutor Kim Foxx, who by a remarkable coincidence happens to be black, originally refused to prosecute Smollett, so a special prosecutor was eventually appointed.  His comments on the verdict:

Special prosecutor Dan Webb addressed the media after the verdict was read. ‘Mr. Smollett did exactly what we said he did,’ he said. “Mr. Smollett got up in front of this jury and lied for hours and hours,” he continued. ‘We don’t expect defendants to do that. Mr. Smollett would not have lost this case unless the jury found that he had lied to them.’

And so they did.  Several prominent lawyers spoke on Smollett’s decision to perjure himself:

Smollett testifying in his own defense is one of two things, or maybe both: a narcissistic criminal defendant who is doubling down on his charged lies to law enforcement or defense attorneys who know they are way behind and are throwing a low probability Hail Mary to try to get their client off,’ former U.S. attorney Neama Rahmani, who is not involved with Smollett’s case, told Fox News Digital.

Rahmani added: ‘Either way, Smollett’s story was a bizarre attempt at forcing a square peg into a round hole by offering every possible explanation for the state’s digital evidence except the most obvious one: that he is guilty. In the unlikely event he is acquitted, Smollett’s decision was a genius move. But it is far more likely that the jury sees through his ruse and Smollett is convicted. If so, the judge may sentence him to prison time for obstructing justice and perjuring himself on the witness stand.

And so they did and so the judge may.

James White, a high-powered attorney in Michigan who is also not involved in the Smollett case, echoed Rahmani’s comments that the actor’s testimony was nothing more than ‘an unparalleled disaster.’ White noted that he believes Smollett not only ‘hurt his case’ but also ‘went beyond and made the prosecutor’s case’ in the process.

‘His story is so unbelievable and in the face of the evidence that no reasonable jury is ever going to buy it,’ White said of Smollett’s time on the stand in which he admitted to doing drugs with Bola Osundairo and mentioned other personal anecdotes that White believes ‘[weren’t] relevant’ to Smollett’s defense.

‘I think that he absolutely buried himself to the extent he wasn’t already buried,’ White pressed.

Although White acknowledged closing arguments have yet to be made and the jury is yet to deliver a verdict, he said Smollett’s testimony ‘was almost indecipherable trying to make sense of it, and I just don’t see how any reasonable jury is going to find any truth in anything he said.’

The litigator also contended that Smollett should not have taken the stand at all.

‘The real issue of the real story here is why was he even up there taking the stand?’ questioned White. ‘So for me, the million-dollar question, which really hasn’t played out during the course of the trial to the extent that I’ve seen is, did his attorneys try to stop this? Or were they a part of this plan? Because if it’s the latter, that’s a problem.’

Added White: ‘To go up in international media coverage and do what he did if it was sanctioned by his counsel, that’s concerning to me. I don’t think that it’s anything that will reverse convictions or anything to that degree, but it’s concerning.’

Why did he do it?  Law Professor Jonathan Turley explains:  

Many have marveled at the audacity of Smollett, who literally is asking jurors to discard not just every piece of material evidence, videotape and eyewitness testimony but to defy any semblance of logic in accepting his account of a racist attack by Trump supporters. That’s because he is not really trying to convince anyone he didn’t stage the attack with the help of Nigerian brothers Abimbola and Olabingo Osundairo. He is trying to get the jury to vote for him despite his guilt. It is called jury nullification, and this may be the most raw example of the practice in decades. Even if he can get a single holdout juror, he has a hung jury.

Final Thoughts:  As in the Rittenhouse case, justice was done, but the verdict will not change the sociopolitical forces dividing America.  As Prof. Turley said, Smollett’s testimony was an attempt to leverage those forces, to say: “I’m black and gay.  I check several woke boxes. I’m a perpetual, double victim!   America is racist and homophobic.  Ignore the evidence; it’s racist and homophobic too!  Everybody is lying but me!  The police want to murder every black person!  You can strike a blow for social justice by acquitting me!”  Smollett’s lawyer was just a bit more subtle when he told the jury they needed to be “constitutional warriors,” and so they were, just not as he intended.

Perhaps a few years ago, it would have worked.  Thankfully, for most Americans, the race card is expired.  A summer and more of watching America’s cities burn, years of Black Lives Matter Marxist, racist propaganda, Antifa anarchy and skyrocketing crime rates have awakened many to reality and stiffened more than a few spines.  And of course, seeing race hoax after race hoax exposed, and more and more hoaxers prosecuted, may well have made jury nullification on such matters harder to obtain.  Perhaps not only in Chicago.

Smollett’s problem was he is an actor, and not a very good one.  Desperate to keep his job and his standard of living—he failed–he concocted this hoax, but did it with the skill of a C grade screenwriter.  It was too convoluted, involved too many people, and was poorly acted.  Worse yet, Smollett didn’t write the police into the script and thought announcing his victimhood to a willing media would be the last, triumphant act.  How could he possibly be written off Empire then?  Why, he’d be far more famous than before. It would be his best role yet.  He’d be a mega/super black/gay star!

Writing racial slurs on a dorm room door often can’t be absolutely disproved as a racial attack unless the hoaxer confesses, as most do.  But involve coconspirators who aren’t smart criminals, write a script that checks all the right—left–boxes, leave a huge trail of evidence, and confession isn’t necessary.

For all that, Smollett almost got away with it.  He knew he could count on his connections, including Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris and Kim Foxx, and they came through for him.  Unfortunately for Smollett, the hoax was too elaborate, generated too much publicity and caught the wave of backlash against the woke “summer of love” and the overreach of politicians and “activists” trying to destroy America.

Ultimately, Smollett came up against Normal Americans who aren’t racist, domestic terrorists, insurrectionists, or anti-vaxxers.  They don’t want to see America “fundamentally transformed,” and understand the necessity of the rule of law, which they applied in this case.

So what has changed?  Perhaps a red wave for the restoration of America has gained new momentum.  Perhaps it will be harder to commit a successful race hoax, which will tend to reduce their numbers.  And perhaps, if people screaming RACIST! just shut up, America, which is the least racist nation on Earth, will get back to being America.  Most Americans, upon hearing of Smollett’s conviction, will be momentarily glad because as Chappelle put it: “this nigger was clearly lying,” and immediately go about their business.  But race hustlers gotta hustle, and the woke movement won’t quietly slink away in shame and embarassment.  After all, some things are just too good to check, and fake but accurate.