In a saner world, we would never hear a word about Jussie Smollett

By David McElroy · February 22, 2019

Until last month, I had never heard of Jussie Smollett. (I don’t watch television.)

I was vaguely aware of a television show called Empire, but I couldn’t have told you whether it was still on the air or not. And I certainly couldn’t have told you anything about an obscure gay actor on the show.

All of that changed last month when Smollett claimed he had been attacked by Trump-supporting white people in red MAGA hats. I quickly got sick of the story when progressives were screaming about the alleged attack, calling it a “modern-day lynching” and all sorts of nonsense that people say when their biases are confirmed.

For the last week, the tables have turned and Smollett has been arrested for making the whole thing up. Now I’m sick of conservatives screaming about the hoax. Their overreaction is just as insane as the reaction from the left was last month.

I just want to know why we allow media to fill our minds — and take our attention — with stories about nobodies such as Jussie Smollett.

Unless you knew Smollett or worked with him, this story never made any difference in your life. It certainly never made any difference in my life.

We have somehow allowed media to convince us that every isolated outrage matters in our lives, but that’s a lie. Even if the alleged attack had happened the way Smollett claimed, it wouldn’t have mattered — and it wouldn’t have said anything about the actual way in which blacks and gays are treated in this country.

Individual stories can be outrageous, but they prove absolutely nothing. If these sorts of attacks were happening in multiple places around the country, there would be a pattern. It would show a systemic problem that more of us should know about. But even if it had been true, one attack on an obscure actor by a couple of alleged right-wing hoodlums would have proven nothing.

One incident of almost any kind is meaningless, but we’ve allowed media to convince us that each of these sorts of stories matter to us. We’re trained to believe that we’re supposed to have opinions about these incidents — and we’re supposed to use these isolated incidents to advance our political agendas.

When news of the alleged attack first came out last month, I didn’t form any strong opinion about it, but when I heard that the assailants were alleged to have shouted, “This is MAGA country,” I knew that part was a lie. That’s not the way actual Trump-loving racists would talk. (Seriously.) And it made the weaknesses in the rest of the story even more suspect.

But the more appalling point is that I even knew enough about this story to have an opinion. I should have never heard about it. It’s meaningless to me. But we have opened wide the gateways of media — to the point that we have meaningless digital sewage pumped into our lives every day.

Very little of life is actually experienced in terms of identity-group conflict, but if you follow the news media even casually, you could be forgiven for assuming these group conflicts are central to public life for most people.

That’s because keeping those conflicts stirred up helps two groups. It serves the financial interests of the media companies, which don’t make a nickel if you turn them off. So they have to keep us outraged. And all these conflicts serve the interests of the “political activists” who are determined to gain political power to force their agendas — right or left — on the rest of us.

These media feeding frenzies do not serve us. They only steal our time. They take our attention away from the things in our lives which truly matter. Think about it. Every minute that we spend forming opinions about people such as Smollett — or thousands of others — is a minute which is gone from our ever-shortening lives.

Now that Smollett turns out to have made the whole thing up — legally it’s not proven, but I’m convinced — conservatives are playing the same game which the progressives were playing last month. They’re pretending this story matters and that it tells us something about those evil and stupid people on the left.

It does nothing of the sort. One man who made up ridiculous charges — which have been easy to disprove, apparently — but that doesn’t tell us anything about black men in general or gay men in general. It’s just one selfish man who tried to manipulate a society in a way that would have boosted his career.

This isn’t a story which tells us anything meaningful about progressives or anything meaningful about conservatives — and certainly nothing about their intellectual bankruptcy. It’s a story that tells us something sickening about a media culture which is eager to use outrage to divide people further and get more people to watch — all because we’ve allowed them to make us believe that a nobody such as Jussie Smollett actually matters to us.

But he doesn’t matter to me or to you. I’ll be happy if I never hear his name again.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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