by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images.
As evidence piled up suggesting Empire actor Jussie Smollett staged a hate crime against himself—one in which two alleged assailants poured bleach on him, called him racist and homophobic slurs, and yelled “this is MAGA country”—many of his most vocal defenders on the left went silent. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quietly deleted a supportive tweet. Cory Booker, who previously called the attack an “attempted modern-day lynching,” declined to comment on new developments, as did Kamala Harris. “I think the facts are still unfolding, and I’m very concerned,” she told a reporter at a New Hampshire town hall, after taking several painfully long seconds to formulate a response. (Smollett, whose case went before a grand jury on Tuesday, maintains his innocence, while his alleged attackers have been released by police.)
Conservatives seized on the awkwardness, with many baldly vinicated at Smollett’s seeming duplicity, and incensed that his story had been leveraged to bash Trump and his supporters. “The reason [the right] is dunking on media pundits and activists masquerading as journalists over this [is] because it shows just how full of shit this new era of ‘facts-first journalism’ is,” said Stephen L. Miller, a media columnist at National Review. “We know there are no consequences for Harris or Booker calling this a lynching. We know there will be no apology from Ellen Page or Stephen Colbert.”
This may be an oversimplification. After all, expressions of sympathy are far different from reportorial inquiry. And the mainstream media’s very investigation into the matter, however delinquent, is proof of a commitment to nonpartisan truth-telling. Nevertheless, many right-wing pundits remain aggrieved and frustrated by the matter, seemingly viewing it as proof that different standards of veracity apply to anti-Trump coverage than pro-Trump reporting. “There was no conservative angle,” said the influential conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. “I mean, people were hoping the story was true, and then they could jump on Republicans for not having been quick enough to embrace the story. That’s what happened here. And that’s a bad tendency. The story itself was not supremely credible from the very first. It was perfectly tailored to fit a narrative. And maybe it was true, and maybe it wasn’t. But when a story is that perfectly tailored to fit a narrative”—there were initially reports floating around that the assailants were wearing MAGA hats—“you have to start asking whether it was actually filled in to fit the narrative.”
The Smollett episode, of course, is also a window into a complementary phenomenon on the right, specifically an ever-simmering resentment at being labeled the party of bigotry, or racial grievance, or discrimination, which many conservatives reject as a form of discrimination itself. The opportunity to take the rare, public victory lap, then, was irresistible for some. As Quillette editor Andy Ngo noted in an extensive Twitter thread, conservative writers and journalists have been keeping tabs on fabricated hate crimes for years, most notably the Duke lacrosse scandal and the U.V.A.-Rolling Stone affair. The Covington Catholic High School fracas, in which a white male teenager faced off in a video against a Native American activist, quickly devolved into a political version of Rashomon, in which several prominent pundits ultimately apologized for rushing to judgment.
But the Smollett case was one of the most egregious examples that Ngo had observed to date. “He is a well-connected celebrity and political activist—in other words, very privileged… His celebrity friends are numerous,” Ngo told me in an e-mail. “The influencer ecosystem was able to amplify his fake story to millions and millions of people across the globe.” Daily Beast senior columnist Matt Lewis, formerly of the Daily Caller, made a similar point. “Victim status [has become] the pinnacle of moral authority” in the culture, he told me. “It’s not surprising to me that people are treating themselves as victims specifically, or members of a victim class. So I think that conservatives are cognizant of media confirmation bias, and the desire for people to get attention, and to treat themselves as beyond reproach.”
Indeed, for days, the story was pure woke-bait, prompting journalists to write long pieces condemning the seeming Trump-fueled motivations behind the attack, and leading activist-politicians to target reporters who, lacking further evidence, had packed their earlier stories with qualifiers. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Entertainment Tonight after it tweeted that Smollett was “possibl[y]” the victim of a “homophobic and racially charged attack.” “This attack was not ‘possibly’ homophobic. It was a racist and homophobic attack,” the congresswoman tweeted, adding: “It is no one’s job to water down or sugar-coat the rise of hate crimes.” Activist Deray McKesson accused a local Chicago reporter of acting as a mouthpiece for the Chicago Police Department. GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis, meanwhile, claimed Smollett was “doubly victimized as the subject of speculation by the media industry and broader culture.” (None of these figures have commented on Smollett since the case began to unravel.)
Yet as Brian Stelter has pointed out, attacks on supposed liberal bias can be equally knee-jerk and convenient. The media, as he put it in a recent newsletter, is not “one big blog,” but comprised of “thousands of outlets and hundreds of thousands of people, with great journalists and lazy aggregators, with no single mission or belief system.” In Hollywood, many of Smollett’s defenders are now honestly and publicly grappling with the possibility that he fabricated the attack. (“I feel like he fucked up Black History Month, bro,” said Cardi B. “Goddam.”) While Democratic politicians have remained mostly quiet, mainstream media outlets have worked diligently, if in some cases belatedly, to report on new developments.
What Smollett himself might have been attempting to accomplish is still unclear. Some accounts intimate he was upset after the Empire studio received an earlier racist and homophobic letter that was disregarded. Perhaps, as others have suggested, he hoped to advance his own career. However it shakes out, conservatives are frustrated that they couldn’t interrogate the alleged attack without facing criticism. “The way this works is that we’ve now reached a state where if you say, ‘I have some questions about the veracity of the story,’ then you are immediately labeled the person who didn’t take seriously the original allegations,” said Shapiro. “So you don’t care about any crimes unless you believe Jussie Smollett and believe all of that night.” Those on the left should be frustrated, too. If Smollett did report a fake crime, he did an incredible disservice to the thousands of people who are victims of real hate crimes every year. Amid a culture war that is tearing America apart at the seams, he may have taken advantage of a woke generation that defaults to believing victims and is trying, in fits and starts, to create a safer and more tolerant world.
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