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On February 21, 2019, the heretofore unknown actor Jussie (Empire) Smollett was charged with felony disorderly conduct for allegedly filing a false police report in Chicago claiming he was the victim of a hate crime.
The charge came from the Cook County Stateâs Attorney office.
NBC News reported (emphases mine):
The state alleges Smollett filed a false report with Chicago police on Jan. 29, when he claimed he was assaulted by two masked men who hurled racist and homophobic slurs.
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, speaking at a press conference, skewered Smollett and false police reports generally. He said that while no violent crimes went uninvestigated as a result of Smollett’s claims, Johnson suggested that the hundreds of killings in Chicago represented a more serious problem deserving of national attention than a celebrityâs allegedly false police report.
Disorderly conduct is normally thought of as a low-level crime. In Illinois, however, making false reports to peace officers is actually a felony contained within the disorderly statute. A false report is a class four felony, punishable by up to three years in prison. The elements that make it such a felony are: any kind of transmission to a peace officer reporting a crime without reasonable grounds.
There is also the question of a hoax hate letter with his name on it that was sent to the set of Empire before the attack. That is potentially more serious, as the former sheriff of Milwaukee says:
For those who missed the running three-week saga, this is what happened. Click on the image to enlarge. Read the top three columns, then the bottom horizontal bar:
Sheriff Clarke tweeted more observations about this case:
On February 22, an editorial appeared in USA Today, ‘Hate crime hoaxes, like Jussie Smollett’s alleged attack, are more common than you think’.
The author is Wilfred Reilly:
an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University, a historically Black institution located in Frankfort. He is the author of the upcoming book Hate Crime Hoax, as well as The $50,000,000 Question, a book dealing with how people value identity.Â
Reilly says:
The questions here are obvious. How many Trump supporters even exist in the downtown of a city that went 83% for Hillary Clinton â and how many of them watch “Empire?” How many guys looking for a fight carry rope and bottles of bleach around with them? Almost every normal citizen had questions like these about this incident, and we were justified in having them.
That this case turned out to be a hoax shouldn’t come as too big of a shock. A great many hate crime stories turn out to be hoaxes. Simply looking at what happened to the most widely reported hate crime stories over the past 4-5 years illustrates this: not only the Smollett case but also the Yasmin Seweid, Air Force Academy, Eastern Michigan, Wisconsin-Parkside, Kean College, Covington Catholic, and âHopewell Baptist burningâ racial scandals all turned out to be fakes. And, these cases are not isolated outliers.
He went on to describe research in this area:
Doing research for a book, Hate Crime Hoax, I was able to easily put together a data set of 409 confirmed hate hoaxes. An overlapping but substantially different list of 348 hoaxes exists at fakehatecrimes.org, and researcher Laird Wilcox put together another list of at least 300 in his still-contemporary book Crying Wolf. To put these numbers in context, a little over 7,000 hate crimes were reported by the FBI in 2017 and perhaps 8-10% of these are widely reported enough to catch the eye of a national researcher.
Therefore, of the 7,000 real hate crimes, a small number actually make a researcher’s list. In order to make the researcher’s list, they have to appear in the media.
Ironically, it would seem that we hear more about the hoaxes than the real hate crimes.
It is also important to note that most real hate crimes are not inter-racial:
84% of white murder victims and 93% of Black murder victims are killed by criminals of their own race, and the person most likely to kill you is your ex-wife or husband. When violent inter-racial crimes do occur, whites are at least as likely to be the targets as are minorities. Simply put, Klansmen armed with nooses are not lurking on Chicago street corners.
This seems to be a good point to let everyone know that the last time a lynching took place — and by a Klansman, no less — was in 1981 in Mobile, Alabama. Wikipedia records that the defendants received maximum sentences for the murder of Michael Donald, and the Klan went bankrupt:
Henry Hay executed in the electric chair. James Knowles and an accomplice sentenced to life in prison. Civil suit against United Klans of America caused their bankruptcy.
Reilly points out that hoaxes do a lot of harm to community relations as well as waste precious police time:
what hate hoaxers actually do is worsen generally good race relations, and distract attention from real problems. As Chicagoâs disgusted top cop, Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, pointed out yesterday, skilled police officers spent four weeks tracking down Smollettâs imaginary attackers â in a city that has seen 28 murders as of Feb. 9th, according to The Chicago Tribune. We all, media and citizens alike, would be better served to focus on real issues like gun violence and the opiate epidemic than on fairy tales like Jussieâs.
How true.
Hoax hate crimes have proliferated in recent years, especially since Donald Trump was elected president. You can read more about them in the articles below. There is some overlap, but not much:
‘Here are 50 campus hate-crime hoaxes The College Fix has covered since 2012’
‘Nolte: From Trayvon to Jussie â Poll Shows Media Hoaxes Killed Race Relations’ (Breitbart)
‘Hereâs A List Of Hoax “Hate Crimes” In The Trump Era’ (The Daily Caller)
Were it not for a diligent citizen social media, Jussie Smollett’s hoax could have run for much longer and done irreparable damage to the fabric of America.
As it was, good people everywhere put their heads together across the country and pieced the puzzle together online.
This is yet another example of citizen media doing the job of supposedly legitimate media.
Well, well, well, on Tuesday, February 12, 2019, the Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded there is ‘no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia’.
NBC News intelligence and national security correspondent Reporter Ken Dilanian broke the story in his article, ‘Senate has uncovered no direct evidence of conspiracy between Trump campaign and Russia’.
This is a bipartisan finding, by the way.
Later, MSNBC interviewed Dilanian:
NBC has a summary on Twitter:
This finding comes after the Senate Intelligence Committee spent two years on an investigation involving 200 interviews and 300,000 documents.
Their investigation has not yet concluded, but its end is nigh, according to Senator Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), the chairman. Dilanian’s article tells us:
“We know we’re getting to the bottom of the barrel because there’re not new questions that we’re searching for answers to,” Burr said.
On Tuesday, Burr doubled down, telling NBC News, “There is no factual evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”
It could take the committee several more months to produce a written report of their findings, which, even with this news, could be inconclusive:
The final Senate report may not reach a conclusion on whether the contacts added up to collusion or coordination with Russia, Burr said.
Democrats told NBC News that’s a distinct possibility.
“What I’m telling you is that I’m going to present, as best we can, the facts to you and to the American people,” Burr told CBS. “And you’ll have to draw your own conclusion as to whether you think that, by whatever definition, that’s collusion.”
The Senate investigation is separate from the Mueller probe, which trundles along.
Also, the House of Representatives, now Democrat-controlled, is planning to conduct a separate investigation:
that will go beyond the 2016 election to examine whether any foreign government has undue financial influence on Trump or his family. And New York federal prosecutors are pursuing their own criminal inquiry related to hush-money payments to women. The investigations into Donald Trump, therefore, are far from over.
Nonetheless, the Senate news puts a dent in Big Media’s anti-Trump narrative.
ZeroHedge reports that when Dilanian appeared on MSNBC (see video above, bold emphases in the original, those in purple mine):
MSNBC anchor Hallie Jackson and her guest panelists’ faces looked visibly confused and uncomfortable as they learned the Senate report is going in the opposite direction of everything MSNBC and other mainstream outlets have been breathlessly reporting on a near 24/7 basis.Â
More importantly, if this is a precursor of what the Mueller report concludes in a few weeks/months, the TV station that built its current reputation on the premise of Russian collusion, may have no option but to go on indefinite hiatus.
Watch the segment … with host Hallie Jackson appearing to grow exasperated by the 2:20 mark:âIf and when the president, as he may inevitably do, points to these conclusions and says look, the Senate intelligence committee found I am not guilty of conspiracy… he would be correct in saying that?â
Dilanian noted that while the Republican chair of the committee made what he characterized as “partisan” comments the week prior, it turned out be unanimous fact. âWhat I found,â he said, âis that Democrats donât dispute that characterization.â
But perhaps sensing how “contrary” to the network’s own hysterical ‘Russiagate’ coverage his reporting was, he tried to soften the blow, saying, âBut, again, no direct proof of a conspiracy. As one democratic aide said to me, âwe never thought we were going to find a Democrat between Trump and Vladimir Putin saying letâs collude, but the question is how do we interpret all these various contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.’â
Hallie Jackson followed with further probing: âNot to put too fine a point on it, but I want to make sure Iâm understanding this…â and asked âIf and when the president, as he may inevitably do, points to these conclusions and says look, the Senate intelligence committee found Iâm not guilty of conspiracy… he would be correct in saying that?â
Her face looking rather incredulous at this point, Dilanian responded by invoking the Meuller investigation, reassuring her his inquiry is not complete and likely could uncover more information. But then the bottom line: âThat said, Trump will claim vindication through this, and heâll be partially right,â he said.
President Trump tweeted his thanks:
Some readers might be sceptical.
However, an investigative journalist who has no ties to Trump and is not a supporter — Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept — agrees with him:
Greenwald’s readers were not happy.
On another tweet, Greenwald still had to repeat himself:
More angry readers tweeted here.
Let’s remind ourselves of what Big Media have been foisting on us since 2017: ‘bombshell’, ‘tipping point’, ‘beginning of the end’, ‘Trump will resign’:
Big Media’s narrative is ‘too big to fail’:
Trump supporters, understandably, are sick and tired of it all, because the Democrats started this narrative shortly before the 2016 election:
This chap meant ‘wielded’, but his point still stands. I hope he is correct:
Here are a few suggestions for President Trump on how to wield that hammer:
As for Robert Mueller and his team, the same day NBC’s Ken Dilanian filed his report, President Trump’s former attorney John Dowd gave an interview to ABC News (full transcript).
John Dowd does not believe the report of Mueller’s findings will be released to the public. He thinks there will simply be an announcement that the two-year investigation has ended.
Dowd says that Mueller had all the information he needed nearly a year ago (emphases mine):
In my opinion, on March 5th, we were done. He had everything. He said he had everything. He told me that no one had lied. He told me they had every document we asked for. He told me that it was nothing more. He told me that the president was not a target. That is, he did not have any exposure, that he was a witness subject, which is perfectly normal for someone’s conduct you’re looking at, but they don’t have exposure.
Dowd later said the same thing and says Mueller should have admitted that he was being pressured to find something by a ‘cabal in the FBI’:
There’s no exposure. It’s been a terrible waste of time. What’s worse is let’s get on the other side of this, how it all happened. This is one of the greatest frauds this country’s ever seen. And I’m just shocked that Bob Mueller didn’t call it that way and say, “I’m being used.” I wouldâve done that. If I were in his shoes in this thing, I’d have gone to the– I’d have gone to Sessions and Rosenstein and said, “Look. This is nonsense. We are being used by a cabal in the F.B.I. to get even.”
President Trump has co-operated with Mueller, responding to requests that no other president has never had to endure (source):
Note the third paragraph in that last tweet. Had Trump agreed to an interview with Mueller:
it would set a precedent that would open the current president and future presidents to this kind of interview.
Given the Senate Intelligence Committee’s findings, it will be interesting to see how much longer the Mueller probe lasts.
David A Clarke, Jr, the most famous retired sheriff of Milwaukee, has an outstanding Twitter feed.
He tells it like it is.
A selection of his recent tweets follows.
On the December 26 murder of the on-duty police officer, Corporal Ronil Singh, in California:
On the Wall:
On Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California), who spent her Christmas holiday in Hawaii (while President Trump worked in the Oval Office):
On feminism:
On self-defence:
On voter fraud:
On police killed in the line of duty and policing policy:
On Obama:
On the media:
On Mitt Romney:
On the Democrats’ hypocrisy:
If you enjoyed those, there is more at his website:
Sheriff Clarke has views on a wide range of topics. His site is definitely worth visiting.
Over Christmas, I received one message from a loved one worried that President Trump will lead the US into war.
It was a bit surprising, as he had already laid out his policy to withdraw from Syria and would begin a troop draw-down in Afghanistan. That said, my loved one is a faithful MSNBC viewer. I have tried but cannot persuade her to get news from other sources.
As the American president noted yesterday:
As Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of Turning Point USA — an organisation for university-aged Trump supporters — says, President Trump had a very successful 2018 despite his opponents’ best efforts to thwart him:
As an article in today’s Tennessee Star (initially posted on ConservativeHQ.com) pointed out:
President Trumpâs been remarkably successful in a short time â through legitimate means. Democrats and the media relentlessly peck at him for his brash personal style and reflexive tendency to punch back via tweet, but if the success of a president is measured in actions performed, Trump rates extremely high.
It’s important to look back at Donald Trump’s personal history through his outstanding career in real estate. He knew anybody who was anybody. He went to all sorts of parties and receptions. People told him all manner of secrets in conversation.
The important thing to remember here is that Donald Trump does not drink. Nor has he ever used drugs. So, he remembers all sorts of details about what people — his friends, at the time — told him.
Shortly before the election on November 8, 2016, he held one of his many campaign rallies. At this particular one, he explained why his notional friends hated him for running for president:
He won the election he was not supposed to win. He became the leader of the free world, in traditional parlance.
It was more than just the media who had it in for him. A coup of sorts has been going on ever since he was elected, so please read the text inside the box:
At some point, however, one has to question the abject hatred. Is it just about President Trump — or is it about something more?
Because it’s about more than Trump.
This visceral hatred from the Left — media included — is also aimed at half of the US population:
President Trump spent all of Christmas and New Year at the White House:
All of the legislators have been on holiday, except for one, a Republican.
President Trump — and this Republican legislator — were hoping for an early return of senators and congressional representatives in order to press ahead with urgent legislation regarding the southern US border. But to no avail. Here is the Speaker-Designate of the House of Representatives:
Meanwhile, the First Lady hosted the Trumps’ New Year party on her own:
So, when the Democrats rail against President Trump come January 3, remember why the media and political elite — including his own Republicans — are doing so. They are being duplicitous in their rants.
Regardless, 2019 promises to be a ‘fantastic’ one for the United States, and, by extension, the world!
Perhaps less so for the president’s detractors.
If we want peace in the world, we need to continue to pray for President Trump’s safety and well-being.
Many thanks to Martin Geddes for coming out with two very important graphics explaining the Democrats and the media.
I am unfamiliar with Mr Geddes but appreciate the time he put into them. (Click on each one to enlarge.)
Outside of The Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit and Breitbart, most of the heavy lifting for President Trump and his MAGA agenda is done by citizen journalists, everyday people like you and me, whereas the Democrats have most of Big Media at their beck and call:
Note the colour codes. Twitter gives everyone in Big Media a pass. Citizen investigative journalists, not so much.
And it’s not just citizen journalists who are banned. On November 26, 2018, The Daily Caller reported that Twitter permanently banned an American veteran who had a radio show (emphases mine):
Conservative veteran and radio host Jesse Kelly was permanently banned from Twitter on Sunday for allegedly committing multiple violations of the Twitter terms of service.
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Callerâs Amber Athey, Kelly said Twitter informed him that he was banned with no warning and no explanation of what rules he allegedly broke.
That day, Kelly appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight (Fox News):
The article says that Twitter banned a feminist, too:
Last week, the tech giant banned feminist Meghan Murphy for questioning the ideology behind the transgender movement.
The good news is that Kelly’s Twitter account appears to have been reinstated. Result! Thanks go to the senators who support freedom of speech:
Despite that success and a few others, Twitter can and does stifle those who do not support the leftist agenda. On July 29, The Daily Caller reported that Republican legislators also fell foul of the social media giant:
Twitterâs censorship problem looks like itâs here to stay.
The company faced a sharp backlash last week after a Vice News investigation revealed that Twitter was hiding several prominent Republicans from its search bar.
Those affected included four House Republicans: Rep. Devin Nunes of California, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina. All four are members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Democrats werenât affected in the same way, Vice found.
Interesting, especially when the four who were censored are relatively young supporters of President Trump and MAGA. It’s as if Twitter doesn’t want Americans to know that younger legislators support the president. Why, that might influence others in that same age bracket to jump aboard the Trump Train.
The article says that Twitter claims their shadowbanning — hiding the congressmen’s accounts from the search bar — wasn’t to do with anything the congressmen tweeted, but rather their followers. Does the following sound totalitarian?
At the center of the companyâs censorship problem is its decision to penalize âbad-faith actors,â who arenât actually in violation of any rules but still threaten âhealthy conversation.â
Much the sorting between good and bad actors on Twitter is done by an algorithm which takes into account criteria like whom you follow and tweet at, and who follows and tweets at you.
Twitter didnât penalize the congressmen because of anything they said, but because the âwrongâ accounts were engaging with their tweets, two Twitter executives conceded in a blog post Thursday. The Republicans were guilty of being followed by the wrong people.
Twitter has since restored the congressmenâs visibility on Twitter, but the underlying issue remains.
The company is still burying accounts it deems âbad-faith actors,â while remaining opaque about who does or doesnât fit that classification â and which accounts follow or retweet you are still part of the criteria.
The Daily Caller attempted to find out more from Twitter, but the company did not reply.
Remember back in the old days, not so many years ago:
Twitter … once described itself as the âfree speech wing of the free speech partyâ …
Earlier this year, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey:
sparked controversy in April when he endorsed an article calling for a total Democratic victory the ânew civil war.â He similarly raised eyebrows in June by apologizing for the sin of eating at Chick-Fil-A.
Moving along, the next graphic from Martin Geddes outlines the fundamental differences between the Democrats and Trump supporters:
Most people following my site will know that Q is a person or small group of people who probably work for President Trump. For over a year now, Q has asked readers via the Socratic method to analyse what has actually been happening in the United States behind the scenes over the past few decades.
Q’s slogan is ‘Where We Go One, We Go All’: WWG1WGA. In other words, we’re all in this together!
By contrast, the characteristics of the Democratic Party are all too destructive, corrupt — and, sadly, real. Please read them carefully.
The MAGA agenda welcomes everyone, regardless of race, colour or creed.
MAGA is a bit old school — a compliment — in that regard. We believe in freedom, duty, sacrifice and the ideals upon which America was founded. We remember and appreciate our history, good and bad. We like tradition and beauty.
Unlike the Dems, we’re not out to destroy. We’re out to conserve and, where necessary, rebuild with care and attention, in the way the Founding Fathers would have wanted.
Let’s hope the following video still shows by the time this post appears:
On Thursday, October 18, 2018, Tucker Carlson featured a video of a crazed leftist ripping up Ted Cruz (R-Texas) campaign signs in Houston’s middle class Montrose neighbourhood. The guy was jumping around and screaming directly into the camera.
There is a ‘zombie’ virus infecting raccoons in the US at the moment. Tucker asked whether it made its way to Texas.
Then he discussed the attacks — verbal and physical — on Trump supporters. Dan Bongino, a former NYPD policeman and retired Secret Service agent joined him. Tucker rolled footage of CNN’s discussion of the ‘bullying’ tactics of Trump supporters with mugs that read ‘Liberal Tears’ then showed a video of left-wing violence in Portland, Oregon. The two men wondered how CNN could be complaining about mugs when Antifa are tearing up the streets of a major American city.
Bongino says that the media are complicit in this crazed violence and the attacks on Trump supporters. The chyron at the bottom of that segment reads:
MEDIA: IF YOU DON’T BACK DEMS, YOU’RE EVIL
Seriously, the Dems are unhinged. They don’t mind Antifa. Legislators such as Maxine Waters and Tim Kaine encourage leftists to harass decent Americans minding their own business. The decent Americans’ sin? Supporting President Donald Trump.
This madness has been going on for two-and-a-half years, since Trump was running for president.
It started in Chicago, where Trump’s scheduled rally had to be abandoned in March 2016.
Democrats are the party of crime and crazed violence. Stop voting for them.
