Triggered

  This is because of something called the Communications Decency Act, which was passed in 1996, in the days of the dial-up modem and long before everyone had computers in their homes, let alone belonged to social media networks. According to a section of this law, websites cannot be held accountable for content that’s posted on their platforms. They’re just supposed to sit back and watch the shit show happen. This is why when you scroll down to a comments section on YouTube or Facebook, you often see some pretty hateful stuff. As long as a website doesn’t take any steps to curate or change the content, it’s protected by this law, and it can’t be held accountable for anything its users say.

  But once a website starts to make decisions about what it’s going to allow and not allow on its platform, it goes from a “platform” to a “publisher,” at least in the eyes of the law. Once Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram start to ban people or remove content, they’re no longer just interested observers of content who sit back and let their users run the show. They’re publishers just like the New York Times or the Washington Post. Clearly, this is what they’re doing. They’ve admitted it themselves.

  Last summer, Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter (probably fresh off some weird meditation trip to the desert somewhere), appeared before lawmakers to explain his company’s practices. During one hearing, Senator Ted Cruz pointed out that Twitter and Facebook now have power that is much greater than that of any other company that has ever existed in the United States, and that’s including the ones that have been broken up by antitrust laws. According to the rules of the free market, you need to have competition. Otherwise, the company that controls the whole thing becomes lazy, corrupt, or worse. This is what is happening right now with big tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Because they’re so big and because they’re almost 100 percent liberal, they have the power to tilt the national conversation to the left and literally block the voices on the right.

  In the end, Jack Dorsey admitted that Twitter had blocked its users from accessing about 600,000 accounts. An extremely disproportionate number of these accounts, he said, belonged to conservatives. Some of them even belonged to the very members of Congress who were questioning him that day. Twitter, Facebook, and Google have become modern-day monopolies. The internet was created at the expense of the taxpayer. Monopolies on search engines or social media should not be enabled or tolerated by our government. Yes, we should reduce entry barriers for others to compete, but it will take something phenomenal to overtake Google. Forget about Russia trying to influence the US election with the measly $100,000 it spent on ads; how about the real influencers, the multibillion-dollar companies such as Facebook and Google, that block and silence the voices of conservatives?

  Considering how the deck is stacked, what my father, and I to a lesser extent, have accomplished on Twitter is remarkable. Ev Williams, another cofounder of the social media giant, recently called my dad a “genius” and a “master of the platform.” He’s right; he is. But just imagine how powerful our Twitter accounts would be if the playing field were level. And level for everyone, including you.

  Think about it. If they can minimize the president of the United States—or at least try—what can they do to you? Recently, an expert on the subject estimated that somewhere between 2.5 million and 10 million voters had been swayed to Hillary by Big Tech’s tactics during the election. There goes the popular vote! Make no mistake. They did it before, and they’re going to do it again. As long as the outrage machine is still operating, it’s never going to stop.

  14.

  THE LATE-NIGHT KING OF COMEDY WITH JUSSIE SMOLLETT AND THE FAUXTRAGE ORCHESTRA

  IT SEEMED that Jussie had picked the wrong night to go out for a footlong.

  It was two in the morning on January 29, 2019, the single coldest night of what had already been one of the coldest winters on record. Not the sort of night you’d expect to encounter a lot of pedestrians. Yet this young, gay, black actor was heading home on foot to his apartment in a fashionable section of Chicago. He’d gone out to an all-night Subway restaurant for a sandwich. (A lot of rich young actors go to Subway at 2:00 a.m. in −4° F weather instead of ordering Seamless. Nothing to see here, folks.)

  According to the account he would later give the police, Jussie was on the phone with his manager when he heard someone screaming at him in the distance. He turned to see two large white men staring at him. Then he realized—gasp!—that they were wearing red Make America Great Again hats!

  The two men started walking toward him, hate in their eyes, yelling racial epithets and gay insults. One of them carried a length of clothesline. The other had a white bottle marked “bleach.”

  “Hey!” one of them yelled. “Is that him?”

  “Faggot, Empire n***er!”

  Now, if you’ve never tuned in, allow me to explain: The show Empire is a kind of soap opera about hip-hop that is popular with a black audience. Jussie Smollett plays a young, up-and-coming singer with lots of relationship problems. Even if those two crazy rednecks did exist, I don’t think they’d have recognized him from the show, let alone made him their target. Jussie wasn’t exactly the star of the show. Also, I doubt these supposed white supremacists were tuning in.

  But according to Smollett, when they got close enough, those two Empire-viewing, Trump-loving racists started beating him with their fists, kicking him with their boots, and trying to fit the rope, which they had pre-tied in the shape of a noose, around his neck. One guy poured bleach from the white bottle onto his body. The other punched him in the face, shattering his sunglasses (because what completely sane, definitely-not-on-drugs young actor doesn’t wear designer shades when he goes out at 2:00 a.m.?). Then, before the two crazed maniacs got their last punches in and left Smollett bleeding and bleach soaked in the street, one of them shouted at him, “This is MAGA country, n***er!”

  Satisfied with their violent hate crime, the men then disappeared into the subzero air of Chicago.

  It was quite a story. When Jussie went public with it, which happened almost immediately, the outpouring of support from the left was overwhelming. Every liberal hate-watch group in the country came out to demand that something be done. A legion of social justice warriors, armed with their keyboards and hashtags, stormed the internet. So many outraged tweets came from Hollywood that the lights in Tinseltown dimmed.

  Just hours after the news broke, Kamala Harris, a Democrat contender for president, whose campaign Jussie had supported, called the attack a “modern day lynching.” Cory Booker did the same thing, using precisely the same language—almost as if they had been reading from the same script. It seemed as though every liberal in the country wanted to use the attack as an example of something larger: the racism that’s inescapable in the United States and the casual hatred and bigotry that, in their opinion, had propelled Donald Trump to the White House—in other words, the DNC’s talking points. Within a few hours of the attack, the hashtag #JusticeForJussie was trending.

  The rush to judgment was so swift, so overwhelming, that no one from the left seemed to care one bit about the details Jussie had given. Every elite liberal was positive that Trump supporters would do something like that. And every elite liberal was quick to blame my father for it.

  From the moment I heard Jussie’s tale, I knew there was a good chance that it was bullshit.

  I mean, Subway? At two in the morning? When it’s −4° outside? And he’s wearing a sweater and sunglasses? Please. Who takes a vicious beating, holding his cell phone to his ear the whole time, and manages not to drop his sandwich in the process? Who would keep a flimsy noose around his neck for forty-five minutes after the attack?

  And the attackers? Who would be dumb enough to wear a MAGA hat that time of the morning in Chicago? Come on! They would have been shot in two seconds! And why would they target Jussie Smollett anyway?

  But the kicker was their saying “This is MAGA country!”

  I’ve been to all fifty states and
talked to hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters, and not once in all that time, from all those people, have I heard the phrase “MAGA country.”

  You know what Trump supporters call MAGA country?

  They call it America!

  So I decided to retweet some folks who were raising questions about the details of the supposed attack, questions that any reasonable person would ask. They weren’t lunatic figures on the fringes of the alt-right. They were respected commentators who had the good sense to ask questions when nobody else would: Candace Owens and the actor Terrence K. Williams (both black, by the way).

  Within hours, I was met with a backlash so big that Jussie Smollett was no longer the story; I was. Later that night, a news story titled “Is Donald Trump Jr. Promoting a Jussie Smollett Conspiracy Theory?” was careening around the internet, followed by a torrent of comments accusing me of—you guessed it—being a racist. My Twitter mentions exploded.

  I would like to say I was surprised at the overreaction, but I really wasn’t. Overreacting is the left’s favorite pastime. Being OUTRAGED is what they do. They’re always so SHOCKED! Still, the hypocrisy grated on me. I hadn’t said anything racist about Jussie Smollett. And there was nothing racist about doubting his story. I was simply pointing out how his story defied all logic. But all of a sudden, I was an evil racist just for asking the questions.

  When it comes to the left and its rigid adherence to orthodoxy, even asking questions can be too much. If the questions stray too far from its narrative, they don’t want to hear them.

  Just as the triggered SJW editors were pushing “publish” on the stories targeting me, new details were emerging about the attack—details that began to punch holes in Jussie’s story. It was information that any real journalist might have been interested in. But those people weren’t real journalists (most journalists aren’t real anymore), so they didn’t care. The new details didn’t fit the hate-attack narrative they wanted so much to be true. All they wanted to do was keep feeding the liberal outrage machine.

  So the Chicago Police Department had to do their reporting for them. It released new details on February 1, which leftist news organizations repeated only with the most extreme reluctance. According to their report, during the search for the two crazy white MAGA racists, Chicago police had found no such people. But they had recovered some footage from a security camera that showed two large men walking away from what appeared to be the scene of the crime. The chief communications officer for the Chicago police told his Twitter followers that the cops were very interested in questioning those two men and asked everyone to be on the lookout for them.

  The next night, Jussie played a concert that had been scheduled before the attack. Between songs, he took the microphone and launched into a weird, half-sung-word-poetry kind of speech, telling the crowd that he had been “one hundred percent factual and consistent on every level.” You know, the sort of thing you say when you’re totally innocent and have nothing to hide. Smollett also noted that people had been saying “some stuff” about him that was “absolutely not true.”

  Then, on Valentine’s Day, the pair of crazy white racists everyone had been looking for turned up at the police department of their own volition. At last there was a breakthrough! Only those two gentlemen weren’t crazy, they weren’t fans of Donald Trump, and they had not attacked Jussie Smollett. Not in any real sense, anyway.

  Oh, and they weren’t white.

  The men who came forward were two brothers from Nigeria named Olabinjo and Abimbola Osundairo. Each one was just over six feet tall and pretty well built. One was an amateur boxer. Soon police would learn that they worked on the show Empire as extras and had allegedly sold illegal drugs to Jussie, arranging the sales via text message. According to police, Smollett had offered them $3,500 to stage the attack and paid them with a check for said amount, upon which he had affixed his signature and the date. In the memo line, he had written “personal training sessions.” Police also discovered footage of the brothers buying bleach, a clothesline, black face masks, and red baseball caps.

  Now, I don’t think I’m cut out for the staged-hate-crime business. But if I were, I really don’t think I would pay my “attackers” with a personal check. (I also probably wouldn’t hire two black guys to stage an antiblack hate crime. But, hey, that’s just me.) But Jussie did. Thanks to that small piece of evidence—with the signature, the weird memo line, and the matching date—public opinion finally started to shift away from Smollett. On February 20, he was charged with disorderly conduct and filing a false police report. He turned himself in, stood before a judge, and paid $10,000 bail to the city of Chicago.

  Of course, Twitter was filled with repentant Hollywood stars and Democrat politicians apologizing for rushing to judgment.

  Yeah, right… Presidential hopefuls and social justice warriors were off to find the next fauxtrage.

  Some of them twisted themselves into pretzels trying to moonwalk back their initial reactions. Here’s what Kamala Harris had to say:

  I’m very, um, concerned about obviously, the initial, um, allegation that he made about what might have happened.

  Clear as a bell, Kamala.

  It’s a little different from the succinct “THIS IS A MODERN DAY LYNCHING” she had first posted.

  “Strange that no one in Hollywood or the Main Stream Media seems to want #JusticeForJussie anymore. Wonder what changed?” I tweeted.

  Predictably, the left had nothing to say. As the facts kept coming, it kept getting quieter (funny how that tends to happen).

  In some sick way, the Smollett attack—when people believed it—was the best thing that had ever happened to liberals. For two years, they had been telling the world that Donald Trump had made our country more racist, more divisive, and more dangerous for minorities, and they’d been saying it without a shred of evidence. It was one of those things that—I don’t know—just felt true, man. But that attack, with its gratuitous violence and horrible B-movie dialogue, gave them all the evidence they needed. It was like Christmas all over again, a gift too good to be true.

  You see, in the prevailing view of the left, this whole country is a sick, evil white supremacist plot gone wrong. The left likes to think we didn’t like Barack Obama because of his race. In fact, we didn’t like him because of his economic stance, globalist views, and gun-grabbing, big-government, liberal policies—the list is never ending—but race wasn’t our issue with Barry.

  They believe our founding fathers were nothing but murderous colonizers who eliminated the Native Americans, enslaved African Americans, and set up the country so that all ethnic and racial minorities would be oppressed for eternity. Anyone who’s proud to be an American is racist. From the leftist historian Howard Zinn up to AOC, people on the left believe that history has been a battle between good people and evil people, oppressors and oppressed, colonizers and victims. This is a binary system. There is no gray area between the two types of people. No nuances. You can be either an oppressor or an oppressed. And if you’re a white man, you’re almost always the former.

  Here’s the thing: Democrats have built an entire platform around victimhood and oppression. Radical liberals believe that the more labels you have—lesbian, bi, trans, gay, black, Hispanic, etc.—the more “woke” points you have. And the more you’ve suffered and been oppressed, the more you are worth in the eyes of the modern Democrat Party. More important, you cannot gain an understanding of what it’s like to be black, transgender, or gay by talking to people, reading, or doing your own research on the subject. In fact, it’s racist of you even to try.

  So when a minority or a person of color says he or she feels as though something has happened to him or her—whether it’s a microaggression or a full-on act of racial hatred such as the one Smollett described—you are required by the wacky bylaws of leftism to believe that person. If you don’t, you’re a racist.

  Jussie took advantage of that flaw in reasoning, and liberals hit the jackpot with
all the victim boxes that he checked. How could they pass on the chance? You can imagine Hollywood already planning a movie, Harvard offering him a professorship, and Time magazine putting him on its cover!

  If something doesn’t change very soon, it won’t be long before someone tries to do it again. You can’t decide how smart or worthy of praise people are based on how much they’ve suffered or been oppressed by the system (or how much their ancestors or people who are like them have suffered and been oppressed) and not expect there to be consequences.

  I’ve always said that if you took all the labels that liberals hold in such high esteem and combined them into one person, you would have the ultimate Democrat candidate for president—a nonbinary minority who identifies as a dolphin, maybe. And although nobody has managed to check all those boxes, our friend Jussie Smollett came pretty damn close. He was OppressionTron 2.0: a gay, black, sensitive man who worked in Hollywood and supported Kamala Harris, the first black female candidate for president. Plus he was an activist with a huge social media platform!

  Jackpot! His woke score was off the charts.

  Because of their obsession with identity politics, liberals were on Jussie’s side from the beginning. Nothing could have swayed them from their defense of him. And even as some peeled off and joined the real world as the Smollett saga continued, he still had a few strident defenders—far too many, in my opinion, even for these polarized times. DeRay Mckesson, a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and the host of a podcast for Crooked Media, seemed only to be concerned about what the Chicago police were doing wrong.

  In the eyes of radical liberals like Mckesson, cops are nothing but evil people who only murder young black teenagers. Anytime cops enter the picture, they’re immediately labeled the bad guys. No amount of research or evidence to the contrary can change their minds.