Triggered

  Another ride-or-die supporter of Smollett, apparently, was Cook County state’s attorney and Hillary pal Kim Foxx. As documents would later reveal, Foxx worked out a backroom deal that would set Jussie free, absolving him of blame and allowing him to avoid the years of jail time he might face if the case ever went to trial. All he would have to do was forfeit his $10,000 bail to the city of Chicago—essentially a bribe for his freedom, if you ask me. That deal went into action on March 26, 2019, when Smollett strode into a courthouse in Chicago and stepped up to the microphone, reiterating that he was still not changing his story.

  “I would have not been my mother’s son,” he said, “if I was capable of one drop of what I was accused of.”

  We hear a lot about white privilege in this country today. Well, I haven’t heard anyone give a name to whatever happened to Jussie, but I’m waiting.

  Whatever you want to call it, it’s a miscarriage of justice. Just hours after the decision was made, Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago and former chief of staff to Barack Obama, held a press conference. “This is without a doubt a whitewash of justice, and sends a clear message that if you’re in a position of influence and power, you’ll get treated one way, [while] other people will be treated another way,” he said. “There is no accountability in the system. It is wrong—full stop.”

  Donald Trump Jr.

  @DonaldJTrumpJr

  Never thought I’d agree 100% with RAHM Emanuel.

  If Rahm Emanuel, who served in the very administration that brought this kind of hysterical identity politics into the mainstream, was that upset about Smollett, you know it had to be pretty bad! Believe me, Rahm knows a thing or two about pulling strings, so if he thought it was bad, it was BAD.

  No matter what he does, how often he breaks the law, or how much he lies, Smollett will never be held accountable by the mob. If you’re looking for an example of systemic privilege, don’t look at middle-class white people. Look at Smollett, who broke the law, got nailed in court, and still, at least at this writing, does not have to pay for the crime he committed.

  That is privilege.

  The Smollett stunt wasn’t an isolated incident. Not by a long shot. The left has been pulling this kind of crap ever since the campaign. Just after my father was elected, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the lefty watchdog group, published a report titled “Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election.” The first example it used in the report was the Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi, which had been torched and vandalized a week before the election. Firefighters found the words “Vote Trump” spray painted on a wall in the burnt-out hull of the church.

  “The incident was just a harbinger of what has become a national outbreak of hate, as white supremacists celebrate Donald Trump’s victory,” the report stated.

  Two weeks later, a member of the church was arrested for arson that was not “politically motivated,” according to the police. He had spray painted “Vote Trump” to throw police off the scent.

  There was no outbreak of hate, only an outbreak of phony hate crimes.

  Andy Ngo, the editor at Quillette I mentioned earlier, has written often about fake hate crimes against the LGBTQ community in Portland, including one that supposedly happened in the aftermath of the Jussie Smollett case. The Portland incident caused widespread panic in the trans and gay communities there and spurred a rash of other supposed attacks. The first so-called attack happened on February 10, 2019, to a trans woman named Sophia Gabrielle Stanford, who claimed she was the victim of a “brutal and aggressively blatant hate crime.” A GoFundMe page was posted as a “Trauma fund for our girl.” The page described the attack in detail: Stanford had been hit in the head from behind with a baseball bat, had been found unconscious in the street by a “good Samaritan,” and had been transported to the hospital for a CAT scan and treatment for her wounds.

  According to Ngo, however, the Portland police have a completely different story. The responding officer found Stanford lying in the street drunk and wrote in his report that he believed she’d fallen to the ground and hit her head.

  The GoFundMe page went viral, raised thousands of dollars, and added fuel to the growing number of alleged hate crimes against gays and trans people in the area. The local newspaper fanned the flames, apparently without checking with the police. The Democrat mayor of the town tweeted that the reported crimes “were deeply disturbing” and invited the trans and gay communities to join him in a town hall meeting to listen “to victims and leaders.” Activist leaders sent out “attack warnings” and told the community to carry Mace. The progressive city of Portland was gripped in panic.

  One of the so-called attacks that happened in the wake of Stanford’s pushed SJWs to the next level.

  Jenny Bruso, who describes herself as a “fat-queer activist,” claimed in a Facebook post that two white men had pulled up next to her and her partner, Brie Jones, at a busy intersection and thrown a full beer can at them that had hit Jones in the face. The post included a photo of Jones with a small scar and a red cheek. In the heated atmosphere, the post went viral. Bruso said they had reported the attack to police, but the cops told Ngo they had no record of it. When he contacted Bruso to inquire about the attack, she refused to talk to him and took the post down. It was too late, however, to stop the momentum of outrage.

  SJWs began posting photographs of the “attackers,” members of the Proud Boys group who had been in a brawl with Antifa activists the year before. “These are the faces of the attackers that have been terrorizing the queer/trans community lately. If you see any of these faces in public, hit them with a brick, because the police don’t do anything to stop it,” read one viral Instagram post. Unverified rumors littered social media, including one accusing one of the Proud Boys of murder.

  One of the men targeted as an attacker was thirty-five-year-old Robert Zerfing. According to Ngo, Zerfing had renounced his membership with the Proud Boys long before his photo was posted. By “doxing,” the process of finding documents on the web and publishing them, searchers found Zerfing’s address and posted it online. A text he received from one activist read, “4 hate crimes in the last week you were involved in. Paybacks a bitch mother f—ker.” He’s received numerous death threats.

  According to organizers involved in the gay and trans communities in Portland, there were at least fifteen hate crime attacks in the aftermath of the one Stanford alleged. According to Ngo, the police do not have a record of any of them.

  On the national level, the left has used erroneous information like Portland’s to fuel the phony narrative that hate crimes have been soaring since my father was elected president. In story after story about this worrisome trend, they point to the FBI’s 2017 Hate Crime Statistics report. According to the report, the number of hate crimes in the United States was at its highest since Barack Obama was elected eleven years ago, an increase of nearly a thousand crimes from the year before. What that number doesn’t tell you, however, is that almost a thousand new law enforcement agencies contributed statistics to the report. In other words, the instances of hate crimes aren’t rising. They’re just finding ways to bump up the number artificially.

  Not too long ago, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed that quoted Wilfred Reilly, a political science professor at the historically black Kentucky State University. According to Mr. Reilly, who’s written a book called Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left Is Selling a Fake Race War, the report is deeply flawed. “To be responsible for the entire surge, each agency [of the 1,000] would have to report exactly one hate crime,” he told the Epoch Times. “I believe with reason—given the average agency has reported between 0.44 and 0.63 hate crimes annually in recent years, and that high-crime agencies are more likely to withhold data from the FBI in the first place—that almost all of the surge is due to this technical change in reporting rates.”

  Reilly also says that as many as 10 percent of the hate crimes reported to t
he FBI in 2017 turned out to be fake. That’s seven hundred fake hate crimes!

  The more the media spin stories like Jussie’s to the public, the more the left, starving for anything to fuel their hatred, believes that hate crime is rampant, leading to more erroneous reports of hate crimes and fake hate crimes. Around and around it goes.

  It’s not as if fake hate crimes are victimless. They increase distrust and hysteria in communities, add gasoline to an already flaming political divide, instill hate into people who previously had none, and distract police from doing their jobs, which includes saving lives. Here’s just a percentage of what Smollett cost his city. Chicago police put twenty-four detectives on the case. They worked one thousand hours, not including overtime. They executed fifty search warrants and watched dozens of hours of surveillance tape. Now, it’s not as though the cops in Chicago have nothing else to do. During that January, one of the coldest on record, twenty people were murdered. The angry Eddie Johnson, the superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, called Smollett’s alleged stunt “shameful.”

  “I just wish the families of gun violence in this city got this much attention,” he said, “because that’s who really deserves [it].”

  The left in this country has become so radical, so intent on proving that cops and Republicans are evil while people of color and members of the LGBT community can do no wrong, that it is refusing to accept what is right in front of them. To be a member of the Democrat Party in 2019, you have to deny evidence of all kinds. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

  Of course, the Democrats would be nothing without the mainstream media, their all-purpose PR operation. The media are the vehicle through which all the identity-politics craziness gets out onto the airwaves. The Jussie Smollett case was a prime example. On February 24, after the whole thing had been revealed as a hoax, Jonathan Capehart, a columnist for the Washington Post who suffers from a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, went on MSNBC and argued that, yes, although Jussie had faked the whole thing, it was Donald Trump’s fault that everyone had fallen for it. I’m not making that up. “The president actually stokes the atmosphere of menace and insecurity that millions of Americans feel across this country,” he said, not joking at all. “There are people in this country who every day feel that their very existence—their own security is at stake. And so, you know, the president’s superpac, right-wingers, far right, conservatives who are using the Jussie Smollett situation to rhetorically bash people who are afraid for their own existence and their own lives… is really despicable.”

  So hold on. Jussie creates a fake hate crime and tries to blame my father for it, and it’s… my father’s fault?

  Look, I don’t know what part of the universe the guy lives in, but down here in the United States, things just aren’t that bleak anymore. By almost every measure imaginable, life for people who claim to “feel that their very existence is at stake” has only gotten better over the past fifty years. Their quality of life has improved. High school graduation rates for racial minorities have soared. Unemployment among African Americans is at its lowest levels in the history of this country. DJT has implemented prison reform and pushed through opportunity zone legislation to help those he apparently discriminates against. And there are no bands of insane racists roving the streets looking for minorities to beat up. There certainly aren’t racist Trump supporters looking to assault people just for being who they are. But it is better for Democrats, whose entire platform relies on calling the other side of the aisle a bunch of racists, if voters believe that the world is a scary and racist place. Those people are so triggered by the current president that they will believe anything.

  In an ideal world, as laid out by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., people would be judged based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Operating on that belief, we managed to pass the most sweeping civil rights legislation in the history of the world, improve conditions for all races, and begin to heal the divide between black and white people in this country. Now people who claim to share Dr. King’s vision of the world are asking us to go backward, to pay more attention to the color of everyone’s skin and less attention to the content of their character. They’re claiming that knowledge can come only from being born a certain color or with a particular sexual orientation and that no one can understand anyone else just by sitting down and talking to them. This takes away what makes us human, and we need to move away from it.

  Accepting Jussie Smollett’s view of the world, where getting beaten up by racists makes you cool—or could perhaps add more pay to your already lucrative acting salary—and the whole world is just one big scary place where evil racists go on the prowl for innocent victims, would be a huge step backward for society. Some days, I worry that we have already taken a big backward step. Think, for example, about how easy it would have been for Smollett to get away with perpetrating his little hoax. All he would have had to do was clean it up a little bit, maybe lose the noose and the bleach or do some better planning before the event, and people would have bought it. What concerns me about the case isn’t that a liberal is getting away with a crime. (As I write this, the city of Chicago is in the process of appointing a special prosecutor who might take care of that.) What concerns me is that the whole liberal world was more than willing to take Smollett at his word despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary.

  Liberals have become so deluded in their hatred of my father that they’ll latch onto any story that makes him look bad, even a story as phony as Jussie Smollett’s. But the kind of hatred that Smollett was trying to create has no basis in reality. That’s why he had to pay people to act it out.

  So, Jussie, I’d like to personally thank you for bringing this all to light and for this indirect contribution to Trump 2020. Jussie, you’re the best, and, as it’s been said, I hope you’re not beating yourself up over it—AGAIN!

  15.

  JOE CHINA

  ABOUT THREE YEARS AFTER I had the discussion with Rusty, the union carpenter in Wisconsin, Joe Biden visited a union job site a few miles down the road as part of the kickoff of his 2020 presidential primary campaign. Apparently, he had stopped into a Delaware union hall one time in, like, 1984 to use the bathroom, and now he was acting as though the organized labor vote should be all his. Truth is, he has no claim on the union vote. None at all. He makes a big deal about growing up in the blue-collar town of Scranton, but from what I heard, he didn’t have it all that hard. His father ran a car dealership in Delaware and before that had owned an airport and crop-dusting service on Long Island. He was also an executive in a chemical company during the war. Joe went to prep school, just as I did. He’s had his fingernails manicured since he was elected to the US Senate, and that was back when Nixon was president. I’m not saying he isn’t good with his hands; he’s just not fond of using them for work. Judging from the legislation he’s supported—NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement—it doesn’t seem as though he’s all that found of workers, either.

  But his kind of arrogance, purporting to be a regular Joe while actively working against labor, shouldn’t be surprising to you. In fact, it’s perfectly consistent with the Democrat platform. Despite what they’ve done (or haven’t done) politically over the past two decades and the disastrous policies they’ve enacted, politicians on the left seem to think they’re entitled to votes based on who they are. We’re the Democrat Party, they’ll say. Vote for anyone else, and you’re for the one percent or a racist!

  If you think I’m exaggerating, just look at what happens to any woman or ethnic minority who dares to stray from the Democrat Party and its liberal agenda. They’re excommunicated, burned as a witch. When Kanye West put on a MAGA hat and went to the White House, he was attacked as though he had just thrown a bag of kittens into the ocean. People were boycotting his concerts, burning his records (which they had
already paid for), and going after any artists who had the audacity to work with him. When Candace Owens, the black female political commentator with whom I’ve done events many times, decided to testify in front of Congress about how harmful political correctness can be to young black women, she was labeled a Nazi and threats were made on her life. An op-ed piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer compared her to a house slave. Last April, Candace was eating breakfast with Charlie Kirk in a local Philly diner when a mob from Antifa, the militant left-wing organization, surrounded them, screaming obscenities and throwing bottles at them.

  With tactics like that, it’s no wonder Democrats don’t have to do any real voter outreach—or enact any real policies—to keep people pulling the levers for whatever wacky liberal wins their primary. Everyone is so afraid to be labeled racist or sexist that they’ll vote for anyone with a D next to his or her name. It doesn’t seem to matter that they’re voting against their own self-interest. Over the past few years, largely thanks to the culture of outrage and public shaming, Democrats have been allowed to have it both ways. They buddy up with the economic enemies of the United States on Monday, making it easier for us to ship high-paying jobs overseas to countries that pay their workers a fraction of our wages, and then by Friday, they’re out giving speeches to union leaders, saying they actually give a shit about the American worker. All of them, from Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton to John Kerry and Barack Obama, are as two-faced as they come.

  Joe Biden’s duplicity, however, takes the cake. Before he was going on and on about foreign interference in the 2016 election, threatening to take my father out behind the high school gym and beat him up, “Joey Hands” was making a number of state visits to China, all on the taxpayers’ dime, to cut what seem to be more than a few shady deals. In December 2013, he went there on an official visit on Air Force Two, allegedly to settle some disputes about territory in the East China Sea. To help out with that, he took along his son Hunter, the noted military scholar and—wait, no, that can’t be right. Oh, here we go. He took along his son Hunter, a guy who had been thrown out of the Naval Reserve for cocaine use and was trying to start up a private equity firm with a buddy, John Kerry’s stepson and ketchup heir Christopher Heinz. During the trip, Hunter and Heinz sat in on meetings with the US-China Business Council, where the vice president struck a pretty friendly tone with the leadership. According to press reports, ten days later, Hunter’s new hedge fund signed a billion-dollar deal with the Bank of China, which is owned by the Chinese government. That deal was expanded to $1.5 billion a little while later. So, let me see if I got this straight. Three journeymen investors, including the sitting Vice President’s son, are able to get a $1.5 billion deal with the Chinese government the first time they try. That’s one, comma, five, zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero. Some of the best businesspeople in the world, all with great track records, have tried and failed for years to get their hands on that money. I guess the Bidens had something special to offer. As Steve Hilton of Fox News discovered, the company had posted pictures of the meeting on its Chinese-language website but not on the English-language version of the site. Clearly, they had something to hide. Imagine if their names had been Trump instead of Biden. Think about it. What would happen if I went to China and came back with 1.5 dollars, let alone 1.5 billion? Think anyone would ignore that? That’s what I thought.