Jussie Smollett 2020

The best way to start a blog about one thing is to blargh(!) about something else entirely. There’s only so much internet out there, after all, so it’s important to be efficient in these matters, especially in these times of increased awareness about important environmental issues, like internet scarcity. Here’s something else they won’t teach you at your fancy Blog State University, that you can only learn down here in the real blarghing muck: the more of your blogs that start with “You know what really grinds my gears”-style old-man whining, the more successful your blog will be. These are simple facts. To wit:

Something that drives me nuts when I’m listening to a news program about current events is when someone’s talking and the host or interviewer jumps in to clarify a minute detail of minimal importance that anyone who knows anything about the subject at hand definitely already knows. The idea is to keep everything clear for the audience, to make things as easy to understand as possible for the widest possible swath of lowest-common-denominator seventh-graders who have today decided to tune in to the news for the first time ever.

Perhaps an illustrative example is in order.

Three minutes into a segment in which all relevant context was laid out at the beginning, the major parties involved identified, and in the midst of a news cycle already completely dominated by the subject at hand:

GUEST: …the CIA reportedly concluded that MbS ordered the killing of Khashoggi, but Trump—

Joshua Johnson, HOST: All right, just a second, let’s not get lost in all those acronyms. That’s the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, led by Gina Haspel, just confirmed last year after some of her own controversy, and MbS, meaning Mohammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and, Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi expat and journalist for the Washington Post who was allegedly murdered in the Saudi consulate in Turkey, and President Trump, who, I think we all know, is the president of the United States.

GUEST: Right, sorry, I should’ve been more clear. So, Khashoggi had been a vocal critic of the Saudi ruling family—

Joshua Johnson, HOST: Saudi Arabia being an absolute monarchy ruled by the House of Saud, led by King Salman al Saud, but with much of the political power currently held by his appointed successor, Mohammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince, often referred to as MbS.

GUEST: Absolutely. So, Erdogan, the president of Turkey—

HOST: That’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, whose regime withstood an attempted coup in 2016.

GUEST: Yes, that’s the one. So—

HOST: Hold that thought, because we’ll be right back after this quick break. I’m Joshua Johnson, and you’re listening to 1-A on NPR—National Public Radio.

The point of all that is to say that I’m not going to give you a goddamn summary of the Jussie Smollett story. You already know all about the Jussie Smollett story, and have likely made up your mind about the Jussie Smollett story, and either want to never hear about the Jussie Smollett story again, or want to luxuriate in a great big warm schadenfreude bubble bath of Jussie Smollett Story, touching yourself sensuously while whispering sweet nothings to yourself about how hypocritical your enemies are. If you for some reason have made it this far in life and to this point in this stupid discursive blog without knowing everything you think you want to know about the Jussie Smollett story, Google away! I will not play public radio host, filling in contextual details of where the fuck the sun rises in the morning to my non-existent audience. We are drowning in context already! Enough!

I’ve never been a fan of the “hate crime” distinction. I could make this a whole blog about that, I guess, with lots of REASONS, but two opinions about the Smollett Affair from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum kinda illustrate the underlying absurdity for me.

Matt Walsh is a Christian Blogging and Tweeting Man who has all the predictably terrible opinions that go with such a description, and then some. He has topped Christianity Today’s Sanctimony and Self-Righteousness 40-Under-40 List since he was twelve years-old, and has made an entire life for himself by leaning into one specific logical fallacy over and over again. Walsh built his whole The Only Pious Man brand by writing things like No True Christian Can Support Gay Marriage, or No True Christian Does Yoga, or No True Christian Watches TV. I don’t want to get into all of it. Here, look at his face—it tells most of the story.

SEE?!

Anyway, Matt Walsh, an angry popped zit yelling at you for not properly regulating your hormone stress levels in person form, believes that Jussie Smollett should be charged with a hate crime.

People aren't generally given hard time for making up stories, despite whatever sentencing the law technically allows. But people are given hard time for hate crimes, and that should be the charge against Smollett. It isn't just a false report, it's a bias crime against white conservatives as a whole.

(…)

This is a man whose bigotry constitutes a threat to civilized society. Let him face the consequences that he would have happily allowed innocent white men to face. Prosecute him and maybe the next hate crime hoaxer will think twice.

Matt Walsh wants Smollett charged with a hate crime because the invention of the theoretical white people (who definitely didn’t actually do the thing Smollett said they did (because they don’t actually exist)) actually victimizes white people collectively. He’s saying that by inventing hateful perpetrators Smollett has threatened the fabric of society—as though racism and anti-gay feelings and violence wouldn’t actually exist except for Smollett having fabricated them into existence, and that this is the real crime, the one against white people. It’s like a “the real problem isn’t racism, it’s people talking about racism” take on steroids.

Matt Walsh isn’t the only guy who thinks Smollett should be charged with a hate crime, though he’s definitely the last one you’d want to swipe right on. Dan Savage—sex-advice columnist, sex-advice podcaster, and lexiconnoisseur extraordinaire—also thinks Smollett should be charged with a hate crime. From his podcast, from 2:56-5:45 of the linked episode:

A false hate crime report is itself a hate crime. (…) When a homophobic piece of shit finds a gay guy to beat up…it’s not just an attack on that one gay man. That queer person is obviously the immediate and most traumatized victim of that attack, but all members of the queer community are impacted by anti-queer hate crimes. We are all made to feel unsafe, fearful, and threatened.

Hate-crime statutes—they don't make it "extra illegal" to punch someone because they're black, queer, or Muslim. For the record: Hate-crime statutes apply when people are singled out for attack because they're white, straight, or Christian, too. Hate-crime statutes—the additional penalties that kick in when hate-crime charges are brought—address the impact hate crimes have on whole communities. The damage they do to the fabric of our society—because there are additional victims, there are additional penalties.

So when a queer person makes a false hate crime report, others in the community are impacted, others in the community are terrorized. The false filer of a false hate crime report victimizes other members of their own community in the same way that someone who commits a violent hate crime does.

(…)

These crimes were faked, but the harm done by the false reports was real. So by the logic of hate crime statutes—additional victims, additional penalties—someone who lies about being the victim of a hate crime shouldn’t just be charged with making a false statement to the police. They should also be charged with committing a hate crime.

Typically, a prosecutor charges a criminal with a hate crime as a way to escalate the initial charge—say, from simple misdemeanor assault to felony assault—and thereby enhance the severity of the eventual punishment. Savage wants to escalate the initial charge of filing a false report by tacking on a hate crime because of the damage done to some wider community. Savage thinks that whoever is responsible for increasing the emotional and psychological burden of being [insert identity group here] should be prosecuted for doing a hate crime—whether that person is an actual violent criminal or just pretending that actual (specific) violent criminals exist.

Or, as above: Dan Savage wants Smollett charged with a hate crime because the invention of the theoretical white people (who definitely didn’t actually do the thing Smollett said they did (because they don’t actually exist)) actually victimizes queer people collectively.

Regardless of who the Truest Victim Group is, here—and whoever it is, it’s not THE WHITES, Matt—even entertaining the idea of charging Smollett with a hate crime makes a mockery of the whole concept. Walsh imagines some scenario in which two random innocent white men are falsely imprisoned for a crime that never happened, and that that somehow justifies charging Smollett with an actual crime against “whites.” Savage, meanwhile, makes entirely explicit the dystopian thought-crime underpinning of hate crime legislation, demanding an extra pound of flesh for psychological damage done to the collective even in the absence of an actual crime. Not to go full slippery-slope on you, but one might wonder where on the spectrum of pay-for-inflicted-pain hurtful opinions or bad movies or even forgotten trigger warnings might fall—especially in a time of a culture-wide turn away from intent, and toward a sort of morality of emotional-consequentialism.

Hot Take Asides Get The Extra Indent

If there are hate crime enhancements to regular crimes, there ought to be Collective Catharsis Diminutions, too. If I commit a felony murder of a widely-hated individual, and polling indicates that the elimination of that person from society reduced the emotional and psychological burden of a majority of people, I should be charged with a misdemeanor and released on my own recognizance with the gratitude of the court and the public.

Oh, and also:

Here is a silly thought experiment, just to round out this blog with something else not related to the middle portion, but very much related to the lead image up there, which has thus far not tied into anything at all.

Imagine, if you can, a scenario in which the political ideologies surrounding the Jussie Smollett Affair were precisely flipped. That is, imagine a world in which Smollett pulled off the exact same scam, but the world was such that all of the relevant cultural/identitarian alliances were reversed—like a photo negative of current political reality flipped around the person of Jussie Smollett.

In bizzarro-land, Smollett’s allies in conservative media (trolls, effectively, in this era) would instrumentalize Smollett as a smirking, defiant middle finger held up in the face of liberal media types. Trump Jr. and Charlie Kirk and Hannity would know that Smollett’s story was steaming bullshit, that he made it all up for weird personal gain and social capital. They’d know, and they’d hold him up as a hero because it would so thoroughly trigger the libs. Not because they believed it, or were deluded about the truth of what actually happened, but just to own the libs.

The typical Fox News or Breitbart consumer wouldn’t even blink twice—they’d think it was hilarious. It's what makes co-existing in a shared reality with bad-faith actors so dispiriting. They never accept defeat, they simply declare victory. “But I can see the scoreboard, and you lost. We’re both looking right at it,” you might say. “FAKE NEWS, you triggered little bitch,” they might riposte. And they wouldn't cast him out, this craven fraud who faked his victimhood and pretended hate crimes happened, he wouldn't be "cancelled."

Not to put too fine a point on it, but they'd elect him fucking president, it seems.