In a verdict that will surprise few, the actor Jussie Smollett was found guilty of making a false report to Chicago police.

In January 2019, Smollett told police he was attacked by two men in ski masks who beat him up and used racial and homophobic slurs, saying ‘This is MAGA country now,’ pouring bleach on him and tying a noose around his neck.

It turned out that the ‘attack’ had been paid for by Smollett himself, who hired two Nigerian coworkers to simulate a hate crime.

To many, including perhaps most famously the comedian Dave Chappelle, Smollett’s story seemed too cartoonish to be true from the get-go.

And yet, for too many liberal journalists, influencers and politicians, it was too delicious a confirmation of their dystopian fantasies to be verified.

From Joy Reid to AOC to Kamala Harris to Lori Lightfoot, Smollett’s false attack seemed to confirm everything they wanted to believe about their fellow Americans across the political divide.

These liberal elites, who defended a hoax artist have also abandoned the victims of real crimes. Their worldview – not imaginary MAGA white supremacists – truly threatens black lives.

Then-candidate Joe Biden (left) immediately pledged to support Jussie Smollett after the alleged attack. Kamala Harris (right) alleged a ‘modern day lynching’ had been carried out against Smollett.

‘What happened today to @JussieSmollett must never be tolerated in this country,’ tweeted then-presidential candidate Joe Biden.

‘We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place in our streets or in our hearts. We are with you, Jussie.’

Now that a jury has decided that the attack didn’t happen, most of these voices have gone mum.

Most—but not all.

‘In our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom,’ wrote the Black Lives Matter movement in a statement this week ahead of the verdict.

The statement was widely condemned, including by some on the Left.

Supporting a liar and a hoaxer—one who tried to frame two other black people for a crime he paid them to simulate—was finally a bridge too far.

And yet, the statement revealed something deeper at work in our culture on the Left when it comes to the relationship between race and the criminal justice system.

The moral force of Black Lives Matter comes from the way the movement pointed to a standard of justice that is still not being met for black Americans.

The way black Americans are treated by the criminal justice system remains a blight on our nation; our failure to ensure equality before the law is a moral emergency that all Americans of conscience should object to vocally and vigorously.

But in their support for Jussie Smollett, BLM betrayed that cause, demanding that Smollett be held to a lower standard of justice because he is ‘a Black man.’

The statement called the trial ‘a white supremacist charade.’

Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of BLM’s Los Angeles chapter, on Tuesday defended Smollett

If the jury system is itself a white supremacist charade, then there can be no standard of equality before the law to even aspire to.

Worse, BLM has elevated race over justice, over equality, even over the truth—which is exactly what a white supremacist charade would do.

The statement was egregious.

And yet, the sentiment it expressed is omnipresent, the animating principle at play in the tweets that still have not been deleted by Biden, Harris et al.

They were willing to believe the worst of their fellow Americans because of the racial dynamics at play—just like they called Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist when those dynamics were reversed.

Rittenhouse shot three men and killed two of them at a Kenosha Black Lives Matter rally turned riot and was recently found not guilty due to the overwhelming evidence that he had acted in self-defense.

Yet the same people who tweeted vigorously in defense of Smollett—members of the Squad, Joy Reid, the President—went out of their way to imply Rittenhouse as a white supremacist.

‘There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night,’ Biden tweeted in 2020 over a compilation of photos that included Rittenhouse.

What kind of worldview demands you defame a kid defending himself against a pedophile and domestic abuser—a kid who supports Black Lives Matter and pointed out racism in the criminal justice system—but support a rich hoaxer who tried to get two black men falsely imprisoned by lying about being called a racial slur?

We’ve abandoned a worldview based on right vs. wrong for a worldview based on powerful vs. powerless, and then superimposed a racial binary onto it.

What kind of worldview demands you defame a kid defending himself against a pedophile and domestic abuser but support a rich hoaxer who tried to get two black men falsely imprisoned by lying about being called a racial slur? (Left: Biden’s tweet on Kyle Rittenhouse shortly after the Kenosha shootings) (Right: Biden’s tweet on Jussie Smollett immediately after hate crime allegations)

Believability, like all virtue, is now a quality associated exclusively with people of color, irrespective of their actions, while everyone else is just one move away from being smeared as a white supremacist—especially if they disagree politically with the reigning narrative.

But this worldview is not just racist, depriving people of color of any kind of agency or the most basic recognition of their humanity, that their actions will be judged by a standard shared by all.

It’s resulted in a veritable taboo against covering crime in minority communities, whose chief victims are poor black Americans.

Because the perpetrators of these crimes are mostly also people of color, to a liberal media in thrall to a diseased worldview that ascribes virtue to those without white privilege, crimes perpetrated by people of color are not just embarrassing but invisible.

If you can’t blame your political opponents and smear them as racists, the liberal mainstream media and Left-wing politicians don’t want to hear about it.

And this means that a murder spree that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds and hundreds of poor black children goes virtually unreported. Their names are never mentioned. And this signals to politicians that they can ignore it.

Their lives matter.

They deserve good policing that is neither abusive nor neglectful. They deserve a media that says their names.

And despite the fiction scripted by Jussie Smollett and his defenders in the liberal media, in the activist set and in the political class, the threat to these children’s lives doesn’t come from MAGA-hat wearing white supremacists, a mirage created in the liberal imagination that Smollett knew all too well.

The threat comes from an apathetic liberal elite that would rather not read about crime because it offends their worldview.

The blood is on their hands.

Members of the liberal elite defended a hoax artist who invented a crime while abandoning the victims of very real crimes. 

It’s today’s reigning liberal orthodoxy – not imaginary MAGA white supremacists – that truly threatens black lives. 

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk

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