Yeah, and from a local level the Chicago PD isn’t going to be real thrilled with him for trying to fuck with them. National news and such. Of course, you know, if that’s what he did.
News reports now say that they caught the guys who did it. Smolett was acquainted with them and they told police that he hired them to do it.
The conspiracy theorists are claiming that he is friends with Senator Harris and he did it to help her pass her anti-lynching bill a couple of days ago.
Smollett was on national television just 2 days ago speaking with Robin Roberts where he was doubling down on his claims and saying people who doubted him would believe the story if the attackers had been black or Muslim. And Michael Cohen’s attorney is representing him now.
I think they knew early on. They’re not in a position to disagree with the narrative given Chicago PD’s past history.
Well no, He’s just one person and he will be judged by his actions. But when you use terms like “Orange Dick Suckers” the same process holds true for you.
That’s the question that never seems to get asked after this type of hoax is exposed. Shortly after the 2016 election I started a thread mentioning the sizable number of hate crimes and incidents where people claimed to have been attacked by roving gangs of white men wearing MAGA hats or chanting Trump-related slogans. Fake racist incidents have continued happening since then, but no one seems to want to discuss why.
Here are two possible explanations.
-
Some people play the role of a victim in order to get sympathy, attention, and praise for their courageous response to the supposed hate crime. (I would say that anyone who actually goes so far as to physically injure themself while doing this must be mentally ill.)
-
Leftists live in a narrative in which racial minorities, women, gays, other groups are always defined as victims of white men or “society” in general. A leftist must always be promoting the narrative and must never question it. Phony hate crimes can be used to prop up the narrative.
So for Smollet it might be 1 or 2 or a bit of both or something else. Some people certainly jumped straight to using the attack for political purposes, though that does not prove anything about Smollett’s motivation.
When this case first emerged, I figured there had been an altercation of some sort but nothing like what Smollett was claiming. The new developments are considerably more bizarre than anything I could have predicted.
I suspect this will degenerate further into a he-said-they-said, true believers will continue to back Smollett, various sides will exploit their own angles for political gain and self-gratification, no one will ever be convicted of anything, and new faux scandals will emerge to take the place of this one.
Just wish Huey Freeman was still here to provide us with his unique insights.
It’s getting much harder to do the mental gymnastics involved in backing him.
The latest I saw on Snopes was that one of the suspects is his personal trainer. I’ve seen people try to say if they were just extras on the show he might not have known them. Hard to say that about his personal trainer. At this point I don’t know if they have Nigerian accents. If so that makes it even more ridiculous to think he could have mistook them for Random white guy attacking him. If he didn’t know the guys well I could buy that He mistakenly thought it was a random attack when he was actually targeted. But his personal trainer? One more improbable on a stack of improbables.
https://www.snopes.com/ap/2019/02/16/smollett-says-no-truth-he-played-role-in-attack/
People be needin’ better hobbies.
I heard a pundit (who I happen to dislike) make an interesting point, that uttering the “MAGA” slogan while assaulting someone is far more prevalent as a caricature that exists in some people’s minds than something that would conceivably happen in reality. And that’s because MAGA represents positive feelings to its adherents while some on the other side see it as negative xenophobia.
I don’t necessarily agree or have any strong opinion on what “MAGA” represents among all who have bought in. If other details of Smollett’s story had been more plausible and had included that utterance, I do expect quite a few here would have become irrationally fixated on that part of the account and trying to connect it with other dots.
[Sorry OP, for repeating mention of Cohen’s attorney. I somehow missed that. :)]
Not likely. There is already video of one of them working out in his building which likely means his apartment. They can also connect the 2 men to the store nearby where the rope was purchased and there are pictures of them wearing black hoods. Their story is checking out much better than his.
There’s no sign of a serious beat-down so Smollett is left with a shaky story and a connection to the other 2 men that appears verifiable.
The general reason I expect of any faker, besides just personally trying to get yourself in the news, is as a sort of signal boost. They believe this happens all the time, and no one gets caught, so they feel justified in faking one that will get caught.
You can see a similar tactic with all the conservatives still trying to rewrite the “MAGA hat kid” story and ignoring that we’ve repeatedly explained what we actually were upset about. They know that wasn’t the issue, but they genuinely think that we regularly do stuff like this, so they’re willing to push along the fiction.
What pisses me off is that by doing shit like this, Smollett just makes it that much worse for actual victims of hate crimes – people become more and more skeptical.
I for one figured he had been attacked, although I thought the noose and the bleach were probably things he himself added to make it worse. But to engineer the whole thing? WTF? This is just beyond my comprehension.
Would you kindly stop with the whole “we” schtick? And there’s already a thread about Covington for you to wag your finger.
Cory Booker is still using this case as a reason to pass the “Justice for Victims of Lynching Act” despite the fact when he said this on Friday that the story had already turned. Wonder if he just didn’t get the memo.
What bothers you, the syntactic ambiguity?
So the two guys he paid were brothers from Nigeria and he thought it looked plausible to have them yell “This is MAGA country!” ?
This… really wasn’t thought out that well… was it
Plus if the photos are accurate you better hope those muscular dudes don’t get too enthusiastic. You might get lumped up pretty bad.
False accusations aren’t unknown though. I remember when Morton Downey Jr. got attacked by so-called Nazis.
Why people do it? There is a whole lot of nuttery in this world.
Nigerians wanting to make America great again by assaulting people they know with rope. Sounds plausible.
He, through his lawyers, is still denying that he had anything to do with this.
What I don’t understand is how this will help get those suitcases of money out of customs.