By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, February 17, 2019
Jussie Smollett’s story has always sounded a little . . .
extraordinary.
Smollett, who appears on the television series Empire, says he was attacked on the
streets of Chicago at 2 a.m. by two men who shouted racial and homophobic
abuses at him, beat him, doused him with bleach, and fastened a noose around
his neck, exclaiming, “This is MAGA country!” a reference to President Donald
Trump’s political slogan.
That story assumes two possible extraordinary
backstories: One, that these two MAGAmen were stalking Smollett and bided their
time until they could nab him at 2 a.m. on his way home from getting a snack at
Subway, executing their lightning strike with practically Swiss precision, over
and done in less than a minute while keeping their violence entirely within the
lacunae between the surrounding security cameras; or, two, that two criminally
violent Trump fans who happened to cruising the streets of the part of Chicago
where Smollett lies at 2 a.m. while in possession of a noose and a jug of
bleach just happened to notice him — these are Trump fans who are also big Empire fans, apparently — and,
recognizing him as a gay black man and outspoken advocate on gay-rights issues,
jumped him on a lark, nonetheless executing their lightning strike with
practically Swiss precision, over and done in less than a minute while keeping
their violence entirely within the lacunae between the surrounding security
cameras.
Either of those scenarios certainly would be
extraordinary.
Two men were captured on video walking near the scene of
the alleged attack at the time it is supposed to have happened, though the
attack itself escaped filming. Smollett says he is sure that the men on the
video are the ones who attacked him. Police believe those two men are Nigerian
nationals and aspiring actors who appeared with Smollett on Empire and sometimes hung around with
him at the gym. It is possible that two black immigrants in the entertainment
business are Trump partisans so rabid in their admiration that they hunted down
one of their black colleagues and abused him in racial terms while assaulting
him.
That would be quite extraordinary.
Two relevant facts here are not in dispute: that gay men
and members of other minority groups sometimes are targeted for violent crimes
by men driven by hatred, and that there has been a years-long epidemic of
members of minority groups and allied political activists staging fake hate
crimes for their own selfish reasons or to — odious phrase — “raise awareness”
about such crimes.
The irony is that the hoaxers have something in common
with Mr. MAGA himself: They desire to proclaim a state of emergency.
Emergencies are dangerous things. India was in many ways
dysfunctional in the 1970s, but it was a democratic society operating under the
rule of law until Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency.
The prelude to her declaration will not be entirely unfamiliar to contemporary
Americans: The executive (in a parliamentary system embedded in the
legislature) arrogated new powers unto itself, unhappy with the limitations
imposed on it by the other branches of government, in this case the judiciary.
Genuine social problems led to tension and unrest, which were channeled into a
dispute involving allegations that the election had been monkeyed with. A court
case was opened. Mrs. Gandhi lost that case, and, with it, her seat in the
upper house of Parliament; the court further banned her from standing for
office for six years. She and her supporters argued that she was being removed
from office for a conviction on relatively trivial charges (misuse of state
resources for political purposes, offenses for which her guilt was never
seriously in doubt) and insisted that her critics were not merely engaged in
opposition politics but attempting a coup
d’état. A state of emergency was declared, and Mrs. Gandhi’s first use of
her new emergency powers was to . . . cut off the electricity to the nation’s
newspapers. India’s newspapers are a wonderfully troublesome lot. Mrs. Gandhi
considered them agents of the coup.
Everybody has an emergency to peddle. They always appear
at the most convenient times and in the most convenient places. President Trump
has just suffered a humiliating defeat in his confrontation with Congress about
funding for his beloved wall — and losing a political contest, or having a
disagreement about spending, is not an emergency.
President Trump has been in office since January 2017, and if illegal
immigration is an emergency now, it was an emergency then, but he has only now
got around to declaring a state of emergency. The variable isn’t the level of
illegal immigration — it’s Trump’s getting steamrolled by Nancy Pelosi.
The fake hate crimes tend to crop up in the places where
real ones are least likely to happen but where people are most eager to have
them happen in order to affirm their own petty hatreds, which means the
socially segregated spaces occupied by the social-justice Left, college
campuses prominent among them. In November, Goucher College was convulsed by a
series of threats against black students and racist graffiti, which turned out
to be the work of a hoaxer, Fynn Arthur, a black student and member of the
lacrosse team who was charged with a criminal offense in the matter. These
things have the feel of inevitability: The closest thing to a genuine hate
crime to happen at Goucher College was the school’s decision to admit young
Jonah Goldberg as an undergraduate.
Likewise, the “epidemic” of sexual assaults on college
campuses is a myth, an urban legend that shows up nowhere in the actual crime
statistics, which suggest that college women are in fact less likely to suffer
a sexual assault than a member of the general population. (The women most likely
to suffer sexual assault are poor, nonwhite, and non-college educated,
especially those residing in relatively insular or isolated communities.)
Campus feminists invent these stories for reasons of cultural politics, as we
have seen over and over: Lena Dunham and “Barry” the College Republican, the Rolling Stone fiction, etc.
Informed by Randolph Bourne’s admonition that “war is the
health of the state,” socialists have long used every war — or “moral
equivalent of war” — as a pretext for insisting that the state take over the
commanding heights of the economy: World War I, the Great Depression, World War
II, Paul Ehrlich’s fanciful Malthusian prophecies regarding overpopulation, the
2008-09 financial crisis, the “inequality” panic, and now, under the dotty
inspiration of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, global warming — a
dozen different maladies, the same proffered therapy in every case.
Extraordinary.
Emergencies offer a moral permission slip. Under normal
circumstances, the political leaders of the democratic world would not
countenance the indiscriminate bombing of civilian population centers for the
purpose of trying to bully a foreign dictator into surrender, but that is
exactly what happened under U.S. leadership in World War II. (Necessary evil is
no less evil for its being necessary.) President Lincoln did a few things that
probably weren’t quite legal. Winston
Churchill favored a massacre of German military and government leaders after
the war as a prophylactic against Nazi revanchism and had to be pressed into
accepting the Nuremberg trials, which he considered a farce. The citizens of
the world’s liberal democracies, Americans especially, have an implicit
understanding with their covert operatives: Our agents do things that are
sometimes illegal or immoral in the pursuit of that which is necessary to
physical security, and we pretend not to notice as long as they perform their
additional professional duty of preventing us from being forced to notice.
What to do about Adolf Hitler is a different kind of
question from what to do about Donald Trump or what to do about the illegal
immigrants employed by such firms as Houston-based Waste Management of Texas.
But if you can convince yourself that Trump is the moral equivalent of Hitler,
that illegal immigration is a sudden existential threat to the republic, that our
nation’s allegedly atavistic redneck culture has us on the verge of a Kristallnacht for homosexuals, or that
all life on Earth will become extinct if Field Marshal Sandy doesn’t have her
way every time she stamps her foot, then you can justify — to others, and to
yourself — measures that are extraordinary.
Among those extraordinary measures is the lie in the service of “a greater
truth.”
But what if these are not extraordinary times — or, at
least, not extraordinary in the way our activists and media entrepreneurs would
have us believe?
The “greater truth” is this: The United States of America
is a relatively peaceful, extraordinarily prosperous, and fundamentally decent
society. Americans are greedy and violent, but we also are generous and brave.
Our country is home to flat-Earthers and world-changing geniuses, both of them
in unusual numbers. It’s a package deal. We have a relatively ineffective and
dysfunctional federal government, and we have social differences that have put
the two main modes of American life (and the political tendencies related to
them) at odds with one another, and that more bitterly than is necessary. Those
are real problems.
We’ll sort them out — if we allow the excellent
institutions we have painstakingly constructed to do that perform as necessary.
These include the separation of powers, the rule of law, due process and the
presumption of innocence, models of guilt and entitlement that are individual
rather than racial or otherwise corporate, freedom of speech, open discourse
and inquiry, adversarial political parties, and — this is almost lost — a
meaningful distinction between public and private things. The purpose of
emergencies — and, especially, phony emergencies — is to empower partisans and
advocates and people with power to overrule those institutions in the pursuit
of their own immediate parochial goals, whether those include a wall along the
southern border or a mandatory seminar on “rape culture” at Yale. Conservative
budget nerds often speak of their desire to see Congress return to “regular
order.” But it isn’t just Congress that needs to return to regular order — so
do the presidency, and the courts, and the people.
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