By now many people will have come across the case of American ‘Empire’ actor Jussie Smollett whose claim that he was attacked on a street in Chicago by ‘Trump supporters’ ended up rapidly falling apart and shown to be false. It is a story that has crossed over from online comment sections and into the British mainstream media.
The motivations for this faked attack, allegedly carried out by two friends of Smollett’s whom he paid to act as violent Trump supporters is the subject of speculation. Did he do it in order to make people feel sorry for him? Did he do it for political reasons? Or did he do it, as some out there are saying, in order to boost his earnings as an actor on ‘Empire’ a Rap music themed drama?
It could be any or all of these reasons or for a reason not yet disclosed. What we do know is that Jussie Smollett is now in an awful lot of legal trouble due to his actions. From what I can gather from various sources, Jussie Smollett may well be getting quite intimate in the future with the prison system of State of Illinois because of his ill judged and thoroughly dishonest behaviour.
Those who promote the dubious idea of ‘hate crimes’ like to promulgate the view that we and police forces should automatically believe the alleged victim or complainant when it comes to ‘hate crimes’. However this view is significantly undermined by the existence of hundreds upon hundreds of fake ‘hate crimes’, cases where people have exploited ‘hate crime’ legislation or a cultural willingness to believe that ‘hate crimes’ are at epidemic levels, in order to gain an advantage for themselves. Some of these fake ‘hate crimes’, at least those that occur in the United States, are documented on the ‘Fake Hate Crimes’ website. The Fake Hate Crimes site makes grim reading for those of us who believe that ‘hate crime’ legislation has created a boom time for liars and opportunists. It is no surprise to find out that Jussie Smollett has now been featured on the Fake Hate Crimes list of incidents.
Although we don’t at this moment know exactly why Jussie Smollett faked this assault upon himself, we do know that he has probably ruined what may have been a promising entertainment career by doing so. Reports are saying that he is being written out of the ‘Empire’ storyline and I doubt that the period of justifiable imprisonment that he’s likely to get will do anything for his future career.
What this case does show us is that despite the bleatings of the Left to the contrary, there are hundreds of fake hate crimes being reported every year. These bad laws encourage bad and venal people to exploit them either to settle personal scores with others or to gain themselves money, services or attention. Despite the Smollett case is primarily a United States story, I suspect that there may be similar cases that have cropped up elsewhere. Some of the ‘hijab pulling’ cases that the Left, Islamic organisations and the mainstream media in the United Kingdom like to bleat about have, when properly investigated, turned out to be a tissue of lies.
Whilst I could never condone the idea of people being physically attacked because of some immutable or mutable characteristic about them, ‘hate crime’ laws represent a moral hazard. They are too easily abused. There are plenty of other laws, such as in the UK the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, that can be used to deal with those who carry out physical attacks without ‘hate crime’ laws that are too easily exploitable by the unscrupulous or the greedy. ‘Hate crime’ laws are just the ticket for liars, exploiters and those who wish to stifle debate. They are an excrescence on the face of the legal systems of the West and need to be dismantled. There should be no more Jussie Smollets able to use questionable legislation in order to promote even more questionable narratives.
