Now, the corporate press will admit they make mistakes. They don't say they're perfect. They'll
say, "look, we churn out a lot of information every single day based on limited data. Of
course you're going to have errors for various reasons. People are going to try to deceive you,
at the very least. But they do their best to learn from their mistakes and to correct them."
But Michael, if that were true they wouldn't come to us with absolute certainty, they'd have
some sense of being tentative and careful. Like take for example the Jussie Smollett story where
there there was supposedly a hate crime committed against him, and it seemed kind of suspicious to
some people but it didn't matter what the details were. We got the official narrative immediately.
And we were also told that this was indicative of something broader,
and that to have any kind of questioning over the details of the case was a reflection on the person
questioning the case and not on the media itself, or even on Jussie. So immediately we got the
narrative that, "this is all because of Trump's America, and it's racism, we all know who the
perpetrators are, we all know people of color are living in terror, and all that. That was what we
got even though the details seemed a little fishy, I mean two o'clock in the morning it's absolutely
freezing out in Chicago and who can seriously call Chicago MAGA country?! Shout that out loud without
bursting into laughter. There were fishy aspects of the story but nobody really wanted to look into
them in any detail because they already had the story they wanted. New York Magazine: Jussie Smollett
Hospitalized After Racist and Homophobic Attack in Chicago. Daily Beast: What Jussie Smollett's
Attack Reveals About Hate Crime in America, it did reveal a lot didn't it. MSNBC: Jussie Smollett
attacked in Chicago by men hurling homophobic, racial slurs. There's not even the pretense
that something might be up. CNN Opinion, same thing: Jussie Smollett isn't the problem. We are.
GQ, Gentlemen's Quarterly: The Racist Homophobic Attack on Jussie Smollett is America's Endgame.
Can we really trust the magazine that calls itself quarterly, but is published monthly?
And let me quote from Gentleman's Quarterly, "while it's veracity isn't confirmed,
its sentiment needs no fact-check." The facts of the case don't matter, we are pushing forth
a broader truth. It turned out Jussie Smollett was fake noose. Hate crimes are absolutely outrageous
and unacceptable, and what else is outrageous and unacceptable is faking a hate crime and exploiting
the genuine discrimination and oppression that others have felt. How about if we contrast the
way the Jussie news item was treated as compared to the way the violent assault on journalist Andy
Ngo was treated. So Andy Ngo, he's an independent journalist; this was supposed to be the dream,
everyone can have a camera, everyone can have a mic, everyone can be their own journalist. Don't
we want a country where everyone's a firefighter? There's no fires left, that's great! So he goes to
these rallies with his gear, he films things, he's assaulted, he's sent to the hospital,
has brain damage, just like Jussie he's gay and a minority, but Kamala Harris doesn't
speak out in his defense. People keep quiet and on Twitter the response very frequently was, "well
the important thing is you shouldn't really call him a journalist."
But that's not what the important thing is. The important thing is someone was physically
hurt, and it was filmed, and we know who did it. Michael, it's almost as if there's some kind of
double standard going on here. Andy Ngo represents opposition to Antifa and progressivism, and Jussie
is like a poster child for it. So by an odd coincidence Andy is portrayed as somebody who's
undeserving of our sympathy, and Jussie becomes a superstar. And that was all over Twitter, and not
just unverified people like me, there were super blue checkmark people who said this sort of stuff
from HuffPo, The New York Times, Slate, NBC News, and The Atlantic. In fact, the writer for The
Atlantic said, "calling Andy Ngo a journalist is inaccurate. Doing so gives fascists a propaganda
victory." Jussie and his imaginary assault became a story that everyone in America heard about. Andy
to this day no one even knows how to pronounce his last name. Now the argument is alright, America's
gotten more divided. Trump's America, we've gotten more extreme. This is new and it's a function
of our increasingly extremist culture. But this isn't new. During the 90s when President
Clinton was being impeached over perjury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering,
NBC News had a credible accusation of sexual assault by the President from Juanita Broaddrick.
They sat on the story for weeks because they said they didn't want to influence impeachment.
In 2019, when you have E. Jean Carroll writing a book saying that Donald Trump
as a private citizen had assaulted her in the dressing room of a luxury department store,
they couldn't put her on the air fast enough! Huge outlets like The New York Times, USA Today,
and the LA Times, and Glamour, were livid that this story wasn't getting even more attention.
They dropped her like a hot potato as soon as Anderson Cooper put her on and she made
the bold claim that most people find rape to be "sexy." They think of the fantasies.
And if it's true that these firefighters make mistakes and then acknowledge them,
where was all the ringing of hands of "why did we put this woman forward so quickly?"