Rushing to judgment
In “The Oxbow Incident,” Walter van Tilburg Clark’s classic western novel, a lynch mob sets out to find three men who rustled cattle and murdered a man. Having been plagued by a rash of rustling in the area, the mob finds three strangers asleep and are convinced they’ve found the culprits.
Unwilling to wait for a trial, the mob hang the three. Later, mob members discover that the men were innocent.
A modern-day lynch mob equally sure it knew the culprit rushed to judgment. And like those at Ox Bow, it hanged the wrong man.
Jussie Smollett, a star on the soap opera “Empire,” told Chicago police that he was attacked at 2 a.m. as he walked back to his apartment. He told police that his assailants tied a noose around his neck and shouted racial and homophobic slurs, yelling “This is MAGA country.”
Given Smollett’s celebrity status, the story hit media headlines immediately. And in wholly predictable fashion, a liberal lynch mob formed to call out the obvious suspect: President Trump.
Two Democratic presidential hopefuls, Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, independently called the attack a “modern-day lynching.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders said that “the racist and homophobic attack on Jussie Smollett is a horrific instance of the surging hostility toward minorities around the country.”
NAACP President Derrick Johnson tweeted, “The rise in hate crimes is directly linked to President Donald J. Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric.”
All these folks and dozens of others should be embarrassed. Smollett staged a phony attack with two friends and has been arrested and charged with lying to police.
The liberal media that leaped to judgment ignored the basics of crime reporting. A number of obvious discrepancies in Smollett’s story should have prompted caution and a little more digging.
Downtown Chicago is hardly MAGA country. Smollett waited over an hour before contacting police. He walked into the station with the noose still around his neck and still holding the sandwich he was bringing back to his apartment.
He refused to give police his mobile phone to corroborate his story timeline.
Those expressing outrage at the alleged attack were exhibiting what psychologists call confirmation bias. As described in Psychology Today, we “stop gathering information when evidence gathered so far confirms the views (prejudices) we would like to be true.”
That human frailty exists in all of us to some extent. But when those in positions of influence fall victim, it often impacts large numbers of people in an organization or society at large.
Politicians on both the left and right, always searching for advantage, are perennially susceptible. However Democrats are particularly vulnerable by virtue of two aspects of their ideology.
First, Democratic identity politics segregates all of us into cubbyholes based on gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual identities. Democrats then appeal to various groups by calling them victims of one form of prejudice or another. Straight white male Republicans are the oppressors of choice.
Hence when an instance of white male oppression comes along — and they do — confirmation bias kicks in with liberal hand-wringing and “I told you so” statements.
For example, the Washington Post’s Eugene Scott stated, “To many, the Smollett incident — and the political nature of the assault — is yet another reminder for many black gay Americans that this president’s vision of a ‘great America’ does not appear to include them.”
Second, Democrats’ unflinching embrace of the #MeToo movement requires them to believe any victim without qualification and usually without bothering to fact check. Case in point: Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Those who called for restraint in the Smollett case, wanting to get all the facts, were called bigots. Tre’Vell Anderson said, “I believe Jussie Smollett. You should, too.” He denounced “malicious and unfounded rumors, criticisms, and allegations of deception lodged at … black LGBTQ+ people.”
Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and chief executive of Glaad, said the actor had been “doubly victimized” by the police investigation: “Jussie’s experience is sadly not unique in today’s America and we all must lock arms to change that.”
But basic fact checking should be fundamental to reporters’ work, especially for inflammatory cases like this. Why? Because Smollett’s hoax was only one of many in recent years.
The College Fix has documented 50 similar hoaxes perpetrated by college students since 2012. Hot Air lists dozens more.
For some in one of Democrats’ identity politics cubbyholes, faking an assault seems to be the way to attract attention or make a political statement. In doing so, they feed the image of a bigoted America led by a racist president.
Our mainstream media demonstrate confirmation bias daily not only with their words but by the very stories they choose to cover. Have they learned a lesson? It’s probably too much to hope for.
The viewpoints expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Independent.
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