Monday marked the five-year anniversary of President Joe Biden’s online condemnation of a “hate crime” that never happened.
On Jan. 29, 2019, “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett, who is black and gay, made national headlines with claims a pair of white supremacist Trump supporters violently attacked him. The actor said his assailants screamed, “This is MAGA country!” in the apparently far-right city of Chicago.
“I will never be the man this did not happen to,” Smollett told ABC News in an interview with Robin Roberts two weeks later. By December 2021, Smollett was convicted on five out of six charges over staging a fake attack. As it turns out, Smollett hired a pair of Nigerian brothers to help him carry out the hate crime hoax.
I’ll never get over Smollett telling Robin Roberts, “I will never be the man that this did not happen to.”
💀💀💀
pic.twitter.com/mdANCHULhX
— Kylee Griswold (like the family vacation) (@kyleezempel) December 10, 2021
Eager to exploit the episode as an example of America’s systemic, virulent discrimination illustrating the country’s irredeemable racism and homophobia, Biden got swept up in the controversy along with the rest of the corporate press.
[READ: Falling For Racist Hoaxes Is A Symptom Of Self-Loathing]
“What happened today to [Jussie Smollett] must never be tolerated in this country,” Biden wrote on Twitter, now known as X. “We must stand up and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our
