Scott Jennings

Opinion contributor

Let’s be honest with each other for a moment.

There’s a cabal of people in this country fully invested in driving The Narrative instead of The Truth. The Cabal is powerful, made up of those who wield outsized influence on what Americans know about our nation’s public affairs.

You know it, and I know it. The Narrative is simple:

President Donald Trump is a hypocrite and a liar. Everything he says and does is without precedent and has sinister motive. Anyone who supports Trump is complicit in racism and in allowing Russia to control the United States.

Trump has unleashed an army of misogynist, racist, red-hat wearing monsters who terrorize people for skin color, gender and sexual preference. Trump’s policies are built on lies and hurt many who support him and everyone who doesn’t. American democracy will cease to exist should Trump win re-election.

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The Cabal will do virtually anything to keep The Narrative afloat. It reported erroneously that Trump threw a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. out of the Oval Office. With a straight face, it told you that a federal judge and future Supreme Court justice essentially participated in a high school sex cult.

It vilified — in error and without investigation — a mild-mannered teenager for wearing a hat while visiting the Lincoln Memorial. It pretends that members of the Trump #Resistance simply didn’t say about infanticide what the cameras clearly recorded, and that anti-Semitism in its ranks isn’t really anti-Semitism.

The Narrative is an elaborate stage production featuring clever sleight of hand. The actors portraying Victim and Perpetrator always feature the same characteristics. Desperation for The Narrative to become reality eliminates critical thinking from the minds of otherwise smart people.

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The latest example of this phenomenon came as Chicago police pulled the plug on actor Jussie Smollett’s claim of being beaten in the middle of the night by two men who shouted racist and homophobic slurs while wearing “Make America Great Again” hats. Smollett’s story was shaky from the beginning, but virtually every mainstream media outlet and leading liberal voice weaponized the incident into The Narrative’s latest cause célèbre.

A “modern day lynching,” Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker called it.

"This attack was not 'possibly' homophobic. It was a racist and homophobic attack,” tweeted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a master of driving The Narrative instead of The Truth about her own upbringing.

Sen. Bernie Sanders said it was “a horrific instance of the surging hostility toward minorities around the country.”

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The Cabal is a bad take factory, but it never exhibits shame or guilt.

The Cabal never waits, racing to cement The Narrative no matter how fantastical the details. I helped Covington Catholic high school student Nick Sandmann distribute the literal truth of what happened to him and his classmates at the Lincoln Memorial, even as The Cabal raged and advocated that Nick be punched in the face.

Sandmann and his classmates, via video evidence and an investigative report, were exonerated, but The Cabal refuses to punish the actual instigators for spewing hate and dissembling about what really happened. Instead, The Cabal searches for Orwell’s face crimes while calling for hat bans.

The Narrative demands that certain people must always be believed, and that certain others must always be guilty. The Guilty must pay with their reputations and livelihoods, no exceptions. The Cabal refuses to take responsibility for its mistakes and never pumps the brakes on these stories, despite crash after crash. Of course, never admitting a mistake means never having to reflect on the destruction of your own credibility.

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Neither American political tribe is without sin. Trump, like most presidents, has told some absolute whoppers, and some of his supporters have done dumb things. But that is no excuse for a cabal of the powerful to create a narrative that destroys lives and reputations in the name of achieving a political outcome. The Cabal accuses Trump of creating an “alternate reality” for his supporters. But what do you call the proliferation of narrative over truth?

Brett Kavanaugh is not a sex maniac. There isn’t a racist bone in Nick Sandmann’s body. A smaller refund, Sen. Harris, does not mean taxes went up. MAGA hat gangs aren’t terrorizing American streets.

Mitt Romney, a Republican, warned us about Russia as Barack Obama and Joe Biden laughed in his face. There is no evidence, Elizabeth Warren, that the Georgia governor’s race was stolen from Democrats. Other presidents have declared national emergencies and yes, Democrats supported border walls before they became “immoral” and “racist.”

But don’t tell The Cabal. It may come for you next.

Scott Jennings is a CNN Contributor and Partner at RunSwitch Public Relations. Reach him at scott@runswitchpr.com or @ScottJenningsKY on Twitter.