Cook County state's attorney Kim Foxx inadvertently gave away the game — what's really behind the bizarre dropping of charges and sealing of court records of the slam-dunk case put together by Chicago police on Jussie Smollett's fake hate crime report — when she explained to two reporters for Chicago public radio station WBEZ in an interview:

I don't believe it is in the interest of the people of Cook County to engage in a narrative that is anything other than all of us working collectively for the public safety of the people of Cook County.



State's attorney Kim Foxx (cropped from CBS Chicago video screen grab).

The dominant factions of the Democrats now believe that truth and facts matter not at all if a convincing narrative can be constructed and sold to the public. With a near monopoly on mass media and entertainment, fantasies can be sold to the public, and a critical mass can be persuaded to embrace the fiction. Postmodernism, the pernicious doctrine that there is no truth, only narratives, has moved beyond the campus into the power structure of the Left. The Democrats dominate Hollywood, and now Hollywood — the world capital of creating and selling fictional narratives (and the world in which Jussie Smollett lives) — dominates the Democrats, or at least the rising new-guard social justice warrior forces that are rapidly taking over the party.

Foxx let Jussie Smollett walk away from the felonies he was facing for the bargain price of ten grand and a few hours helping out Jesse Jackson's operation because she was talked into the notion that it was critical that the narrative be changed. The narrative of a fake hate crime threatens the key strategy of the Democrats, standing up for the victims against the oppressors — whites, males, Republicans, and the rich (except for rich actors and other "woke" donors to the Democrats).

Jussie and his lawyers immediately started constructing their own narrative that Jussie was in fact the victim, and he might even sue the Chicago police. An absurd whiteface narrative — that the two Nigerian brothers caught on a surveillance camera buying the supplies for the attack were the real perps who fooled Jussie into believing they were white MAGA-supporters — was soon on offer.

Of course, it is ludicrous, but people who are in the fantasy business believe they are able to sell imaginary stories, and the ones who are stars reap big rewards for the success in doing so. For her part, Foxx, steeped in social justice theory as well as the postmodernism that is its intellectual foundation, was persuadable. In an excellent article, Heather Mac Donald explains the ideological predispositions that led Foxx to take this course of action:

Foxx is a leading figure in the recent national wave of progressive local prosecutors who came to power by playing race politics. She campaigned on the Critical Race Theory credo that the criminal-justice system is endemically biased. She inveighed against the so-called school-to-prison pipeline and promised to reduce racial disparities in prosecutions. Last month, she dismissed aggravated battery charges against a 16-year-old student who had attacked two Chicago police officers; the Chicago police union argued that her dismissal of the charges fit a pattern of favoring offenders over police officers. Foxx operates in a cultural milieu that holds that the fact that a hate crime is a hoax is less important than the fact that it could have been true. Prosecuting Smollett could have sent another black man to prison. Is there a race-based system of justice here?

Selling this scheme was helped by the fact that Foxx appears to be a genuine fool, the kind of fool who doesn't follow the rules and is exceedingly sloppy. Lisa Eustachewich reports for Page Six:

Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx did not "formally" recuse herself from the Jussie Smollett case — she only did so "colloquially," prosecutors said on Wednesday.

This position, that she is casual in her "colloquial" use of technical terms of law, utterly contradicts the explanation she gave to the WBEZ reporters about why her move is so difficult for the public, so ignorant of the technicalities of law, to understand:

I think the confusion for people who don't understand the intricacies of the justice system, who don't understand alternative prosecution or diversion or alternate outcomes outside of prison or lengthy probation, it's a hard thing for people to process.

I suspect that Foxx was talked into believing that with the presumed support of the Obamas — whose former close associate Tina Tchen first intervened with Foxx to save Jussie's bacon — the narrative could be sold, and questions could be avoided with the usual techniques of citing her own authority, secret technicalities, sealed records, sympathy for the victim Jussie, and ultimately crying racism.

Foxx was so stupid (and perhaps a little star-struck) that she did not predict the vehement opposition of Rahm Emanuel and police superintendent Eddie Johnson. I wonder if any mention was made to her of the award from the NAACP that Jussie was scheduled to receive — if only he were free to travel to California.

It is all going to fall apart. The FBI and DoJ are investigating, and Rahm Emanuel has demanded that Jussie pay the costs of investigating his false claim.

The city on Thursday laid out the cost of the investigation into the alleged hate crime against actor Jussie Smollett and demanded the "Empire" star pay pay the city more than $130,000.

"The city threatened to take legal action under the municipal code of Chicago" if the actor did not pay up.

"If the amount is not timely paid, the Department of Law may prosecute you [Mr. Smollett] for making a false statement to the City under section 1-21-010 of the Municipal Code of Chicago or pursue any other legal remedy available at law," it reads. "A violation of the false statement ordinance imposes a fine of not less than $500 and a maximum of $1,000, plus up to three times the amount of damages the City sustains as a result of the violation. The City may also seek to recover court costs, collection costs, and attorney's fees."

Discovery in civil law cases can be powerful, while the evidentiary standards are much lower — a preponderance of evidence instead of beyond a reasonable doubt.

But even angry Rahm is buying into narrative-building, disgracefully blaming President Trump for the phony "hate crime" attack that was intended to incriminate his supporters, and by implication himself:

I believe that this is what is called "blaming the victim."

Fantasy + stupidity of the audience works well in the entertainment world, and sometimes in politics. But I think it will not work out well for Foxx. People are fed up and paying attention too closely, and most of them are so uneducated by the postmodernists that they still believe in truth.