When it became clear a few weeks ago that Nathan “Stolen Valor” Phillips had lied about his interaction with the Covington Catholic boys, media sycophants assumed either one of two mendacious stances. For some, the original story admittedly was inaccurate, but they still regarded it as valid, since it highlighted and affirmed an “important” narrative about the implicit evil of straight white men. For many others, the follow-up video that exonerated the boys did not actually exonerate them at all.

Retractions and apologies were few and far between.

As Dennis Prager highlighted this week, the Left’s relationship with the truth is incidental at best. To blue-checkmarked pharisees, bits and pieces of the truth are only ever means to an end. When the truth does not conform with the objective of achieving their ends, they gleefully and unapologetically manipulate it.

In a recent interview with Anderson Cooper, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) shed light on this tendency to invert and distort objective reality. When Cooper pressed her on her mischaracterization of some key facts on Pentagon spending, she responded:

If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees. There’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.

In a moment of forthrightness, the golden child of 21st-century socialism admitted that in her eyes, evidence is secondary to narrative. The Left knows that fiction can communicate a more riveting moralistic tale than cold, hard facts. Ironically, Ocasio-Cortez is morally wrong in so casually dispensing with the truth, but she is factually correct about its power in the realm of public opinion: feelings don’t care about your facts. Sorry, Ben Shapiro.

Ultimately, one video here or one witness statement there may or may not have exonerated the Catholic boys for the “unacceptable” crime of failing to kowtow to their pagan animist spiritual superior, but it doesn’t matter either way. That was never their real crime. The story was never about what the Covington boys did or did not do. In a moral system predicated entirely on racial and sexual identity, it was always about who they are.

As Judy Berman writes in Time:

The thing is, this story was never really about who said or did what to inflame whom at the Capitol. High schoolers getting into trouble on school trips is not news. The video went viral because the images it contained drew such an immediate, visceral response: Knowing only that Sandmann was a white teenage boy in a MAGA hat surrounded by a pack of other white teenage boys—some in MAGA hats, some yelling—at an anti-abortion protest, observers on the left felt certain that they were peering into the soul of white, male privilege.

The Covington boys in all their privileged, heteronormative, Christian, straight, white maleness were manifestations of the Left’s cardinal archetype of evil. This archetype animates the progressive worldview and underpins their axiomatic beliefs about good and evil. They live in a world of perennial victims and oppressors; straight, white men are the embodiment of the latter. As a matter of doctrine, any story told in service of further demonizing that symbol of oppression, no matter how spurious, is justified as a matter of advancing the greater good. The ends always justify the means.

On the flip side, any story about white men which does not highlight their implicit evil is fundamentally unjust. The jackals lambasted Savannah Guthrie for offering Nick Sandmann a platform. Weeks later, they again flogged Esquire magazine for writing a fairly humanizing story about what it’s like to be a white boy growing up in America these days. The horror!

Manufacturing Victimhood

In light of the Left’s habit of lying and their core animosity toward people who look like the American Founders, the unfolding of the Jussie Smollett hate hoax scandal should surprise no one. Evidence has revealed that the B-list actor paid two Nigerian bodybuilders to fake beat him up, throw a bleach-like substance on him, and tie a noose around his neck before blaming the whole thing on two white Trump supporters. When the story originally broke, hoards of Twitter trolls and salivating celebrity NPCs rushed to condemn Trump’s America. As reality begins to expose Smollett’s deceit, many of those very people remain either mum or willfully blind. Looking at you, Nancy Pelosi.

Smollett’s interview with Robin Roberts is stomach-turning. The actor cries on cue. He morally grandstands about his gayness, his blackness, his activism against “45.” Hilariously, he considers himself a likely target for this kind of political crime. (How many people actually knew his name before the story broke?) He decries the implicit bias of his detractors, psychopathically lamenting that they simply cannot recognize the truth when they see it. Smollett’s unmerciful gaslighting of his audience is nothing short of psychological warfare.

By manufacturing his own victimhood, Jussie Smollett was willing to ruin the lives of innocent men. Had the Chicago police come up with two white suspects, and had those suspects by some accident or malintent been found guilty, they might have spent life in prison. Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) used Smollett’s fiction to support their recently passed bill making lynching (extrajudicial killing used to punish an alleged transgressor or intimidate a particular group of people) a federal crime. Harris and Booker called the Smollett incident a “modern-day lynching.”

What now? Smollett has been arrested. But will he be as harshly punished as his imagined perpetrators would have been? We know his defense will be robust. But what about the prosecution?

Do Not Let This Go

If “conservatives” had a backbone, they would hold these cretins (all of them) to account. Inexplicably, Washington Examiner Magazine’s Seth Mandel believes Smollett deserves a second chance. Yikes. The Right must confront Smollett with the same intensity as Nick Sandmann’s lawyers have confronted the Washington Post. Otherwise, we can expect false lynching claims to disappear into the same memory-hole as false rape accusations—which is to say, they will continue to happen and no one will be permitted to remember or cite them when hoax hate strikes again.

This pattern—indict the real or imagined white man for some real or imagined crime, publicly shame him and those like him by proxy, and when the truth comes out, move on to the next sensational fiction without really atoning for the lies—is the common thread between the Kavanaugh, Covington, Esquire, Jazmine Barnes, and Smollett cases. The moment a story is introduced into the public consciousness, the media and her agents of influence have already done their job. Passive consumers of media have absorbed the lie; public opinion moves an inch to the left. Constant inundation keeps the pressure on, further ensuring the culture keeps moving in the intended direction.

What we are seeing from the Left today, aided and abetted by the media, is more than “spin.” It is the targeted destruction of a particular group of people through the complete inversion of the truth. Any story that serves the dehumanization and demoralization of white males is enthusiastically memed into reality by the media. This concerted effort to gaslight Americans into self-hatred and self-detonation is beyond mendacity; it is evil.

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