In case you somehow missed it, in 2019, on the night before a polar vortex of bitterly cold temperatures hit Chicago, at 1:00am on the Near North Side, the onetime Empire actor claimed that two men yelling, “This is MAGA country” poured bleach on him and put a noose around his neck after his visit to a Subway restaurant.
As soon as I heard about the “attack,” I had my doubts. So did the Chicago Police.
What really happened is that Smollett, who is also a rapper, paid two Nigerian brothers to stage the attack.
A few weeks later, Cook County’s so-called prosecutor, State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, dropped all of the hoax-related charges against Smollett–without an admission of guilt from Smollett. His $10,000 bond was forfeited.
The uproar forced Foxx to appoint a special prosecutor, tough-as-nails former US Attorney Dan Webb, to try the case against Smollett, and a jury here in Cook County found him guilty–he was sentenced to five months in prison. But Smollett served only a few days of that sentence after being released until his appeal played out.
Keep in mind that many CPD man-hours were wasted as cops, under pressure from police brass, no doubt, investigated the “crime” against Smollett.
Tina Tchen. a former top aide to Barack Obama, called Foxx on behalf of Smollett’s family to work out a deal.
Foxx despises the Smollett millstone around her neck, because she believes they diminish her so-called accomplishments in office. She leaves office after eight years of catch-and-release “prosecution” that has made Chicago and its inner suburbs a worse place to live. Foxx sadly, wasn’t voted out, she chose not to run for a third term.
Foxx should be best remembered for enabling of criminals, but since the Smollett case reignited interest in her botched handling of his crimes, something that will haunt her forever.
When Foxx dies and her obituaries are published, the Smollett case will be the lead.
Good.
Kim Foxx sucked as a prosecutor, and because of Smollett, she’ll be remembered as incompetent. And she is–on so many levels.
There is at least some justice in this world.
John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit from suburban Cook County.
One of the reasons why this blog is going to end as a business at the end of this year has been the various reverses and collapses that took place after things started to get big around here, plus I’m now kinda old to be chasing around the country in the hope that someone will fund it and maybe slip a few extra buck to keep the lights on at home.
But I had my share of big moments, reporting from the middle of an Antifa riots in Denver, My 2010 road trip with Stacy McCain. Multiple CPACS including my final one with my sons when I first reported on Trump making gains with the black community, Scott Brown’s victory party of course, credentialed press at the Romney “victory” party but likely the biggest one in terms of relevance was covering Donald Trump’s first NH rally and it’s the one that makes the point concerning letting alternative media into the press room at the White House.
When I got to that event in Derry I noticed right away that these weren’t the normal activists turning up or being bussed in that I had seen over and over when covering events in NH. These were regular people. I did a bunch of interviews talking to anyone willing to talk to me to find out why they came and was quickly convinced those regular people showing up WAS the story (Stacy McCain will tell you about my call to him on that matter). As you may or may not know I carried three cameras with me at the time because I didn’t have a ton of extra batteries. I was on my 2nd camera when Trump had his press conference where I was standing in the back. Here is my recording of same.
You might notice two things when watching.
I repeatedly attempted to get my question in and failed
The media questions were all basicially
Why does the GOP suck?
Why do you, your campaign & your ideas suck?
What are you going to do about the fact that you, your campaign, your ideas and the GOP suck?
My recording stopped 18 min in because at that point camera 2’s battery gave out and I have to resort to camera #3 which due to a problem did not allow me to zoom in so I had a wide shot when finally I got to ask Donald Trump my question:
Two things you might notice about my question:
Notice the surprise from Trump getting an actual relevant question.
Notice the media looking back to find out: “Hey, whose not with the program?”
It wasn’t a question of trying to give Trump an easy question. I had decided that those regular folks WERE the story and the question I asked was consistent with what I thought the most important thing was.
Any one of those media people there could have done those interview or asked that question but nobody bothered because they weren’t there to cover a story in the hopes of making a buck, they were there to advance an agenda because that’s how they made their bucks. And that simple act of asking that question in Derry is why he recognized me and called on me in Worcester months later again on what I considered the real story, the lack of protestors when people had been calling for them in the 2nd biggest city in New England which has 10 Colleges in it.
Although in fairness wearing a 12 ft long Dr. Who scarf and a fedora likely helped a bit for him remember me.
I suspect that if you open things up to bloggers like myself or influencers or the alternative media you will get a better set of questions and actually inform the public.
And why would you want to reward a press corps that hates you anyways?
So Donald Trump JR. I strongly suggest you go ahead and let guys like me in, even though by the time you do so I won’t be doing it anymore.
Closing thought: However I would love to get a 20 min on camera interview with the president election before the end of the year and post that as the final act of DaBlog as a business. Might as well go out in style.
If you’re willing let me know.
Update: I mentioned my call to Stacy McCain in this post completely unaware that he mentioned the same in a post today:
After going all-in on the 2012 campaign (“Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption”), I’d decided to avoid the 2016 campaign and was more or less neutral about the GOP primary. But then in September 2015, I got a call from Pete Da Tech Guy, who was covering a Trump rally in New Hampshire. “Stacy, this Trump thing is for real,” Pete told me. “You wouldn’t believe the size of this crowd.”
There was a real grassroots surge of support for Trump, and so the attitude of the Professional Conservative Pundit crowd turned from ridicule to hatred. Whereas they had originally treated Trump as a joke, now he was seen as threat.
Sir Thomas More:But Richard, that’s a little bribe. At court they offer you all sorts of things, home, manors, manor houses, coats of arms. Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one.
Richard Rich:If I was, who would know it?
Sir Thomas More:You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that. Oh, and a quiet life.
A Man for all Seasons 1966
This weekend I binge watched Tulsa King (highly recommended) but because my wife didn’t start with me I had to backtrack so she could catch up so in between I popped onto Youtube and there was an election night reaction video of the Bulwark.
Now I had watched reaction videos of all the other networks but these people were supposedly the “true conservatives” who had left the party because of Trump and were now pushing things like abortion and embracing far leftist because that’s what true principled conservatives do if they don’t get the nominee of their choice.
Check out the reactions and the people there and you’d swear they were a parody. It’s as if they never met a normal working class person or left the presence of anyone outside of the beltway who was not of the donor class.
It was especially interesting to see these supposedly expert people scoffing at the idea that people were hurting from inflation and how horrible the electorate is. Oh and I can’t wait to see Jonathan Altar starting hiding illegal immigrants in his attic as he said he would do, we should check back in six months to see if it’s happening. For me the real moment was Mono Charen declaring how America was not special or extraordinary because we elected Donald Trump over a woman who could not win a primary to save her life and whose entry into the political world was made possible by servicing Willie Brown’s willie.
It was the classic SNL 2016 election skit only without Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock there to mock the cluelessness, but what it really was comparable to was watching a group of courtiers in say the 12th to 16th century who spend all their time around the King’s court hoping to curry favor. Go back and watch scenes from the classic movie A Man for all Seasons. You will recognize these folks as the ones rushing on and off the barge after Henry VIII or in the inquiry pressing Sir Thomas Moore to give an answer and you will especially recognize them as Richard Rich whose primary purpose was to gain a position, any position that was above the common people so that the world would recognize their position.
And if some had to give up conservatism that they once supposedly championed for years well that’s a small price to pay for being above the mere commoners.
Now in fairness the Bulwark is a business and their job is to earn, and since they can’t earn on the conservative side they’ll service the left to keep those envelopes coming. Now I can understand that, I don’t approve but I understand and perhaps in an honest moment they might see themselves that way, but I suspect not, that’s the real irony here.
Look at that video. Every single one of them think’s they are Sir Thomas Moore, standing up to the king risking all for the sake of righteousness. Not one of them perceives that they are in fact an Army of Richard Riches all hoping to get Wales for themselves.
Captain Kidd:Well Captain Barsiliano are you satisfied?
Captain Barsiliano: I still put no trust in him.
Spitfire Stevens:Well I do and enough to give him my ship as soon as it’s re-rigged
Captain Barsiliano: No man is taking a ship out of here unless he has a rope around his neck like any known pirate. All right if he wants to sail let him sail on the Scorpion as my navigator, I have need of one and at once. When he comes back with blood on his hands he can hoist his own black flag, but not before.
Against All Flags 1952
One of the things that you learn quickly if you spend any time with Robert Stacy McCain is that this person is smart, and not just folksy country smart but book smart. He is extremely well read and when he decides to go after Marxists and feminists it’s because he had read more Marx than many Marxists and more Feminism than most Feminists, in fact it was his insistence on quoting feminists in their own words that made him one of the first conservative journalists banned from twitter years ago.
Why Elon Musk’s company has not reinstated him and his 80K+ followers as he has many others is still a large pet peeve for me and a matter of some mystery but I digress…
Well Stacy McCain has looked at the numbers from the last president election and notes a real oddity:
On Wednesday, November 6, the day after Election Day, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter was full of Democrats wondering about the “missing” votes — Kamala Harris’s vote totals were remarkably lower than the 81 million that Joe Biden supposedly got in 2020. This provoked all kinds of paranoid conspiracy theory comments among liberals, none of whom seemed to consider the obvious alternative: Maybe Joe really didn’t get 81 million votes. Maybe “ballot harvesting” and other Democrat shenanigans in 2020 really did amount to a stolen election. But only right-wing extremists could think such a thing.
It is not merely that Harris got some 7 million fewer votes than Biden, but rather than the total number of votes cast was lower by about 5 million. Who were those disappearing voters? Why would so many people not even bother to vote this year? Good luck coming up with an explanation for this that doesn’t include the possibiliity [sic] that what Democrats did in 2020 was to manufacture millions of fake votes for Joe Biden
Democrats being Democrats are floating other theories;
One final point about non-voters. We don’t know how many non-voters might have voted for Harris if they had voted, but Levitz suggests there’s no reason to think those voters who chose not to vote are an especially progressive group.
In truth, Americans who want the Democratic Party to be more uniformly progressive are, by and large, the most reliably Democratic voters in the country.
Emphasis Mine
Now let’s go back to Stacy McCain’s argument:
Hmmm. Read the whole thing and you will find no attempt to explain why turnout was so much worse in these “heavily Democratic cities,” because this might lead to questions about why these “heavily Democratic cities” had such phenomenally high turnout in 2020. What happened in 2020 that did not happen in 2024?
And let me remind you all that it was turnout in five heavily Democrat machine controlled counties in five different states that made the difference in 2020 and the real reason why Biden finally had to go:
And you will recall the big question that Kamala’s incompetent campaign raised: Steal or No Steal?
In short we are in a position where while the apparatus is in place in key states to steal and election you have a strong likely hood that it would fail because of
Increased vigilance
A larger margin to overcome
A candidate even less credible then LOL 81 million Joe
All of this puts us back to the same formula I postulated 8 years ago:
If (Number of votes you can get away stealing) > (Number of votes you might lose by)
Then
Go For it!
Else
Release your vote totals as is
Endif
You will not I have bolded the key phrase get away because we are at a point where it is not only likely that a steal might fail do to the volume of the vote, but the dissatisfaction of the electorate has, in my opinion, reached a point where officials held their noses and went along with the steal last time because they disliked Trump might decide against playing ball.
Furthermore if the steal DOES fail you will not only get a Trump administration with a Trump AG and a bunch of new Trump lawyers at Justice but you will get a Trump administration that has had an election stolen from them hell bent on getting those who did tried to do it to them again.
Stacy noted some of these reasons why the steal didn’t take place and added a key one of his own:
Why didn’t the same thing happen in 2024? Well, first of all, Republicans raised hell about election integrity and Democrats, realizing that they couldn’t get away with running the same game again, refrained from the most egregious practices that had tainted 2020. Also, however, Zuckerberg stopped pouring out money (or certainly did not spend as much as he did in 2020) for the Democrat ballot-harvesting gangs.
If you’re wondering why Zuckerberg lost his enthusiasm for helping Democrats steal elections, perhaps the date of October 7, 2023, might be viewed as the decisive factor. Why should a Jew spend his money to help elect Democrats, if Democrats are going to support murderous Jew-hating terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah?
In short the steal wasn’t plausible and wasn’t funded, thieves like to be paid and Kamala spent her billon of celebs, Stacy saw all of this from numbers. I suggest you point to his piece (and maybe to this one) when some smug leftist asks why the GOP didn’t scream “fraud” this time around.
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