Good morning!

1. Nah, there’s no mainstream media ignorance and stupidity…

Mecca!

These are the people we trust to keep us informed about the world, and explain what we don’t have the time to study.  Great. [Pointer: Instapundit]

2.  Please circulate to your tantrum-throwing Impeach Trump friends...Yet another sharp column by Glenn Greenwald cutting through the fog and wind, and explaining that, as he puts it, “Robert Mueller Did Not Merely Reject the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theories. He Obliterated Them.”

Unlike the New York Times, which intentionally cherry-picked quotes from the Mueller Report to give solace to its Trump-Deranged readers, Greenwald reproduced the substantive conclusions that put the nails into the collusion fantasy. Like…

• “The investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA’s interference operation”
• “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
• 
• 

Greenwald concludes,

In sum, Democrats and their supporters had the exact prosecutor they all agreed was the embodiment of competence and integrity in Robert Mueller. He assembled a team of prosecutors and investigators that countless media accounts heralded as the most aggressive and adept in the nation. They had subpoena power, the vast surveillance apparatus of the U.S. government at their disposal, a demonstrated willingness to imprison anyone who lied to them, and unlimited time and resources to dig up everything they could.

The result of all of that was that not a single American – whether with the Trump campaign or otherwise – was charged or indicted on the core question of whether there was any conspiracy or coordination with Russia over the election. No Americans were charged or even accused of being controlled by or working at the behest of the Russian government. None of the key White House aides at the center of the controversy who testified for hours and hours – including Donald Trump, Jr. or Jared Kushner – were charged with any crimes of any kind, not even perjury, obstruction of justice or lying to Congress.

These facts are fatal to the conspiracy theorists who have drowned U.S. discourse for almost three years with a dangerous and distracting fixation on a fictitious espionage thriller involved unhinged claims of sexual and financial blackmail, nefarious infiltration of the U.S. Government by familiar foreign villains, and election cheating that empowered an illegitimate President. They got the exact prosecutor and investigation that they wanted, yet he could not establish that any of this happened and, in many cases, established that it did not.

Precisely.

3. Stop making me defend Beto! Poor Beto O’Rourke. Once the leader in the empty-suit division of the Democratic Presidential sweepstakes, he has now been supplanted by Pete Whateverhisnameis thanks to the news media manipulation we know so well.  Now Beto’s being mocked in conservative circles for his tax returns, which showed that despite having qute a bit of money in his family (Beto’s wife is rich), the O’Rourkes gave just .3% to charity.

Quizzed about this at a campaign even, O’Rourke’s answer was that his campaign was his major altruistic contribution, saying,

“I’ll tell you, I’m doing everything I can right now, spending this time with you, not with our kiddos, not back home in El Paso, because I want to sacrifice everything to make sure that we meet this moment of truth with everything we’ve got.”

This has gotten him roundly mocked. Victory Girls is typical: “Beto is so stupendously awesome that we should be applauding his sacrifice! He’s donating himself to America therefore his past record of paltry donations to charity has been surpassed by this one amazingly bold move! What a guy! Such a giver!”

I won’t opine on the wisdom of putting it that way, but Beto, for once, is right. Running for President is a sacrifice, and a major one, for the public good, and a lot more difficult than writing a check.

4. And this is why Jussie Smollett belongs in jail… In the Detroit News, Nolan Finley writes that the supposed wave of hate crimes in America since President Trump was elected  is a hoax, though a convenient narrative that the media is happy to keep repeating. Kentucky State University professor Wilfred Reilly, researched hate-motivated violence in America for his book “Hate Crime Hoax,” and found that the majority of high-profile hate crimes over the past few years have been faked. Finley writes,

Reilly studied 409 reported hate crimes over the past five years that received media attention. They include incidents such as the racist graffiti at Eastern Michigan University and the minority woman in Grand Rapids who claimed a group of white men urinated on her.

“In major cases, almost all of them have been hoaxes,” Reilly says. “The number of hate crime hoaxes actually exceeds the number of convictions. The majority of these high-profile incidents never happened….Portraying America as a hate-filled country is wildly inaccurate,” Reilly says.

The professor himself writes at Commentary:

I take no position on what exact percentage of all hate crimes are hoaxes. Such a conclusion would be nearly impossible to calculate. It would be necessary, just for starters, to determine the percentage of all cases of alleged interracial fist fights that were classified as hate crimes across every county-level police precinct in the United States, the conviction versus dismissal rate for those crimes, and the percentage of prosecutorial dismissals or nolle prosequi decisions that were motivated by a belief that the allegation in question was a false one.

False hate crimes inflict a heavy cost on society. …The hoaxes are bound to increase hostility between blacks and whites. The wonder is that, very much to the credit of the American people, these fake hate crimes have not (yet) fomented more real hate crimes. But if the fake crimes continue unabated and unexposed, it is only a matter of time before the racial divisions they fuel will inspire actual violence.

…It’s no secret that there exists a large and well-entrenched grievance industry in the United States. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which labels organizations such as the Family Research Council and Jewish Political Action Committee “hate groups,” pulls in $51.8 million per year and has a well-invested endowment of $432 million. …Civil-rights groups such as the NAACP [and] the Urban League… have a deep-rooted interest in presenting the sort of bigotry they fight as a serious ongoing problem in the United States in order to continue receiving donations and funding. … Especially in a liberal environment, such as a college campus, the false report of a hate crime brings both predictable support from a preset group of allies and a chance to strike back at perceived oppressors.

Pointer: Advice Goddess