Martyrs are an important aspect of many religions. Christians have a book called Foxe’s Book of Martyrs that details the often gruesome deaths of many Christians at the hands of Roman Catholics. Anabaptists have their own version called Martyrs’ Mirror that does the same thing except that those making the martyrs include Protestants. Islam has their own “martyrs” but they tend to be killed while committing acts of violence against the infidels so not exactly the same thing.
Leftist ideology is also a religion. It is a “secular religion” but it is a religion just as much as any other religion, whether Buddhism or Scientology or Catholicism. In order for progressivism to survive it needs to maintain their mythology and sacred stories, just like most religions. In America one of the most important myths is the myth of “white supremacy” and “white privilege”. According to this myth, America was entirely built by black people while white people sat around on the porch drinking Bud light and saying mean things. The pervasive “institutional racism” of America has prevented the black population from ever rising above their circumstances like European immigrants, Chinese immigrants, other Asian immigrants, have done. In order to keep this myth operating in a nation that elected and then re-elected a black man as President, there needs to be a constant stream of sacred faith affirming stories. These stories include the lore of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
For people like me, the story of these two young black men is very different from the sacred lore of Cultural Marxism. Trayvon Martin attacked George Zimmerman, who is obviously an jackass of the highest order but that isn’t illegal. He was punching him and banging his head on the sidewalk. Photos of Zimmerman after the fact show his nose was bloodied as was the back of his head. Having a young man banging your head on the concrete could be fatal. Zimmerman pulled his gun, shot and killed Trayvon Martin in self-defense. In the leftist mythology Trayvon was just minding his own business when a white guy (Zimmerman is not white) stalked and shot him for no reason other than Trayvon being a “black body” wearing a hoody. This has led to iconography of the hooded sweatshirt representing taking a stand against oppression. He was an innocent boy. The media and the clergy of the Leftist cult usually show pictures of Trayvon as a much younger and sweet looking boy. They don’t show the later pictures of Trayvon closer to his death when he was exhaling smoke, perhaps marijuana, and giving the middle finger to the camera. He wasn’t a little boy, he was already 5′ 11″. He was in trouble on a regular basis, liked fighting and was a drug user. He was probably headed for jail or an early grave one way or the other. Again Zimmerman isn’t a swell human being but no one is going to let a 5’11” guy smash their head into the sidewalk.
Then Michael Brown. The Brown incident led to the “hands up, don’t shoot” liturgy even though it was proven that Michael Brown did not have his hands up and was in fact trying to take the cops gun when he was shot. Brown had just strong-armed a store clerk and then attacked a cop. While Trayvon Martin was a slender but strong 5’11”, Michael Brown was enormous, 6’4″ and nearly 300 pounds. That is NFL sized. If you attack a cop and go for his gun you are getting shot 100 times out of 100. But even still, years after the court proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Michael Brown was the aggressor and the cop was absolutely justified in shooting him, he is still invoked as a martyr to “police brutality”.
Now along comes Jussie Smollett. I have written about this case before and I am not going to reiterate the obviously unbelievable narrative. It was clear that whatever happened to him was nothing like what he was describing and the case, which has already bled untold man-hours of Chicago police time that could have been spent investigating actual crimes that actually happened. But it seems apparent that what is going to happen now is most likely that the police drag out the “investigation”, which most recently involved questioning two “persons of interest” that happened to be black Nigerian guys, until the public loses interest and then quietly let the case die without charging Smollett. Chicago is a Democrat party machine run town and always has been. No leader in the police with any aspirations wants to be the one connected with charging a black sodomite with filing a false hate crime. So I expect this to just fade away because it is pretty hard to convict someone that doesn’t exist for a crime that didn’t happen.
That won’t stop Jussie Smollett from being elevated to sainthood. In 2019 it doesn’t matter if a crime actually occurred, it only matters if people believe that it could have occurred, in “Trump’s America”. The people predisposed to think that it is feasible to have two white guys wearing MAGA caps, carrying a bottle of bleach and a noose, running around at 2 AM in a Chicago neighborhood described by one resident as being half black and half homosexual, are going to be convinced this happened no matter what. Jussie will join the sainted Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin as victims of white supremacist America. The facts don’t matter because the falsified event advances the narrative that blacks are under constant assault from white Trump supporters even though black men are generally speaking almost 100% more likely to be killed by another black man than they are a white Trump voter. Unless Jussie is arrested, tried, convicted and jailed, his story will be repeated as if it is Gospel truth by the social justice warriors that form the core of the Leftist laity. His name will be spoken in whispered, reverent tones. “Remember what they did to Jussie!” will be the mantra.
The rest of America will soon forget Jussie Smollett and his farcical claims of being assaulted while coming home with his Subway sammich but not the Left. He will claim a spot in their pantheon of demi-gods as a Victim™ and that is all that matters. The narrative has been reinforced and a new sacred story has been added to the lore of progressivism. Until people on the Right get it in their heads that what we are fighting is not a war of ideas but a religious jihad where facts don’t matter, we will keep losing.