Michelle Malkin: Handy history of fake noose

Is it any wonder that American news consumers are at the end of their ropes of patience with the “mainstream media”?

Three weeks ago, there were troubling questions, contradictions and doubts about Trump-hating, attention-craving actor Jussie Smollett’s absurd hate crime claims. Few in the “professional” journalism herd paid heed. Now, with a grand jury investigation on the horizon, everyone’s a Johnny-come-lately debunker.

And everyone’s making excuses: How could we have known? Why would anyone lie about racism? What could have possibly prepared us for such a scandalous swindle?

Listen and learn, addled enablers of fraud. Fake Noose is a sick phenomenon that has run rampant across the country unchecked:

• Columbia University, 2007. Black psychology professor Madonna Constantine made the media rounds claiming she found a “degrading” noose (made of hand-tied twine) hanging from her office door. Constantine led fist-waving protests, decried “systematic racism” and prompted a nationwide uproar. Things didn’t add up when Columbia initially blocked investigators from obtaining 56 hours of surveillance video.. It turned out she was desperately trying to distract from a brewing internal probe of her serial plagiarism, for which she was eventually fired. The hate crime probe hit a dead end and Constantine faced no criminal charges over the Fake Noose incident.

• Baltimore Fire Department, 2007. Another manufactured outrage erupted when Donald Maynard, a black firefighter-paramedic apprentice, claimed he found a knotted rope and threatening note with a noose drawing on it at his stationhouse. A federal civil rights investigation ensued and the NAACP cried racism — until Maynard confessed to the noose nonsense amid a department-wide cheating scandal. A top official revealed that Maynard admitted “conducting a scheme meant to create the perception that members within our department were acting in a discriminatory and unprofessional manner.” Maynard faced no criminal charges over the Fake Noose incident

• Salisbury State University, 2016. Students, faculty and administrators were horrified when a stick figure hanging from a noose on a whiteboard was discovered at the school’s library. The N-word and hashtag #WhitePower also appeared in the menacing graffiti. Campus authorities immediately launched an investigation, which exposed two black students as the perpetrators. Prosecutors declined to file criminal charges against the Fake Noosers.

• Kansas State University, 2017. A paroxysm of protest struck K-State after someone reported a noose hanging from a tree on campus. Black students lambasted authorities for not acting quickly enough. They stoked anger online with the hashtag #DontLeaveUsHanging and demanded increased security. But the “noose” was made of cut pieces of nylon parachute cord, which police believed had been discarded by someone who “may have simply been practicing tying different kinds of knots.”

• Michigan State University, 2017. When a student reported a noose hanging outside her dorm room, MSU administrators went into full freakout mode over the racial incident. Cops and the Office of Institutional Equity were immediately notified. “A noose is a symbol of intimidation and threat that has a horrendous history in America,” the university president bemoaned. But it turned out the “noose” was a “packaged leather shoelace” that someone had dropped accidentally.

• Mississippi State Capitol, 2018. Media outlets blared headlines about seven nooses and “hate signs” found hanging in trees by the capitol building before a special runoff election for U.S. Senate. The stories created an unmistakable impression that the nooses were left by GOP racists intending to intimidate black voters. In truth, they were a publicity stunt perpetrated by Democrats.

In the wake of Smollett’s folly, media sensationalists bluster that there’s no way they could have known they were being strung along. Thanks for the valuable admission, elite news professionals, that you are not only dumb and blind but incompetent to boot. It doesn’t take a fancy journalism degree to learn from the long, sordid history of Fake Noose.

When you’ve seen one social justice huckster, you’ve seen ’em all.