A Tale of Two Hoaxes

According to the Chinese lunar calendar, we are now in the Year of the Pig. However, this is surely the Decade and most probably the Century of Bullshit. As such, there are a huge number of hoaxes out there, too many to count. However, some of them, a select few, for whatever reasons, receive far more attention than the rest. A recent hoax, perpetrated (or attempted, rather) by one Jussie Smollett really seems to have hit the sweet spot.

Jussie Smollett, who is actually biracial (and thus, a particularly good stand-in for Trump’s predecessor in the White House) was initially portrayed as the innocent victim of racist Trump supporting thugs. However, soon there was narrative breakdown.

Since the story broke some weeks ago, readers of the Unz Review have been regaled with an average of two articles a day about Jussie, the man of of the hour. As I write these lines, Unz’s prolific racialist blogger, Steve Sailer has devoted thirty-two blog posts to this latest hate hoax, more than one a day since the story broke.

You see, just as there are worthy victims and unworthy ones, so it is with hoaxes. So I thought to remedy the situation a bit by bringing to your attention one of the hoaxes deemed (by whoever decides these things) to be less worthy. This one did not take place in the U.S. of A., but in merry old England.

That Obscure Object of Desire

The story broke in the British press in the summer of 2017, but I only came across it some months later. Jemma Beale, a 25-year-old young lady (perhaps using the term “lady” rather loosely) was sentenced to 10 years in prison for falsely accusing 15 (!) different men of rape and sexual assault over a multi-year period.

Though this case has various noteworthy aspects, the first that is bound to jump out at a reader pertains to Ms. Beale’s physical charms. My own first reaction to this was one of amazement. Surely, I thought, anybody with eyes to see would have had immediate doubts about this woman’s claims of being a serial rape victim!

“I don’t think so, Papi.”

“Really? Why not?”

“She is really very ugly, Papi.”

To be fair, the relevant authorities, to their credit, did eventually figure this out also, but it took them quite a bit longer. Thus, one of the falsely accused, Somali-born Mahad Cassim, served two years and nine months of a seven-year prison sentence for the crime of defiling this particular English rose.

From the Guardian, Britain’s newspaper of record, we have:

Sentencing her on Thursday, the judge, Nicholas Loraine-Smith, said: “This trial has revealed, what was then not obvious, that you are a very, very convincing liar… (my emphasis)

No mention of anybody having been very, very gullible. Of course not. It would be grossly unfair to reproach any of them for having been duped. Obviously, the problem is solely that Jemma is such a very convincing liar.

Though I have never personally met Jemma Beale and have no desire to do so, I do not believe that the story is principally about Jemma’s great talent for lying. Nor is it really about the gullibility of the specific local authorities who handled the case. That various young men could have their lives ruined based on this deranged woman’s storytelling tells us something more general about the pathologies of the society in which we live. I suspect that the Jemma Beale story is only possible in this current-day petri dish of weaponized feminism, political correctness, suppressed (and not so suppressed) racism, and generalized nuttiness.

Narrative and Counternarrative, the “Man bites dog” theory

A famous adage has it that it is not news when a dog bites a man, but when the man bites the dog… Or in other words, the events that are newsworthy are those that run counter to the conventional narrative. I have wondered of late whether this is really quite true. On the one hand, the counternarrative “man bites dog” story tends to pique one’s curiosity more than the humdrum “dog bites man”. But then, on the other hand, many (or most?) people are not particularly interested in having their belief system challenged. They have certain narratives running through their heads and they are constantly seeking to confirm them. Such people have a tendency to gravitate towards news sources that run stories that bolster their existing prejudices. Such outlets are highly ideological, which is basically another way of saying that they are heavily invested in certain narratives. That in turn amounts to saying that they have a vested interest in suppressing or downplaying inconvenient counternarratives.

The dominant feminist discourse on rape is that the crime is very underreported; few women will press charges, since, in our sexist society, the deck is stacked against rape victims. However, I daresay that all this would come as news to Jemma Beale’s victims. For example, another of the men whom Jemma Beale falsely accused, one Noam Shahzad, avoided the aforementioned Mr. Cassim’s plight by fleeing to Pakistan, where doubtless, he has extended family. Clearly, Mr. Shahzad did not harbor any illusions that the British legal system was skewed in his favor. Quite the contrary. He reasoned, probably correctly, that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. So…

Run, baby, run!

In any case, if the feminist narrative is largely about portraying women as victims, the Jemma Beale story, a clear case of a woman victimizing men, is a rather inconvenient counternarrative. Actually, it goes beyond that; effectively, this obese lesbian, with the full complicity of British law enforcement and courts, was able to wield this feminist victimization narrative as a weapon to victimize innocent men. What we have here, at least in this instance, is a weaponized victimization narrative.

Now, obviously, all of this is a question of perspective. For the feminists pushing a certain world view in which women are always the victim, the Jemma Beale story is clearly rather inconvenient. However, if you are opposed to the feminist ideology, or you feel, at the very least, that the whole thing has gone way too far, and it is, increasingly that men are being unfairly demonized, then you would think that such a case provides some much needed balance to the discussion.

Narrative Crossfire

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. ​ George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”

Based on the foregoing considerations, one would expect that the right-wing anti-PC sorts of websites would have had a field day with the Jemma Beale case. Surely, when your publication is catering to the disgruntled angry white man demographic, you wouldn’t miss something this good, would you? You’d seize any opportunity to stick it to those feminists, right?

So I was quite interested in how such outlets presented this story and one of the first sites I thought to check was Breitbart. On Google, I tried the search string:

Jemma Beale site:breitbart.com

It turned up absolutely no results. Zero. Zilch. It turns out that Breitbart simply ignored this story completely. Note, by the way, that this is not because Breitbart is an American outfit, and thus, largely unaware of what happens in Britain. That might have been true once, but Breitbart has had a non-virtual presence, an actual physical office, Breitbart London, since 2014. All of their London based people must have known about the Jemma Beale story since it was all over the London tabloids that they would see on the streets. So I think they must have made a conscious decision, however juicy the story is, not to cover it.

Well, there is no great mystery here. Breitbart is an outlet that largely exists to present a very right-wing Zionist world view. A very large part of that is unrelenting, rabid Islamophobia. Thus, Breitbart is a news outlet (using the term rather loosely) that is heavily invested in a set of Islamophobic narratives. In the period of over a year running up to when the Jemma Beale case broke, Breitbart went whole hog on the narrative of a rape epidemic allegedly taking place in Europe, being attributed to Muslim refugees. So, finally, the Jemma Beale story is counternarrative for them, just as it is for the radical feminists — albeit for entirely different reasons!

The Jemma Beale story is quite fascinating and I forwarded it to various people with whom I correspond. As juicy as it is, none of them had ever heard of the story. I pondered this for a while and came to the conclusion that this is a case of what one could call narrative crossfire. While people on the cultural left would not find the story ideologically useful for obvious reasons, the case of those on the alt-right is more nuanced. The story of a woman mounting a hate hoax by crying rape is a great story for them, but a white girl falsely accusing Muslim men of raping her is something they would tend to downplay. Actually, they didn’t just downplay it. They simply ignored the story completely. A search for any reference to Jemma Beale on the Unz Review also comes up with nothing.

Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine that the Jemma Beale story is the same in all respects except for the racial backgrounds of the people involved. Now Jemma is an obese black woman who falsely accused a number of white English lads of raping her, causing at least one of them to spend years in prison.

Would the readership of Breitbart or the Unz Review be unaware of that story? Come to think of it, ideally, the obese false accuser, besides being Black, would also be Muslim.

You hit the trifecta, baby!

Though it cannot be absolutely proven, I daresay that all the Alt-Right bloggers, people like Steve Sailer and the rest, would go absolutely apeshit over this modified version of the story. I think it would easily take the limelight away from Jussie Smollett. It would be like… Jussie who?

But that is still just a thought experiment. As it is, just about nobody has heard of Jemma Beale, any more than they have heard of Sophie Pointon, the lily white English girl who falsely accused a Muslim taxi driver of sexually molesting her. Apparently, the drunken Sophie was incensed that the Pakistani cabby did not want to accept her ten pound note in payment because it was drenched in the oil of the greasy doner kebab she had been eating during the ride. (I myself have observed that even the most virulently racist English people just looove their doner kebab.)

Sophie was, at least, a more credible sexual assault victim than Jemma Beale.

The problem was, however, that the cab’s GPS gadget left an electronic record of the cab trip that revealed that Sophie was lying in various particulars. So now Sophie suffered from narrative breakdown. I have no idea whether Ms. Pointon is still in prison.

Perhaps needless to say, a search for this story on Breitbart also yields zero hits:

“Pointon” site:breitbart.com

The readership of Unz Review is also no more likely to have heard of the Sophie Pointon case than Jemma Beale. A search for either incident produces no search results there either. It seems that the writers there, by and large, only cover the hate hoaxes that they feel like covering.

What to Do?

I guess it is inevitable that Alt-Right writers and venues will go on endlessly about Jussie Smollett but hardly mention Jemma Beale. Of course, writers on the other end of the political spectrum can be equally selective in what they tell you about. This is regrettable but there is not much to be done about it.

From the perspective of a reader, one who wants to be well informed, there is a clear lesson in this tale of two hoaxes: one should be very wary of relying solely on information sources that are aligned with one particular ideological perspective. If you want to learn about the world, you should not avoid material that will challenge your preconceived ideas; you should even seek it out. A white nationalist should not just read Occidental Observer but should read Black Agenda Report as well — at least occasionally. A person with right-wing republican leanings should read this sort of left-wing site as well as their usual right-wing fare. You see, even if you don’t agree with their perspectives, these sites will inform you of facts that you would simply not otherwise know.

Of course, the above is based on the assumption that you are seeking the truth. For those of you who do not at all mind that your habitual information sources go on endlessly about Jussie Smollett but don’t mention a single word about Jemma Beale, I don’t have any particular advice. If what you want is simply to reinforce your existing world view, then just keep on doing whatever you’re doing, I guess.