Jussie Smollett just a symptom of the fake outrage disease
Remember folk expressions about the wisdom of being careful? “Look before you leap.” “Measure twice, cut once.” “Don’t go off half-cocked.” All of this should go double for online culture. Instead lives are being destroyed over misleading, unfair, or just plain false accusations.
People are being turned into public enemies or even fired after being framed for racism, homophobia or other perceived social crimes. Others are casting themselves as victims of hate in order to line their pockets. These days anyone with a phone in his hand can be P.T. Barnum. And people who congratulate themselves for being unusually tolerant, kind-hearted and impervious to misinformation are the leaders of frenzied online mobs who are pitchforking innocent people.
Fake news is bad enough. Fake outrage is even worse.
Consider Dominique Moran, a 23-year-old Mexican-American former Chipotle worker. When some knuckleheads who had previously done a dine-and-dash at her store came in, she told them they’d have to pay in advance. The young men, who were black, filmed the interaction on their smartphones and posted part of it, framing the matter as an instance of racism. The video was watched more than 7 million times. Mainstream media picked up on the story. Strangers vilified Moran on social media, calling her “racist bitch” and “dumb whore.”
Chipotle didn’t bother to figure out what had happened but fired her. Only after a random Twitter user discovered the guy who first posted the video had actually bragged about his dine-and-dash habit in the past did the narrative begin to change. If he hadn’t been so spectacularly unwise as to have done that, what then? Moran would probably still be a public enemy, perhaps unemployable. As it is, Chipotle offered her job back to her, but she declined. The anxiety of being publicly shamed lingers. She is spending “a lot more time alone” because, “I don’t really have a desire to meet new people right now. I feel drained of energy.” Not the way a 23-year-old should talk.
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Other times fake outrage is used directly to raise money, as in the case of Bonnie Kimball, the New Hampshire lunch lady who told The Manchester Union Leader she was fired for giving a student an $8 meal free because he couldn’t pay. Kimball became an insta-celebrity: the angel of the steam table. Take that, heartless America that is pro-starving children!
Kimball racked up $8,500 in online donations, plus a job offer from famed chef José Andrés, who called her a hero. One minor problem: Kimball’s story was false. The boy’s mother said he was bringing his own lunch to school, yet Kimball had been giving the 17-year-old free food for three months. Kimball and the student had discussed covering up what actually happened in Facebook messages.
A few years ago, a New Jersey waitress, Dayna Morales, falsely claimed a customer wrote an anti-gay message on a receipt as justification for leaving no tip. She raised thousands off the story, which was false in every detail, and claimed the money was going to charity, though it wasn’t.
Texas “Clock Boy” Ahmed Mohamed, via his litigious father Mohamed Mohamed, used fake outrage over supposed Islamophobia to fool virtually all of the major media and the president of the United States, Barack Obama. In reality, the boy, whose father is an activist with a long history of grievances, removed part of a clock radio with apparent intent to cause confusion and was arrested not for having a bomb but for having a “hoax bomb device.” Meanwhile his dad leveraged the incident to sue the city, the school district, the principal, Fox News, Glenn Beck, the mayor of Irving, etc., as his lawyers claimed he was entitled to $15 million. The lawsuits were thrown out but the family moved to Qatar after a foundation offered to pay for the boy’s schooling there.
If you’re more than about 10 minutes old, you probably remember the expression, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” How is it that so many Americans are willing to believe something that sounds too bad to be true? Worse, those who believe these tall tales without waiting to hear the other side of the story and rush to join the mob are throwing gasoline-soaked logs on the bonfire of the animosities — the thing they claim to oppose. Jussie Smollett is just the symptom; the disease is everywhere.
