Observe a sociopath in action......

....by watching this interview of Jussie Smollett by Robin Roberts on Good Morning America from a week ago (before the information on his two Nigerian accomplices surfaced). You needn't watch the entire sixteen minutes to get a sense of how sociopaths operate.

Note how heartfelt Smollett's delivery comes across. There's absolutely no sheepishness or furtiveness on his face, and no catch in his voice to betray him.

Note how reasonable and calm he appears.

Note how he characterizes his doubters as "offensive," and "unfair." (There's no better way to put your opponents on defense these days than to claim "offense.")

And listen to Smollett's noble words: "We have the right and responsibility to make something meaningful out of the things that happen to us, good and bad.....I just want members of the LGBTQ community, I just want young black children to know, how strong that they are." (See? He doesn't care about himself, he only wants to do right by the downtrodden!)

Note the tremulous passion in his voice as he says these things.

Note how the tears come to his eyes as he recounts the attack. What a traumatic memory that must be for him! (Sociopaths can summon tears at will, as we have seen here and here.)

Note how gentle he seems. (No wonder Kamala Harris described him that way!)

It's enough to make you want to stand up and chant, "Justice for Jussie!"

That is, if you can suspend your disbelief -- which a number of Presidential candidates were apparently willing and able to do.

One of the giveaways to Smollett's dishonesty is that he repeatedly prefaces his statements with the word "honestly." And at one point, he refers to his doubters as having made "false, inaccurate" statements (one of those words would have sufficed), demonstrating typical sociopathic overuse of adjectives (and sometimes adverbs), as we saw here and here. 

Note how Smollett tells his doubters, "You don't even want to see the truth," though that advice would actually be better directed at his supporters.

And when Roberts asks him what people need to hear the most, Smollett replies, "I think what people need to hear is the truth. It's just the truth."

The gentleman doth protest too loudly.

Keep in mind, this isn't even a particularly intelligent sociopath. (If he were smarter, he would have come up with a more plausible story.) A smart one is more slippery, and gets further with his lies.

And a really clever one can even get elected President.

A modern day lynching

It's now all but certain that the attack on Empire actor Jussie Smollett two weeks ago in Chicago was nothing but another hate hoax. Although practically his entire walk that night was captured by security cameras, there is no footage of him being accosted.

It took place at 2AM, on a night when it was 6 degrees, a temperature which tends to inhibit outdoor criminal activity.

It seems highly unlikely that some hate-mongering white supremacist gay-bashers would actually recognize Jussie Smollett (who claimed they called him "that Empire f----t n----r"), in the middle of the night, when he's presumably bundled up to ward off the extreme cold.

Jussie Smollett himself still refuses to release his phone records from that night to the Chicago police.

The "noose" which was found tied around Smollett's neck was not tied in a hangman's knot, but rather the way a necktie is. (What self-respecting lynch mob would ever use a Windsor or four-in-one knot?)

And when Smollett, after his "ordeal," showed up at a friend's apartment, he still had the "noose" around his neck. (Wouldn't your instinct be to get that thing off you as soon as possible?)

Immediately following the reports of the attack, Presidential candidate Kamala Harris released a statement saying, "@Jussie Smollett is one of the kindest, most gentle human beings I know. I'm praying for his quick recovery. This was an attempted modern day lynching. No one should have to fear for their life because of their sexuality or the color of their skin. We must confront this hate."

Presidential candidate Cory Booker, our modern day Spartacus, released a similar statement: "The vicious attack on actor Jussie Smollett was an attempted modern-day lynching. I'm glad he's safe. To those in Congress who don't feel the urgency to pass our Anti-Lynching bill designating lynching as a federal hate crime – I urge you to pay attention."

Both candidates are undoubtedly regretting their hasty words. But both are correct, in a sense. What happened that night in Chicago was in fact a "modern day lynching": the kind that never took place.

Historically, lynchings are a blight on this country. Between 1882 and 1968, roughly 3500 blacks and 1300 whites were killed this way.

Now things are different. I don't have an exact number, but it does seem that a high percentage of the most dramatic instances of white-on-black "hate crimes" so breathlessly reported on by the media in fact turn out to be hoaxes.

The mainstream media, of course, splash the initial reports all over their front pages, but then, as they are debunked, are content to let these stories quietly die.

I've explained before how hate hoaxers have Munchausen's Syndrome, which is nothing more than an offshoot of sociopathy. Except that these days, instead of falsely claiming to be victims of cancer, that time-honored sociopathic scam, they choose to be victims of "hate crimes" instead. Gays will pretend to be victims of gay-bashing, and blacks will pretend to be victims of racially-motivated hate. (Jussie Smollett claimed to be a victim of both.)

The one thing that all of these "victims" have in common is that they're sociopaths. (No one else would even consider such a scam, let alone keeping it going with ongoing lies for as long as they can.)

Given which, Kamala Harris's description of Smollett as one of the "kindest" people she knows seems a severe misjudgment of character.

Such a mistake is forgivable: we all make them, especially with sociopaths. (At the time it just seemed surprising that Harris would know Smollett so well: do their social circles really overlap that much?)

We can hope that a President Harris would learn from her mistake and be a tad more circumspect about the next such "hate crime." Maybe she'll even acknowledge that black-on-white violence is far more prevalent than the reverse, despite what the media would have us believe.

But that seems unlikely.

And perhaps a President Booker might, along with his demand for an anti-lynching law, also consider a law against hate hoaxes, given how they stir up so much hate.

But that, too, seems unlikely.

And perhaps even the kind and gentle Jussie Smollett himself -- our modern-day Emmett Till -- will feel guilt-ridden about his hoax.

But, once a sociopath, always a sociopath.

But it's not just sociopaths. For the most part, no one ever changes.

So probably the stupidest mistake of all was for me to think I could ever sway anyone's thinking in the slightest by explaining the truth about these things.