A handy and sordid history of fake nooses from liberals

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

Three weeks ago, when I first documented 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 Johnnycome-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?

Fake Noose is a sick phenomenon that has run rampant across the country unchecked. I’ve chronicled the self-victimization pathology in my books, columns and blog posts:

■ Columbia University, 2007. Remember black psychology professor Madonna Constantine? She made the rounds on none other than ABC’s “Good Morning America,” 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, as I reported at the time in the New York Post. Things didn’t add up when Columbia initially blocked investigators from obtaining 56 hours of surveillance video. No culprits could be found on the militantly progressive campus obsessed with diversity and multiculturalism. It turned out that Constantine 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 black firefighter-paramedic apprentice Donald Maynard 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.

■ University of Delaware, 2015. Black Lives Matter agitators and campus activists triggered a full alert when a student spotted a “racist display” of three “noose-like objects” hanging from trees. The UD president called it “deplorable;” protesters wept that they were not being taken seriously. After investigating, police discovered the “nooses” were metal “remnants of paper lanterns” hung as decorations during an alumni weekend celebration.

■ Mississippi State Capitol, 2018. ABC, CBS, CNN and Yahoo were among the media outlets that 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, the nooses 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 but incompetent. 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.