And are taken seriously. There's the elephant.
They are given a platform to spew their nonsense without the least bit of criticism. Sharpton is a particularly odorous piece of garbage.
However, even several months before the Grand Jury issued its report, one of Sharpton’s top aides revealed Sharpton's mercenary motive. Perry McKinnon, a decorated black Vietnam vet and former police officer, told federal investigators that Rev. Al had admitted privately that he didn’t believe Tawana Brawley’s story, but intended to ride it to fame and glory. McKinnon stated:
Sharpton acknowledged to me early on that “The Brawley story do (sic) sound like bull****, but it don’t matter. We’re building a movement. This is the perfect issue. Because you’ve got whites on blacks. That’s an easy way to stir up all the deprived people, who would want to believe and who would believe — and all [you’ve] got to do is convince them — that all white people are bad. Then you’ve got a movement.... It don’t matter whether any whites did it or not. Something happened to her ... even if Tawana don’t (sic) it to herself."
Perry McKinnon submitted to a lie detector test administered on camera and passed all questions. In the Retro Report video, McKinnon further remarked, on camera:
This whole situation is not about Tawana Brawley. It's about Mason, Maddox, and Sharpton taking over the town. Their exact words were, “We beat this, we will be the biggest N****** in New York."