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Chicago Police Department Superintendent Eddie Johnson said Thursday that Empire actor Jussie Smollett sent himself a threatening letter because he was dissatisfied with his salary on the hit FOX drama.

JUST IN: Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson: Jussie Smollett “paid $3,500 to stage this attack…The stunt was orchestrated by Smollett because he was dissatisfied with his salary.” https://t.co/5AiMcfe6iH pic.twitter.com/0za7CEbVtv

— ABC News (@ABC) February 21, 2019

This story is developing. 

Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson blasted Jussie Smollett for a “shameful” hoax hate crime, and lashed out at media, celebrities, and politicians who amplified Smollett’s story to promote their own agendas, at a press conference held Thursday morning to discuss Smollett’s felony charge.

Police announced the charges against Smollett late Wednesday; Smollett turned himself into authorities early Thursday morning.

CPD Superintendent Johnson revealed details of the Chicago PD’s investigation of Smollett, including that Smollett had paid his co-conspirators by check, and that he allegedly staged the attack because he was dissatisfied with his $1.17 million paycheck from the Fox show “Empire,” and believed he could do better. Johnson also revealed that authorities believe Smollett authored and sent a threatening letter to himself, but that Federal authorities will handle that aspect of the case.

Johnson also took the opportunity to comment on the Smollett case, calling the actor’s alleged actions “shameful” and accusing the actor of taking “advantage of the pain and anger of racism to advance his career.”

“As a black man who spent his entire life living in the city of Chicago, I know the racial divide that exists here,” Johnson said. “I know how hard it’s been for our city and our nation to come together. How can an individual who’s been embraced by the city of Chicago turn around and slap everyone in this city in the face by making these false claims?”

WATCH:

JUST IN: “‘Empire’ actor Jussie Smollett took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career,” Chicago PD Superintendent Eddie Johnson says. https://t.co/5AiMcfe6iH pic.twitter.com/nOOhk0e8YD

— ABC News (@ABC) February 21, 2019

Johnson added that he was personally offended by Smollett’s alleged actions, and blamed Smollett for taking police resources away from Chicago residents who really need them.

“I am left hanging my head asking ‘why?’ Why would anyone — especially an African American man — use the symbolism of a noose to make false accusation,” Johnson said, according to The Wrap. “Bogus police reports cause real harm. They do harm to every legitimate victim who is in need of support by police and investigators as well as the citizens of this city … I’m offended by what happened and I am also angry.”

But Smollett wasn’t the only one Johnson had words for. The police superintendent also lashed out at those who amplified Smollett’s story in order to capture attention for themselves.

“The accusation within this phony attack received national attention for weeks,” Johnson continued. “Celebrities, news commentators and even presidential candidates weighed in on something that was choreographed by an actor.”

“I wish the families of gun violence in this city got so much attention,” he added.

It seems Johnson was referring specifically to comments made by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), who called the alleged attack a “modern-day lynching,” and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), who used Smollett’s story to promote his own legislative agenda.

Smollett will likely remain in custody until a bond hearing Thursday afternoon. His lawyers have pledged to mount an “aggressive defense” to the felony charge, and 20th Century Fox Entertainment, which produces “Empire,” says they are standing by Smollett for the time being.

Although CPD has concluded its investigation, statements from the FBI and the USPS Inspector are expected.

Estimates from the Congressional Budget Office about the impact of Obamacare’s individual mandate off by millions, according to a new report.

My former editor at the Washington Examiner, Phil Klein, writes that the “scandalously off” estimates “had significant ramifications for healthcare and tax policy over the past decade.”:

“CBO estimates about the importance of an individual mandate to a national healthcare scheme prodded President Barack Obama into including the unpopular provision into the law in the first place. The mandate projections also played a key role in President Trump’s two major legislative initiatives. The fact that the CBO assumed 14 million could lose coverage mainly due to the elimination of mandate penalties helped kill the effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, while its later assumption that 13 million fewer insured individuals would mean less spending on subsidies from the federal government helped get the 2017 Republican tax cut across the finish line by improving the budgetary math. Yet those incredibly influential estimates now appear to have been wildly off.”

This information was contained not in a major section of the report, or in news sources about the report, but in a lone footnote in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ annual report on national health expenditure projections, according to Klein.

Remember that the scary “14 million would lose coverage” was based almost entirely on people voluntarily giving up their insurance because they no longer would be charged for going without. This new report from CMS shows that just 2.5 million more would forgo health insurance coverage in 2019 because the individual mandate was repealed and even fewer would be impacted after 2019.

As Klein reports, the individual mandate was included in Obamacare even though then-candidate Barack Obama opposed the mandate during the 2008 campaign. It was included in the legislation because the CBO and others estimated it was necessary to pay for older Americans by forcing the young – who don’t need as much health care – to pay into the system. The CBO estimates worked for the passage of the bill and against Republican attempts in 2017 to repeal and replace it. Then, CBO estimates saying 14 million would lose coverage (even though the majority would voluntarily give up their coverage) scared some Republicans from voting to repeal.

“While any CBO analysis of the Republican bills was likely to project large coverage losses due to the cuts to Medicaid and subsidies, if CBO had more realistic assumptions about the mandate, the numbers would have been significantly smaller, and perhaps left more room to convince centrist Republicans to get on board,” Klein wrote.

But, Klein notes, these misleading numbers ended up helping Republicans when it came time to pass President Donald Trump’s tax cuts in 2017. The CBO said 4 million fewer people would have coverage in 2019 because of the penalties, and 13 million fewer would have insurance over all – thus saving $338 billion.

The footnote in the annual report states there would be just “1.5 million fewer direct-purchase-market enrollees” because the mandate was repealed, and about “1.0 million fewer employer-sponsored-insurance-market enrollees.” The footnote also said Medicaid enrollment was “assumed to be unaffected.”

Klein, who’s spent a decade covering Obamacare, says “the CBO’s misfire on the individual mandate should be a major story.”

Obviously, it won’t be. One, because few people talk about Obamacare anymore since it has become so entangled in our healthcare system, and two, because the left-wing media isn’t going to give up one of its favorite talking points.

One man was given a humiliating lesson in respect after slinging some vile words at a teenage fan of President Donald Trump over the weekend.

According to The Daily Caller, it all started when a 14-year-old boy walked into a Vans skateboarding apparel store at a mall in Overland Park, Kansas, wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat. An employee spotted the iconic headgear, and allegedly said “f*** you” to the teen.

When the boy’s mom stepped in, the employee’s anti-Trump bravado vanished.

Part of the encounter was recorded and made its way to Twitter, where it quickly went viral.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. A Vans store employee at Oak Park Mall, Kansas told a 14-year-old “f*ck you” for wearing a MAGA hat. Let’s get him fired. pic.twitter.com/PNkPqAxBci

— Ryan Fournier (@RyanAFournier) February 17, 2019

TRENDING: Man in MAGA Hat Has Incredible Reaction to Trump-Hater Pointing Gun at Him

Although the video doesn’t capture the employee’s vulgar insult, it certainly records his apparent regret over being held accountable for his actions.

It opens with the mom demanding answers for the treatment of her teenage son. The Vans employee smugly replied, “I’m sure he’s heard it before.”

Wrong answer.

The mom then hits him with the three words every bottom-rung retail employee dreads: “Where’s your manager?”

What follows is the beginning of the end for the seemingly liberal worker. A man at the register, apparently a manager, looks around the store as he’s being told about his unruly employee.

The Daily Caller reported that the incident was even escalated to Vans’ corporate level, and ultimately ended in the vulgar employee losing his job.

“We did let this employee go. He is no longer with our company. The actions and comments from this employee at the Oak Park location is in contrast with our values and beliefs,” the company said in a statement.

“We have taken care of the situation,” it added.

RELATED: Trump Hints He’d Put Pelosi on a Payment Plan

Vans, for those who don’t know, is a Santa Ana, California-based company that trades in skateboarding shoes and clothing and also sponsors surfing, snowboarding and motorcross teams.

That kind of business might lean toward a more stereotypically liberal customer base, but that doesn’t explain the employee’s outburst by itself. Not even liberal businesses generally want employees insulting paying customers.

It’s a good possibility that this whole incident was another manifestation of Trump derangement syndrome.

Trump derangement syndrome, or TDS, is the anger, confusion, and mania exhibited by some in the left over the fact that Donald Trump is president. Even the esteemed mental health journal Psychology Today weighed in on the syndrome.

While the author, an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Canada’s McGill University, acknowledged that the syndrome isn’t officially recognized, he did point out that it has been widely observed:

“Many have argued that some people have been seriously disturbed and distressed by the policies, speech, behavior and tweets of President Trump, so much so that it has affected their cognitive, affective and behavioral functioning. Such people may need mental health support.”

What else could lead a grown man to verbally attack a boy who can’t even legally drive a car by himself? And in a workplace environment, no less.

Whether it was TDS or something else, it doesn’t excuse the former employee’s behavior.

Pro-Trump Americans have been demonized by the left and the mainstream media, leading to unfair smearing like what the Covington Catholic boys endured. The strange case of actor Jussie Smollett reveals that sometimes, unscrupulous people might even manufacture their own “MAGA hate crime” out of thin air.

Accountability appears to be the answer. This means accountability for everyone — from the nameless mall employee to newsroom editors. A consequence-free culture is not something we should embrace.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

David Wallace-Wells is taking his climate change fear mongering to a new level. He has transformed his doomsday pieces featured in the past two years in New York magazine into a book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, released today.

James Delingpole, the executive editor of Breitbart London, has written about Wallace-Wells’ previous over-the-top predictions about global warming, including an article in the magazine last year: 

Climate change is going to kill at least 150 million people and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

Well, at least it is if you believe climate doomster David Wallace-Wells in the latest issue of New York magazine. Things are bad. Really bad. We didn’t listen and now we can expect to pay a terrible price — starting with all those deaths:

Numbers that large can be hard to grasp, but 150 million is the equivalent of 25 Holocausts. It is five times the size of the death toll of the Great Leap Forward — the largest non-military death toll humanity has ever produced. It is three times the greatest death toll of any kind: World War II.

Now that the book is in print, the author is making the rounds to promote it, including in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) where he announces more staggering numbers attributed to climate change.

• “More than half of all fossil fuel emissions have been emitted in the last 25 years, which means that we’ve now done more damage to the climate than in all of the millennia before and all of the centuries before.”

• “4.3 degrees of warming would mean $600 trillion in damages from climate impacts. Six hundred trillion dollars is double all of the wealth that exists in the world today. Our agriculture would probably be about half as bountiful, so the same plot of land would be producing about half as much yield in a world that we would have at least 50 percent more people to feed.”

• “U.N. estimates for the number of climate refugees that could be produced just by 2050 – on the conservative end of their estimates, we’re dealing with 100 million climate refugees by 2050.”

Delingpole is not the only critic of Wallace-Wells’ climate change reporting. 

The Washington Post did a round up of scientists panning his 2017 article:

The temptation to paint a dire picture of climate change, at a time when the Trump administration seems bent on questioning a widely accepted body of climate science and withdrawing from international agreements, is clear. But the picture still has to be plausible and accurate, a number of scientists argued this week in response to a lengthy article in New York Magazine.

The article by David Wallace-Wells is entitled “The Uninhabitable Earth” and begins with the sentence, “It is, I promise, worse than you think.” It runs through a number of extreme climate possibilities — most prominently, the idea that some parts of the Earth will experience a combination of heat and humidity so intense that human beings won’t be able to survive outdoors in some regions.

The article gives the sense of being fairly definitive, saying it is “the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change.” Wallace-Wells also warns that he’s describing worst-case scenarios that might not be realized but could occur if the world does not take action. “But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline,” he writes. “In fact, they are our schedule.”

Scientists weighed in:

Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University is a climate researcher who isn’t always kind to climate change skeptics.

“The article argues that climate change will render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this century,” Mann wrote. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it.”

“The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now is overwhelming on its own,” Mann continued. “There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.”

“Overall, the article highlights important effects that have been discussed in the literature, but in a manner that is often sloppy and hyperbolic,” Bob Kopp of Rutgers University said of Wallace-Wells’ reporting. “It would have been helpful had the reporter identified his sources, which makes it difficult to check what he intended in some points.”

Wallace-Wells defended his work.

“My purpose in writing the story wasn’t to survey the median scenario, it was to survey the worst-case scenarios because I believed — and still believe — that the public does not appreciate the unlikely-but-still-possible dangers of climate change,” he said.

“It is difficult to tell the story of climate change,” the Post reported. “It never happens on any particular day; it never moves very rapidly; it does not directly cause individual weather events.”

“But a number of scientists are saying that this particular story has gone too far,” the Post reported.

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President Donald Trump on Wednesday supported Covington High School student Nick Sandmann and his lawyers for suing the Washington Post.

“Go get them, Nick,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Fake News!”

Trump quoted the lawsuit which said the Post “ignored basic journalistic standards because it wanted to advance its well-known and easily documented biased agenda against President Donald J. Trump.”

The lawsuit is seeking $250 million in damages, accusing the Post of targeting and bullying Sandmann and his peers for wearing a Trump campaign Make America Great Again hats during a school trip for the March for Life.

The lawsuit claims that the Washington Post ignored the truth of the event between Sandmann and Native American activist Nathan Phillips on three different occasions.

On January 19, 20 and 21,the Post ignored the truth and falsely accused Nicholasof, among other things, “accost[ing]” Phillips by “suddenly swarm[ing]” him in a “threaten[ing]” and “physically intimidat[ing]” manner as Phillips “and other activists were wrapping up the march and preparing to leave,” “block[ing]” Phillips path, refusing to allow Phillips “to retreat,” “taunting the dispersing indigenous crowd,” chanting “build that wall,” “Trump2020,” or “go back to Africa,” and otherwise engaging in racist and improper conduct which ended only “when Phillips and other activists walked away.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.