Bullies

by Ben Shapiro

  “RT @fukunurhoexxx: #youthetype of b— that give up your p—y for free and think its cool #p—yaintfree #fb.”

  “RT @x_highlyfavored: ‘@Slim_Nigga: I wanna experience a white girl just one time.’ ”

  And he used some hieroglyphics of his own:

  “BEND IT OVA HOE!!”2

  Which, loosely translated, means “I hate women.” Or “I hate English.” Martin’s parents should have slapped a bumper sticker on their car: “If my child can’t read, write, or tweet coherently, blame a teacher . . . and his parents.”

  Trayvon’s classy friends tweeted him about whether he punched a bus driver: “<<<
  So this was the young man Obama chose to eulogize.

  Now, none of this is to say that Martin should have been shot and killed. But it was quite odd for Obama to single out Martin’s death, as opposed to other victims with less-checkered histories. According to Obama, we were all supposed to search our collective souls about Trayvon Martin’s death. We weren’t supposed to consider the actual facts surrounding his shooting. We weren’t supposed to consider his prior behavior, his penchant for drug use, his previous disciplinary actions.

  We were supposed to consider one fact, and one fact only: Trayvon Martin was black. Or, as Obama put it, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”3

  Apparently, all black people look alike to Obama. In reality, Trayvon would look nothing like Obama’s potential son. But the important thing was that Trayvon shared a skin color with the president.

  Unlike the famed Henry Louis Gates Jr. incident, in which President Obama slandered the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police for arresting a black Harvard professor, this remark wasn’t off-the-cuff. It was well planned and well executed. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said that Obama had known about the Martin story for days, and “clearly had some thoughts about it and—as a parent, and expressed those to [the media] today.” Earlier in the week, the White House had ignored the question; now, said Carney, Obama was “certainly prepared to answer a question if he were to get one.” Said Obama, “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.”4

  Of course, that wasn’t all it took for Trayvon Martin to become a household name. He also had to be shot to death by a supposed white person.

  The word supposed is used advisedly here, because Trayvon Martin’s shooter was a fellow named George Zimmerman. The media quickly labeled Zimmerman “white.” In actuality, Zimmerman was of Hispanic origin, but that didn’t matter to either the media or to the Democratic Party and liberal organizational establishment. They wanted a racist shooting in preparation for the 2012 election so that they could claim that America was still a racist country. The implication would be clear: the only way Americans could prove that they weren’t racist was by reelecting President Obama. Hence President Obama’s bizarre self-insertion into the story. It was no coincidence. Dozens of black teens are gunned down each year in major cities across the United States. None of them has a face or a name that anyone knows. But Trayvon did, because he was a bullying tool for Obama and his minions.

  The left never cared about Trayvon Martin or his family. They didn’t give a damn. They didn’t care about him when his parents split. They didn’t care about him when he misbehaved in school. They didn’t care about him when he started doing drugs, and possibly dealing drugs. They didn’t care about him when he got tattoos, dressed like a thug, and tweeted misogynistically. They cared about one thing and one thing only: achieving their political ends by exploiting a dead black teen. The minute Trayvon’s story hit the press, the left began drooling. That’s what they do when they see an opportunity to bully Americans using race as a club. Their goal: silence Americans who disagree with the liberal agenda by labeling them part of the unalterably racist white majority. The bullies were people of all races united by a common cause: using race to bully their political opponents into submission.

  It’s important to note that there’s a pattern to racial controversies in America. Usually it begins with a flash-point event—some event occurs that may or may not have anything to do with race. The media, in coordination with leftist groups, then launches a smear campaign to turn the event into the Biggest Event Ever, evidence that racism is rife in America. With that groundwork in place, they then proclaim that events like the Biggest Event Ever will continue to take place unless vaguely defined, albeit nonexistent systemic racism is removed from the equation—which, of course, can happen only if liberal policies are enacted, and if conservatives shut the hell up.

  The Trayvon Martin case played out the leftist strategy perfectly.

  ANATOMY OF A RACIAL BULLYING: THE FLASH POINT

  The real story of the Trayvon killing began three weeks earlier. George Zimmerman, a Hispanic American, lived in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, called the Retreat at Twin Lakes. He was a twenty-eight-year-old insurance fraud investigator with a religious Catholic background. According to Reuters, “He was raised in a racially integrated household and himself has black roots through an Afro-Peruvian great-grandfather—the father of the maternal grandmother who helped raise him.” During his young adulthood, he and a black friend partnered in starting a business. Now, Zimmerman was no angel. He had two prior arrests, one for assaulting a police officer, and one for domestic abuse. The charge for domestic abuse was dropped; the charge for assaulting a police officer was reduced to resisting arrest without violence. So there was evidence that Zimmerman had serious temper issues. There was zero evidence he was a budding KKK member.

  After Zimmerman moved to the Retreat, which was 20 percent black, the neighborhood fell victim to a series of crimes perpetrated by young men who looked like Barack Obama’s fictional son. Vandalism and robberies became commonplace, and drug activity became a serious problem. From November 2010 to February 2012, there were at least eight burglaries in the neighborhood. Dozens more reports of attempted burglaries made the neighborhood gossip rounds. In July 2011, a young black man stole Zimmerman’s bicycle from his home. In August 2011, Shellie Zimmerman, George’s wife, saw a young black man fleeing a nearby home during a robbery. “We were calling the police at least once a week,” said a neighborhood resident. By September 2011, the neighborhood had asked Zimmerman to lead their neighborhood watch program. In February 2012, the Retreat’s monthly newsletter stated, “The Sanford PD has announced an increased patrol within our neighborhood . . . during peak crime hours. If you’ve been a victim of a crime in the community, after calling police, please contact our captain, George Zimmerman.”

  On February 2, 2012, Zimmerman called 911 after he saw a young black man possibly scouting out a robbery location—an empty home. “I don’t know what he’s doing,” said Zimmerman. “I don’t want to approach him, personally.” Zimmerman didn’t. The cops sent a car; by the time it got there, the suspect was gone.

  Four days later, two young black men burglarized another home in the Retreat. The police caught one of the suspects, eighteen-year-old Emmanuel Burgess, and found stolen property on him.5

  About three weeks later, on February 26, 2012, Zimmerman was driving to the grocery store when he spotted a young black man walking around the neighborhood. He immediately called the nonemergency number at the Sanford Police Department. “Hey,” said Zimmerman, “we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there’s a real suspicious guy, uh, it’s Retreat View Circle, um, the best address I can give you is 111 Retreat View Circle. This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” The dispatcher asked if the suspect was “white, black, or Hispanic?” Zimmerman answered, “He looks black.” The dispatcher asked what the suspect was wearing.
“A dark hoodie, like a gray hoodie, and either jeans or sweatpants and white tennis shoes. He’s here now, he was just staring,” said Zimmerman.

  The suspect, said Zimmerman, was “looking at all the houses. . . . Now he’s just staring at me. . . . Yeah, now he’s coming towards me. . . . He’s got his hand in his waistband. And he’s a black male. . . . He’s got buttons on his shirt, late teens. . . . Something’s wrong with him. Yup, he’s coming to check me out, he’s got something in his hands, I don’t know what his deal is. . . . See if you can get an officer over here. . . . These a—h—, they always get away.” Zimmerman then told the dispatcher that the suspect was running.

  Zimmerman apparently got out of his car. Still on his phone, he told the dispatcher he was following the suspect. “Okay, we don’t need you to do that,” said the dispatcher. At some point during the call, Zimmerman lost track of the suspect. The conversation continued, with Zimmerman saying he would meet law enforcement. Then he hung up.6 The time was approximately 7:13 p.m.

  What happened next remains controversial.

  Martin’s defenders maintained that Zimmerman provoked a physical confrontation with Martin, then shot him in cold blood.

  Zimmerman claimed that Martin confronted him and demanded to know why Zimmerman was following him; Martin, said Zimmerman, then punched him in the face.

  Whatever happened, Zimmerman clearly fell backward onto the ground.

  At this point, witness testimony takes over. Trayvon jumped on top of him and began beating him savagely, pounding his head into the ground. Zimmerman, according to witnesses, was screaming for help. According to one witness, Trayvon was pummeling Zimmerman “MMA-style”—mixed martial arts, a brutal form of combat with no holds barred.7

  Zimmerman then reached into his waistband, pulled out his handgun, and shot Trayvon in the chest, killing him.

  Zimmerman’s story was corroborated by all available evidence, including the physical evidence: Martin’s body was undamaged except for the gunshot wound and injuries to his knuckles, indicating that he had been hitting someone, while Zimmerman’s head had massive lacerations, he had two black eyes, and his nose had been broken.8

  The Sanford Police Department arrested Zimmerman and brought him to the police station for questioning. He asserted self-defense, and the police found no evidence to disprove it. While the police filed a “capias request,” which suggests that criminal charges be filed, investigators decided that such a request was inappropriate in this case.9

  ANATOMY OF A RACIAL BULLYING: THE SMEAR CAMPAIGN

  And that’s where the case lay for one day. Two days. A week. A full eleven days. While local media covered the story, that’s what it remained—a local story, one of dozens of shootings around the country every week.

  Then, on March 8, 2012, the mainstream media finally decided to weigh in.

  The Associated Press wrote a nationally syndicated story highlighting specific facts that made the killing seem racial in nature. Trayvon’s family’s attorneys, the AP reported, “said they believed Trayvon Martin was being profiled at the time of the encounter because he was a young black man. The neighborhood watch leader is white. The attorneys also questioned why a neighborhood watch leader would carry a gun. ‘He was stereotyped for some reason,’ attorney Ben Crump said of the victim. ‘Why was Trayvon suspicious? There are hundreds of children in that community.’ ”10

  It was an entirely one-sided hit piece on Zimmerman—and the fact that it labeled Zimmerman “white” sparked a firestorm. Now the story wasn’t a Hispanic man killing a young black man who was ramming his skull against the sidewalk. It was a white guy straight from Birth of a Nation stalking a young black man and murdering him in cold blood.

  This was a much sexier narrative than the truth. And so it became common belief. Only later, when it came out that Zimmerman was in fact Hispanic, did the media back down—and they did so only by coining a new term, “white Hispanic,” since Zimmerman was of mixed parentage. By that standard, Barack Obama is “white black.”

  In any case, the media coverage was black-and-white.

  Al Sharpton—an alleged news host for MSNBC, which would be like Fox News hiring David Duke to do a show in prime time—quickly jetted down to Florida, eager to get his shaggy mane before a camera. It wasn’t enough that this was the man who had disgraced himself repeatedly in the Tawana Brawley case, in which he falsely accused a white man of raping a black woman, and the Duke lacrosse case, in which he falsely accused several white men of raping a black woman—now he wanted to play the race card on George Zimmerman, with the help of the NBC News brass. His National Action Network immediately released a statement calling for a “full investigation”—and then simultaneously stated, “The fact that a young unarmed man could be killed by a neighborhood watch captain while his family was blatantly misled by local police as to the background of the shooter is disturbing. Further, the fact that we are told that racial language was used when the young man reported his suspicions to police . . . is a compelling reason for NAN and I to become involved.”11 So Sharpton had two problems: he didn’t care about the facts, and he didn’t care about grammar.

  The next night, Sharpton interviewed Martin’s family attorney. The attorney called Zimmerman “white.” Sharpton didn’t contradict him. But then again, you couldn’t expect Sharpton to “resist he much.”

  The media quickly supplemented the narrative by presenting George Zimmerman as a racist monster, and Trayvon Martin as a darling little angel. Charles Blow of the New York Times wrote a race-baiting masterpiece centered on a simple fact: “Trayvon is black. Zimmerman is not.” He continued, “As the father of two black teenage boys, this case hits close to home. This is the fear that seizes me whenever my boys are out in the world: that a man with a gun and an itchy finger will find them ‘suspicious.’ That passions may run hot and blood run cold. That it might all end with a hole in their chest and hole in my heart. That the law might prove insufficient to salve my loss. That is the burden of black boys in America and the people that love them: running the risk of being descended upon in the dark and caught in the cross-hairs of someone who crosses the line.” And then, ominously: “that is the burden of black boys, and this case can either ease or exacerbate it.”12 In other words, if Zimmerman wasn’t arrested, tried, and convicted, it meant that America was deeply racist. Even if he was arrested, tried, and convicted, “black boys” would still carry their burden. But if he wasn’t, it just showed that America was still racist.

  Zimmerman’s 2005 arrest mug shot (for battery) was flashed across televisions throughout the nation, unshaven, heavy, and menacing. Meanwhile, the pictures of Trayvon Martin used by the media and supplied by the family showed a kid who did look like Obama’s hypothetical son: twelve years old, clean-cut, bright smile. To look at the pictures, you’d assume that Zimmerman was a linebacker attacking a waif; in reality, Zimmerman was five foot eight and 185 pounds, while Trayvon was five foot eleven and clocked in at 158 pounds. Newer photos showed Trayvon sporting tattoos and a grille, and looking significantly more menacing than he had at age twelve. When this was pointed out, of course, the left-wing media called that racism, suggesting that it was fine to bias the pictures against Zimmerman, but to do so against Trayvon was George Wallace lite.13

  The New Black Panther Party showed up outside the Sanford, Florida, police headquarters three days later demanding an arrest.14 Three days after that, a massive crowd, including leaders from the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Sanford City Commission, massed at Allen Chapel AME Church to call for Zimmerman’s arrest. Local city officials called on the police chief to resign. Rev. Jamal Bryant, a Baltimore preacher, came to put the Zimmerman case into a broader racial context: “We call for an immediate arrest. We want him behind bars,” said Bryant. “Because you have arrested a lot of black men without probable cause.” He then led the crowd in chants of “If there is no justice, there is no peace.” He railed, “This is a wake-up call for the state of Flor
ida, and for any racist who has a gun and thinks it’s a license to kill our children.”15

  This was disgusting. Bryant and company spoke from complete ignorance. Was Zimmerman a racist? There was no evidence to that effect. Did he hunt down Trayvon in cold blood, looking to kill him? Certainly not. But that didn’t matter to them. They wanted a race case, and they were going to fit this square peg into that round hole no matter what. The Zimmerman lynching had begun.

  And it was a lynching.

  On March 23, President Obama stepped into the case—not coincidentally, just three days before Obama’s signature health-care legislation came up for hearing before the Supreme Court. Obama wanted Americans’ attention on what was happening in the Florida courtrooms, not the halls of Washington, D.C. It was brilliant misdirection. And it succeeded.

  Now Obama had opened the floodgates. The next day, the New Black Panthers led a protest in Sanford. There, leader Mikhail Muhammad—someone who certainly needs a day job—put a bounty on George Zimmerman’s head: ten thousand dollars. Someone asked him whether he meant to cause violence to Zimmerman. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” said Muhammad. The Panthers also suggested that ten thousand black men should go on the hunt for the fugitive Neighborhood Watch volunteer Zimmerman. “If the government won’t do the job, we’ll do it!” he yelled. The city begged for quiet. The Panthers wouldn’t let up. Instead, when the police arrived to keep the peace, Muhammad shouted, “If you’d had shown this much concern, Trayvon may still be alive today!” Even black residents were getting freaked out by this point. “I’m as much for black power as anybody,” said one puzzled resident. “But this is going to alienate the white friends we need to get things done.” The Panthers were less concerned about alienating whites than about milking blacks for cash—they wanted to raise $1 million for their anti-Zimmerman campaign.16