by Ben Shapiro
Where there’s money to be made, Rev. Jesse Jackson is never far behind—and he, too, told the fictional story of poor little Trayvon, stalked and killed by George “Hitler Youth” Zimmerman. Preaching before 1,600 people in Eatonville, Florida, the Rhyming Race-baiter launched into full campaign mode. He compared Trayvon’s death to the murders of Emmett Till in 1955, civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963, and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Because as we all know, pounding a man’s head into the ground and then being shot is the same as leading a struggle for equal rights for millions of black Americans.
But at least Jackson was honest. He didn’t care about Trayvon in the slightest. He cared about using Trayvon as a tool to push his brand of liberalism. Trayvon, said Jackson, was “killed because he was black.” Trayvon, said Jackson, was a “martyr.” And that meant it was time for some leftist solutions to America’s problems. It was time for war. “How do we go from a moment to a movement that creates fundamental change?” he asked. “If it’s a moment, we go home. If it’s a movement, we go to war.” What kind of war? Political war. “I would hope that movement would turn into Trayvon Martin voter-registration rallies,” said Jackson.17 Now, put aside the passion for a moment. Martin was seventeen years old. He had never voted. And Jackson was using him as a martyr for voter registration?
And in his efforts to advance his cause, Jackson appears to have misstated the facts of the case. In reports from the church that were later pulled by the media, Jackson reportedly said, “Zimmerman told police he had killed him. Shot him in the back of the head in self-defense.” Jackson’s surrogates across the country echoed the malicious and false charge.18
His allies in the media, meanwhile, were spinning away furiously on behalf of Obama and his team of race-baiting liar allies. On March 26, NBC News played a tape on the Today show from the Zimmerman 911 call. It had been selectively edited to make Zimmerman seem racist. “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black,” said the tape. As you’ll remember from the more complete transcript above, Zimmerman said that Trayvon looked like he was “up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” The 911 operator then prompted Zimmerman on Trayvon’s race, to which Zimmerman said that he looked black.19
But the media wasn’t done lying yet. CNN isolated audio that made it sound as if Zimmerman used a racial slur, mumbling about “f—ing c—ns.” Mediaite repeated the falsehood. Soon it was zooming around the news sphere—Zimmerman was a racist! He’d used a fifty-year-old slur that nobody knows anymore!20 CNN even called their favorite legal nonexpert, Jeffrey Toobin, to explain that the finding was “extremely significant” and could lead to hate crimes prosecution for Zimmerman.
Oops. As it turned out, Zimmerman had said that it was “f—ing cold,” since it was raining that night. Now Toobin retracted his former enthusiasm for the “c—n” charge: “[T]his certainly sounds like cold. . . . Again, everybody wants this case to be wrapped up tomorrow. This just shows why it’s important to say, let’s get all the best evidence we can.”21
That was a laugh. A few days later, the media doubled down on its opposition to Zimmerman. Now he wasn’t just a racist—he was lying about his own wounds. And he wasn’t the only liar—the police lied, too, to cover up the murder. On March 28, ABC News released a poorly pixelated videotape of George Zimmerman in the police station after the killing. The report by Matt Gutman pulled no punches: “A police surveillance video taken the night that Trayvon Martin was shot dead shows no blood or bruises on George Zimmerman. . . . The initial police report noted that Zimmerman was bleeding from the back of the head and nose. . . . ”22 NBC News agreed. The video, they said, “shows no blood or bruises on George Zimmerman.”23
Oops. Within a week, ABC News released enhanced video showing massive gashes on Zimmerman’s dome.
It was obvious that the so-called objective news media was in the tank on the story. And they were going to ruin a man’s life to achieve their political ends.
But that was the media. Surely government officials would be more responsible.
Or they could wear hoodies and complain about Zimmerman’s supposed racism on the House floor.
They chose the latter. On March 20, just before President Obama took to the Rose Garden to announce the skin color of Trayvon Martin, colorfully behatted Representative Frederica Wilson (D-FL) got up on the House floor and went berserk. “Mr. Speaker, I am tired of burying young black boys. I am tired of watching them suffer at the hands of those who fear them and despise them. I am tired of comforting mothers, fathers, grandparents, sisters and brothers after such unnecessary, heinous crimes of violence.” She wasn’t tired, however, of a permanent black underclass brought about by a purposefully implemented regime of government dependency—after all, that’s what she does for a living. Well, when she’s not blaming whites for all the problems of blacks, that is: “Trayvon was running for his life. He was screaming for help, fighting for his life, and then he was murdered, shot dead. . . . No more racial profiling. I am tired of fighting when the evidence is so clear, so transparent.”24
The evidence was clear and transparent: Frederica’s hatband was too tight. But she was too busy bullying George Zimmerman—and white America—to worry about either poisoning the jury pool in the Trayvon case or pursuing the facts.
She wasn’t the only one. Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA), who routinely defends violent action by black Americans, called the situation a “hate crime.” Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) joined Waters in her outrage. He claimed, “The issue is the low esteem in which black life is held, particularly black males.” He neglected to mention that the people who apparently hold black life in least regard are other black males, who murder blacks at rates that far outpace white-on-black murder.25
Meanwhile, congressional Democrats invited Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, to a hearing where she announced, “Trayvon was our son, but Trayvon was your son.” Actually, his behavior was such that you could argue he was nobody’s son—his parents were divorced, and he was on his way to his father’s girlfriend’s house when he had his fatal encounter with Zimmerman. Yet now, both of Trayvon’s parents were touring the country preaching about their son. And they were toeing the liberal line, suggesting that people live “the legacy of Trayvon and [make] sure that he did not indeed die in vain.”
Democrats took up the battle cry. “If you review the case, every aspect of it has been handled very poorly,” said Representative Corrine Brown (D-FL), whose district includes Sanford. “I don’t know whether it’s incompetence, or whether it’s a cover-up, or all of the above. But we have got to make sure that what has happened in Sanford, with the police department and how they have handled this situation, never happens again in the United States.” Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) said she wanted Zimmerman arrested, too.26
But the mother of all rants was reserved for Representative Bobby Rush (D-IL). Rush bought into the press angle that it was Martin’s hoodie that led to his death—a meme repeated by celebrities from LeBron James to Chris Brown to Jamie Foxx to P. Diddy, who all donned hoodies to proclaim their support for Trayvon. Of course, one of those folks urging kids like Trayvon to go to school, stay away from drugs, and not steal things might have been more useful to Trayvon. Maybe it wouldn’t have stopped him from being killed—maybe Zimmerman really went off that night. But it would have served him better during his life. Then again, such advice wouldn’t have been nearly as emotionally cathartic as whining about hoodies.
Bobby Rush wanted that same catharsis. So he headed for the floor of the House, wearing a hoodie sweatshirt. There, according to the Washington Post, Rush delivered a “rousing speech.” “I applaud the young people, all across the land who are making a statement about hoodies, about the real hoodlums in his nation, specifically those who tread on our law wearing official or quasi-official cloaks,” Rush ranted. “Racial profiling has got to stop. Just becau
se someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum.” Rush was then tossed from the floor for breach of sartorial protocol.27
There was only one problem: hoodies do make you more suspicious. Or at least they should. Within days of Rush’s House speech, hoodie-wearing gunmen shot thirteen people and killed two in Rush’s district in Chicago.28 As it turns out, wearing a hoodie to commit a crime is a great way to cover your face and prevent identification.
The Los Angeles Police Department actually admits as much. The LAPD North Hollywood Division is fine if you wear a hoodie—but they don’t want you to do so inside places of commerce. In October 2011, they told store owners in the area to be on the lookout for people wearing hoodies, and asked customers to take off their hats and pull down their hoodies to prevent suspicion. “The LAPD isn’t anti-hoodie,” said LAPD Lieutenant Alan Hamilton. “If you walk into the LAPD academy, one of the first things you will see selling are LAPD hoodies. We are not asking you to take off your hoodie. Just take down the hood when you enter a business. It is not raining in the bank.” As the Los Angeles Times reported, “The anti-crime tool dates at least to King Carlos III of Spain, who banned the wearing of broad-brimmed hats in the 1700s to deter robberies and other crimes.”29 Of course, the article doesn’t mention that King Carlos III did it because he hated black folks.
But the fight for hoodies was a transitional moment for the Trayvon story. Until the hoodie fight, everyone had focused on Zimmerman himself, as well as the local police force—were they racist? Should Zimmerman have been arrested? With the transition to the hoodie conversation, the left was beginning to direct America’s attention to policy.
And that was the final step in the Race Card Mazurka.
ANATOMY OF A RACIAL BULLYING: THE PAYOFF
While Martin’s supporters—or supposed supporters—marched throughout America, protested on the floors of legislatures, and generally kicked up a fuss about the shooting of one young black man by one young Hispanic man, they didn’t give a damn about Trayvon’s case. If they had, they would have stopped poisoning the jury pool, making it that much more difficult to convict Zimmerman in a trial by giving his lawyers the ability to appeal any verdict.
No, they were interested in something much more valuable than Zimmerman’s scalp: they were interested in political point-scoring. And if it took violence to make those political points, so be it.
Even as the left decried racial profiling and violent action from Zimmerman, they had nothing to say about the violence they were themselves breeding. When Zimmerman was actually arrested and then released on bail, Twitter went wild with thugs calling for riots across America. And the left said nothing at all.
That’s because the violence they were breeding was good violence.
The leftist philosophy of violence is simple: It’s good when it’s being used for leftist causes. It’s bad when it’s being used for any other purpose. When Twitter nuts call for the murder of George Zimmerman,30 or when Al Sharpton threatens the entire town of Sanford,31 or when Spike Lee tweets the address of Zimmerman’s parents’ house (and gets the address wrong, threatening the lives of the actual residents),32 that’s not really a huge deal because . . . well . . . shut up, you racist! But when anyone speaks out in favor of policies that the left doesn’t like, they are quickly lumped in with the racists. They’re just like George Zimmerman, gunning down black folks at will, if they don’t approve the straightforward leftist agenda.
This has long been the leftist pattern. Take, for example, the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992. As with Trayvon Martin, the liberal media turned an ugly incident into the pretext for a broader push for liberal policies. They started with a flash point—the beating of King—and then proceeded to ignore many of the relevant facts, including the facts that there were two other black men in King’s car, neither of whom was beaten; King was speeding at 115 mph through a residential area in an attempt to avoid police so that he wouldn’t be taken back to jail for violating his parole; he resisted arrest; he was Tasered, then got back up and began attacking police again, which made them believe he was on PCP. None of that justified the extent of the beating he received. But it certainly gave the beating some much-needed context. Rodney King was no victim. He was a career scumbag and criminal who beat up women, drove drunk, and robbed stores with tire irons. And, as the beating death of homeless white man Kelly Thomas in Fullerton, California, in 2011 shows, police occasionally (and wrongly) excessively beat those who resist arrest because they’re resisting arrest, not because they’re black.
But the media thought this was Bull Connor, the Birmingham commissioner of public safety who turned fire hoses on civil rights protesters, all over again. And so they played the tape over and over and over again. They cited endemic police racism as the background for the King beating. When three of the officers were acquitted and the jury split on the fourth, blacks in South Central Los Angeles immediately rioted.
Now, you’d think that when a group of folks randomly loot, beat, murder, and destroy entire neighborhoods, that would be seen as a bad thing—especially when the neighborhood they’re destroying is majority black, and many of the businesses they’re destroying are Korean. Fifty-three dead, 2,400 injured, 3,000 businesses ruined, and $1 billion in damage—normally, that’s seen as a problem.
But not according to the left. Because the left wanted to achieve certain goals—in particular, the hamstringing of the Los Angeles Police Department, as well as the defeat of President George H. W. Bush—these thugs became freedom fighters. Representative Maxine Waters actually encouraged the rioting, suggesting that Bush had to sic the Justice Department on the officers. Waters called the rampage “a spontaneous reaction to inequality and injustice.” She called it “righteous anger, and it’s difficult for me to say to the people, ‘Don’t be angry.’ When people are angry and enraged, they do do senseless things, they do act even sometimes out of character, and that is why it is the responsibility of America to try and avoid putting people in these kinds of situations.”
It was now America’s fault that the scum of the earth were stealing TVs from the local Kmart.
But she wasn’t done. Waters actually threatened the rest of the country with similar violence if the Bush administration didn’t sic the Justice Department on the police officers. “Many other cities could go the way that Los Angeles went last night unless the president is willing to step in and take some strong action,” she said. What was her ultimate goal? “We have a moral responsibility to share the resources of this country,” she said. The Marxist–Race Bully Horsemen of the Apocalypse were riding again. Waters still calls the riots the “Los Angeles Rebellion.” And when the National Guard came to South Central to stop the rioting, she called it an “occupation.” “Riot,” she blithely explained, “is the voice of the unheard.”33 In Los Angeles, of course, riots were the voice of the morons who wanted new tape decks. But same difference.
Just as with the Los Angeles riots, the left used the Trayvon case to push anticapitalism. The same day that Barack Obama claimed quasi-parentage of Trayvon, smelly, anarchist Occupy idiots joined the “Million Hoodie March”—and then proceeded to sprint through the streets of New York, overturning barricades, assaulting and taunting police officers, climbing public monuments. The videos flooded YouTube. And the mainstream media said nothing. The New York Times reported on the rally but said nothing about the violence; the Los Angeles Times talked about the glory of social networking, which had allowed the rioters to organize.
But the Occupy movement knew exactly what it was doing: they were bullying the American public with the race club, pushing for their own agenda at the same time. They didn’t give a hoot about Trayvon. They just thought Trayvon would be a good excuse to bash capitalism. As Natasha Lennard, a former freelance New York Times reporter and Occupy Wall Street organizer, said, “It might at first seem confusing that a solidarity march over justice for a murdered Florida teen would involve mass support from Occupy Wal
l Street. But those who still see Occupy as limited to contesting corporate greed and the influence of money in politics have fallen behind the movement. Occupy actions take aim at all oppressive, hierarchical systems—capitalism and racism (and their interplay) among them. Indeed, a popular printed-out sign held by many on Wednesday’s march read, ‘You can’t have capitalism without racism.’ ” And you can’t have riots without falsely invoking racism, these days.34
Occupy isn’t about racism. It’s about anticapitalism. But the bullies saw their opportunity, and they conflated the two. Of course, as we’ll see, there’s a long history of Marxism infiltrating the race card movement and radicalizing it; by now, the two movements are so comfortable working together, they don’t even know where they shift from black and white to red.
Capitalism wasn’t the left’s preferred Trayvon target—after all, they may be nasty bigots, but they’re not idiots. They knew that they weren’t going to overthrow the American economic system because a black teenager got shot after pounding a Hispanic man’s noggin into the ground.
But the left could, at least, take out some smaller, more cohesive targets.
One of the first targets they settled on was the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is an organization dedicated to advancing “the fundamental principles of free-market enterprise, limited government, and federalism at the state level.” They’re highly successful, and they pose a huge threat to Democrats at the state and local level, since they lobby effectively for their positions.
That’s why ALEC became a target. Thanks in part to ALEC, at least eighteen states enacted or were poised to enact measures opposing Obamacare, including six states proposing constitutional amendments. Thanks in part to ALEC, states have opposed raising taxes and greater encroachment of federal legislation.35
They had to be destroyed. So the left went to work bullying them by wielding the corpse of Trayvon Martin.
