A Decade of Deceit and Division: What Trayvon Wrought By Jack Cashill
Although he certainly did not intend to, the drugged and despondent 17-year-old who wandered through a failing Florida subdivision on a rainy February night ten years ago Saturday launched a new phase in the American civil rights movement.
This was to be the Jacobin phase, the phase in which traditional civil rights standards such as equality before the law and innocent until proven guilty yielded to mob rule and race-based outcomes.
Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin would not live to see this transition. The 28-year-old man who shot and killed Trayvon, George Zimmerman, has lived in the shadows of Jacobin justice every day of the last ten years, always with an eye out for assassins like the one who nearly killed him in 2015.
On February 26, 2012, Trayvon had reason to be despondent. His school had suspended him for the third time that school year. His mother, Sybrina Fulton, had kicked him out of the house. His father, Tracy Martin, had abandoned the stepmother who helped raise Trayvon for a new girlfriend, Brandy Green. And, most immediately, “Diamond,” the 16-year-old who had stolen his heart, was playing him for a fool.
Exiled to Green’s townhouse in Sanford, 250 miles from his Miami home, Trayvon texted and called throughout that last day looking for reassurance from Diamond. He didn’t get it. Instead, she taunted him with tales of her “clubbing” adventures the night before. In his final texts that rainy Sunday, Trayvon’s desperation showed through: “wat up with u man how u feel bout me cuz u not say cuz bout to hung up ur ass.”
For George, meanwhile, it was just another Sunday. About 7 P.M. that evening, he headed out to Target to buy lunch meat for a week’s worth of sandwiches. While taking night classes in law enforcement, he worked during the day as a forensic review analyst at a fraud detection company.
George had recently assumed the role of neighborhood watch captain. He stepped up to pacify his wife, Shellie. She had recently seen two young black men fleeing from the site of a neighbor’s home invasion, and one of the men had seen her. Shellie was scared to death and wanted to move. George talked her out of it.
When he saw Trayvon lurking in the shadows, George called the non-emergency dispatcher, as he had been instructed to do:
SPD: Sanford Police Department, (garbled) recording, this is Sean.
GZ: Hey, we’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood and there’s a real suspicious guy, uh [near] Retreat View Circle. 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.
SPD: Okay, and this guy, is he White, Black, or Hispanic?
GZ: He looks black.
SPD: Did you see what he was wearing?
GZ: Yeah, a dark hoodie, like a gray hoodie, and either jeans or sweat pants and white tennis shoes. He’s here now. He’s just staring.
Jumping ahead a bit, here is how NBC edited this exchange:
GZ: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.
SPD: Did you see what he was wearing?
GZ: Yeah, a dark hoodie.
Unfortunately for George, this kind of race-baiting media malpractice was normative. After circling George’s car, Trayvon took off running. He likely suspected that George was on the phone with the police. The dispatcher then asked, “Which way is he running?” George left the car “to maintain a visual” and walked in the direction Trayvon had run.
When the ambient noises alerted the dispatcher to the fact that George had left the car, the dispatcher made a suggestion:
SPD: Are you following him?
GZ: Yeah.
SPD: Okay. We don’t need you to do that.
GZ: Okay.
George promptly stopped following and went to look for an address where he could meet the police. The media routinely edited out his “okay,” all the better to preserve the narrative, most memorably phrased by Miami congresswoman, Frederica Wilson, “Trayvon was hunted down like a rabid dog.”
Trayvon had four minutes to run the 100 or so yards to Green’s townhouse. He chose not to. The “little boy,” as the media liked to depict him, circled back, leaped out of the shadows, and sucker-punched George, who is nearly a half-foot shorter.
Neighbor Jonathon Good looked outside upon hearing the ruckus. He told the Sanford P.D. that he saw a “black man in a black hoodie on top of either a white guy … or a Hispanic guy in a red sweater on the ground yelling out help.”
According to Good, the black man on top was “throwing down blows on the guy MMA [mixed martial arts] style.” When Good went in to call 911, he heard the shot. After having his head pounded for more than 40 seconds — another 911 call picked up his screams — George shot Trayvon in the chest.
In the weeks after the shooting, I discovered a blog called the Conservative Treehouse. Its followers had crowd-sourced the truth of what happened within weeks. Inspired by their reporting, I got a contract to write a book on the case, If I Had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman.
The book owed its title to President Obama’s public identification with the troubled young Trayvon. “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon,” said Obama in the Rose Garden three weeks after the shooting. So saying, he threw in with the Jacobins and gave his imprimatur to their racial madness.
I attended the July 2013 trial and got to meet George’s family and later George himself. Far from being the white supremacist the media made him out to be, George was an Obama supporter, the mentor of two black teens, and an old-school civil rights activist. Spanish was his first language. His mother is a Peruvian immigrant. His great-grandfather was black.
George was named after his uncle, Jorge. One day at lunch with the Zimmermans (George’s parents), I observed that if they had named George “Jorge,” this case would never have left Sanford. The media would have steered clear of a conflict between a Jorge and a Trayvon in a battleground state during an election year. George agreed. With great comic timing, Mrs. Zimmerman turned to her husband and said, “I told you we should have called him Jorge.”
A year before the shooting, George had led a one-man crusade to get justice for a black homeless man who had been cold-cocked by a police lieutenant’s drunken son. At a town hall meeting in Sanford, George spoke passionately in defense of the homeless man, Sherman Ware. His activism led to the termination of the Sanford Police chief.
CNN had an audio copy of George’s speech. CNN also had access to the interview Jonathon Good gave to the local media the day after the shooting. Its producers buried them both. CNN audiences would not have known that this was an open-and-shut case of self-defense. It had nothing to do with “Stand Your Ground.” It should never have come to trial.
With the mobs howling for justice, the surfacing of a “phone witness” by Jacobin civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump gave state authorities the pretext needed to arrest Zimmerman. In fact, Diamond, the real girlfriend, had been on the phone with George right up until the end. For the ABC cameras, Crump played a phone interview with Diamond, who dutifully followed Crump’s spurious script.
In the fifteen months between arrest and trial, Florida state prosecutors and Crump kept the phone witness out of view.
The “Diamond” they produced at the trial shocked all of us who were following the case. Instead of the 16-year-old Crump had promised, the State presented the mentally challenged and massively overweight Rachel Jeantel, now 19, as the object of Trayvon’s “puppy love.”
The defense attorneys did not have the time and resources to challenge this obvious bait and switch. Besides, Jeantel made such a poor witness that she all but guaranteed George’s acquittal by the six-woman jury. Outraged by the verdict, three Marxists “of color” promptly formed a group called Black Lives Matter.
Working their combined magic in Ferguson a year after George’s acquittal, BLM and the media helped reverse an eight-year downward trend in homicides. As a result of the so-called “Ferguson effect,” 3,000 more Americans were murdered in 2016 than in 2014. BLM was just warming up. The multi-city mania BLM helped generate in 2020 — Minneapolis, Louisville, Kenosha — triggered a nationwide 30-percent-plus increase in homicides over 2019, the greatest annual spike ever recorded.
Had the media paid any attention to Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert’s brilliantly researched book and film, The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America, released in the fall of 2019, much of the death and destruction could have been avoided.
Working doggedly through Trayvon’s phone logs, texts, and social media feeds — all of which prosecutors had in their possession for more than a year — Gilbert found his way to the real Diamond. On meeting this Haitian-American hottie, he understood why Trayvon lost his mind that fateful night. As Gilbert learned, Diamond withstood major pressure from Trayvon’s inner circle and refused to perjure herself. She has since graduated from Florida State with a degree in criminal justice.
To share his finds, Gilbert rented theater space at the National Press Club. No one in the major media came. Not having a financial interest in the project, I volunteered to call the Florida media. As I explained in multiple phone calls, Gilbert had unearthed the most consequential judicial fraud of the modern era, one that made a rich man out of Benjamin Crump and unleashed a decade of death and destruction.
Not one of the “journalists” with whom I spoke could be bothered. A Florida judge’s ruling two weeks ago gave them a little breathing room when he ruled against Zimmerman’s defamation and conspiracy suit. I listened in on the hearing. Zimmerman based his suit on Gilbert’s research. The research is rock-solid. Its validity was not at issue. What was at issue was the statute of limitations and the quality of the attorney’s presentation. The defendants had eleven attorneys present. No one in the suit will dare sue Gilbert.
In 2012, only one man in the media had the clout and cojones to call out the Jacobins in real-time. Unfortunately, Andrew Breitbart died at age 43 of heart failure on a Los Angeles street just four days after Trayvon’s death. Go with God, Andrew. You are missed.
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