On the morning of March 23, 2012, after introducing the new head of the World Bank in the White House Rose Garden, Barack Obama took just one question, likely pre-arranged. It was on the recent shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Said Obama for the ages, “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon: If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”
In projecting Trayvon as a “son,” Obama strongly suggested that all black children were equally vulnerable to the predations of white men. Four weeks after the shooting, Obama had no excuse for not knowing the facts of the case. This would prove to be the most destructive moment of his presidency.
Without a hint of regret, the most powerful institutions of the nation – the Department of Justice, the leading civil rights groups, the White House – conspired to send George Zimmerman, an Hispanic Obama supporter and civil rights activist, to prison for the rest of his life. Without any meaningful exceptions, the mainstream media enabled this dark turn in American history.
Anyone following the case closely in the blogosphere knew Zimmerman was innocent. Sundance and his fellow Treepers at the Conservative Tree House deconstructed the case before Zimmerman even was arrested.
The arrest was based on a massive judicial fraud. In his stunning documentary, “The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud That Divided America,” Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert proves beyond doubt that the “star witness” in the state of Florida’s case against Zimmerman was an impostor.
The media chose not to notice. There have been no apologies, no revisions, no lessons learned. Only Obama could have reversed this ugly momentum, and he chose not to.
Six days after Zimmerman’s acquittal, Obama appeared unexpectedly at a routine White House press conference, specifically to address the “Trayvon Martin ruling.”
Obama began by sending his “thoughts and prayers” to the family of Trayvon Martin. For Zimmerman and his family, still in hiding, there was not a word.
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Much as he had a year earlier, Obama identified himself with Martin, this time even more directly. “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” said Obama, ignoring the fact that the guys at his exclusive prep school did not make a habit of viciously attacking armed strangers.
A NBC News and Wall Street Journal poll taken in the week after the verdict showed Obama failing in the one area in which even Republicans hoped he would succeed.
In January 2009, 79% of whites and 64% of blacks held a favorable view of race relations in America. By July 2013, those figures had fallen to 52% among whites and 38% among blacks.
Getting neither satisfaction nor any corrective truth from Obama, militants transformed their anger into action. The most radical of these activists formed Black Lives Matter (BLM), a group whose website traces its founding “to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman.”
A year after Zimmerman’s acquittal, protesters chanting “black lives matter” turned the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson upside down and left much of it in ruins.
With a huge assist from the major media, BLM activists and their camp followers were quickly able to build another fatally divisive racial incident around a lie, this time, “Hands up, don’t shoot.”
As he did with Trayvon Martin, Obama sanctioned the lie and fully identified with Michael Brown. “My mind went back to what it was like for me when I was 17, 18, 20,” he told a BET audience, ignoring the fact that the guys at his exclusive prep school did not make a habit of viciously attacking armed police officers.
Obama noted too that America had a “systemic problem,” the police being the most obvious symptom. The nation’s police got the message. Their understandable reluctance to enforce the law aggressively in black neighborhoods led to a massive crime wave known as the “Ferguson effect.”
In 2015, the murder rate rose nearly 11%, its greatest one year jump in a half century. In 2016, the trend continued with an 8.5% increase over the year before. What this means is that nearly 3,000 more Americans were murdered in 2016 than in 2014, perhaps 2,000 of them black.
If the catastrophe of Obama’s racial leadership had a face, it was that of former San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick. In August 2016, Kaepernick explained why he chose to sit out the national anthem: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”
Said the biracial adopted son of a white Christian family, “There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
Yes, there were bodies in the street, but Kaepernick had no idea how they got there. Misled by his president and the media, he somehow concluded that America “oppresses black people” and leaves them to die in the streets.
He reached this conclusion, it should be noted, in the eighth year of the Obama presidency. For all of those years, an African American headed the Department of Justice, and Democrats headed every major city in America and its police force, Minneapolis included.
Through his passive acquiescence, Obama allowed this division to fester and the mayhem to explode. It was not necessarily coincidental that the murder rate leveled off as soon as Obama left the White House and declined substantially the following year.
It kept declining until 2020. The Democrats had a presidential election to win. It was time to fire up the base once again and kill a few thousand more black bystanders in the process.