Hughey Newsome: The Race Card, Detroit & Zimmerman

Hughey Newsome, a black businessman who lived in Detroit for the past ten years, looks at how the race card is used by blacks in the grievance industry and in government, from our President to Detroit, and its impact. This from Mr. Newsomee in the Daily Caller:

Living in the Detroit metro area most of the last decade, I have experienced many of the events leading to its bankruptcy.

Take, for example, the 2008 State of the City address by then-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. With Detroit facing a perilous fiscal future and him facing ethics complaints, Kirkpatrick highlighted race. He sparked controversy by using the “n-word” while referencing an insult he received from some random person.

Kirkpatrick vowed to stand strong against this attack, and asked citizens to stand by him against a “lynch mob mentality.” He essentially used that slur to leverage racial tension, inciting and dividing the mostly-black city against mostly-white suburbs. After all, it was the people in the suburbs — many who either worked in Detroit or had economic ties to the city — who were frustrated with mounting city corruption and mismanagement.

The citizens of Detroit rallied behind their mayor. It was racial politics — pure and simple.

Five years later, Detroit is in the midst of bankruptcy proceedings, and Kilpatrick – who resigned six months after his controversial address — was convicted of a series of felonies that may put him in prison for the rest of his life.

Kilpatrick is not the one bad apple who destroyed Detroit. Using race to cover for failure is commonplace. . . .

There are many similar examples of corruption and divisiveness involving city leadership where race is has often been used to rouse and incite but – most importantly – to distract from ineptness and unethical behavior.

Why is this dangerous?

Playing on peoples’ sensitivities and fears distracts attention from holding elected leaders accountable. Detroit’s political class understands this, and regularly delivers racial division rather than doing the hard work of attracting investment in the city. . . .

It’s not just Detroit where this game of racial division is played. This trick is played at the highest levels of government. . . .

George Zimmerman was found not guilty the same week Detroit declared bankruptcy. In the former case, too many — and too many who are too powerful — cast Zimmerman as a bigot despite no evidence validating this claim.

In his surprise address to the press about the Zimmerman verdict on July 19, President Obama mentioned the real bias that black men face on a regular basis. But rather than channel this concern into a productive conversation, he sought to leverage the racial tension he created to criticize “stand your ground” laws (which played no actual role in Zimmerman’s defense) and promote gun control. Obama’s question — “[I]f Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?” — is particularly disheartening. On what evidence is this based? Does he not know that over 30 percent of Florida’s “stand your ground” claims are made by blacks and are 55 percent effective for blacks in court? Obama’s words of division and distrust – to advance a political agenda — diminish an opportunity to address real biases principally driven by media and entertainment. Too much time is spent complaining about and looking for the overt racism that has largely been banished from our society. Perversely, this effort to protect minorities from the bigot under the bed promotes the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that Obama’s predecessor sought to stamp out. . . .

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Dear Ms. Martin - Regarding Your Speech To The National Urban League

Ms. Martin:

Regarding your speech at the National Urban League, let me first say that I sympathize with your overwhelming grief at the loss of your son. I can assure you that, despite what some are asserting, the loss of your son's life resonates deeply throughout all of America, irrespective of politics or skin color. In that, please accept my heartfelt condolences.

Ms. Martin, it is apparent that in your grief, you are looking about for anyone or anything to blame for the death of your son. You are looking around for something to give some greater meaning to your son's death. No one can begrudge you that. We would all react similarly.

That said, Ms. Martin, you are being used. While no one can have even the slightest doubt that your grief is real, it is grief blind to reality, and you are being manipulated by those of your skin color who have staked their careers on furthering racial division and the canards that this is still the America of Emmett Till, that America of today is 1950's Mississippi writ large, that blacks are under siege and threat from white racism.

Who is it, Ms. Martin, that is telling you that, but for Florida's Stand Your Ground law, your son would be alive today? I ask because that person is shamelessly lying to you. I hope you realize that what was at issue in your son's case was not the Stand Your Ground law - your son was on top of Zimmerman, pummeling him. Zimmerman had no opportunity to retreat. What was at issue in the trial was the ancient right of self defense. I am sure, at some level, you realize this.

Yet you are being invited to inveigh against Stand Your Ground laws as if it was what caused your son's death, let alone what allowed Zimmerman to be found not guilty. You are being invited to inveigh against the law as if it is a racist construct.

At some point, you will look back on this and, I hope, realize that those who are urging you on are doing a great disservice not merely to you, but to your son and to the black community. If there is to be meaning to your son's death, then you need to ask why your son, that night, decided to beat a "creepy ass cracker." What led him to make that criminal and fatal mistake? If you really want to honor your son, may I suggest ma'am, that no matter how painful, you take a cold, hard, and realistic look not merely at your son, but the people now inviting you to speak at their gatherings to blame, ultimately, race for your son's death.



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A Racial Picture Worth A Thousand Words (Updated)

Photo taken from American Digest

The expression that a picture is worth a thousand words just does not do justice to the above photo of a black woman in Chicago at a rally to have George Zimmerman lynched. The photo neatly sums up the state of race in America today. It puts into perspective not merely the history of the last half century of the civil rights movement, but also its state today, its success and failures, and the focus of the racial grievance industry on George Zimmerman at the complete expense of focusing on all of the real problems in the black community.

The History

The woman in the photo is holding up a sign decrying racism. We have been seeing pictures like that since the 1950's and 60's, when the movement for black civil rights was finally gaining unstoppable momentum. The movement was one of moral clarity and purity - nothing less than a demand that America finally and fully live up to its premise, that "all men are created equal," and its promise, that each person have a level playing field on which to pursue "life, liberty and happiness." Many of the blacks of that era felt themselves, as a group, victimized and denied that promise. Rightly so.

In many areas of 1950's America, racism, often violent, still held sway, and nowhere more so than in the Democrat controlled South. Lynching and violence were hardly rare. It was Mississippi of the era that gave America the brutal murders and subsequent justice denied in the cases of Emmett Till and Medger Evers. It was Alabama of the era where the name of Democrat Bull Connor became infamous. Martin Luther King Jr. shamed America with his brave, non-violent demand for full civil rights for blacks. MLK's goal for the movement was a colorblind society where each person would be "judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin." Amen.

Republicans and Northern Democrats both were deeply involved in pushing forward the civil rights movement in the 20th century. It was three white Republicans who gathered together to start the NAACP. The NAACP would later argue Brown v. Board of Education before a Republican dominated Supreme Court, resulting in the landmark legal decision that spelled the end of segregation. It was Democrat President Truman in 1948 who fully integrated the military. Republican President Eisenhower oversaw the passage of two major civil rights laws and faced down Alabama Democrats in the Little Rock Nine incident.

But then four critical things happened in the 1960's. One, Barry Goldwater, figurehead of the Republican conservative movement, decided to contest the 1964 Civil Rights Act because he believed it was beyond the bounds of federal commerce clause authority. He was right on the law but utterly on the wrong side of history. Republicans gave massive support to both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it didn't matter. Because of Goldwater's opposition, he, and ultimately all Republicans, were painted as the vile racists that Southern Democrats actually were.

The second critical event was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. With him died the purpose of the Civil Rights Movement as one for equality.

The third critical event was the rise of 1960's radicals. Steeped in neo-Marxist philosophy, they are the far left that now controls the Democrat Party. After the death of MLK, it was the far left that commandeered the civil rights movement, fundamentally altering its nature. They imprinted the movement with identity politics, grossly distorting the movement's goal of a level playing field for all Americans and creating in its stead a Marxist world of permanent victimized classes entitled to special treatment. It has had profound implications for blacks and our nation.

And the last critical event, following Goldwater's highly impolitic stand, was the creation of the single greatest monolithic voting block in our nation's history. Blacks, who had never before been monolithic with their votes, became and have since remained one for the Democrat Party. Indeed, that monolithic vote is utterly essential to the left - they would be politically massacred were it to stop today.

Race Currently

The woman in the picture decries racism that apparently even she admits does not seem to exist. She explains that away by claiming that racism today is just in hiding.

What happened over the half century since the 60's has been nothing short of revolutionary. The efforts undertaken by both right and left to combat racism bore fruit. For the right, racism became an object of utter scorn, not to be tolerated. For Democrats, the party of slavery, Jim Crow, separate but equal, the KKK and lynchings, the transformation from the font of racism to, ostensibly, champions of blacks was overnight once they saw the political and monetary benefits of such a change. But it was not a complete break with their racist past. What many on the left did was merely submerge their hard racism, substituting for it the soft racism of low expectation.

The success of the civil rights movement has been a problem for the far left - the group that controls the Democrat Party today. Keeping blacks as a monolithic voting block has required a lot of effort along three parallel lines. One, convince blacks that all non-lib whites are irredeemably racist. Two, meet any effort to contest a left wing policy or criticism of a black politician with charges of racism. Indeed, the use of that charge since 1965 has been so ubiquitous and successful that "playing the race card" has become the single most fundamental tactic of the left. And lastly, brutally punish any black who refuses to tow the line. Nothing will get you lynched in the square of public opinion by the left quicker than the crime of being black and questioning far left / race grievance industry dogma.

Keeping blacks convinced that our nation is, fifty years on, still Mississippi circa 1965, is increasingly hard. The "black community" receives a constant stream of messages that they are still, today, living in Biloxi of 1965 writ large. They are kept divided from society and taught to nurse their grievances. Major colleges have embraced this with Black studies programs - nothing more than intellectual training grounds for the race grievance industry. Those programs have given us such gems as Critical Race Theory and the theory of White Privilege while Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates makes ludicrous calls for all non-whites to pay reparations to all blacks for the original sin of slavery.

Yet as blacks have taken part in an ever more integrated society, they are ever more seeing the absence of racism in white middle class America. That is a real problem for the left's narrative. It is why the woman in the photo above claims that whites today "just be concealing" their racism. And it is why you have Prof. Gates pushing the utterly ludicrous and despicable theory of "color blind racism." When in 1960 the narrative expressed the reality of racism in America, the gap between the narrative and reality has steadily grown until today it is separated by yawning canyon. Almost as important, white guilt at past racism has receded with racism's ever shrinking presence in our society.

The Far Left / Racial Grievance Industry's Attempted Lynching Of George Zimmerman

Which brings us to Zimmerman. The racial grievance industry has locked onto the Zimmerman like a drowning man grabs onto a life preserver. That was understandable at the start since the optics initially promoted by the media seemed perfect for them. An innocent black child is profiled, stalked and murdered by a racist white. A racist judicial system then refused to even arrest or charge the killer. This was Emmett Till and Medger Evers. This was a God send, a chance for the race hustlers to reassert their narrative based on an anecdotal - but real - case.

But it has all gone bad. None of the narrative holds up in the light of day. Many of the facts have come out in a fair, televised trial. Others have made there way into the media.

To begin with, George Zimmerman was neither racist nor white. He was predominantly Hispanic with some white and black DNA tossed in - thus leading to the first canard of the Zimmerman narrative, the creation of a wholly new racial category - that of White Hispanic.

As to Zimmerman's racial attitudes, he was Mother Theresa. There was no hint of racial animus in his background. To the contrary, all indications were that he was color-blind. He tutored black children, he dated black girls, he befriended all in his community irrespective of race, and he launched a one man crusade in support of a homeless black man who had been beaten up by the white son of the local Chief of Police. An FBI investigation into his background searching for racial animus turned up, after more than 40 interviews, nothing.

As to racial profiling, when Zimmerman called the police on Trayvon Martin, he sited activities that were suspicious as the basis. He only identified Martin as possibly black when prompted by the 911 operator. And any inference of racial profiling goes out the window when you look at Zimmerman's other calls to police over a three year period. Two were to alert police to the presence of a black man wanted for burglary. One was to alert police to a black seven year old child wandering unsupervised in the road because of concern for the child's safety. Zimmerman placed three calls about black men acting suspiciously, one of which was Trayvon. He had previously made five calls about whites and hispanics acting suspiciously in the neighborhood. Listen to the calls and the descriptions of why Zimmerman was suspicious, and the inference is that Zimmerman acted reasonably and did not profile on the basis of race.

Evidence at trial suggests that Trayvon Martin could have, during a three to four minute interlude, simply gone to his home a stone's throw away. Instead, he ended up assaulting Zimmerman, battering him and leaving Zimmerman in extreme panic. The jurors found that Zimmerman acted in self defense, which means that Zimmerman acted in reasonable belief that he was in imminent danger of great bodily harm.

The racial grievance industry, outrageously supported in all of their assertions by President Obama, utterly refuses to acknowledge any of the facts that have been broadcast to the world. Just as the grievance industry is founded on the canard of rampant racism in society, so is their Zimmerman narrative founded on a complete ignoring of the facts. Indeed, to hold onto their narrative, the race baiters are agitating that Zimmerman be charged under federal law because he was motivated by race to kill Martin. They want a lynching - a sacrifice on the alter of race - in order to justify their narrative.

But there is some hope. Rev. Al Sharpton, the nation's most prominent race baiter, arranged for demonstrations in 100 cities last week to forward the narrative. It speaks volumes that the crowds were small indeed, with most being in the hundreds or lower, in double digits. I am hopeful that this is a sign that blacks are waking up to the fact that the left and their leaders in the race grievance industry are taking them for a ride, with the only winners being Al Sharpton and the Democrats.

Detroit, The Blue Social Model & Failed Education Systems

Detroit is a city intimately caught up in politics of the left into which racial politics are fully integrated. And today, Detroit has utterly failed, it is a city in ruins. It is a city that that has been run wholly by the left since the 60's, from whence its decline began. Today, it is bloated public sector union pensions and health care costs that have eventually caught up to the city's treasury.

Michael Barone grew up in Detroit and was a friend of Mayor Cavanaugh in the 1960's. He writes today:

[Detroit Mayor] Cavanagh was bright, young, liberal, and charming. He had been elected in 1961 at age 33 with virtually unanimous support from blacks and with substantial support from white homeowners—then the majority of Detroit voters—and he was reelected by a wide margin in 1965. He and Martin Luther King, Jr., led a civil rights march of 100,000 down Woodward Avenue in June 1963. He was one of the first mayors to set up an antipoverty program and believed that city governments could do more than provide routine services; they could lift people, especially black people, out of poverty and into productive lives. Liberal policies promised to produce something like heaven. Instead they produced something more closely resembling hell. You can get an idea of what happened to Detroit by looking at some numbers. The Census counted 1,849,568 people in Detroit in 1950, including me. It counted 713,777 in 2010.”

There are a thousand things to write about on Detroit, but the one that stands out for the purpose of this essay is the unholy alliance between public sector unions, local government and the education available to blacks.

Education is penultimately the key to giving black children a route out of poverty and into the mainstream of American life. Yet, in every city run by the left, public sector unions have a lock on public education. And inevitably, it is the education of students that suffer. Detroit is the poster child for this. Detroit's public education system has produced a population that is near 50% functionally illiterate. Those are third world numbers. And the people so afflicted, largely black, will never be able to fully compete in the American marketplace.

Blacks as a whole have not yet figured out that in the pantheon of the left, public sector unions are valued above the education and well being of black children. Unions hold the trump card - they are valued for the money that they pump into the Democrat Party while the left already has the monolithic vote of blacks in their pocket.

The clearest example of this pecking order comes from President Obama. When he first took office, Washington D.C., with the worst public schools in the nation, was running a voucher program to allow poor black D.C. students to attend the same private schools where Obama had enrolled his daughters. At the urging of the teachers unions, Obama ordered that program terminated.

The bottom line is that the Blue social model is failing. One important aspect of that model, the one that directly implicates blacks, is that the left embraces public sector unions at the expense of blacks. This is one of the reason the left keeps blacks firmly fixed on imaginary white racism.

The Black Community Today

In the photo at the top, the woman's sign reads "Racisms still alive. They just be concealing it." This really says it all about the lack of racism in society, the fact that many in the black community still wish to blame racism for their problems, and a demonstration of the failed education system to which many blacks have no other recourse.

The civil rights movement has had its great successes and its stunning failures. Chief among its successes has been in driving racism totally from acceptability in the public square. Racism has receded from the mainstream to the very fringes of society. That this has been accomplished in but a few decades is truly amazing. But it also speaks to the moral imperative of the civil rights movement for blacks. It is a reason for all people in our nation to take pride.

The most glaring failure of the civil rights movement is that the black community has been, and ever more continues to be, ill served by the left and its ally, the racial grievance community. While many blacks have been able to use the decades since the 60's to work themselves into the mainstream, it is a fair argument that such has been in spite of, not because of, left wing policies that have contributed to a horrible breakdown in the black family and left in its wake intractable problems of poverty, joblessness, poor education and criminality running rampant through a large strata of the black population.

The true disconnect here comes from the left and a racial grievance industry that lays these problems in the black community at the feet of imaginary racism. These intractable problems of the black community are inexcusable and obscene in the 21st century. Yet blacks in the grievance industry simply will not face these problems on their merits, nor will they tolerate any on the right raising these issues. That will bring out the race card at the speed of light. To do so threatens their power base.

Nothing has thrown this into such a harsh light as the Zimmerman case and its aftermath. Will it make any difference?

Update: O'Reilly gets it. Kudos to him for his Talking Points Memo tonight

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More On Trayvon Martin, Profiling & The Canard Of The "White" Menace To Blacks (Updated)

This from Bill Whittle, making the point that George Zimmerman is being lynched by the race grievance industry while painting a fact based picture of Trayvon Martin the likes of which we have never gotten from the MSM.



In my post below, responding to the race grievance industry's (and Obama's) generalized complaints about racial profiling, I wrote:

In 2011, blacks made up 13% of the population. Yet according to FBI Crime Statistics, in not a single category of crime - with the exception of DUI - was the number of total criminal incidents committed by blacks equal to or below their proportionate representation in society. In 2011, blacks in the U.S. were responsible for 49.7% of all murders, 55.6% of all robberies, 32.9% of all forcible rapes, and 33.9% of all aggravated assaults. The FBI does not publish - or at least I could not find - like statistics for victims, but looking at the numbers, blacks were just as likely to be the victims of crime out of all proportion to their representation in society. In 2011, 49.9% of all murder victims were black.

According to the left, this "disproportionate problem," as Obama called it, of criminality in the black community is the problem of . . . [wait for it] . . . a racist criminal justice system. They never quite indicate whether they think all of the black men in jail are actually innocent or whether the police just spend too much time catching actual black criminals. Either way, this from Heather McDonald:

The criminal law regularly announces that black Americans are “worth less than other Americans,” Cardozo Law School professor Ekow Yankah wrote on the New York Times opinion page this week. It wasn’t activists who “injected” race into the discussion, scoffed The American Prospect’s Jamelle Bouie on Monday, the “criminal-justice system” is “already” racial. An e-mail alert on Wednesday from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School proclaimed: “An ugly truth rears its head again: Racial disparities are alive and well in our criminal-justice system.”

The idea that the criminal-justice system discriminates against blacks — and that this bias explains blacks’ disproportionate presence in custody — is a staple of civil-rights activism and of the academic Left. Every effort to prove it empirically, however, has come up short [See Is The Criminal Justice System Racist]. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Alfred Blumstein has found that blacks are underrepresented in prison for homicide compared with their arrest rates. A meta-analysis of charging and sentencing studies showed that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms, according to criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen.

This is not merely something the left and the race grievance industry want to studiously ignore. They want to use the Martin trial to push the utter canard that what blacks have most to worry about are racist whites out to stalk and kill them. In the dark fantasy that the race hustlers push, our nation is 1950's Mississippi writ large. That is why they are so deeply committed to painting George Zimmerman as not merely Bull Conner reborn, but as a metaphor for all "whites." But, as Ms. McDonald notes:

In fact, if a black parent wants to radically reduce his son’s chance of getting shot, he should live in a white neighborhood. New York’s crime profile is typical of urban-crime disparities across the country. The per capita shooting rate in predominantly black Brownsville, Brooklyn, is 81 times higher than that of predominantly white and Asian Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, according to the New York Police Department. Blacks in 2012 committed about 75 percent of all shootings in New York, and whites a little over 2 percent, though blacks are 23 percent of the city’s population and whites 35 percent. Blacks are 60 percent of the city’s homicide victims. Their killers? They aren’t white.

The picture is the same nationally. . . .

Update: The Faculty Lounge blog has an exceptional post up on Zimmerman's calls to police over a period years, with the vast majority being in his capacity of neighborhood watch. Evaluating whether Trayvon Martin was subject, in any degree, to "racial profiling" is made easier in respect to the entire log of Zimmerman's calls. The picture the log paints of Zimmerman is of someone who was racially neutral - which would fit with his life story - and who in fact keyed on aspects of suspicious behavior by people of any and all races.

- Zimmerman called police on three occasions to report people identified as black acting suspiciously, one of whom was Trayvon.

- Zimmerman called police twice when he noticed a man who fit the description of a person wanted for burglary. The man happened to be black - and indeed, the burgler in question.

- Zimmerman called police out of "concern for the safety" of a seven year old black child wandering unsupervised in the road.

- Zimmerman called police five times to report suspicious activity by whites and hispanics.

Do read the whole post for much more detail, particularly into what actions Zimmerman reasonably deemed suspicious. This provides another piece of the puzzle of which I was unaware. Many blacks describe the Zimmerman case as a replay of the brutal lynching of Emmett Till. They are right, though it seems that the more facts come to light, the more it appears that Zimmerman is the one being brutally lynched.

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Obama's Outrageous Pandering To The Racial Grievance Crowd

Obama made an appearance at today's White House Press Briefing to weigh in on the Zimmerman trial, race and racism in America (text and video here Many on the left, such as the NYT, were laudatory of the President's remarks. Others, such as Charles Krauthammer were highly critical.



Dr. Krauthammer is on the right track, but he is not critical enough.

Obama spent the vast majority of his speech pandering outrageously to the racial grievance industry, justifying, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, their vile race baiting directed at George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin. Obama reached a disgusting nadir in his remarks when he claimed that if Trayvon had been white and Zimmerman black, the "outcome and aftermath might have been different."

The narrative of the grievance industry is that George Zimmerman racially profiled Trayvon Martin, then stalked and murdered him because he was black. The narrative continues that the jury trial resulted in a travesty of justice. According to the NAACP and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, there is no difference between what George Zimmerman did and what happened in the savage racial murders and subsequent denial of justice to Emmet Till and Medger Evers, incidents that occurred over half a century ago in Mississippi. In the fantasy painted by the racial grievance industry, America of today is 1950's Mississippi writ large, and all non-progressive whites are as racist as the Democrat Bull Conner.

Obama used his remarks to bless off on all of it.

Obama made no attempt to correct the outrageous narrative. To the contrary, he justified it by saying that the "African- American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that — that doesn’t go away." In other words, he explained the genesis of their fantasy without even the slightest criticism of it.

Obama then turned to "racial profiling," giving example after example of how people react with fear aand trepidation at the approach of black men that they do not know. The inference he left was that racial profiling is pervasive, that it occurred in the Zimmerman case, and that such fear is unreasonable.

Well, the reason non-whites and blacks, including such luminaries as Jessee Jackson, react that way at the approach of young black men that they don't is because it is a fact that blacks are exponentially more likely to commit crimes, and especially violent crime, including murder and robbery, than other racial groups.

In 2011, blacks made up 13% of the population. Yet according to FBI Crime Statistics, in not a single category of crime - with the exception of DUI - was the number of total criminal incidents committed by blacks equal to or below their proportionate representation in society. In 2011, blacks in the U.S. were responsible for 49.7% of all murders, 55.6% of all robberies, 32.9% of all forcible rapes, and 33.9% of all aggravated assaults. The FBI does not publish - or at least I could not find - like statistics for victims, but looking at the numbers, blacks were just as likely to be the victims of crime out of all proportion to their representation in society. In 2011, 49.9% of all murder victims were black.

So if the presence of blacks, and particularly young black men, causes such an unfortunate reaction in others, it is not because of the other's racism, its because of the reality of criminality. That is not a fault of whites, nor for that matter, of Jessee Jackson.

Moreover, in bringing up racial profiling as he did, in remarks on the Zimmerman case, Obama's unstated message was that the race baiters are right, that George Zimmerman racially profiled Trayvon Martin. Facts and findings at trial don't matter to the racial grievance industry, nor do they matter to Obama who, even in his capacity as President, keeps one foot squarely in the racial grievance camp.

As to whether Trayvon Martin received justice in the trial of George Zimmerman, Obama threw the racial grievance industry this nugget:

The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.

So, Obama is saying that it is understandable that blacks would believe the verdict unjust, irrespective of the facts established at trial. He does this with no criticism, thus sanctifying this belief.

Later in his remarks, Obama made all this crystal clear. In his most outrageous moment, Obama claimed as fact that if Trayvon had been white and Zimmerman black (he actually is in part, and indeed, he is less white than is Obama), then the "outcome and the aftermath" of the incident would have been different. That is a race hustler's indictment of our nation and our entire criminal justice system.

Unfortunately, Obama did not take questions. One that should have been was whether he felt the same way about Roderick Scott and Christopher Cervini.. Roderick Scott's case was a photo negative of the Zimmerman case. Scott is a black man in Rochester, New York who came upon three 16 year old white boys whom he believed were stealing from cars in the area. Brandishing a gun, he ordered them to stay in place until the police arrived. According to Scott, one of the boys, Cervini, charged him, saying that he was going to "get" Scott. Before the boy so much as touched Scott, he lay dead of two gunshot wounds that Scott claimed he fired in self defense. Unlike Trayvon Martin, the person Scott shot had no history of any troubled past. Like Trayvon Martin, the boy's parents are inconsolable, believing their innocent son was murdered. Scott was acquitted of manslaughter charges within the past week following a jury trial.

Obama did pay lip service to the grossly disproportionate criminality in the black community/ He then said that his remarks were not "to make excuses" for the criminality. But then he launched into a litany of excuses, intimating that this violent culture exists because of historical white racism. Moreover, he justified the hysterical reaction of the racial grievance industry to the Zimmerman case on the grounds that non-blacks are insufficiently willing to drown themselves in guilt for past historical sins that they did not commit.

All of this was a preamble to telling blacks, in so many words, that there was not going to be a prosecution of George Zimmerman for a violation of Trayvon Martin's civil rights. I would be surprised if that is announced officially a day before the 2014 election.

That said, Obama did have other bones to throw the racial grievance industry, suggesting changes to laws on racial profiling and Stand Your Ground. Given that neither racial profiling nor Stand Your Ground laws were implicated in the Zimmerman case, this is Obama's way hoodwinking blacks into believing that he and the rest of the racial grievance industry are standing up for them. And therein lies the true irony of the racial grievance industry. The demands of Obama will, if pushed forward, have their most clear and negative impact on one identifiable racial group - blacks. The racial profiling laws would make another Chicago of New York City. Taking away Stand Your Ground laws would most hurt the black population, those most subject to violence and those most likely to rely on Stand Your Ground in defense. That pales in comparison, though, to the fact that while more black teens will murdered and more blacks put in jail for defending themselves, at least more money will flow into the coffers of the NAACP and the members of the Congressional Black Caucus will have a better chance of reelection. It's obscene.

Towards the end of his remarks, Obama said that the reality is that racism is on a decline, that there must be help given to black boys, and that our goals should be to judge "based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character." All laudable. But Obama did not stop there. He concluded his remarks by say "those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions." The hypocrisy left me speechless.

Obama ran in 2008 on a platform of "healing the racial divide" in America, and many a person pulled the level hoping that he would do that. The reality is the opposite. No President in the past century has played such a negative role in regards to race in America. That will be a large part of President Obama's legacy. It is tragic both for the black community and our nation.

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Comments From & On Our Race Baiter In Chief

Obama appeared at today's White House Press Briefing to weigh in on the Zimmerman trial, its aftermath and racism in America. Some of what he said was good, some was bad - but unfortunately, the most important of his points were simply utterly outrageous.  Here are his entire remarks:



Here are the test of those remarks with comments in blue:


The reason I actually wanted to come out today is not to take questions, but to speak to an issue that obviously has gotten a lot of attention over the course of the last week, the issue of the Trayvon Martin ruling. I gave an — a preliminary statement right after the ruling on Sunday, but watching the debate over the course of the last week I thought it might be useful for me to expand on my thoughts a little bit.

First of all, you know, I — I want to make sure that, once again, I send my thoughts and prayers, as well as Michelle’s, to the family of Trayvon Martin, and to remark on the incredible grace and dignity with which they’ve dealt with the entire situation. I can only imagine what they’re going through, and it’s — it’s remarkable how they’ve handled it.


I think it horrendous that, at no point does Obama similarly mention George Zimmerman, his family or parent, nor the mountain of death threats being made against them.


The second thing I want to say is to reiterate what I said on Sunday, which is there are going to be a lot of arguments about the legal — legal issues in the case. I’ll let all the legal analysts and talking heads address those issues. The judge conducted the trial in a professional manner. The prosecution and the defense made their arguments. The juries were properly instructed that in a — in a case such as this, reasonable doubt was relevant, and they rendered a verdict. And once the jury’s spoken, that’s how our system works.

But I did want to just talk a little bit about context and how people have responded to it and how people are feeling. You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African- American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African- American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that — that doesn’t go away.


According to the racial grievance industry, our nation is still 1950 Selma, Alabama writ large. Outrageously, many in the racial grievance industry - including the NAACP and members of the Congressional Black Congress - are comparing the Zimmerman case is to the savage racist murders and subsequent denial of justice in the cases of Emmet Till and Medger Evers. Emmet Till, a 14 years old Missippi boy, was tortured and murdered in 1955 by a group of white men for the crime of flirting with a white girl. Two men were acquitted by an all white jury at trial, after which they bragged of their act of murder. Medger Evers was a former soldier and civil rights activist assassinated in 1963, Mississippi, by a member of the KKK, Bryan de la Beckwith. Two trials held at the time resulted in hung juries. Beckwith was not successfully prosecuted for the murder until 1994.

Obama just blessed off on that viewpoint as, at least, not unreasonable.  That is absolutely outrageous.


There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

And you know, I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.


One, Obama is suggesting that Trayvon Martin was racially profiled by George Zimmerman.  Wow.   No one on either side of the trial claimed that by the conclusion of the trial.  Nor is there a single bit of evidence of that.  But Obama just gave it a wink and a nod.

Two, there is a reason people, including blacks such as Jessee Jackson, react that way at the approach of young black men that they don't know.  It is because, statistically, blacks are exponentially more likely to commit crimes, and especially violent crime, including murder and robbery, than other racial groups.  In 2011, blacks made up 13% of the population. Yet according to FBI Crime Statistics, in not a single category of crime, with the exception of DUI was the number of total criminal incidents committed by blacks equal to or below their proportionate representation in society. In 2011, blacks in the U.S. were responsible for 49.7% of all murders, 55.6% of all robberies, 32.9% of all forcible rapes, and 33.9% of all aggravated assaults. The FBI does not publish like statistics for victims, but looking at the numbers, blacks were just as likely to be the victims of crime out of all proportion to their representation in society. In 2011, 49.9% of all murder victims were black.

So if the presence of blacks, and particularly young black men, causes such an unfortunate reaction in others, it is not because of their racism, its because of the reality of rampant black criminality.  That is not a fault of whites, nor for that matter, Jessee Jackson.

Three, this plays right into the claims that there should never be racial profiling.  Now, after listening to many in the racial grievance industry speak about "racial profiling" this past week, it seems that what they mean is they don't want anyone not black to feel suspicious about a black person, irrespective of how they are acting.  That is not merely a philosophical argument - it is as real as the crime and murder rate differentials between NYC and Chicago.  New York City, under Nanny Bloomberg's aggressive 'Stop & Frisk' policies, something the same racial grievance industry claims is racism - now has less than a third of the murder rate of Chicago where, if you are black, it is statistically less safe to live than it is to be a soldier in Afghanistan.


The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. And that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case.


This is an attack our criminal justice system without adjusting for the reality of grossly disproportionate black criminality relative to population.  Further, it is a back handed slap at the Zimmerman verdict.  Regardless of the facts at trial, Obama is saying that it is reasonable that blacks interpret it as a racist incident.  Just horseshit.


Now, this isn’t to say that the African-American community is naive about the fact that African-American young men are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, that they are disproportionately both victims and perpetrators of violence. It’s not to make excuses for that fact, although black folks do interpret the reasons for that in a historical context.


This is a non-sequiter.  There is no ":historical context" for massively disproportionate criminality in the black community. The racial grievance industry interprets the plight of all blacks through is the utter canard that all whites in the U.S. are racist.  We - and in particular those on the right - are all Bull Connor Democrats.  That is not a "historical context.  That is an incredibly destructive fantasy,


We understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to a very difficult history.


No, black violence is not born out of a "very violent past."  That is not merely an excuse, it is false.  It is born out of a breakdown in the black family unit that has gotten worse, not better, since Daniel Patrick Moynihan's landmark report of 1965.  It there is ever going to be a true "dialogue" on race that has a chance of improving the plight of blacks as a whole, that is where it has to begin.  In fairness, that dialogue would, as Moynihan pointed out, have to acknowledge the role of racism in current situation of blacks.  But we arrived at that point in the dialogue in 1965.  Any and every attempt to continue the dialogue since then has been met with the 'race card.'      .


And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration. And the fact that a lot of African-American boys are painted with a broad brush and the excuse is given, well, there are these statistics out there that show that African-American boys are more violent — using that as an excuse to then see sons treated differently causes pain.

I think the African-American community is also not naive in understanding that statistically somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else. So — so folks understand the challenges that exist for African- American boys, but they get frustrated, I think, if they feel that there’s no context for it or — and that context is being denied. And — and that all contributes,


So, if I understand this argument, unless non-blacks are willing to drown themselves in guilt for past historical sins that they did not commit, then the racial grievance industry is justified to be frustrated..


I think, to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.


This is the single most outrageous statement that Obama makes - one that undergirds the whole racial grievance industry,  It, to use the words of Obama, painting America with a "broad brush."  He condemns our society and our legal system as irredeemably racist.  It means that we are still the America of Till and Evers.  And that is pure bullshit.
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Two cases come immediately to mind - O.J. Simpson and Roderick Scott.  Simpson was given the same treatment that the murderers of Till and Evers were given.  That case was a travesty of justice, but leave it aside.  Roderick Scott is of particular note.  His case, decided just days ago, was a photo negative of the Zimmerman case. Scott is a black man in Rochester, New York who came upon three 16 year old white boys whom he believed were stealing from cars in the area. Brandishing a gun, he ordered them to stay in place until the police arrived. According to Scott, one of the boys charged him, saying that he was going to "get" Scott. Before the boy so much as touched Scott, he lay dead of two gunshot wounds that Scott claimed he fired in self defense. Unlike Trayvon Martin, the person Scott shot had no history of any troubled past. Like Trayvon Martin, the boy's parents are inconsolable, believing their innocent son was murdered. Scott was acquitted of manslaughter charges within the past week following a jury trial.


Now, the question for me at least, and I think, for a lot of folks is, where do we take this? How do we learn some lessons from this and move in a positive direction? You know, I think it’s understandable that there have been demonstrations and vigils and protests, and some of that stuff is just going to have to work its way through as long as it remains nonviolent. If I see any violence, then I will remind folks that that dishonors what happened to Trayvon Martin and his family.


Again, Obama portrays Martin as an innocent victim.  Trayvon's death is a tragedy, but what did he do on that night he died for which he should be honored?  The only possible inference is that he is a martyr to racism.


But beyond protests or vigils, the question is, are there some concrete things that we might be able to do? I know that Eric Holder is reviewing what happened down there, but I think it’s important for people to have some clear expectations here. Traditionally, these are issues of state and local government — the criminal code. And law enforcement has traditionally done it at the state and local levels, not at the federal levels.


Obama just told the racial grievance industry that, try as they might, there will be no federal civil rights case filed against George Zimmerman.  It is called burying the lead.


That doesn’t mean, though, that as a nation, we can’t do some things that I think would be productive. So let me just give a couple of specifics that I’m still bouncing around with my staff so we’re not rolling out some five-point plan, but some areas where I think all of us could potentially focus.

Number one, precisely because law enforcement is often determined at the state and local level, I think it’d be productive for the Justice Department — governors, mayors to work with law enforcement about training at the state and local levels in order to reduce the kind of mistrust in the system that sometimes currently exists. You know, when I was in Illinois I passed racial profiling legislation. And it actually did just two simple things. One, it collected data on traffic stops and the race of the person who was stopped. But the other thing was it resourced us training police departments across the state on how to think about potential racial bias and ways to further professionalize what they were doing.

And initially, the police departments across the state were resistant, but actually they came to recognize that if it was done in a fair, straightforward way, that it would allow them to do their jobs better and communities would have more confidence in them and in turn be more helpful in applying the law. And obviously law enforcement’s got a very tough job.

So that’s one area where I think there are a lot of resources and best practices that could be brought bear if state and local governments are receptive. And I think a lot of them would be. And — and let’s figure out other ways for us to push out that kind of training.

Along the same lines, I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it — if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations. I know that there’s been commentary about the fact that the stand your ground laws in Florida were not used as a defense in the case.

On the other hand, if we’re sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?

And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these “stand your ground” laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?

And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.


Given that neither racial profiling nor Stand Your Ground laws were implicated in the Zimmerman case, this is Obama's way hoodwinking blacks into believing that he and the rest of the racial grievance industry are standing up for them.  And therein lies the true irony of the racial grievance industry.  The demands of Obama will, if pushed forward, have their most clear and negative impact on one identifiable racial group - blacks.  The racial profiling laws would make another Chicago of New York City.  Taking away Stand Your Ground laws would most hurt the black population, those most subject to violence and those most likely to rely on Stand Your Ground in defense.  That pales in comparison, though, to the fact that while more black teens will murdered and more blacks put in jail for defending themselves, at least more money will flow into the coffers of the NAACP and the members of the Congressional Black Caucus will have a better chance of reelection. It's obscene  


Number three — and this is a long-term project: We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys? And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there who need help who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them?


This is the only redeeming part of Obama's remarks.  It is the thousand dollar question.  It is unfortunate that Obama only gets to it after reinforcing all of the canards of the racial grievance industry.  And because of that, it is why nothing will happen under Obama's watch to change the dynamic in the black community.  That is the real tragedy of what will be President Obama's legacy.


You know, I’m not naive about the prospects of some brand-new federal program.  I’m not sure that that’s what we’re talking about here. But I do recognize that as president, I’ve got some convening power.

And there are a lot of good programs that are being done across the country on this front. And for us to be able to gather together business leaders and local elected officials and clergy and celebrities and athletes and figure out how are we doing a better job helping young African-American men feel that they’re a full part of this society and that — and that they’ve got pathways and avenues to succeed — you know, I think that would be a pretty good outcome from what was obviously a tragic situation. And we’re going to spend some time working on that and thinking about that.

And then finally, I think it’s going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching. You know, there have been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven’t seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have.

On the other hand, in families and churches and workplaces, there’s a possibility that people are a little bit more honest, and at least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can; am I judging people, as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy.

And let me just leave you with — with a final thought, that as difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don’t want us to lose sight that things are getting better. Each successive generation seems to be making progress in changing attitudes when it comes to race. I doesn’t mean that we’re in a postracial society. It doesn’t mean that racism is eliminated. But you know, when I talk to Malia and Sasha and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they’re better than we are. They’re better than we were on these issues. And that’s true in every community that I’ve visited all across the country.

And so, you know, we have to be vigilant and we have to work on these issues, and those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions. But we should also have confidence that kids these days I think have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did, and that along this long, difficult journey, you know, we’re becoming a more perfect union — not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.

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Bob Parks On The Zimmerman Trial & Its Aftermath

Bob Parks is a conservative journalist and radio show host. He runs the website Black & Right. He appears in a Sun TV interview on the Zimmerman case as well as how it is being exploited by the racial grievance industry. It is well worth a listen.



And here is another radio show host, Larry Elder, also on the Zimmerman trial with CNN Host Piers Morgan. Let the fireworks begin:



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Interview of Zimmerman Case Alternate Juror

1. The evidence indicated that Trayvon Martin arrived at his home, then doubled back to confront Zimmerman.

2. There was no evidence shown that it was a racist incident. The evidence was to the contrary.

3. The evidence shows that it was Zimmerman on the ground and screaming for help.

4. The verdict was accurate based on the evidence.

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Stand Your Ground: Holder's Pandering And The Reality Of The Black Community

Eric Holder's latest paen to the vociferous racial grievance industry is to suggest that Stand Your Ground laws play an unfair role in violence against blacks. As I said the moment Holder made the claim, the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus will eat this up. It will give many in their constituency the illusion that their leaders are taking a firm stand against something implicated in imaginary rampant white racism. Of much greater import, I opined that those who would be most hurt by removing Stand Your Ground laws would of necessity be blacks - that group of people far more likely to suffer violent crime, and indeed, to suffer it from other blacks. And lo and behold, this from the Daily Caller:

African Americans benefit from Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law at a rate far out of proportion to their presence in the state’s population, despite an assertion by Attorney General Eric Holder that repealing “Stand Your Ground” would help African Americans.

Black Floridians have made about a third of the state’s total “Stand Your Ground” claims in homicide cases, a rate nearly double the black percentage of Florida’s population. The majority of those claims have been successful, a success rate that exceeds that for Florida whites. . . .

But approximately one third of Florida “Stand Your Ground” claims in fatal cases have been made by black defendants, and they have used the defense successfully 55 percent of the time, at the same rate as the population at large and at a higher rate than white defendants, according to a Daily Caller analysis of a database maintained by the Tampa Bay Times. Additionally, the majority of victims in Florida “Stand Your Ground” cases have been white.

African Americans used “Stand Your Ground” defenses at nearly twice the rate of their presence in the Florida population, which was listed at 16.6 percent in 2012.

So Hodler takes a law to task as racist that actually protects law abiding blacks most of all. What a nightmare.

There are several inexcusable obscenities in American society. One is the endless cycle of poverty, single parent homes, criminality and poor education effecting a large strata of black society. Another is the racial grievance industry that does NOTHING beyond paying lip service to these conditions. It paints a picture of America still in 1950's Selma with the deeply racist Bull Connor Democrats still in control. I truly hope that there is a special place in hell for the leaders of the racial grievance industry. They are causing untold harm to our nation and, even worse, they are devastating to black culture and society.

Related: Speak of the devil, I just now saw this from The Hill:

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) are readying a flurry of bills in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal on charges in last year’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin.

The lawmakers are drafting proposals intended to rein in racial profiling; scrap state stand-your-ground laws; and promote better training for the nation’s neighborhood watch volunteers, among other anti-violence measures. CBC members had remained largely silent throughout the trial, but following the verdict, argued forcefully that, decades after the civil rights movement, the nation’s criminal justice system still discriminates against blacks and other minorities.

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), an icon of the civil rights era, said the decision “seems to justify the stalking and killing of innocent black boys and deny them any avenue of self-defense.” Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), head of the CBC, decried “the presumption of guilt so often associated with people of color.”

“George Zimmerman targeted Trayvon Martin as a potential criminal because Trayvon Martin is black,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told MSNBC Monday.

“Anyone who denies that racism isn’t alive today, particularly in the so-called justice system, is exceedingly delusional,” said Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), who wore a hoodie on the House floor last year in a demonstration.

“This verdict points to the reality that there are far too many walking America’s streets wearing a hoodie, carrying snacks and soft drink, which can result in a ‘death sentence’ particularly if they are young, black and male.”

Leading the legislative charge is Rep. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and a CBC member, who for years has pushed legislation to curtail racial profiling in the nation’s law enforcement agencies.

Conyers’s proposal is still being crafted, but past iterations have barred any law enforcement agent from targeting people based solely on race, gender or religion. It would also mandate race-sensitive training as a condition of receiving federal funding and require the Justice Department to provide Congress with periodic reports detailing discriminatory profiling practices.

Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), a CBC member who represents the district where Martin lived, said problems would persist until Congress acts.

“Until we pass meaningful laws against profiling, Americans will continue to be singled out and arrested for driving while black, shopping while black, walking while black and just plain being black,” said Wilson, who’s also working on the racial profiling bill. “My own children, and nearly all of the young men I know, have been stopped by the police at least once, for no apparent reason.”

Right - because laws against profiling will help blacks every bit as much as repeal of stand your ground laws. Compare and contrast the black murder capital of America, Chicago, a place more deadly than for Americans than Afghanistan and a place that studiously does not "profile," with, and I hate to say it, but Nanny Bloomberg's New York City. Under Bloomberg, NYC has instituted a highly aggressive stop and frisk program - something that clearly falls in the CBC's definition of profiling. That program has had a tremendously positive impact on crime in NYC, to the benefit of all but, particularly, to blacks and hispanics. This from NPR:

Closing arguments are set to take place Monday in the federal class action trial involving New York City's stop-and-frisk policy. The trial has been going on for two months in Manhattan.

Plaintiffs in Floyd v. City of New York claim the New York Police Department, its supervisors and its union pressured police officers to stop, question and frisk hundreds of thousands of people each year, even establishing quotas. They argue that 88 percent of the stops involved blacks and Hispanics, mostly men, and were in fact a form of racial profiling.

The police and the city argued that these policies were goals, not quotas, and have made New York the safest big city in America.

"I can't imagine any rational person saying that the techniques are not working and that we should stop them," says Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The city also argued that these stops took place in high crime areas where the crime was often black on black or Hispanic on Hispanic. As NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told public radio station WNYC: "Ninety-six percent of the shooting victims in New York City are black or Hispanic. Crime is down in this city in the last two decades 80 percent."

So the CBC and Eric Holder want to ritually sacrifice George Zimmerman, they want to repeal all stand your ground laws, and they want to end "racial profiling." Not a single one of those actions will help, in any way, the black population of our nation. To the contrary, each in their own way will do significant damage to the black population - including the sacrifice of the racially innocent George Zimmerman. But all will help the racial grievance industry to gather money and stay in power. Bastards. Absolutely worthless bastards.

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The Zimmerman Case: Of Idiots, Race Baiters, Animals & . . . A Few Who Get It

The Zimmerman case has brought out the full panapoly of the worst in our nation, along with a smattering of the intellectually honest.

The Idiots

Stevie Wonder - Mr. Wonder has vowed not to perform again in Florida until the state rescinds the Stand Your Ground law. Somebody tell this idiot that the Zimmerman case was purely a self defense case - the Stand Your Ground law was never raised in the Zimmerman trial.

The Race Baiters

Eric Holder - The most politicized - and race baiting - attorney general our nation has ever had, spoke today before the penultimate race baiters, the NAACP. What did he attack today to satisfy the NAACP lust for racial vengence? Stand Your Ground laws - while never mentioning what he well knows, that Stand Your Ground was never raised in the Zimmerman trial.



Like virtually everything that a race baiter touches, this is actually insidious in respect to the black community. Blacks do not merely commit crimes at the greatest rate in our nation, they are also much more likely to be the victims of that crime. Just what law abiding black victims need is to make it more difficult to legally defend themselves. As to Holder's assertions regarding stand your ground laws, I know of no data whatsoever that would support his claims.

Chicago's First Baptist Church, University Park -

Hillary Clinton - She gave a speech to a black sorority, painting Trayvon Martin as an innocent angel and a victim, There were no words of support for the jury verdict, nor for George Zimmerman, nor for the people or businesses suffering violence at the hands of animals in the wake of the jury verdict. Rather Clinton described the verdict as causing "heartache, deep painful heartache."

Charles Blow - At the NYT, Blow puts the all the blame for innocent Trayvon Martin's death on "the system," amazingly enough, even including the right to self defense.

Yahoo News - Yahoo begins their story: "In a case that bears some striking similarities to George Zimmerman's, a 76-year-old Milwaukee man is set to stand trial this week in the 2012 shooting death a 13-year-old boy he had accused of stealing from him." Striking similarities? Read about the case. That statement is insane. There is not a single similarity beyond the fact that a person with black skin is dead.

The Animals

Baltimore: A group of black teens chased down a Hispanic man in Baltimore then pistol whipped and beat him, shouting that "this is for Trayvon."

Mississippi - Three blacks pulled a white jogger into their car then pummelled him, shouting that "this is for Trayvon."

Los Angeles - Rioters (race not identified) damaged cars, assaulted people and swarmed a Wal Mart.

Pennsylvania - Someone painted "Kill Zimmerman" on the wall of a commercial business and then set it on fire.

A Few Who Get It

Jason Riley - WSJ: Race, Politics & The Zimmerman Trial

Richard Cohen - WP: Racism versus Reality Kudos to Cohen, a left wing journalist, for making a decent effort at intellectual honesty while literally bleeding onto the page in an effort not to overly offend his left wing readers.

Patrick Brenan - NRO: "There Is No Such Thing As Black On Black Crime?"

And One Who Doesn't

Yamiche Alcindor - USA Today: Experts: Prosecutors failed to humanize Trayvon. Mx. Alcindor opines that the reason Zimmerman wasn't convicted was because the state failed to humanize Trayvon Martin, arguing that they should have played more on the emotion of the jurors. She must not have watched the trial. The state's whole case was emotion, not fact. Further, if Trayvon had been portrayed realistically, it would only have been easier for the jury to decide that he was a troubled teen who made a fatal - and criminal - error in attacking Zimmerman.

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Race & The Zimmerman Case (Updated)

The Zimmerman case is the poster child for all that is wrong and destructive with racial politics in America. The left has been trying to make this into a race hate crime, something which it never was. Nor was this case about Florida's Stand Your Ground law, something never raised as a defense at trial. This has been about racial politics from start to finish - facts be damned.

The race machine - and the left which is fully invested in it - has built up a pile of myths surrounding this case, none of which stood the test of evidence at trial. They painted Treyvon Martin as an innocent angel who did nothing wrong while demonizing a white man (actually a mixed race hispanic, white and black, but let's not confuse the issues with facts) who supposedly hunted Trayvon down, accosted him and then killed him for no reason but racial animus. No one more so than the nation's worst race baiter, Al Sharpton (a man actually responsible for murder) has led the charge:



As to the facts and law presented at trial, it is clear that both Zimmerman and Martin had every right to be where they were on the night of the shooting. What Trayvon Martin did not have a right to do was begin pummelling Zimmerman. What Zimmerman had a right to do was act in self defense if he reasonably believed himself in danger of serious harm. Listen to those screams on the 9-11 tape and it is apparent that the person screaming felt himself in extremis. Since we know that Martin was on top, pummelling Zimmerman, it follows logically that it was Zimmerman making those panicked screams for help. [Update: One of the jurors has just in confirmed the above as the basis for the jury verdict] This from Protein Wisdom:

Anyone with half-a-brain who actually watched the trial cannot come away without knowing that it was Trayvon’s own behavior that led to his death. It was the behavior embodied in his “creepy-ass cracker” remark, his braggadocio attitude about street-fighting and his problems with authority that had him bounced to his father’s home that ultimately killed him, not George Zimmerman. . . .

So when Martin circled back to teach the “creepy-ass cracker” a lesson in respect by punching George in the nose, then beating his head against the concrete for 40 seconds while George screamed for help, then it was Trayvon, not George, that ended his own life.

George never did anything illegal, though those that want the sheep civilians to “shelter in place” in their homes at night, tried to use this show trial to reinforce the meme that The State will take care of you, don’t you dare try it on your own. . . .

The race machine, epitomized by Sharpton, wants desperately to milk this incident for all of the black rage and white liberal guilt that its worth, irregardless of the facts. And for their part, many on the left, including Obama, want to use this as an excuse for limiting access to guns. Obama actually has a foot in both camps, calling not only for gun control - apparently irrespective of whether Zimmerman used his gun in a legitimate act of self defense - but also called on the nation to "honor" Treyvon Martin, certainly suggesting that Martin was the innocent in this matter.

The last thing any on the left, from Obama on down, want is to have someone point out that this case is, more than anything, an indictment of the black subculture that promotes violence and criminality. For instance, Tristan Breaux, the recently elected 25 year old head of the Norfolk NAACP wrote the following on his Facebook Page:

"I wonder why it is that we are always willing to say someone who clearly had a shaky past, was the victim," Breaux asked . . . referring to Trayvon Martin. . . .

The post went on to ask if people are blinded to why Trayvon was staying with his dad and why he wasn't at home at at time of the shooting.

For his intellectual honesty, the left has turned on Breaux and are now calling for his ouster. And Mr. Breaux is not the only voice of honesty - rapper Lupe Fiasco can also likely expect a backlash one would imagine for his non-conformist remarks in the wake of the trial.

As to the legacy of this case, the attorney who runs the site Talk Left gives a good summation:

. . . [T]he legacy of this case will be that the media never gets it right, and worse, that a group of lawyers, with the aid of a public relations team, who had a financial stake in the outcome of pending and anticipated civil litigation, were allowed to commandeer control of Florida's criminal justice system, in pursuit of a divisive, personal agenda.

Their transformation of a tragic but spontaneous shooting into the crime of the century, and their relentless demonization of the person they deemed responsible, not for a tragic killing, but for "cold-blooded murder," has called into question the political motives and ethics of the officials serving in the Executive branch of Florida's government, ruined the career of other public officials, turned the lives of the Zimmerman family, who are as innocent as their grieving clients, into a nightmare, and along the way, set back any chance of a rational discussion of the very cause they were promoting, probably for years. . . .

The NAACP is now calling for Holder's Justice Department to file civil rights charges against Zimmerman. The big problem for this is that none of the evidence, including that unearthed during an FBI investigation, showed any hint of racial animus in George Zimmerman's past. But then again, this is not about facts, its about myths and political power. This is doing a grave injustice not merely to our nation and to the Zimmerman family, but most tragically to the black community. This is saying that there are no problems in the incredibly dysfunctional lower strata of black society, but rather that it is all a function of racism. No one sums up the myths of this case or the specious argument more so than the NYT editorial board in their op-ed of yesterday:

. . . While Mr. Zimmerman’s conviction might have provided an emotional catharsis, we would still be a country plagued by racism, which persists in ever more insidious forms despite the Supreme Court’s sanguine assessment that “things have changed dramatically,” as it said in last month’s ruling striking down the heart of the Voting Rights Act. (The Justice Department is right to continue its investigation into whether Mr. Zimmerman may still be prosecuted under federal civil rights laws.)

The jury reached its verdict after having been asked to consider Mr. Zimmerman’s actions in light of Florida’s now-notorious Stand Your Ground statute. Under that law, versions of which are on the books in two dozen states, a person may use deadly force if he or she “reasonably believes” it is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm — a low bar that the prosecutors in this case fought in vain to overcome.

These laws sound intuitive: who would argue that you may not protect yourself against great harm? But of course, the concept of “reasonable belief” is transformed into something deadly dangerous when firearms are involved. And when the Stand Your Ground laws intersect with lax concealed-carry laws, it works essentially to self-deputize anyone with a Kel-Tec 9 millimeter and a grudge.

It has been a bad year so far for gun control. But if anything, cases like this should be as troubling as the mass killings that always prompt a national outcry and promises of legislative remedy. We were heartened that President Obama, in his statement after the verdict was issued, took the opportunity to denounce once again “the tide of gun violence” sweeping the country.

In the end, what is most frightening is that there are so many people with guns who are like George Zimmerman. Fear and racism may never be fully eliminated by legislative or judicial order, but neither should our laws allow and even facilitate their most deadly expression. Trayvon Martin was an unarmed boy walking home from the convenience store. If only Florida could give him back his life as easily as it is giving back George Zimmerman’s gun.

The NYT is hardly the only outlet keeping up the myths, and indeed, are positively staid in comparison to Salon's Edward Wyckoff Williams who writes that the trial was part of the "new Jim Crow," that calls not to riot are unreasonable, and that:

The nation’s sociopolitical consciousness remains plagued by a three-fifths compromise that devalues the lives of black people in general, and black boys and men in particular. . . .

For African-Americans this is not new. The paradox of being implicitly excluded from the guarantee of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness has been reiterated and reinforced by public policy and social malaise for centuries. President Barack Obama is not immune — as he’s become the target of incessant “white rage”: race-baiting attacks, prejudice and bias even prior to his election. The Republican Party and its neo-Confederate Tea Party wing has been committed to invalidating his political and legislative legacy as much as the Zimmerman jury invalidated the civil rights of Trayvon. The disparate precedent set, therefore, becomes all the more insulting when we’re told to simply shut up and bear it. . . .

What words written here can suffice to argue on behalf of an innocent dead child, as his murderer walks free — absolved by the system that failed to hold him responsible from the very beginning? The very logic that precipitated Trayvon’s death and rendered jurisprudence to justify his killing reflects the misguided principles at the heart of Zimmerman’s defense: that this black boy had no right to live. . . .

And that's not even the most outrageous example of this political myth of victimization and rampant white-conservative racism. The worst comes from The Guardian, where Gary Younge wrote over a picture of then 12 year old Treyvon that it is now "Open season on black boys after a verdict like this."

The race machine is in overdrive and there not going to let this one go so long as they see the possibility for political and monetary gain. Al Sharpton, who demanded not merely the arrest of Zimmerman but his conviction, will be "mobilizing" protests in 100 cities . . . to pressure the Justice Department into taking legal action against George Zimmerman." And the animals are out, with death threats against Zimmerman and other "crackers." These are people fed on a steady diet of victimization and the myth that we are still in (Democratic controlled) 1950's Selma. It is obscene.

But the settling of accounts on this is far from just on the side of the race baiters. The parents of Trayvon Martin are considering a civil case against Zimmerman - and that is the one where all of the unvarnished truth will come out. What will be on trial in such a proceeding is not merely Zimmerman, but also Trayon Martin. All of the evidence kept out of the criminal trial will likely be admissible in a civil trial, and from just what is out in the public domain today, it would likely paint the picture of a young man with impaired judgement, uncontrollable by his mother and caught up in the black subculture of violence. Zimmerman, for his part, plans to sue NBC - and hopefully others - for their role in demonizing him.

And then there is the Special Prosecutor in this case, Angela Corey. One could argue that her decision to bring suit in this case - even for second degree murder - was within the outer boundaries of her discretion. But what is beyond argument is the way she handled this trial, including the withholding of key evidence and the termination of a whistleblower who brought her actions to the attention of the defense attorneys. She needs to be fired and subject to a civil suit for these acts.

Lastly, to add on a personal note, I am so tired of this horseshit it is beyond belief. I am deeply conservative, as are many, but hardly all, of my friends. I firmly believe in equality for all and that neither racism nor race baiting have any place in this country. And indeed, I know of no one among my friends, nor in the larger circle of those on the right, who believes in anything else. I resent the hell out of being labeled a racist by the left because I refuse to kow tow to their use of the race card or because I think their policies a complete failure. I am apoplectic with Sharpton and his ilk doing their best to gin up rage in the black community for their own power and wealth while doing nothing to fix the real problems in at least a large strata of black society. At the heart of those problems is, as David Goldman writes at PJM, "the breakdown of the black family" and all that means for criminality, jobs and education - something apparent ever since Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan raised it in his 1965 report "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." As Goldman concludes at PJM:

Why have civil rights organizations and black clergy wagered their reputations on the Zimmerman case? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the issues that really concern African-Americans simply are too painful to discuss. Five years after the ultimate boost to self-esteem — the election of the first black president — things are getting worse faster. If black leaders — from Barack Obama and Eric Holder on down — can’t talk about the real problems, the prospects for the future are frightening indeed.

Goldman is right. The race baiters need to be called to account every bit as much as actual racists. And the race card, something that has done so much to harm our nation, needs to be put in the dust bin of history.

In conclusion, this from Martin Luther King, quoted in today's WSJ by Jason Riley:

"Do you know that Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes? We've got to face that. And we've got to do something about our moral standards," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told a congregation in 1961. "We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can't keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves."

The problems of actual racism in our society have greatly receded since MLK's remarks. But clearly, the problems raised by MLK have not - least of all by the race baiting industry exploiting the tragedy of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.

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