by Ben Shapiro
ALEC happened to back state legislation like Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which provided, essentially, that if you are in a place where you have a right to be, and you’re attacked physically, you don’t have a duty to retreat—you can stand your ground and “meet force with force, including deadly force” if necessary to save your own life. This isn’t self-defense, which is a defense to a charge—it provides immunity from criminal prosecution and civil action.36 Florida isn’t the only state with such laws; over twenty other states have them.
As soon as the media focused its ire on George Zimmerman, it began claiming that Zimmerman had not been arrested due to the stand-your-ground law. Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post called the law “insane” and suggested that it was a “license to kill” invoked by police to protect Zimmerman.37 So did Eugene Robinson of the Post. Robinson went further—not only was the law wrong, it was . . . wait for it . . . racist! “Imagine that Martin, not Zimmerman, had been carrying a legal handgun—and that it was Zimmerman who ended up dead. The law should have compelled police to release Martin, a young African American in a hoodie, without charges. Somehow, I doubt that would have happened.”38
There was no actual evidence that Zimmerman had been released thanks to “stand your ground.” In fact, there were zero contemporaneous media reports claiming that Zimmerman had cited the stand-your-ground law to justify his actions. He instead said what all nonlawyers would say: self-defense. As for the police, while later reports claimed that they cited “stand your ground” to release Zimmerman, contemporaneous reports said he was released because they had no evidence to contradict his self-defense claims.
Yet the stand-your-ground meme was picked up by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and virtually everyone else in the mainstream media.
This was deliberate. Zimmerman wasn’t arrested initially because police often don’t arrest in clear cases of self-defense, which is what Zimmerman claimed. Only after an arrest does stand-your-ground come into play—a lawyer can ask for a hearing on the stand-your-ground issue, which can result in a case being dismissed. But Zimmerman’s first lawyer suggested that stand-your-ground wasn’t even applicable to the case—“this is self-defense, and that’s been around forever,” he said.39
But if Zimmerman had claimed self-defense, the media and Obama’s organizational allies would have no weapon to wield against ALEC.
So the left homed in on ALEC for pushing for stand-your-ground laws—even though such laws were completely irrelevant to this case. On March 29, the NAACP, the National Urban League, the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Van Jones’s ColorOfChange, People for the American Way, and several members of Congress, among others, all came together in front of ALEC’s headquarters to demand that ALEC stop supporting “Kill at Will”—that is, stand-your-ground laws.40 All of these groups are heavily linked to the Obama administration in terms of donations; many of them have a revolving-door staff relationship with the Obama White House.
They simultaneously targeted ALEC for its support of voter identification measures, which would require voters to show ID before casting a ballot. That policy is opposed by liberals on the grounds that it’s “racist.” What makes ID racist? Nothing, really—you have to show ID to buy a beer, unless you can get the creepy guy on the curb to buy a six-pack for you. But what makes voter ID racist is that it stops voter fraud—and we can’t have that, since Democrats are all too eager to find folks they can bus to the polls, with or without ID.
Since February 2012, the Obama administration had, through its liberal organizational allies, pressed against voter ID laws. In early March 2012, NAACP president Ben Jealous appeared at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to proclaim that America was racist for enacting such laws. “The power of the UN on state governments historically is to shame them and to put pressure on the US government to bring them into line with global standards, best practices for democracy.”41
With the newfound publicity surrounding ALEC, however, the Obama administration and its allies knew that the campaign against voter ID could be piggybacked onto Trayvon Martin and the associated anti-ALEC cause.
“We are organizing. We are not agonizing,” railed Representative James Clyburn (D-SC). “We have staffed up.” ColorOf-Change tweeted “@CocaCola is helping undermine voting rights. Tell them to stop.”42 “The clear and simple message was that you can’t come for black folks’ money by day and try to take away our vote by night,” blathered Rashad Robinson, ColorOfChange director.43 ColorOfChange, it is worth noting, has been a powerful tool for the left, standing behind boycott attempts on Fox News’ Eric Bolling and Lou Dobbs, among others. Overall, ColorOf-Change supposedly got 85,000 people to sign an anti-ALEC petition directed at Coke.44
Coke quickly pulled out of ALEC. “The Coca-Cola Company has elected to discontinue its membership with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC),” Coke spokespeople told the Washington Examiner. “We have a long-standing policy of only taking positions on issues that impact our Company and industry.”45
By April 18, 2012, ALEC corporate sponsors, including McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Kraft Foods, had pulled their involvement from the group. And so, that day, ALEC’s legislative board voted without dissent to shut down its noneconomic focuses. “We hate to see any members leave,” said spokeswoman Kaitlyn Buss. “[W]e hope to work with these companies that have had problems again in the future.”46 In May, Wal-Mart followed suit.
Suddenly, one of President Obama’s greatest political adversaries had been castrated.
This is how the left bullies. They use a racial incident to stir up fervor about the generally racist United States of America (remember, as we’ve learned so far, America is a racist and imperialist hellhole), portray conservative legislation as emblematic of that racism, and then fight to shut down any groups promoting that conservative legislation.
That same logic applies to the greatest of all causes: the cherished and powerful Obama administration.
YOU DON’T LIKE OBAMA BECAUSE YOU’RE RACIST
Remember how President Obama said that Trayvon looked like his fictional son?
That wasn’t an accident.
During the 2012 election cycle, President Obama was unable to settle on any workable theme. Hope and change were done. Obama had clearly underperformed, broken his campaign promises, utterly failed to reunite the country after the divisive Bush years. In fact, he had been the most divisive president since the pre–Civil War era.
But he had a reason for that: it wasn’t him, it was you.
See, you were a racist if you didn’t like what Obama was doing. In April 2008, in the secrecy of a fund-raiser in liberal heaven San Francisco, President Obama explained what he really thought of Americans: they’re a bunch of bigots. Small-town Americans—the same Americans who didn’t really like candidate Obama—were, not coincidentally, “bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”47
It was a theme he’d return to over and over again. If Americans didn’t like him, it was because his middle name was Hussein or because he didn’t look like all the other fellas on the dollar bills. For Obama, the only reason somebody would dislike his policies had to be the level of melanin in his skin. Or at least, that’s how the bully strategy went. Because the contrapositive was obvious: if you don’t want to be seen as a racist, back Obama.
It was no wonder, then, that Obama’s followers and backers got the message.
In 2009, when the Tea Party formed spontaneously from the vehement backlash against Obama’s high-spending bailout policies, the Obama administration panicked. They insisted that the Tea Party had started not because of opposition to anti-constitutional values, but because Tea Party was short for Tea and Lynching Party. Obama was black; the Tea Party wanted to throw him into Boston Harbor.
The media jumped on this meme qu
ickly. National Public Radio’s then-CEO and president Vivian Schiller called the Tea Party “racist.”48 MSNBC was so eager to paint the Tea Party as racist that they simply made things up. Contessa Brewer showed video of Tea Partiers legally carrying guns, then said somberly, “There are questions about whether this has racial overtones . . . white people showing up with guns.” Only one problem, Contessa: the footage of the “white person” with a gun was actually a black guy. They’d chopped off his head on the footage. Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC then piped up, “they get the variable of a black president on top of all these other things and that’s the move—the cherry on top, if you will, to the accumulated frustration for folks.” Only on MSNBC would figuratively cutting off a black man’s head be considered antiracist, but carrying a gun at a Tea Party while being black be considered racist.49
Obama’s Hollywood friends turned out to explain to the benighted American public that all those folks protesting with flags had picked up Old Glory because they ran out of replicas of the Confederate Stars and Bars. Morgan Freeman, once again playing God by reading people’s minds, said that the Tea Party was “going to do whatever [they] can to get this black man outta here. . . . It is a racist thing.”50
Sean Penn, taking a break from hanging with South and Central American dictators, called the Tea Party the “Get the N-word out of the White House Party,” and said that the Tea Party wanted to “lynch” President Obama.51 Alan Cumming, the voice of Gutsy from The Smurfs movie, said the Tea Party was both homophobic and racist—a twofer! Janeane Garafalo told Keith Olbermann that the Tea Party love for Herman Cain hid “racist elements of the Republican Party.”52
For good measure, Obama himself said the Tea Party was racist. According to Kenneth T. Walsh’s book Family of Freedom, “Obama, in his most candid moments, acknowledged that race was still a problem. In May 2010, he told guests at a private White House dinner that race was probably a key component in the rising opposition to his presidency from conservatives, especially right-wing activists in the anti-incumbent ‘Tea Party’ movement that was then surging across the country.”53 There was more evidence that Tea Partiers hated Obama for his inability to dunk than for his race. But to Obama, who thinks that all must love him naturally, the only rationale for his dipping popularity had to be his father’s racial heritage.
All this was lies. It was nasty, baseless, and ridiculous—there was far more evidence of anti-Semitism in the Occupy movement than there was evidence of racism within the Tea Party. But that didn’t stop the media from trying. In fact, they and their friends tried so hard to label the Tea Party racist that they stooped to planting faux racists, including faux Nazis, at Tea Parties, just to gin up racial controversy. The Tea Parties threw the infiltrators out.54
But facts didn’t matter to the media. The greatest anti–Tea Party hoax of all came on the day that Nancy Pelosi and her radical minions staged a signing of the Obamacare bill. Tea Partiers showed up en masse on Capitol Hill. They were polite, courteous, and predictably, loud.
It was that noise level that allowed Democrats a chance to pounce on made-up Tea Party racism. First, Representative André Carson (D-IN) said that there were incipient KKK members in the crowd chanting “the N-word, the N-word, 15 times.” Carson walked alongside civil rights leader Representative John Lewis (D-GA). “It was like going into the time machine with John Lewis,” said Carson. “He said it reminded him of another time.”
Opposition to Obamacare was now racism. And it was the worst kind of racism. Bull Connor was lurking somewhere in that crowd with a fire hose and a tricorner hat.
There was only one problem: it didn’t happen.
Andrew Breitbart took the lead in proving it. He offered $10,000 for any tape of the n-word being shouted on Capitol Hill—the money would go to the United Negro College Fund. “It’s time for the allegedly pristine character of Rep. John Lewis to put up or shut up. Therefore, I am offering $10,000 of my own money to provide hard evidence that the N- word was hurled at him not 15 times, as his colleague reported, but just once. Surely one of those two cameras wielded by members of his entourage will prove his point,” wrote Andrew. “Rep. Lewis, if you can’t do that, I’ll give him a backup plan: a lie detector test.”55
Predictably, Lewis could provide no tape, and wouldn’t take a lie detector. But the myth lives on: to this day, leftists cite the phantom n-word incident as proof that the Tea Party was ready to reopen the Triangle Trade.
Despite the media’s complete assault on the Tea Party—despite their racial bullying—the Tea Party drove the Republican Party to a historic landslide in the 2010 congressional elections.
And Obama got more desperate. Which meant it was time to up the racial ante.
That’s where Trayvon Martin came in.
By the time the Trayvon Martin story broke in 2012, Obama’s approval ratings had fallen dramatically. He was in serious trouble. He needed a boost. And what better way to boost his sagging campaign than by labeling all Americans racists? Even better—label them George Zimmerman–style racists who secretly want to kill black folks.
It was a foolproof strategy. So naturally, the Obama folks found the biggest racial fool they could to prime the pump: MSNBC contributor and 9/11 truther Touré, their resident racial analyst, who grew up in an upper-middle-class white enclave. “Historically, after a surge in black power there is a retort, a reassertion of white power,” wrote Touré. “Now in the wake of the rise of Obama, we see the power structure responding by continuing to implement voter ID laws tailored to functionally disenfranchise poor blacks. We see an increase in violent crimes that target blacks but not specific blacks, any black person will do. . . . The anxiety about Obama’s success has led to many reactions, most of them not physical but still emotionally violent.” (This sort of nastiness isn’t unusual for Touré; later in the campaign, he actually suggested that Mitt Romney had engaged in “niggerization” of Obama by accusing Obama of running an “angry” campaign.)
Touré’s masterful bit of propaganda tied together all the loose ends: Trayvon Martin happened because Obama was elected; voter ID laws sprang from the same racism that brought about Trayvon Martin. In the end, it was the White Man’s Fault for not loving Obama.56 Jesse Jackson seconded the motion: “[Obama’s] victory has triggered tremendous backlash. Blacks are under attack.”57 Heather Horn of the Atlantic even wrote a piece saying that Europeans thought white Americans hated President Obama and killed Trayvon Martin for the same reason. “Most significantly, articles tend to connect Trayvon Martin, American history, and Barack Obama,” she wrote. Articles like . . . for example . . . Heather Horn’s.58
Michael Eric Dyson, who talks as though he should be reading commercial liners for the side effects of Cialis, was the worst. In an interview with Touré—and it should be noted here that it is a wonder the earth didn’t implode with stupidity at this pairing—he said, “Now it is the case that whatever hoods we wear, sagging pants, those become part of the folklore of American racism because it now signifies to white America that this is a hood, this is a thug, and the suspicion that is cast not only on Trayvon Martin. Look at the President of the United States of America. Here is a guy who do it the right way. He went to Harvard, he’s the President. Look at the—the ready—the—the steady stream of racism and bigotry . . . the—the—the stereotypes that prevail, right, I’m afraid of him, he’s a—he’s a moron, he’s an orangutan, he’s an animal. Look at all of that.”59 Technically, Dyson is the moron. Everyone agrees that Obama is brilliant, even if he’s a rotten president.
One question remained unanswered: if racist white Americans wanted to kill black teens like Trayvon and hated President Obama, why did Senator Obama become President Obama? Perhaps it was all a dark, clever scheme to suck victims like Trayvon into complacency so white folks could release their white Hispanic hounds.
The Trayvon angle, needless to say, didn’t work.
But that didn’t mean that Obama and his friends would stop invok
ing racism every time somebody looked cross-eyed at the president.
On June 15, 2012, President Obama announced that his executive branch would stop enforcing federal immigration law with regard to people aged sixteen to thirty who had resided in the country for at least five years, among other qualifications. In essence, he granted them amnesty.
That afternoon, the First Immigrant President (after all, according to the press, he’s also been the First Gay President, the First Female President, the First Jewish President, and, of course, the First Slow-Jamming President) held a press conference in the Rose Garden. He blabbed on and on about why he was the First Cool President for ignoring Congress, unilaterally undermining enacted immigration law in violation of constitutional limits on separation of powers. Then a journalist from the Daily Caller had the temerity to shout a question to him. Obama responded as though he’d taken a bullet à la Teddy Roosevelt. “Excuse me, sir. It’s not time for questions, sir. Not while I’m speaking.” When the Great One finally deigned to answer the reporter’s question, and the reporter asked a follow-up, he tut-tutted, “I didn’t ask for an argument, I’m answering your question.”
The New York Times breathlessly reported—as though they had just found a tape of Mitt Romney having sex with a horse—that the “interruption stunned White House correspondents and television viewers . . . [the reporter] violated decorum at the White House and generated online shouts of disapproval from other reporters, analysts and historians.”60
Somehow, the mainstream press didn’t seem to object nearly as much when President Clinton violated decorum on the Oval Office rug. Or when Sam Donaldson abused President Reagan on a regular basis.
But it wasn’t enough to feign outrage over an interruption. The press had to go whole hog and paint Obama’s entire opposition as racist—just because one guy didn’t have the manners to wait until Obama finished his sentence.