Meanwhile, the New Black Panther Party was openly offering a ten-thousand-dollar bounty for the capture of “child killer” George Zimmerman and passing out “Wanted Dead or Alive” posters.13 Not to be out-menaced, the New Black Liberation Militia promised to head to Florida and attempt a citizen’s arrest on George. “We’ll find him. We’ve got his mug shot and everything,” Najee Muhammad, a leader of the militia group, told the Associated Press. In perfectly nonjudgmental prose, the AP inquired as to whether such an arrest would be legal. The authorities they consulted seemed to think that the militia would “face a high legal hurdle in taking such action since they didn’t witness a crime.”14 These legal niceties offered Zimmerman no assurance. Fearing for his life, George left Florida to hide out with relatives in the Washington, D.C. area.

  On March 20 Daniel Maree, a young, black digital strategist then with the ad agency McCann Erickson, launched what he called the Million-Hoodie March to pressure Florida authorities to arrest Zimmerman. Within three days, Maree had gotten more than a million signatures, a glowing article in Ad Age, and an enthusiastic letter of support from McCann North America president Hank Summy. “This is an extraordinary story and a brilliant example of how one person’s idea, combined with the power of social media, and built by collaboration, can change the world,” wrote Summy.15 Yes, it was brilliant if, in fact, Zimmerman targeted Martin because he was black, killed him in cold blood, and skated because of police favoritism toward white, or at least whitish, citizens. Otherwise, it was a terrifying example of the mindless power of the social media.

  On March 21 Maree hosted the first of the Million Hoodie Marches in New York. Although only a few hundred people showed up, the idea was potent enough to attract the media as well as Martin’s parents, who were in town for a media tour. Maree, still a day or two away from being a celebrity, called the timing “incredible.” According to CBS News, the crowd greeted Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton with chants of “We want arrests.” Why the plural “arrests,” and who else might be in the line of fire, no one troubled to explain. “This is not a black and white thing,” Fulton told the crowd. “This is about a right or wrong thing.” She may have been sincere, but for the media and the crowd, including Maree, it was all about black and white. “I was outraged and wanted to do something about it,” he told CBS. He also shared the fact that he first learned about the case “earlier this week.”16

  It was still just Wednesday.

  9

  CHASING THE TRUTH

  NEARLY FOUR WEEKS AFTER THE SHOOTING, Team Trayvon fully owned the narrative. They faced very close to no media or political pushback at all, not in Florida, not in the nation at large. An Obama supporter and civil rights activist himself, Zimmerman had to feel as friendless as a human being possibly could. He surely sensed no relief on that late March day, and Team Trayvon likely felt no threat, when an obscure blog called the Conservative Treehouse began to do what it did best, as blogger Ytz4mee put it, “to deconstruct the narrative, to find out who all the people were behind the curtain.”1 On this case, as was typical, the Treepers pulled back the curtain as a team. One Treeper would post, and the other members and their allies would comment. Unlike most such sites, however, the goal was not just to air gripes. The goal at the Treehouse was to analyze existing data, add information, and, finally, to solve problems. In late March 2012, there was no messier problem to solve than the Trayvon story.

  Sundance launched the inquiry on Thursday morning, March 23. His headline expressed his uncertainty about what had happened in Florida and his uneasiness about its airing in the world’s media. (I first heard of the case on Irish TV). “Look, I’m as concerned at Trayvon Martin’s shooting as anyone,” Sundance observed, “but ’A Million Hoodie March’? Really? C’mon . . .” He was particularly concerned about the “optics,” the obvious imbalance in visual imagery, “the 12-year-old pictures of a pee wee football playing choir boy.” This struck him as excessive and unfair. “Young Mr. Martin was visiting his father after getting suspended from school,” wrote Sundance. “Trayvon was 17 years old when this occurred. Seventeen.”2

  Others shared Sundance’s misgivings. “Apparently the police have written statements from eye witnesses who saw Trayvon on top of Zimmerman, punching him,” commented Ytz4mee. She added another bit of useful information: “When the family retained legal counsel, the FIRST action of the attorney was to have Trayvon’s school records sealed. I find this a curious response for the family of a ‘model’ student who ‘majored in cheerfulness.’”3 She was alluding here to a March 17 article in the Orlando Sentinel that uncritically quoted a teacher of Martin’s.4 “If [Martin] was visiting his father,” asked the Treeper barnslayer, “why was he out alone? Why was there a struggle? Why didn’t the ‘kid’ just run? The security guard is hispanic/black. Where’s the racism?”5 Treeper Patriot Dreamer linked to a source that claimed Bob Zimmerman said his son was a “Spanish-speaking minority with many black family members and friends.”6 To be sure, all of these were bits and pieces, and not every fact was correct. Nevertheless, within hour one on day one of collective Treehouse engagement, the average Treeper had a better handle on the case than did the editorial board of the New York Times.

  Of course, the folks at the Times and other mainstream citadels would never admit this. Going on a half century, they had consistently misreported racial issues and willfully misunderstood those who would challenge them. The Times proved particularly resistant to the lessons of experience. In their insightful book Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, authors Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson document how the Times woefully misreported the Duke story just six years before.

  As the authors relate, the Times initially resisted the general media impulse to convict the accused lacrosse players of raping a black stripper before the evidence was established. Taking the lead for the Times was sportswriter Joe Drape. In a series of articles shortly after the story first broke in March 2006, Drape was among the very few reporters to present the defense’s case thoroughly and fairly. In fact, there was no other case. Durham County district attorney Michael Nifong built his prosecution of the three accused players on a foundation of suppressed evidence and outright lies. Nifong’s handling of the affair ended up costing him his job, his law license, his fortune, and even his freedom—at least for the day he served in the Durham County Jail on a contempt of court charge.

  Early on, Drape sniffed a hoax and told his editors as much. His reporting encouraged the defenders of the accused, and they fed him more inside information, hoping he would set the story straight. Drape never got the chance. He told the Duke people that he was “having problems with his editors.” Problems, indeed; they replaced him with reporters Rick Lyman and Duff Wilson, whose “politically correct politics,” according to Taylor and Johnson, routinely trumped the facts. Sports columnist Serena Roberts complemented the reporting with opinions righteously indifferent to the truth. “The message was clear,” wrote Taylor and Johnson. “Lynch the privileged white boys and due process be damned.” Unfortunately for the Times, the case blew up in Nifong’s face and its reporting was remembered as a “journalistic laughingstock.”7

  For all their public failures, especially on matters of race, the guardians of the mainstream media still felt free to trash those like the Treepers who would challenge their stranglehold on the news. A classic exchange along these lines occurred more than two years before the Trayvon shooting on the mainstream’s punditry showcase, Meet the Press. Host David Gregory and his heavy-hitter guests—Tom Friedman of the New York Times and NBC’s anchorman emeritus Tom Brokaw—were fretting openly about the fate of Barack Obama’s recently deposed “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones.8

  An attorney and “civil rights activist,” Jones had been fast-tracking his way through the Black Grievance Industry by cleverly fusing racial and environmental issues.9 In the way of background, Jones had come of age as a committed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist with a serious grudge against the police. As a leading member of STORM, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, he showed his contempt for justice and common sense by organizing the Bay Area campaign to free Mumia Abu Jamal, the most conspicuously guilty cop killer ever to muster up a movement on his behalf.

  It was with the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, that Jones truly showed his colors. Within hours of the attack, he and his fellow STORM troopers were denouncing American imperialists for having invited disaster by mistreating the Muslim world. The very next day he helped stage a vigil protesting “anti-Arab hostility.” In 2006, as WND first reported, the unrepentant Jones signed a petition calling for nationwide “resistance” to the police, whom he accused of using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to justify torture.10 In 2009, when Obama appointed Jones as special adviser for green jobs, bloggers noticed his past. The chattering classes took offense that they had.

  “You can be a target real fast,” Gregory worried out loud about Jones. “A lot of people will repeat back to me and take it as face value something that they read on the Internet,” cautioned Brokaw. “And my line to them is you have to vet information.” The ever-pious Friedman added, “The Internet is an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information, left, right, center, up, down, and requires that kind of filtering by anyone.”11 The fact that Friedman’s employer championed the disgraced Nifong long after the blogosphere turned him into a human piñata did not seem to prick his hauteur.

  As the Trayvon story developed, once again the stench was coming from the mainstream. All the serious filtering that was being done was taking place at sites like the Treehouse. Each post would spawn a “thread,” and the thread was unkind to misinformation. “The thread is where things happen,” said Treeper Sharon. “People contribute out of nowhere.” She should know. A natural writer who grew up on a farm and now lives in rural Oregon, Sharon came out of nowhere herself to find a home at the Treehouse. She often spends six or seven hours a day tending to the Treehouse’s cyber garden.12

  Of the three hundred or so regular contributors to the Martin thread, the most prolific was DiWataman. Sundance, in fact, was convinced that DiWataman knew more about the case than anyone in America, including the defense attorneys and the prosecutor. Troubled by the media’s handling of the story, the fortyish blogger first got engaged with the site in April 2012. “What interested me about the Treehouse was the collective effort to get at the truth,” said DiWataman. “I saw something there I saw nowhere else: the urge to find the facts and get them out there.” Libertarian by instinct, DiWataman did not quite share Brokaw and Friedman’s trust in the major media’s editorial probity. In fact, the media coverage of the Martin case appalled him. “On subjects dealing with race and sex,” he added, “they deny facts, lie, hyperbolize, distort. I cannot believe how institutionalized the deception is.” A stay-at-home dad in a Midwestern suburb, DiWataman thought nothing of spending a dozen or more consecutive hours on research, and no one paid him the first dime to do this. “From everything I have seen,” DiWataman said months before the trial, “there is a ton of reasonable doubt about murder.”13

  DiWataman, Sundance, and their fellow Treepers made a point of not cozying up to the Zimmermans or sharing their information with the defense team. “Sometimes you have got to call the baby ugly,” said Sun-dance. “If I found one iota of information contra the Zimmerman story, I would post it. I support the truth. It’s not all about defending George.”14 That much said, the Zimmermans let him know how much they appreciated what the Treehouse was doing. Bob Zimmerman would later write, “The research that was being conducted by contributors to this site was astonishing.”15 Sundance described the family members as parched wanderers in a desert of disinformation who finally found someplace they could get a drink. He chose not to talk about the conversations he has had with the family, but they inevitably saddened him. As he and the Zimmermans recognized from the beginning, there could be no good outcome to this case. By the time the Treehouse got involved, the damage done was irreparable. For the three or four weeks after the story broke, Zimmerman had not felt free to leave Osterman’s house save for after-dark walks with his dog, and each night the atmosphere only grew more ominous.16

  “What fresh hell is this?” pundit Dorothy Parker is reported to have famously said upon disturbance. In the month of March 2012, George Zimmerman could surely identify.

  10

  RUNNING OF THE BULLS

  IF AL SHARPTON SEEMS BUFFOONISH from a distance, up close he can intimidate. When he descended on Sanford, Florida, for an evening rally on March 22, 2012, he reminded the overwhelmingly black crowd just why Bishop F. D. Washington ordained him a Pentecostal minister before he turned ten. He had the fire in his belly. After leading the crowd in a chant of “No justice, no peace,” Sharpton powerfully reinforced the BGI narrative. “Twenty-six days ago, this young man, Trayvon Martin did nothin’ criminal, did nothin’ unethical,” said Sharpton in his preacher’s cadence. “He went to the store for his brother. He came back and lost his life. Trayvon could have been any one of our sons. Trayvon could’ve been any one of us.”1

  It had to pain the very reverend Jesse Jackson that when the Trayvon Martin story began to break nationally in mid-March 2012, he was on a pointless glad-handing tour of Europe. The evening of March 19, the night rival Al Sharpton dedicated his own TV show on MSNBC fully to the Trayvon story, Jackson was giving “his perspective on the fight against discrimination” at a 120 Euro-a-head dinner in a swank Brussels hotel. The event was sponsored by Democrats Abroad Belgium.2 The party’s relentless vote harvesters were using the event to troll for votes and dough among the ex-pats, and Jackson was the best they could serve up.

  As Jackson has long understood, the BGI derives its power from its symbiotic relationship with the Democratic-media complex. There was no clearer demonstration of this than Jackson’s decision to embrace President Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky revelations. In an unintentionally comic saga, Jackson emerged as Bill Clinton’s spiritual advisor and, with the aid of his attractive young assistant, Karin Stanford, comforted the repentant president in the midst of his moral crisis.

  In August 1998, after the president’s grudging TV apology, Chelsea Clinton reportedly asked that Jackson come to the White House to counsel her and her mom. Hillary, breathless, had presumably just found out the truth. The three were said to have prayed together for two hours. Jackson then praised Hillary for her strength and her love of her husband, and Hillary’s poll numbers shot up. Jackson wasn’t through. In December of that same year, he led an anti-impeachment rally at the Capitol. As expected, Jackson’s support for the president did not come without a price. A Business Week Online article unconsciously suggests the nature of the likely payoff.

  As House impeachment managers began laying out their case in the Senate for the conviction of Bill Clinton, the president sought solace in a favorite, if unusual, haven: Wall Street. . . . [Clinton] is scheduled to speak on Jan. 15 to a Wall Street conference organized by Jesse L. Jackson. Jackson’s meeting was designed to prod the financial industry both to hire more minority employees and to invest more money in economically distressed areas. Clinton plans to outline a series of steps to leverage billions of dollars in investment in inner cities and poor rural communities, sources tell Business Week Online.3

  For years, the relentlessly clever Jackson was the public face of the BGI. In fact, he all but invented the industry. If pressed, historians could plausibly trace its birth to a specific time and place, namely the Today Show on the morning of April 5, 1968. The night before, in Memphis, an escaped convict by the name of James Earl Ray brought the idealistic phase of the civil rights movement to a sickening halt when he shot and killed Martin Luther King Jr. When hit, King was standing on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. His colleagues Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young rushed to his side, but King never regained consciousness. He was pronounced dead an hour after the shooting at St. Joseph’s Hospital nearby.

  With King’s entourage in Memphis was an ambitious, young divinity school dropout who went by the self-anointed name the “Reverend” Jesse Jackson. By all accounts, King distrusted Jackson’s ambition and did not much like the man. When the shot was fired, Jackson ducked for cover on the lower level of the motel. He had little contact with King before he was shot and none after. That did not stop Jackson from appearing on the Today Show the following morning, wearing an olive turtleneck that allegedly bore the stains of King’s blood. “He died in my arms,” said Jackson shamelessly of King.4 That same day, still wearing the turtleneck, Jackson rushed back to Chicago and began a lifelong career cashing in on the legacy of his would-be mentor. As mentioned earlier, with King’s death the idealistic phase of the civil rights movement had come to an end. With Jackson ascendant, the opportunistic phase had just begun.

  As social philosopher Eric Hoffer once observed, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.”5 Although the major media chose not to notice, the civil rights movement was following Hoffer’s formula with Jackson as racketeer-in-chief. On the occasion of the second anniversary of King’s death, Time magazine put Jackson on the cover and repeated the canard that Jackson “was the last man King spoke to” and that he “ran to the balcony and held King’s head.”6 For more than forty years, Jackson has parlayed his spurious role as King’s “heir apparent” into a series of financial scams, one bolder than the next.