Saturday, April 7, 2012

March Mob Madness

My article from the March 29 Front Page Magazine:


March Mob Madness

By Matthew Vadum


Egged on by professional racial arsonists, virtual lynch mobs have formed across the nation hell-bent on meting out mob justice to the man who shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.

Sanford police chief Bill Lee, who handed the investigation over to the state, the Justice Department, the FBI and a special prosecutor, has received death threats.

Although police insist there is insufficient evidence to arrest shooter George Zimmerman who says he shot Martin in self-defense, calls for Zimmerman’s arrest continue to grow.

Demanding “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” Mikhail Muhammad of the virulently racist New Black Panther Party offered a $10,000 bounty for the “capture” of Zimmerman. Muhammad called for 5,000 black men to hunt him down.


The New Black Panther Party also released a “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster featuring the face of Zimmerman, accompanied by a flier claiming Martin was “murdered in cold blood.”

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan said ominously that “Where there is no justice, there will be no peace. Soon, and very soon, the law of retaliation may … be applied.”

Other supporters of Martin unveiled a new tee shirt that reads: “Pussy Ass Cracker,” over a photo of Zimmerman. The “pussy ass cracker” line appears to refer to lyrics from the rapper Plies’s song “100 Years,” which laments tough sentences pronounced by racist judges.

Movie director Spike Lee did his best to direct vigilantes to Zimmerman’s home by posting his home address on Twitter. (It turns out Lee posted the wrong address, possibly endangering people with no connection to Zimmerman.)

In Miami high school students have staged walkouts to protest the handling of the Martin case by Sanford, Florida police. About 60 of those students ransacked a local Walgreens store, reportedly stealing $1,100 worth of merchandise and damaging some goods in the store.

Whether Zimmerman is actually guilty of anything is not a concern of left-wing demagogues and race hustlers like Jesse Jackson Sr. and Al Sharpton. They don’t care what actually happened in Sanford last month. They only wish to push their narrative. They don’t want to heal wounds and reduce anxieties. They aspire to agitate and incite.

“Blacks are under attack,” Jackson said after the Martin shooting. “Our disparities are great,” he said. “Targeting, arresting, convicting blacks and ultimately killing us is big business.”

Sharpton delivered a petition to authorities in Sanford that he claimed bore 2 million signatures demanding the arrest of Zimmerman. “You are risking going down as the Birmingham and Selma of the 21st century,” Sharpton said.

Radio hothead Ed Schultz blamed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for Martin’s death because Bush signed a “stand your ground” law enacted to allow someone to shoot an attacker when threatened. “Jeb Bush helped pave the way for this senseless tragedy and remains silent,” Schultz said. “What a political tragedy.”

Not to be outdone, the appropriately named Michael Nutter, mayor of Philadelphia, said the shooting of Martin is “nothing short of an assassination.”

The mobs have been encouraged by no less than President Obama himself who injected himself into the story by remarking that if he had a son he would “look like” the hoodie-wearing Martin. Tensions have grown exponentially since those comments were made yet Obama is now strangely silent about the case. Meanwhile, the Obama reelection campaign has started offering collegiate “Obama 2012” hoodies for sale in order to cash in on the Martin case.

The mainstream media is also doing its best to defend the left-wing narrative.

In this stock storyline black Americans are always oppressed – by whites and by the system. It is the same tedious narrative about the evils of American society that is recounted daily by the mainstream media and academia.

But a “problem” arose that needed to be rectified. Zimmerman wasn’t “white” in the sense the term is typically used in America. Initially news reports described Zimmerman as Hispanic or Latino but the thought police at the New York Times decided that descriptor was politically inadequate. And so Zimmerman, one of whose parents is white, began to be described as a “white Hispanic” – whatever that is.

As Jonah Goldberg notes, the term, “rarely if ever used before this tragedy, is necessary in telling the Martin story in a more comfortable way.” Our politically correct betters feel more comfortable blaming “the system” for Martin’s death because “‘the system’ is a white thing” in their view, he writes.

Whatever Zimmerman’s race may be, it hasn’t gotten in the way of the nation’s grievance industry. Expect the rhetoric and hyperbole to intensify in coming days as the media and grievance mongers scramble to protect their narrative.

Meanwhile, the campaign orchestrated by the George Soros-funded Media Matters for America to silence radio host Rush Limbaugh continues unabated.

Media Matters has paid at least $100,000 for two ads running in Boston; Chicago; Detroit; Seattle; Milwaukee; St. Louis; Macon, Ga.; and Cedar Rapids,Iowa.

The cities were chosen because they already have active local campaigns against Limbaugh or because his show might be vulnerable in that market, said Angelo Carusone of Media Matters. “What we’re really looking for is a way to demonstrate the persistence of the effort and the fact that it is on a wide scale,” said Carusone, a veteran of a previous campaign that aimed to drive Glenn Beck off Fox News.

Limbaugh advertiser Mark Stevens, who founded the marketing firm MSCO, accused those attacking the show of “internal American terrorism” against his workers and company. Stevens said in recent days his company’s employees have been subjected to death threats and harassment and abuse by telephone and email.

The attacks on MSCO came after Limbaugh called leftist operative/law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” after she gave false testimony Feb. 23 that birth control costs $3,000 over the duration of law school and demanded that the government force religious objectors to cover such expenses. He later apologized after an eruption of mock indignation from liberals and after several sponsors pulled their ads from his top-rated radio show.

But Limbaugh’s apology hasn’t stopped the campaign to force MSCO to stop advertising on Limbaugh’s show.

“They’ve called my people and my company, they’ve called the women at my company, and told them they’re women haters, the most horrible terms,”said Stevens.

“They’ve told me — these are tens of thousands of emails, by the way, most of them are positive but the small group — they’ve told us that we’re under surveillance. The email subject line says ‘citizen of the internet,’ ‘police of the Internet,’ ‘Mark, you’re in danger,’ ‘your house is going to be surrounded by buses,’ ‘your business is going to be destroyed,’ ‘your people are in trouble.’ This is terrorism. Why don’t we start calling it what it is?”

That’s a good question.

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