A week ago attorney Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch, filed suit on behalf of George Zimmerman in the Circuit Court of Florida’s 10th Judicial Circuit.
The left has responded to the suit in unabashedly Stalinist fashion: Shut down dissent and, if that doesn’t work, slander the dissenters. For Stalinists, new and old, “truth” is what works.
Based on the research of filmmaker Joel Gilbert, as seen in his new documentary and book of the same name, “The Trayvon Hoax,” Zimmerman is charging that Team Trayvon substituted an impostor for the real “phone witness” in Zimmerman’s 2013 murder trial for the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin and in the depositions that led up to it.
In a 2012 deposition, the perjured testimony of that impostor, Rachel Jeantel, enabled the state of Florida to arrest Zimmerman and take him to trial. Evidence strongly suggests that state attorneys knew the witness was a fraud.
Before getting to the left’s response, let me cite the podcast exchange between two black professors, Glenn Loury of Brown and John McWhorter of Columbia, both of whom actually watched the film.
“He makes a very meticulous case,” said McWhorter of Gilbert. “He makes a lawyerly and frankly almost astonishingly diligent case.”
Replied Loury, “You’re right to say that. I agree with that.” Old school liberals, Loury and McWhorter put the truth over politics.
The truth was of little interest to radical leftists like the “Dream Defenders,” a group that came together in 2013 to protest Zimmerman’s acquittal.
In 2018, Dream Defenders worked overtime to get Andrew Gillum elected governor of Florida and very nearly succeeded.
During the 2018 campaign, Gillum showed his support for the group by signing their inflammatory, anti-cop “Freedom Pledge.” According to the aspiring Marxists, Florida was “a for-profit police state.”
Promptly following Zimmerman’s lawsuit, Dream Defenders launched a “#MuteZimmerman” petition drive. Larry Klayman, they argued, “should be disbarred for the harm he is causing. Let’s make sure the Florida Bar hears us!”
Remember, this group came within a percentage point of getting its man Gillum elected governor.
Others on the left bullied the Coral Gables Art Cinema into canceling a press conference and screening of the film Gilbert had booked and paid for.
The theater executive director claimed that “once word got out that her venue was set to screen the movie, people blasted the cinema in emails, phone calls and social media.”
“Thursday’s canceled screening pitted two competing interests against each other,” reported the South Florida Sun Sentinel, “the filmmaker’s expectation his movie won’t be censored against the theater’s desire to avoid a public backlash for presenting it.” The public backlash prevailed.
Although the major media, local and national, covered the lawsuit more or less fairly, if briefly, the left media went ballistic.
All too typical was the coverage on the “Young Turks,” the flagship program of the TYT Network, a multi-channel network that is YouTube based.
To confirm all your suspicions about YouTube’s politicized standards, you need only watch the reckless slander the “Young Turks” serves up on a daily basis.
On Dec. 4, host Cenk Uygur and his two young female co-hosts discussed the Zimmerman suit at some length. All three are white.
To the snarky threesome, Gilbert was a “nonsense conspiracy theorist,” Zimmerman “a sick desperate man addicted to the spotlight,” and Klayman “a raging lunatic.”
The three had clearly not read the book or seen the movie. In fact, they referred continuously to the book, “The Trayvon Hoax,” seemingly unaware there was a movie.
Their discussion of this “right-wing hit job” quickly devolved into fact-free self-parody, with Uygur doubling down on his earlier efforts to send an innocent man to prison for the rest of his life.
“He was a kid. You were a grown man,” said Uygur as though speaking to Zimmerman. “You went after him, and you killed him.”
If he had watched the film, Uygur would have understood that the “kid” was a half-foot taller than the grown man with a penchant for drugs, guns and mixed martial arts.
Uygur might also have understood that the nonsense he has been spewing about this case for the last seven years is based on the perjured testimony of a conspicuous impostor.
Team Trayvon attorney Benjamin Crump responded by doing what he does best: defaming those who dare to tell the truth.
“I have every confidence that this unfounded and reckless lawsuit will be revealed for what it is,” Crump blustered, “another failed attempt to defend the indefensible and a shameless attempt to profit off the lives and grief of others.”
Historically, the left has made a practice of declaring the guilty “innocent.” This practice dates back to the Sacco and Vanzetti case in the 1920s and has carried through the decades.
Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Hurricane Carter, among others, were all as guilty as the murderous Sacco and Vanzetti, but the left scored political points by insisting on their innocence.
The Zimmerman case represents a dark turn in leftist history. Progressives now seem comfortable with declaring the conspicuously innocent “guilty.”
The young leftist today has given up even the illusion of being Atticus Finch. He, she or “zhe” has joined the courthouse mob calling for Tom Robinson’s head, truth be damned.
