On Nov. 4, 2008, I served as a poll watcher at Saint James United Methodist Church in Kansas City, the home base of Rev. Emanuel Cleaver II, my congressman. The workers expected a lot of voters at this overwhelmingly black polling station, and they got them.
Like many of us on the right, I found some consolation in thinking an Obama presidency would ease racial tension in America. On this issue, I genuinely hoped he would succeed. He did not. In fact, Obama failed catastrophically.
As candidate and as president, Obama did nothing to discourage his allies from smearing his opponents as “racist” for opposing him, even on issues that had nothing to do with race.
The itch to impute racism to political opponents swept through the media and the Democratic faithful like head lice. Whites proved even more eager than blacks to denounce the nation’s mushrooming population of bigots.
The mania began as soon as Obama declared his candidacy and did not stop with his presidency’s end.
In the wake of this past week’s insurgency, Obama piously intoned that protests have to be translated into laws and that “only happens when we elect government officials who are responsive to our demands.”
In Obama’s case, the “our” preceding “demands” devolved down to a small slice of his own black constituency and the white radicals who goaded them on. For the great bulk of African Americans, Obama’s presidency was a disaster.
The disaster started to take shape in March 2012 when Obama said for the ages, “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon − If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”
In projecting Trayvon as a “son,” Obama strongly suggested that all black children were equally vulnerable to the predations of white men or, in George Zimmerman’s case, “white Hispanics.”
Four weeks after the shooting, Obama had no excuse for not knowing the facts of the case. This would prove to be the most destructive moment of his presidency.
Largely abandoned by his parents, Trayvon’s Martin’s life had become a downward spiral of drugs, guns and street fighting. On the fateful night, it was he who attacked Zimmerman, an Obama supporter and civil rights activist, a half-foot shorter than the “little boy” Martin.
Without a hint of regret, the most powerful institutions of the nation – the Department of Justice, the leading civil rights groups, the state of Florida – followed Obama’s lead and conspired to send Zimmerman, a transparently innocent man, to prison for the rest of his life.
Scarier still, as documented in Joel Gilbert’s movie and book of the same name, “The Trayvon Hoax,” Trayvon’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, and family attorney Benjamin Crump arranged for an impostor to testify at trial as a “phone witness” when Trayvon’s real girlfriend refused to parrot Crump’s bogus narrative under oath.
Without any meaningful exceptions, the mainstream media enabled the fraud. There have been no apologies, no revisions, no lessons learned. The monster must be fed.
In January 2009, 79% of whites and 64% of blacks held a favorable view of race relations in America. By July 2013, when Zimmerman was rightly acquitted, those figures had fallen to 52% among whites and 38% among blacks.
The acquittal led directly to the creation of Black Lives Matter, and in August 2014 BLM took its show to Ferguson, Missouri. Obama followed in its wake, this time identifying with Michael Brown, whose abandonment by his parents had been even more brutal than Trayvon’s.
“My mind went back to what it was like for me when I was 17, 18, 20,” Obama said in reference to Brown, a desperately troubled young man with whom Obama had nothing in common beside skin color.
Like Zimmerman, Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson was eventually cleared – in his case by a local grand jury and later by Obama’s Department of Justice. By then, it was too late.
In embracing Michael Brown and endorsing the media’s fake “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative, Obama gave a green light to activists hoping to stage their own Ferguson-style morality plays with white cop as villain. This they proceeded to do in Baltimore, New York, Chicago, and lesser cities across the nation.
The cops got the picture. They knew they too could face termination, lawsuits, criminal charges and death threats, all driven by the mandates of mob justice. They knew, as well, that the political class, from the president on down, would gladly throw them to the wolves to preserve the peace.
Nationwide, but especially in cities where rioting followed lethal police-citizen encounters, cops instinctively began to pull back from actively policing black neighborhoods. Sensing opportunity, criminals moved into the void.
Attorney and Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald has dubbed this phenomenon the “Ferguson Effect.” At an emergency session of police chiefs held a year after the Ferguson incident, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel explained the phenomenon to Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
“[Cops] don’t want to be a news story themselves,” said Emanuel. “They don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact.”
The impact was deadly and undeniable. According to FBI data, the murder rate in the United States declined steadily from 2006 to 2014 except for a minor blip in 2012.
As a result, there were three thousand or so fewer murders in 2014 than in 2006. After Brown’s death in August 2014, the trend sharply reversed itself.
In 2015, the murder rate rose nearly 11%, its greatest one-year jump in a half century. In 2016, the trend continued with an 8.5% increase over the year before.
For Crump, this lawlessness meant more opportunity for police-perp encounters to go awry. This week, he’s busy cashing in, running the George Floyd show in Minneapolis.
In 2016, as a result of this chicanery, nearly 3,000 more Americans were murdered than in 2014. An estimated 1,800 of the dead were black.
I wonder if their families know they died to sustain two fraudulent stories, stories that Obama did not have the courage to un-tell.
@jackcashill’s forthcoming book, “Unmasking Obama,” is available for pre-order at Amazon.
