MSNBC Sets Out To Lynch A Hispanic Man...So Typically Progressive

The seated man is George Zimmerman's great-grandfather, who was a black Peruvian.

The woman behind him is his daughter, who was half-black.

The baby seated in his lap is George Zimmerman's mother.

By Jeffrey Lord 

Their disgraceful conduct in the Zimmerman case follows the left’s long history of racism.

Uh-oh.

Trouble in Liberal City. 

Why was there an oh-so-careful liberal media effort to make George Zimmerman a white guy in the middle of ruthlessly attempting to lynch him, high-tech style?

And what is the latest, and biggest, effort to play the race card that is in the news?

No, it isn’t the Zimmerman case. It’s immigration. 

So when your ratings are in the toilet, what else is there to do? 

Why, for heaven’s sake, don’t lynch the Hispanic guy! Lynch the white guy! 

What else would you expect from MSNBC and the larger left-wing media that are nothing more than the modern descendants of all those long-ago liberals who began the practice of using race to gain political power?

You know those people.

The slave owners. The segregationists. The Klan. The lynchers. The racial quota, judge-everyone-by-race crowd.

Every last one of these progressives past and present use race to gain political power. It’s the coin of their world. Or, in the case of their leftist journalistic organs — newspapers in days gone by, cable television today — foaming at the mouth with racial rants was specifically designed to divide Americans by race for circulation and ratings.

To those late to the subject, the liberal media drive to lynch Hispanic George Zimmerman — a man whose mother is from Peru — was nothing if not familiar. And very, very careful.

How familiar?

How careful?

Let’s deal with careful first.

The delicate task that presented itself to liberals in the Zimmerman case — once they belatedly realized that Zimmerman was in fact the son of a Hispanic mother — was to somehow “de-Hispanicize” the man they had already begun to fit for a high-tech white man’s noose.

Why? Why the patently ridiculous nonsense of trying to somehow gloss over Zimmerman’s heritage? To make him white when he was every bit the Hispanic man that President Obama — he too with a white parent — is the black man?

There is a reason.

Can you say “immigration”?

Liberals think they have conservatives backed into a corner on immigration. No need to rehash the issue here — you know the basics and have by now heard the rhetoric endlessly. There are 11 million Hispanic illegals in the country. Then there’s the path to citizenship, and don’t forget bringing them out of the shadows, etc., etc., etc. Liberals — and moderate Republicans — think unless the GOP goes along with the Gang of Eight immigration reform the GOP is toast. Politically finished. Hispanics think Republicans are mean and all of that, as Senator Lindsey Graham insists.

But what would happen if…out of the blue…the shoe was suddenly on the other foot?

What if those very same 11 million illegal Hispanic immigrants-turned-American-citizens suddenly saw liberals and Democrats as the rabid, foaming, anti-Hispanic racists? What if liberals were suddenly seen as so racist that they would sooner lynch an innocent Hispanic man rather than admit a black teenager may in fact have really jumped said Hispanic man and tried to kill him?

What then?

Impossible, you say?

Wrong.

First, let’s look at the black-brown divide. Then let’s look at how the liberal media game was played — and has been played for centuries.

The very first thing to do – make that the very first traditional-for-liberals thing to do – was inject race. Zimmerman, the white guy, killed the black kid, Trayvon. White-on-black; it’s Mississippi Burning all over again. (Although in the real Mississippi Burning, the white killers were liberal Democrats — Klansmen — the Klan long a pillar of the Democratic coalition.)

Then the discovery of Zimmerman’s Hispanic background. Oops. So the drive to de-Hispanicize Zimmerman began.

Which is why we had the spectacle of the New York Times describing Zimmerman thusly – bold print for emphasis:

Mr. Zimmerman, 28, a white Hispanic, told the police that he shot Trayvon in self-defense after an altercation.

Or the spectacle of the Associated Press writing that “Zimmerman identifies as Hispanic.”

Got that?

Mr. Zimmerman — who is every bit as Hispanic as Barack Obama is black — had to be de-Hispanicized. Otherwise there were two problems. First, the narrative of a white man killing an innocent black teenager was lost.

But second — and it is a very big second — was the unspoken reality that black liberals and their white liberal friends could not under any circumstances be seen as crusading against a Hispanic man. Or there goes the coalition with all those millions of Hispanic illegals.

You think the black-Hispanic issue isn’t real?

Take a gander at this very carefully headlined story in The Huffington Post from August of 2011. The headline reads: “Katt Williams’ Anti-Mexican Rant In Phoenix: Comedian Takes On Latino Heckler (VIDEO).”

What word is missing from this headline?

You guessed it. The word “black.” Nor is the word “black” or “African American” used even once by the HuffPo in describing the comedian in question. In fact, even the video that was listed has now been pulled. Did I mention that the comedian concerned, Katt Williams, is, yes, a black man? And Mr. Williams said the following, according to the Huffington Post, when he got into it in a Phoenix club with a heckler of Mexican heritage (note: the transcript is dutifully scrubbed of expletives):

Since y’all like it over here a lot. and I’m saying, if I’m speaking out of line, let me know. But I’m saying it appears to me, y’all like it over here a lot. And let me tell you why I’m making that assumption, because I have no right to make that assumption. But understand this, this what gives me the right, and don’t you get it twisted… If y’all had California and you loved it, then you shouldn’t have given that mothaf*cka up. You should have fought for California, goddamnit, since you love it..

Because you think I’m dissing Mexico and I’m defending America. Are you Mexican? Do you know where Mexico is? No this ain’t Mexico, it used to be Mexico, motherf*cker, and now it’s Phoenix, goddammit. USA! USA!

F*ck you back, n*gga. i bet you dont even go to mexico, motha f*cka… no n*gga, do you know where you at? USA! USA! I dont give a f*ck. no n*gga, this is my hood… [security comes] F*ck him! Mothaf*ckas think they can live in this country and pledge allegience to another country… do you remember when white people used to say go back to Africa? And we’d have to tell them we dont want to? So if you love Mexico, bitch, get the f*ck over there! [Breaks into the National Anthem.]

We were slaves bitch, you just all work like that at the landscapers…

You recall the national outrage in the liberal media over this barbeque of ethnic insults, right? Like, say, when the white comedian Michael Richards delivered a racial rant against blacks and then apologized, as here?

Of course not.

Black-Hispanic racial problems? What problems? Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Not to be outdone on discussing this issue are those race-exploiters extraordinaire, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which reported this in 2005:

One after another, the reports have rolled in. From Florida to California, Nevada to New Jersey, even as far away as the state of Washington, the news is getting harder to ignore: There’s trouble brewing between blacks and browns.

Catch that sentence? Reports have rolled in from…Florida?

Where was the Zimmerman case? Florida. God forbid that by having the liberal media repeatedly cast George Zimmerman as a Hispanic that the spotlight be placed on the “trouble brewing between blacks and browns.”

We can’t have that, can we?

Then there was this story in Esquire back in 2008. The article, written by Ernesto Quiñonez, a Hispanic, bore this title: “The Black-Brown Divide.”

It read, in part:

The Latino-American community is diverse and divided, some forty-four million people and twenty different nationalities struggling in their own way with immigration, assimilation, and political destiny. Yet for all the differences, there’s one thing (language aside) that many Latinos have in common: You won’t find too many pictures of dark-skinned leaders in their homes.

Growing up in Spanish Harlem in the eighties, I don’t recall too many Latinos of any nationality going crazy over Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition….Blame it on our homeland. When Latin Americans quit the old countries and put down roots on U.S. soil, they brought a centuries-old, unreconstructed suspicion of dark skin with them. And it still goes on. Just recently I traveled back to my hometown, and I saw two homeless-looking African-Americans who had wandered in front of a cab and would not budge. The Dominican cabdriver, who wasn’t much lighter than they were, started cursing, calling them maldito trepa palos, which roughly translates to “damn tree climbers.” It was more vile in Spanish, trust me. But it was one that I had never heard before.

There’s more out there on the “black-brown divide.” Tons.

Like this NewsOne report of repeated racial attacks by blacks on Hispanic immigrants in New York City.

Or this story from the Baltimore Sun:

Baltimore police say they are investigating a witness account that a group of black youths beat a Hispanic man near Patterson Park Sunday while saying, “This is for Trayvon.” …

A witness posted the account on a community Facebook page, and police confirmed they are looking into whether the suspects’ reaction to the verdict in the Florida trial of George Zimmerman played a part in the incident.

Using a translator, police spoke to the victim, who knows some English, according to the police report. The victim told officers that he was standing in the intersection of Fairmont and N. Potomac Street when a group of five black males first approached him. …

(The witness) who lives in the neighborhood, said she worries about her Hispanic neighbors and said she and other residents were looking for ways to warn them of the incident beyond Facebook. Patterson Park has one of the city’s highest concentrations of Latinos and is home to the city’s annual Latino Fest.

Or this report in the Los Angeles Times by the L.A. County Sheriff, a Latino, who says: “We have a serious interracial violence problem in this county involving blacks and Latinos.”

Indeed they do.

But to the political point here, in the wake of the Zimmerman case — and recall that the jury of six women was composed of five whites and one Hispanic — it is plain just how delicate a challenge the liberal media had to confront in order to demonize George Zimmerman. Once they realized Zimmerman was in fact every bit as much a Hispanic as Barack Obama is a black man, and that other observers — read: Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative media — understood exactly how addicted liberals are to playing the race game, the move to de-Hispanicize Zimmerman began.
And how addicted are liberals to playing this racist game?

Let’s take a look at MSNBC and their left-leaning media colleagues today, and then climb in the time capsule to zip back to, yes, 1898, for a look at the most prominent progressive journalist of the day. The Al Sharpton/Chris Matthews/Lawrence O’Donnell/NY Times/Washington Post/The Nation/Associated Press-type from yesteryear.

Here’s Chris Matthews (hat tip to Newsbusters):

After telling his Hardball audience Tuesday that Democrats “believe in illegal immigration,” Matthews said Wednesday, “I’m surrounded by people who think he’s guilty, Zimmerman. All my family, my liberal sons, my liberal wife. Everybody thinks the guy, Zimmerman’s the bad guy.

Here’s Lawrence O’Donnell, furious with an early Zimmerman lawyer for not showing up on O’Donnell’s show, berating Zimmerman repeatedly and doing everything but bringing out the noose.

Here’s The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart angrily asserting that Martin was “An unarmed teenager with no documented history of violence lost his life to a man who has a documented history of violence.” Hispanic man? Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Then of course, Al Sharpton, today’s George Wallace, using his MSNBC television show to stoke the fires and lead the rallies. Lawrence O’Donnell, who made much of asking who was paying Zimmerman’s lawyer, seemed curiously uninterested in who other than his own network was paying Sharpton to gin up the rallies against the Hispanic…uh, sorry…white Hispanic Zimmerman.

When your ratings are in the toilet, as are MSNBC’s, why not play the race card? Pay no attention to Zimmerman’s Hispanic heritage…get the noose! And so MSNBC pounded away for months.

But, in fact, all these liberals learned this business from earlier generations of liberal racists. So let’s start with yesteryear so you can see how the game is played by the progressive racist media — because the game hasn’t changed with the left-wing media on race in all these long 115 years.

The most prominent progressive media figure of 1898 was the editor of North Carolina’s Raleigh News & Observer, one Josephus Daniels. Daniels carried all manner of clout in American progressive circles of the day. As Bruce Bartlett records in his seminal work Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past, it was Daniels who began touting the presidential timber of Woodrow Wilson as early as 1886, when then-Professor Wilson was just a lowly visiting academic at Cornell but attracted Daniels’s attention with a speech in North Carolina. Daniels, famously, would later wind up managing Wilson’s winning 1912 presidential campaign and be appointed Secretary of the Navy, where he promptly segregated the Navy in line with both his and Wilson’s segregationist beliefs. Later Daniels would support the presidential ambitions of his Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, winning an appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico.

But the story here is of Daniels’s role and that of the News & Observer in 1898 in what Bartlett refers to as “the only confirmed coup d’etat in American history,” when the paper, under Daniels’ leadership, moved to overthrow the elected government of Wilmington, North Carolina — at gun point. Why? Because the Republican office holders, working with blacks and state Republicans, had (Bartlett again) “moved quickly to expand voting rights for blacks, who had been largely disenfranchised by literacy tests, poll taxes and other measures enacted by Democrats following the end of Reconstruction…..Daniels used it (the News & Observer) any way he could to end Republican control and restore Democrats to office, primarily by playing the race card shamelessly.” 

Just as with MSNBC and its liberal media race-card-playing pals today and their drive to influence enough people to legally lynch the Hispanic Zimmerman, Daniels did everything he could to inject race into the idea of running the duly elected government of Wilmington out of office. Daniels later proudly proclaimed the paper “the militant voice of White Supremacy” and crowed of his success in intimidating North Carolinians, and that the paper “did not fail in what was expected, sometimes going to extremes in its partisanship.”

Daniels used the 1898 version of MSNBC’s relentless Zimmerman-is-guilty high-tech lynch-mob approach. “Among other things,” writes Bartlett, Daniels “published the names of every black office holder in the state, accused the Republican Party of slandering white women, and published front-page stories of all cases in which a black justice of the peace or sheriff had the temerity to force a white man to obey the law in the run-up to the 1898 election.” Daniels even “defended the Red Shirts, a racist group similar to the Ku Klux Klan that had been active in South Carolina and spread across the border into North Carolina in 1898. The Wilmington Race Riot Commission called the Red Shirts ‘effectively a terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.’”

Stop.

The obvious here.

What is the effective difference between what Daniels was doing with his paper in 1898 — and what his successor, modern-media, progressive brethren at MSNBC and other media outlets have been doing with the Zimmerman trial today?

Answer.

Nothing.

The idea in both cases was to inject race into a highly flammable situation — an election in Wilmington, a trial in Florida. To racialize it. To materially effect the outcome by racializing it.

This is what Al Sharpton has done his entire career — for profit. He has leveraged this to make big money as an MSNBC host, using his network podium to lead a full-scale effort to lynch George Zimmerman, with his liberal colleagues in MSNBC and elsewhere obediently following him along.

This time?

This time there was a fly in the ointment.

The Reverend Al and his race-baiting compadres in the liberal media have to be very, very careful.

The black-brown divide is out there.

And lynching a Hispanic man is just not good liberal political form.

Even if it is typical.

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