The 2013 Summer of Race has come to a close, and thanks to endless badgering from the media, America remains sharply divided.  We’re told that on one side are those who care deeply about the plight of blacks in America and, on the other, are racists of varying degrees who are glad that George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin and would love to attend a plantation-style wedding with Paula Deen.

In the months leading up to the Zimmerman trial, casual observers who get their news from mainstream sources were treated to a steady stream of lies about the case.  These sources alleged that Zimmerman was a white man who racially profiled a baby-faced black child who was innocently walking home in the rain with candy purchased for his little brother.  Zimmerman, a racist vigilante “cop wannabe,” disobeyed a direct order from police to stay in his vehicle, pursuing the boy and confronting him.  In an heroic attempt to defend himself, young Trayvon fought off his malevolent stalker “armed only with a pack of Skittles,” until Zimmerman, who had called Martin a “f–king coon,” drew his pistol and murdered Martin in cold blood.

The racist, cop-wannabe narrative was the product of the Al Sharpton-Jesse Jackson “race hustler” regime.  Those were the words of former NAACP leader C.L. Bryant, who accused the reverends of using Trayvon Martin’s death as “bait to inflame racial passions.”  Scant attention was paid to the former civil-rights leader’s warnings, however, because they did not fit the leftist media’s and politicians’ divide-and-conquer strategy of garnering ratings and votes.

Instead, the media piled on Zim merman, adding to the race hustlers’ lies doctored audio and misleading reports of a mixed-martial-arts-trained maniac who, though half Hispanic, was nonetheless a “white Hispanic.”  (Leave it to Geraldo Rivera to wonder aloud whether this makes Barack Obama a “white African-American.”)

The facts of the State of Florida v. George Zimmerman were fairly clear from the beginning, but as the trial unfolded it became obvious that the state had no case and charges never should have been filed.  Zimmerman, who had said “punk,” not “coon,” was no racist, and evidence supported his claim that he heeded the nonemergency operator’s suggestion not to follow Martin and continued on only to obtain an accurate street address for the officer who—based on Zimmerman’s “profile”—was en route.  No physical evidence contradicted Zimmerman’s account that Martin surprised him and assaulted him, bashing his head to the extent that Zimmerman feared for his life and used deadly force to stop the attack.

Jurors clearly agreed, voting to acquit Zimmerman on July 13.

Why, then, if the facts were so clear, does this debate rage on, with both peaceful marches and violent protests occurring across the country, and celebrities and clergy bewailing the verdict?

Because the facts simply don’t matter.  They dissolve very quickly in the solvent of the left’s shaming solution.  We already knew that George Zimmerman was a racist, who must have profiled Martin not based on his demeanor, gait, or attire, the circuitous pathway he’d chosen, or the recent burglaries on the very same street.  The fact that Martin had recently smoked marijuana, and the fact that Martin’s Twitter account showed his abiding interest in a street drug called “lean” or “purple drank”—made, coincidentally, with sweet candies, Arizona watermelon drink, and cough syrup—were irrelevant.  The fact that the prosecution’s star witness, Rachel Jeantel, testified (rather unexpectedly) that Martin racially profiled Zimmerman was ignored.

Naturally, President Obama weighed in, babbling about white women clutching their purses and locking their car doors when he, in his pre-senatorial days, walked by.  “Trayvon Martin could have been me,” he declared, before using his bully pulpit to call for a federal reexamination of state Stand Your Ground laws—laws that turned out to have absolutely nothing to do with this case, as a witness confirmed that Zimmerman was pinned to the ground before he fired, and therefore could not have chosen to retreat.

For the race hustlers and the media and politicians who love them, Martin and Zimmerman are symbols of good and evil.  (“There’s power in the blood of Trayvon Martin,” said the Rev. Jackson.)  Their story belongs to the realm of myth, and anyone who questions the myth-narrative is an unbeliever—an unbeliever in the race paradigm that dominates the cultural and political landscape of America.  It’s the same paradigm that upholds the Welfare State and keeps a great number of blacks in violent ghettos, on the dole, fatherless, and (statistically) dead.

By and large, they die not because of vigilante cop-wannabes, but poisoned by a thug culture aided and abetted by America’s professional race-baiters, who further their careers and heighten their own profiles at the expense of the very people they claim to protect.  That Trayvon Martin styled himself as a gangsta was obviously no crime.  But the fact that he carried a chip on his shoulder, whose weight may have pushed him to confront a “creepy-ass cracka,” got him killed.  If that’s the case, then George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin are both victims of the same con.