At the start of May, right after Elizabeth Warren’s first, toothache-inducing explanations
for why Harvard had called her a “minority” hire, I started seeing a
two-panel photo-editorial pop up on Facebook. On the left: An image of
George Zimmerman’s first mug shot, the one taken in 2005 after an
accidental altercation with an undercover cop. On the right: A photo of a
smiling, blonde-and-blue-eyed Warren. The Zimmerman photo had been
labeled “CRACKER.” The Warren photo: “MINORITY.” The caption: Welcome to Left-Wing Bizarro World.
The illustration originated at IOwntheWorld.com, a pugnacious
conservative news-and-jokes site. The site went live on Jan. 20, 2009,
just as Barack Obama was putting his hand on the Bible. Its better
images were printed in full color and pasted to Tea Party rally signs.
When the president said “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,”
IOwntheWorld was ready with an image of Obama donning a hoodie. There’s a
theme here: The media and the race hustlers told us that George Zimmerman was a white, racist, murderer. You lied to us.
Six weeks passed between
the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the arrest of his shooter. If the
Martin case was a campaign, you’d say that his family’s attorneys “won”
those weeks. Martin, dead at 17, was introduced to the world as an
all-American kid, shot because he wore a hoodie. Zimmerman? The first
image people saw of him was a mug shot of a “white Hispanic” guy. The
first they heard from him was a heavy-breathing 911 call, one of many he
made when he saw interlopers lurking at the Retreat at Twin Lakes.
