For a minute there, it looked like Trayvon Martin might avoid the kind of horseshit thunderstorm that tends to accompany the shooting deaths of unarmed African-Americans. It seemed like everyone agreed that the police had fucked up. Fox News had only one segment on the killing in the weeks following. Not even white racists wanted to defend Martin's killer, George Zimmerman: when I wrote about the case last week, the worst response I got was from one particularly dedicated nutcase, who set up a Twitter account to harass me for not properly specifying that Zimmerman is Hispanic.
But the horseshit is raining down now, helped along by a desperate Sanford Police Department doing everything it can to make Martin look like he deserved to die, and by the champion point-missers of the internet right wing, who hardly need convincing that a 17-year-old black kid was up to no good.
You can see it in the incompetent and widely-circulated "investigations" into Martin's social media presence and in the sudden rise in concern among your Facebook friends over black-on-white crime. You can see it in the faux-naïve concern trolling of the National Review and Business Insider, or on the Drudge Report, where for the second day in a row notorious race hustler Matt Drudge is pimping headlines about "new details" and "multiple suspensions," accompanied by a photo of Martin, baby-faced, mugging for the camera, sparkling grill in his mouth. And you can see it outside the bodega on your way to the subway, on the front page of today's New York Post, which reads "TRAYVON HOODWINK: Tragedy hijacked by race hustlers."
