“I can’t bring myself to press play,” a young woman writes in the YouTube comment section under Joel Gilbert’s film The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud That Divided America.

“I don’t know if I actually want to watch this because of the comments I’ve seen. Look I’m black and I have no desire to discover we got PLAYED and what we were told simply isn’t what happened at all.”

Gilbert’s film on YouTube has drawn nearly 4,000 comments, a surprising number of them from young black people. Bre’s hesitance was understandable. What she was about to learn would turn her world upside down.

As I document in my new book, Unmasking Obama, citizen journalists began to expose the truth about the February 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin as soon as the story left Sanford, Florida.

Within weeks of the incident, Sundance and his fellow Treepers at the Conservative Treehouse had largely deconstructed the trumped-up case against the inarguably innocent George Zimmerman. So thorough was the work done by the Treehouse that prosecutors were observed during the 2013 trial reviewing the Treehouse website. The folks at Legal Insurrection meanwhile did an excellent job proving that Zimmerman had acted in the purest form of self-defense.

Those who followed the alternative conservative media — I refer to it as the “samizdat” in honor of the Soviet dissidents — were not at all surprised that Zimmerman was acquitted. Those who believed the defamatory fables spun by the major media were shocked at the outcome. As Bre notes, “I honestly had NO IDEA this even happened and I DEFINITELY kept up with his trial.”

As the YouTube comments revealed, several of the viewers grew up thinking of Trayvon Martin’s death the way their grandparents thought of Emmett Till’s, two innocent adolescents killed for the crime of being black. They had no idea that Martin, a skilled street fighter a half-foot taller than Zimmerman, gratuitously attacked the neighborhood watch captain. Nor did they know Zimmerman was an Hispanic civil rights activist and Obama supporter.

In 2019, Gilbert took up where Sundance left off and confirmed the Treepers’ suspicion that the State of Florida’s star witness, Rachel Jeantel, was an impostor. In the film, Gilbert proves his case beyond doubt and even locates the real phone witness, an attractive young Haitian–American named Brittany Diamond Eugene.

The attorney who orchestrated this fraud, Gilbert makes clear, was none other than Benjamin Crump, the ringmaster of the George Floyd show and the subject of an upcoming Netflix documentary. If enough young black viewers watch Gilbert’s film and speak out, the Crump film will never air.

“Good work Joel,” wrote one viewer, “My black ppl have to WAKE UP… This reminds me of what we’re seeing now with the Left-Wing pushing this “Race” issue with Trump during this Election Year…. And the MEDIA is just magnifying it x1000.”

“I’m black and I knew something was up,” said another. “I couldn’t find enough information on the case. This is amazing thanks man Ive been trying to convince people it was self-defense they won’t listen.”

Wrote a third: “There are plenty of black people who don’t believe all the black victim narratives, but no one puts us on TV. We have no control over that. 🤷🏾‍♀️ This is a great video. Thanks for sharing.”

There are many more comments in the same vein. One young man encouraged the reluctant Bre to “just watch” the film. “Expose yourself to the truth,” he continued. “The truth shall set you free.”

Bre finally watched. In fact, she watched it twice. “Wow,” she wrote. “How did this ever get this far.” Bre had little use for Crump or for Trayvon’s biological parents, Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton. On Tuesday, Fulton narrowly lost in her Hillary-backed bid to become a commissioner of Miami/Dade County.

“These people are genuinely TRASH,” writes Bre. “To be clear what they DID was DEFINITELY utterly illegal right you guys? WHO does s–t like this on the back of their SON their actual literal SON’s DEATH A N D what was the point?”

Bre’s comment is lengthy, often funny, a little vulgar, and downright astute. She got the message: “They pretty much used [Trayvon] to low key kick off a race war. It’s mind blowing no one caught this and spoke up. This isn’t right on any level. Don’t they feel bad? How do they sleep at night?”

Many of us have asked that same question, not only about the participants in the fraud but also about their enablers in the media and in the Democratic Party. Historically, liberals made a practice of insisting that the transparently guilty were innocent. This time, they insisted that a transparently innocent man was guilty. Zimmerman’s arrest marked the day that liberalism died, and progressivism rose from the ashes, a dark turn in leftist history that no one seems to have noticed.

The results have been catastrophic. In January 2009, 79 percent of whites and 64 percent of blacks held a favorable view of race relations in America. By July 2013, following the Zimmerman trial, those figures had fallen to 52 percent among whites and 38 percent among blacks. They have never recovered. As Gallup notes, “Since 2013, Americans’ overall positive perceptions on race have cooled, and perceptions among blacks have soured considerably.” Propaganda works.

Getting neither satisfaction nor any corrective truth from President Barack “If I had a son” Obama, militants transformed their anger into action. The most radical of these activists formed Black Lives Matter (BLM), a group whose website traces its founding “to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman.”

In August 2014, a year and a month after Zimmerman’s acquittal, protesters chanting “black lives matter” torched the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson and left much of it in ruins. Ferguson represented the second major racial conflagration in two years rooted in a hoax, this time, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” The media chose not to notice.

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.” 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 3,000 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 percent, its greatest one-year jump in a half century. In 2016, the trend continued with an 8.5 percent increase over the year before. What this means is that nearly 3,000 more Americans were murdered in 2016 than in 2014, as many as 2,000 of them black.

The murder rate began a steady decline once Barack Obama left office, but God knows what the final body count will be when the “Minneapolis effect” runs its course. Once again, the great majority of the dead will be black. This time, God willing, the young African Americans who survive may demand real answers as to why their brethren had to die.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is now widely available.