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Wingnut Conspiracy Theory of the Day: Trayvon Photo Was Lightened to Make Him Look 'Innocent'

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The Ghost of a Flea3/24/2012 4:02:26 pm PDT

re: #318 Lidane

David Frum: Trayvon Martin, and the backlash against the backlash

Frum’s conclusion:

As is so often the case, Rush Limbaugh gave these new racial fears their most explicit voice. In September 2009, after Drudge publicized an assault on an Illinois school bus, Limbaugh had this to say: “It’s Obama’s America, is it not? Obama’s America — white kids getting beat up on school buses now.”

You can read the answer on the past four years’ worth of front pages on the hugely popular website, the Drudge Report. Month in, month out, Drudge spotlights gruesome black-on-white crimes. In a country of 300 million people, there are always examples. These same stories circulate in e-mail chains — and often become the focus of local right-wing talk-radio shows.

The U.S. journalist Mickey Kaus calls it “under-news”: news that never quite emerges into the national media, but that shapes the consciousness of millions of people. And what is being shaped is a conviction among many white people — especially fearful elderly whites in the South — that the Obama presidency has licensed a rampage of black-on-white violence. That’s not what the statistics say. But as Stephen Colbert would say: statistics are elitist.

This mood of “backlash” has dominated U.S. politics since 2009 — until now. Now the “backlash” has created an apparent martyr in Trayvon Martin. And it is in Martin’s name that the backlash against the backlash will be launched and be heard.

You think the 2012 election will be about economics? Think again.

Nail on the damn head.