© Jack Cashill
Published in WND.com - August 17, 2014

While the major media were trotting out the same race-baiting narrative they had been trotting out for the last 50 years, the same narrative Tom Wolfe so nicely parodied in his classic 1987 classic, “Bonfire of the Vanities,” the Treepers were doing the real work on the Michael Brown case.

The Treepers are the citizen journalists who comprise the blogging collective known as the Conservative Treehouse. Two years prior, they played a major role in breaking the true story of Trayvon Martin.

They could not help but spot the parallels with the Brown case. As soon as black trial attorney Benjamin Crump came to Ferguson, as he had come to Sanford, Florida, two years earlier, those parallels were hard to miss. Crump was there for another payday.

As he did in Sanford, Crump promptly recruited race hustler Al Sharpton, who has been masquerading as a journalist at MSNBC. Sharpton, in turn, enlisted the AME church network and preacher Jamal Bryant once again.

Crump and Sharpton called for the NAACP’s help in both shootings. The president, the Congressional Black Caucus, and, of course, the New Black Panthers weighed in on the Brown case as they had with Martin.

The media, as the Treepers noted, were telling the same embarrassingly fraudulent story they had told in the Martin shooting: innocent teen, academically ambitious, minding his own business, profiled by racist white vigilante – this time a cop – and shot for no reason other than his race.

Consider the Washington Post’s Aug. 12 article on Michael Brown.

Over the picture of Brown in his cap and gown was the sappy headline, “Mike Brown notched a hard-fought victory just days before he was shot: A diploma.”

At first glance, the article looks like it might have come from the Onion or some other satirical site. Brown had been shot three days prior, and, appallingly, the Post reporters could conjure a representation no more accurate than this.

On the plus side, the media did not show a picture of Brown when he was 12, as they had done relentlessly with Martin, but the picture they collectively painted was as conspicuously dishonest.

To get his diploma, Brown faced “the longest academic odds,” the Post reader was told. “Mike was there every doggone day,” enthused his teacher.

And then, the unthinkable happened. Wrote the Post reporters, “As Brown walked down a street with a friend, the 18-year-old man was fatally shot by a police officer in this city in St. Louis’s north suburbs. Brown was unarmed.”

That was it? Brown was just walking down the street with a pal and some still unnamed, presumably white officer ran up and capped him?

As in the Martin case, Crump and pals conjured an emotional icon to sum up the injustice. For Martin, it was the hoodie. For Brown, it was the hands waving in the air begging the cop not to shoot.

The Treepers knew better and started digging. Others in the blogosphere chimed in, as did the Ferguson police. Over the objection of Obama’s Department of Justice, the police released the video of the 6’4,” 292-pound Brown strong-arming a Middle Eastern clerk half his size to steal a box of cheap cigars.

Curiously, Martin had stopped in a convenience store just before he was shot. In addition to the storied “Skittles and iced tea” – the media did not even get the drink right – Martin purchased a couple of cheap cigars on the sly.

Martin likely filled the casings with marijuana – a.k.a. “blunts” – and smoked them on the way home. He was high at the time of his death.

Brown was not carrying Skittles, but he was carrying the cheap cigars. After the release of the store video, the media tried to rehabilitate Brown and their own narrative by insisting the police officer, unaware of the robbery, stopped Brown just to hassle him.

“Ferguson cop Darren Wilson didn’t know Michael Brown was robbery suspect at time of shooting, chief admits as teen’s backers cry character ‘assassination.’”Thus screamed the headline of the New York Daily News on Oct. 15.

Closer to home, however, Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that “the officer, Darren Wilson, saw cigars in Brown’s hand and realized he might be the robber.”

There is more, of course. As WND reported on Aug. 16, Dorian Johnson, the friend of Brown’s who claims to have witnessed the shooting, had an outstanding arrest warrant for theft, having blown off his day in court last year.

Additionally, in what, according to the Drudge Report, could be a “game-changer,” a sharp-eyed Treeper filtered out a background conversation from a video taken at the crime scene. In it, an eyewitness seems to be corroborating the police version of events.

“Then the next thing I know,”said the eyewitness, [Brown] doubled back toward [Wilson] … he kept coming toward him.”

Finally, the parallel to the Martin shooting would not be complete without the New Black Panthers leading a march down the local streets demanding the head of the shooter, “What do we want? Darren Wilson.How Do We Want Him? Dead?”

And to think that George Zimmerman had to endure a month of this with support from no one but his family and a few close friends. Frightening.

Who is Jack Cashill?