We’ve highlighted WorldNetDaily’s embrace of charlatan filmmaker Joel Gilbert’s new film on the death of Trayvon Martin, which somehow neglected to tell readers about Gilbert’s history of pushing false and otherwise bogus claims. Well, Gilbert has another WND fan in the form of columnist Rachel Alexander, who gushed in a Nov. 6 column:
Filmmaker Joel Gilbert decided to start looking into the Trayvon Martin shooting after hearing Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum say Martin was shot simply because he was wearing a hoodie. Gillum also said it had to do with “stand your ground” laws. Those laws, which almost half the states have, establish a right by which a person may defend himself or others against perceived threats, even up to the point of using lethal force.
Gilbert thinks the situation really had everything to do with self-defense. And why would Gillum bring up Martin so much? He saw that Martin’s mother was a big fan of Gillum’s. Gilbert decided to get to the bottom of it.
Gilbert got to know George Zimmerman, who shot Martin, and Martin’s real girlfriend, Diamond Eugene. Martin was on the phone to Eugene when he was shot. But Gilbert discovered that another woman appeared at the hearing pretending to be Eugene. He decided to produce a documentary exposing this, called “The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America.”
Following in the footsteps of Jack Cashill and other Gilbert boosters at WND, Alexander didn’t tell readers about the fact that his anti-Obama film whose central claim that Barack Obama’s mother posed nude for Frank Marshall Davis was discredited so quickly that Gilbert re-edited promotional videos to play down the claim, or that earlier so-called documentaries have been mysteriously reclassifed as “mockumentaries” years after the fact. Instead, Alexander uncritically promotes Gilbert’s film, touting how you “rent or buy the movie on Vimeo.”
Speaking of Cashill, we’ve noted that he has suggested he had little role in Gilbert’s film, writing in one WND column, “Having written a book on the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin – “If I Had a Son” – I have been following Gilbert’s progress with interest. In fact, I introduced Gilbert to George Zimmerman, the man who shot Martin. Turns out his role is much bigger than that.
In an Oct. 23 column for the far-right American Thinker, Cashill wrote: “For nearly a year now I have been consulting with filmmaker Joel Gilbert on his book and film project, each called The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America From the beginning, I have been impressed by Gilbert’s diligence in exposing the fraud at the heart of America’s most publicized and racially charged trial since O.J.’s.” He denied “having any financial stake in the success of either the book or the film.”
It doesn’t appear Cashill is interested in telling readers about Gilbert’s history of charlatanism either.