Jack Cashill began his March 2 WorldNetDaily column by ranting:
Ten years after the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, former President Barack Obama has no excuse for the litany of lies he either told the Washington Post or that he endorsed by his participation in its perverse video rememberance.
Post writer Charles Blow set the stage by saying, with some unfortunate accuracy, “The contemporary civil rights movement unfolded directly in response to the murder of Trayvon Martin.”
Yes, this was a new phase, the Jacobin phase, the phase in which the mob discards traditions like “innocent until proven guilty” and “equal justice under the law” and dictates judicial outcomes by force of its will.
Yes, this column merges Cashill’s two big obsessions, Trayvon Martin and Barack Obama. But more importantly, readers much more eagle-eyed than Cashill — or even slightly more — may pick up on a major error he committed. The video link goes to the New York Times, not the Washington Post. And Charles Blow works for the Times, not the Post.
That’s right: Cashill spent his entire column attacking the wrong newspaper. Sadly, that’s not out of character for someone who embraces conspiracy theories and plays fast and loose with the facts.
His column has since been corrected and now carries this embarrassing editor’s note: “The original version of this column had an incorrect name of the newspaper involved. The error was corrected March 9, 2022.” That’s sadly telling of both Cashill’s inepititude and WND’s overall failure to fact-check pretty much everything it publishes.
The rest of Cashill’s column is his usual demonization of Martin — the dead can’t be libeled, after all — and complaining that the Post — er, Times misleadingly edited George Zimmerman’s 911 call after killing Martin and further lionizing Zimmerman as as the real victim.
And as he usually does, he whined that Zimmerman’s killing of Martin was the catalyst for the Black Lives Matter movement, adding: “This new generation initiated first the ‘Ferguson effect’ in 2014 and then the even more lethal ‘Minneapolis effect’ in 2020. At least 10,000 people, most of them black, are dead because of this ‘activization.'” It will not surprise you to learn that Cashill did not bother to substantiate where his 10,000 dead number came from.