On the morning after the Army-Navy football game, the one at which Daniel Penny was honored for his good citizenship, I just so happened to meet with George Zimmerman.
If there is anyone in America who could identify with the plight of Penny, the U.S. Marine acquitted in the death of subway terrorist Jordan Neely, it is George. Over breakfast, he and I reflected on the changes in America over the last decade — especially over the last two years — that have made Penny’s life post-acquittal so dramatically different from his own.
Pre-acquittal, the parallels are strong. Like Penny, Zimmerman did what he thought any good citizen should do under similar circumstances. On the rainy night of Feb. 26, 2012, Zimmerman, on the way to the store, saw a suspicious character lurking in the shadows of the troubled housing development in which he lived.
Recently, a neighbor’s home had been invaded by two young black men. His wife saw the men, and they saw her. She wanted to move. George, an Obama supporter and civil rights activist, did not scare easily. His volunteer work mentoring two young black kids exposed him to some seriously troubled neighborhoods. To put his wife at ease, he assumed the role of neighborhood watch captain and honed his gun skills.
In the days after the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, New York City Mayor Eric Adams repeated the common sense understanding, “If you see something, say something.” The police in Sanford, Florida had instructed George to do just that. Upon seeing something suspicious, George called the non-emergency number and, as instructed, tried to keep his eyes on the person in question.
That person was Trayvon Martin, a deeply disturbed 17-year-old whose life had spiraled into a death dive of drugs, guns, burglary, and street fighting. When Trayvon took off running, George tried to follow on foot until warned off by the dispatcher. George complied and went looking for an address at which to meet the police.
To this point in his life, the 28-year-old George had been a model citizen. He had a good job, a full schedule of college coursework, and a wife he was keen on protecting. To Trayvon, none of this mattered. Disconsolate over a failed romance, he caught George walking back to his car and shattered his dreams with one vicious sucker punch.
Having knocked George silly, Trayvon straddled him and started punching his head MMA-style into the concrete. For more than 40 recorded seconds, George screamed for help. Fearful of losing consciousness, he managed to do the one thing he could do to save his life: he pulled out his firearm and shot his assailant.
Like Penny, George killed an unarmed black person. The fact that George was Hispanic — he “looked” it and spoke Spanish fluently — should have mitigated the white-on-black dynamic that the media are keen to exploit.
George’s last name, however, betrayed him. The media had settled on a narrative before they knew anything about George Zimmerman. As George acknowledges, had his Peruvian mother gotten her way and named him “Jorgé,” news of this case would never have escaped Florida. In an election year like 2012, in what was then a battleground state, the media would have wanted no part of a story in which a Jorgé killed a Trayvon.
Given the parallels between his case and Penny’s, George and I pondered the question of how Penny emerged from his ordeal a hero to everyone but the far Left while George emerged as a pariah even on the Right.
Technology explains some of the differences. In 2023, the eyewitnesses had the ability to record Penny’s heroism, and several of them did just that. In 2012, none of the witnesses recorded what they saw although one 911 call picked up George’s screams.
In each case, the eyewitnesses talked to the local TV stations. The one reliable eyewitness to George’s beating told a reporter that he saw a “black man in a black hoodie on top of either a white guy … or a Hispanic guy in a red sweater on the ground yelling out help,” and that black man on top was “throwing down blows on the guy MMA style.”
This interview, which I’ve seen, should have ended the controversy. It did not. Corporate media suppressed it. They still had that power. They also suppressed the recording of a 2011 town hall meeting at which George spoke out in defense of a homeless black man who had been beaten by the son of a Sanford Police lieutenant.
Corporate media still ruled in 2012. To suit their agenda, they could turn a Hispanic civil rights activist into a killer white supremacist and a six-foot street fighter into a helpless little boy, and that is exactly what they did. So effective were the media they cowed Florida’s Republican governor and attorney general into endorsing this shockingly counterfeit narrative. (RELATED: How Pam Bondi Can Atone for the Framing of George Zimmerman)
The day after George was rightfully acquitted in July 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement began as a way of protest. The various social media platforms gained power over the next decade, but as the events of 2020 showed, the media-enabled BLM monster had grown more powerful still.
BLM flexed its muscles in the summer of 2020 and in the 2021 trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer accused of murdering the “unarmed” black man, George Floyd. No one in corporate media said “boo” about this sham trial. No one on the “respectable” Right did either. The jurors and the judge had good cause to fear for their lives, but journalists feared only for their futures in a profession hostile to the truth.
American justice had gone into free fall. Without a press to restrain them, prosecutors chose their prey to appease the mobs. The mobs they faced were virtual now, but vaster and, to them, as intimidating as the mobs in the street.
If there was any one day that checked the BLM ascendancy, it was Oct. 27, 2022, the day Elon Musk concluded his purchase of Twitter, soon rebranded as X. By the time Daniel Penny confronted Jordan Neely in the New York subway — May Day 2023 — X users could freely share the video shot by his fellow passengers and the first-hand accounts these people gave to local news stations.
The corporate media could no longer dictate who was the hero and who was the villain. Viewers could see for themselves and decide. Even in New York City, jurors could not resist the tide of common sense that sustained Penny’s cause and reduced the BLM protest to a toothless sideshow.
From afar, George cheered for Penny and wished him only the best. That said, he could not easily forget the damage done to his own life — the marriage shattered, the legal debt accrued, the jobs denied, the educational opportunities lost, and the future blunted.
If nothing else, his experience as America’s most hated man taught George how to endure. He survived a vicious beating, imprisonment, a grueling trial, an assassination attempt, a fatwa by hip-hop mogul Jay-Z, near-universal media abuse, and a very real case of PTSD.
Today, having survived what few others could, George counts his blessings, and there are many, not the least of which is his own sanity, the love of a wonderful woman, and a renewed hope in America’s future. Like Elon Musk himself, George is no longer an Obama fan. Like Daniel Penny, he proved himself a man.
Jack Cashill is the author of If I Had a Son: Race, Guns, and the Railroading of George Zimmerman and consulted on Joel Gilbert’s film and companion book, The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud That Divided America.
READ MORE from Jack Cashill:
How Pam Bondi Can Atone for the Framing of George Zimmerman
Why the Left’s Long March Might End on Nov. 5
Jack Smith Shamelessly Withholds Evidence
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