Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, February 24, 2015

We have known for some time that the Justice Department was unlikely to file federal civil rights charges against George Zimmerman. Today, it is finally official: Nearly three years to the day after shooting Trayvon Martin, and nearly a year and a half after he was acquitted of state criminal charges, Mr. Zimmerman can finally sleep easy. The federal investigation of Darren Wilson, the unlucky policeman who killed Michael Brown, is still going on.

The Justice Department clearly did its damndest to get the goods on Mr. Zimmerman. It spent more than two years preparing a case for a federal grand jury. It interviewed no fewer than 75 witnesses. It spent millions of tax dollars trying to get the scalp of someone it was dying to prove was a racist.

Vanita Gupta, who is Acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights was clearly disappointed that the search for racism came up dry: “Our decision not to pursue federal charges does not condone the shooting that resulted in the death of Trayvon Martin and is based solely on the high legal standard applicable to these cases,” she says.

In order to have a case, DOJ would have had to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Mr. Zimmerman killed Martin because of his race–that he had committed a hate crime. But since his acquittal in July 2013, we know exactly what happened between George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. Mr. Zimmerman stopped Martin because he thought he looked suspicious. Martin attacked him, knocked him down, and was pounding him when Mr. Zimmerman fired one shot.

It’s entirely possible that Mr. Zimmerman stopped Martin in part because he was black. But he convinced a jury that he shot Martin because he feared for his life.

Where is the evidence that this was a hate crime? Simply the fact that the shooter was a “white” Hispanic and the dead man was black.

That is why the DOJ interviewed all those witnesses. Probably, not a single one was at the scene of the shooting. All that evidence-gathering was not going to chance one shred of factual evidence about what happened that night. There can have been only one reason for it: To sniff out whether Mr. Zimmerman had ever used a forbidden word or had an impure thought. No doubt to their dismay, the federal gumshoes found nothing.

But imagine this: What if the facts in the case had been identical but Mr. Zimmerman had been a reader of AmRen.com? What if he had a copy of a book by Arthur Jensen or Philippe Rushton on his bookshelf. What if he had once called a black a naughty name? We can be certain that if the Department of Justice had found even a shred of evidence it would have ginned up a “civil rights” case. In order to placate the mobs howling for Mr. Zimmerman’s head, even if it could not win, it would have crowed and bellowed and trotted out that shred of evidence as if it were the crown jewels.

This investigation was not about what Mr. Zimmerman did. It was about what he thought, or what he might have thought had he ever done or said certain things.

This is a chilling message for all of us. We are not judged by our acts but by our opinions and convictions. If makes no difference how carefully considered, how thoughtfully arrived at those convictions may be. In a pinch, they could put you in the cross hairs.

How long will he be under the threat of indictment before the feds give up in baffled fury?