An almost identical situation plays out in Ben Shapiro’s “ripped from the headlines” thriller True Allegiance. Into this Tom Clancy knockoff about a special ops soldier captured by terrorists, Shapiro shoehorns a subplot based on the protests against police violence in Ferguson and Baltimore.

In the novel, a young kid named Kendrick Malone tricks a cop into shooting him. The whole thing is an elaborate setup orchestrated by Levon Williams, a slick-talking drug dealer and “race hustler” from Detroit, who manipulates the fallout from the killing for his own nefarious ends.

But this is just fiction, right?

Good fiction is believable, and while True Allegiance is not good fiction, Shapiro no doubt thinks it is. So it logically follows that this scenario is something he thinks could plausibly happen in real life—and it’s largely consistent with how he looks at the world.

In the final chapter of The Blood of Emmett Till titled “The Children Emmett Till,” author Tim Tyson discusses at length the legacy of the case as it relates to the high-profile killings of unarmed black men in the last decade that sparked unrest in Ferguson, Baltimore and elsewhere. He concludes that “America is still killing Emmett Till often for the same reasons that drove the violent segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s.”

Echoes of the same racist logic that was so pervasive in the time when Till lived and died can be heard in Shapiro’s commentary on the police slayings that ignited the Black Lives Matter movement.

During the trial, the defense attempted to assassinate Till’s character. Tyson records how they grilled his mother Mamie, as if the dead boy were on trial. She testified that how she told him how to behave according to the racial norms in the Deep South before he left Chicago for Mississippi:

“[H]ad he been doing anything to cause you to give him that special instruction?” “No sir. Emmett has never been in trouble at any time.” “And has he ever been in a reform school” “No sir”

Emmett was even punished by the media for the (alleged) sins of his father Louis. Local papers as well as national media ran wild after they discovered his father had been court-martialed and executed by the Army for rape and murder (though a later reexamination of the evidence showed he was most likely innocent.)

There are obvious parallels between this and the trial of George Zimmerman for killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Zimmerman’s defense used Martin’s text messages and disciplinary record as evidence. As the defense had in the Till case, Zimmerman’s attorneys played on the racial prejudices of a mostly white jury by portraying Martin as a violent thug stereotype.

It was their only move since Zimmerman’s claims that he acted in self-defense were contradicted by ample evidence from the 911 transcripts, medical examiners and witness testimony.

Nevertheless, a lot of conservatives took Zimmerman at his word. Shapiro remains a vocal defender of Zimmerman’s actions, contending that there is no one to blame for Martin’s death except Trayvon himself.

In a (now deleted) 2016 Breitbart post released the same day as this Tweet, Shapiro purports to tell the “real story.” After acknowledging Zimmerman’s history of violence prior to the incident, including domestic abuse and assault on a police officer, Mr. Facts and Logic argues: “[T]here’s no evidence of Zimmerman’s racism … Actually, there’s far more evidence that Martin was a racist than Zimmerman — Martin, after all, called Zimmerman a ‘creepy ass cracker’”

This was a full year after Zimmerman had been booted from Twitter for posting nude pictures of his ex, who he said cheated on him with a “dirty Muslim.” Prior to that, he had left unambiguous evidence that should meet the Popper-esque empirical standards of an intellectual like Shapiro, ex. calling Obama a baboon, tweeting crime scene photos of Trayvon’s body, asserting that “Cop lives matter, black slime doesnt [sic],” etc.

Several months after Shapiro’s post, Zimmerman was ejected from a bar for calling someone a “n***er lover.”