The Knockout Game is played for glory. Martin’s audience consisted of one person, the sassy, defiant, plus-sized Rachel Jeantel who talked to Martin by phone throughout the encounter.

There is no reason to believe anything Jeantel said about the confrontation between Martin and Zimmerman save for her spectacularly un-coached recollection of how Martin first described Zimmerman, namely as a “creepy ass cracker.”

In sum, Martin saw Zimmerman not as the hulking vigilante the media did but as a vulnerable, possibly gay white man nearly half-a-foot smaller than he.

As to Martin, although the media chose not to let the public know, he was an aspiring mixed martial artist who had recently been disciplined both at home and at school for starting fights.

By the time of this incident, the Knockout Game was a well-established phenomenon among young black males, especially troubled ones like Martin, the product of a broken home and a broken culture. Martin’s assault on Zimmerman fit an obvious pattern.

The State of Florida, Attorney General Holder, President Barack Obama and the entirety of the mainstream media chose not to see that pattern.

Eric Holder’s Justice Department continues not to see it. In 2012, incredible as it seems, the FBI reported three times as many anti-black hate crimes as anti-white ones.

If nothing else, Holder’s perverse enforcement of the law shows just how absurd these laws are in the first place. What they punish is thought, not action, and in the Orwellian world of the DOJ thought is punished with wildly “disparate” selectivity.