Ironically, LeBron James, a superstar basketball player, keeps getting "played."  The Urban Dictionary defines "played" as "being made a fool of."  LeBron James is once again the fool.  After humiliating himself in his defense of China, James has rushed to judgment on the Georgia shooting of Ahmaud Arbery.  "Can't even go for a damn jog...are you kidding me?"  He tweeted, "We're literally hunted every day."

I will refrain from commenting on the Arbery case until all the facts are known, but I can say with complete confidence that LeBron's generalization is incendiary and outrageous.

For LeBron James, being played by the media is nothing new.  Back in 2012, James got played in the Trayvon Martin case, big time.  LeBron James, the fool, wrote messages on his sneakers: "We want justice" and "RIP Trayvon Martin."

As I detailed in my new film, The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America, prosecutors used the statements of a false witness to issue an affidavit of arrest for George Zimmerman, charging him with second-degree murder.  The case proceeded to trial in 2013 in what was the most flagrant case of judicial fraud in modern history.  Despite the fact that the state's star witness, Rachel Jeantel, was an imposter with a made-to-order storyline, Zimmerman was rightly acquitted.  He is now suing the imposter, the real girlfriend Brittany Diamond Eugene, Trayvon's parents, the state prosecutors, and Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump for $100 million.  Despite the ongoing lawsuit, the shameless Crump has descended on Brunswick, Georgia to cash in and incite racial animus in the Ahmaud Arbery case.

What I find encouraging is that many young black Americans are considerably more savvy than LeBron James.  A few weeks ago, I began offering The Trayvon Hoax for free on You Tube for a limited time.  It now has over 50,000 views and 1,000 comments.

Among the young people who watched The Trayvon Hoax is a black teenager going by the screen name "Onebrightmind."  I will call him "OBM" for short.  So heartening was OBM's one-man appeal to the media that I thought it deserved to be shared.

I thought I had made it to the peak of my disgust for the media's blatant lies, but this, this is a WHOLE new level!! This is BETRAYAL to a young black man traumatized by the fear-mongering pushed out as a result of this case, and indoctrinated at TWELVE YEARS OLD with the idea that I was being "hunted down everywhere I went" because of my race. BETRAYAL!!

If you cared about kids like me back in 2012, why the hell would you fill us with so much fear, why lead us to HATE and wish for vengeance on an innocent man [Zimmerman], why allow our communities to be wrapped in this ideology leading to riots that destroyed our own, and why intentionally WORSEN race relations in America over a LIE???

How can you justify it? Where is your conscience; where is your compassion? I doubt they'd ever own up to or answer these questions. I don't know what to do with this anger, with this incredibly heavy sadness at the thought that this nation was taken by storm for a lie. When the emphasis could have gone to the parent's responsibility, the community's responsibility, the responsibility of the individual, where this could have been used as a painful call for reformation, it was instead used as a grim plea for revolution where none may have been needed.

When the environment failed a young man, his life was ruined and lost. When society failed a true victim, his life was ruined as well. This is as sobering as it gets, and this revelation will change my life forever. All I can do is maybe share and pray for the parties involved, that knowledge of this might act as shedding light on the severity of the issues in this nation. It was personal back then, and it's just as personal now.

OMB pretty much sums up why I produced the film.  As he suggests, those who have suffered the most from the Trayvon hoax are the black youths of America.  Prior to the trial in 2012, both blacks and whites rated race relations as positive.  These numbers have been trending downward ever since.

More tangibly, the Zimmerman acquittal led directly to the creation of Black Lives Matter and indirectly to "the Ferguson Effect," a crime syndrome that has led to the deaths of thousands of black men and the imprisonment of the thousands of black men who murdered them.  The Arbery death, like Trayvon Martin's before, makes the news because it is such an outlier.  LeBron James has no excuse for failing to see this.

If we have no right to expect sports figures to be role models, we do have a right to expect they not be racist demagogues.  Athletes should be helping to educate those who look up to them, rather than stoking their fears by echoing the narratives of race-baiting attorneys and the media.  If LeBron is willing, I will go to wherever he wants to meet and walk him through The Trayvon Hoax.  He is still a young man.  If OBM can recognize the truth when he sees it, there is no reason why LeBron James cannot.

Hollywood film director Joel Gilbert is president of Highway 61 Entertainment.  Among his many films are political documentaries including The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America; Trump: The Art of the Insult; There's No Place Like Utopia; Dreams from My Real Father; Atomic Jihad; and Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam.

Image: Keith Allison via Flickr.