I was going to write a lengthy article describing how the media has distorted the facts of the Brown/Wilson case, purposely encouraging misperceptions that have led to outrage and destructive rioting. I was planning to list a whole bunch of articles, and then the omissions and/or lies in each one.
But I was overcome with a vast sense of weariness. I feel as though I’m in an ocean liner that’s taken on enough water to sink, and I’m equipped with only a teaspoon to bail it out while the entire crew is hard at work punching more holes in the hull. That may be a poor analogy, but I think you get the idea. Suffice to say that the entire MSM, the administration, the professional racemongers, and the left in all its glorious manifestations (including the preening, self-righteous Hollywood crowd, scrambling to outdo themselves in showing their allegiance with the Brown forces) were determined to make Michael Brown into the post-Trayvon martyr du jour.
No matter what the facts would reveal. Facts are for the little people.
Summary version of their general argument: Brown was unarmed. At one point, he was running away (briefly; he turned back and charged Wilson). Wilson, in the heat of being attacked by a really, really large and powerful and tremendously aggressive man, who had tried to beat him up and take his gun from him (although this last fact is usually omitted or trivialized), should have somehow figured out a way to stop him in the heat of a few seconds that did not involve shooting him.
In other words, just as in the Zimmerman case, their armchair-philosopher position is that white police officers and white-Hispanic neighborhood security watchers should just lay down and die rather than harm their aggressive black attackers. Whites have no right to self-defense when faced with an imminent threat from a black person.
However, it should go without saying—but I’ll repeat it anyway—that a person (white or black or whatever) who punches a police officer (white or black or whatever), tries to take his firearm, and keeps charging when that officer points the weapon at him and says to stop, ought to consider him or herself a dead person, because that officer has every right in the world to protect him/herself with the use of deadly or possibly-deadly force. This is particularly true if the attacker is a large strong person who could easily overpower the officer in the physical sense. Claiming that the attacker is “unarmed” is sophistry, because the attacker has shown no tendency to be deterred by the officer’s weapon and his/her own lack of weapon, and can easily disarm that officer and then will have a 100% advantage in terms of force. The only chance—the only hope—the officer has of staying on top of the threat is to actually use that weapon to stop the attacker.
In the Brown case virtually all the credible evidence seems to concur in absolving Wilson: the officer’s own testimony (which one would expect would be self-serving), the eyewitnesses (many of whom were black), and the forensic evidence.
But the court of public opinion is bound by no such constraints, unfortunately. And that court is determined to make this case conform to the Narrative. You know the drill. Racist America. Trigger-happy white cop. Gentle Giant.
[NOTE: Rich Lowry makes a good point:
…[W]e don’t try people for crimes they almost certainly didn’t commit just to satisfy a mob that will throw things at the police and burn down local businesses if it doesn’t get its way. If the grand jury had given into the pressure from the streets and indicted as an act of appeasement, the mayhem most likely would have only been delayed until the inevitable acquittal in a trial.]
