The charges seemed ideal to stir up an angry mob. A white policeman shoots and kills an unarmed black teenager. The teen’s companion says his friend, Michael Brown, was shot in the back. Another alleged eyewitness claims the boy had his hands up and said “Don’t shoot” when he was gunned down.
Suddenly, the tiny town of Ferguson, Missouri, was the site of demonstrations that turned into riots. Stores were looted and burned. Police were stoned. Molotov cocktails were hurled. State police were called in to try to prevent things from getting completely out of hand.
Notorious racist agitator Al Sharpton flew into town to add his own incendiary remarks to the volatile mix. For a while, it looked as though an escalation of violence was inevitable.
But then an amazing thing happened: As more facts began to emerge, the picture started to change. Police released a video from a nearby convenience store, taken moments before the shooting on the street. The video allegedly showed Brown threatening and pummeling a store clerk and stealing a box of cigars. This happened minutes before Brown and his companion, Dorian Johnson, were stopped by a local policeman for blocking traffic by walking down the middle of a street.
An autopsy confirmed that Brown had not been shot in the back, as his companion claimed. That was simply a flat-out lie. While officer Darren Wilson’s statement hasn’t been released yet (and it certainly should be!), a woman who said she was a friend called a local radio station and said that Brown punched and pushed Wilson and tried to take his gun. There were reports that Wilson had been severely beaten around the face and suffered a fractured eye socket.
Brown was 6-feet-4 and weighed close to 300 pounds. If he did strike Wilson several times, as has been alleged, I don’t think anyone would blame the policeman for fearing for his life. Wouldn’t you?
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The fact is we don’t know exactly what happened that day in Ferguson. But that hasn’t stopped agitators like Sharpton and Jesse Jackson from demanding “justice” for Brown. Even Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon joined the clamor, demanding the “vigorous prosecution” of Wilson. Shame on him for jumping to judgment!
Attorney General Eric Holder flew to Ferguson to head up the federal investigation of the shooting. Shortly after he landed, he proved that he wasn’t exactly unbiased, when he revealed several confrontations he said he had with white law enforcement officers when he was younger. All of them seemed to demonstrate an anti-black bias.
Way to help calm things down, Attorney General!
As I said, the first reports out of Ferguson seemed ideal to stir up the mob. And for a while, it worked. But thanks to the alternative media in this country — things like talk radio, Fox News and websites such as Personal Liberty — it’s almost impossible to suppress the “other side” of a story for long. And the more facts that came out, the harder it became for the racist agitators to succeed with their bigoted, one-sided portrayals.
Because of this, things are calmer now in Ferguson. Thank goodness! If it hadn’t happened, I have no doubt that there would be more riots, more looting and more bloodshed — probably in many other cities, in addition to that small St. Louis suburb.
Thanks for doing your part to make sure that “the other side” continues to be heard.
Until next time, keep some powder dry.
Chip Wood was the first news editor of The Review of the News and also wrote for American Opinion, our two predecessor publications. He is now the geopolitical editor of Personal Liberty Digest, where his column appears regularly. This article first appeared in PersonalLiberty.com and has been reprinted with permission.
