A Culture of Lies - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
A Culture of Lies
by

The hucksters who falsely accused Darren Wilson of a racially motivated “killing” won’t face justice, even though they have ruined his life and inspired monstrous race riots. The media should treat them as permanently discredited, but of course it won’t. Outlets will continue to give them platforms from which to pontificate on all the “changes” that should come from the controversy. Self-reflection will not be one of them, as they search for new outrages to stoke.

Most of their recommended changes amount to giving criminals a wider berth in society. It is impossible to see how police departments could conform to the demands of Al Sharpton and company unless they simply stopped arresting black criminals.

Almost all of the focus is on changing the police’s reaction to criminal behavior, not changing the behavior itself. Out of this mindset has come a culture that canonizes criminals and criminalizes cops.

Wilson has become a source of revulsion for nothing more than following well-established police procedures. He made the mistake of applying his training to a criminal who attacked him. For that he is now the poster boy of police misconduct. Anchors, from the safety of their studios, continue to second-guess his decision and act baffled as to why he viewed Brown as a threat.

The grand jury in St. Louis didn’t find that incomprehensible and couldn’t find Wilson guilty of any crime, despite enormous pressure to do so. The Left whined about the “special” treatment Wilson received. But the truth is that this case wouldn’t have gone to a grand jury had Brown been white instead of black. Wilson’s misfortune was to follow police procedures against a politically favored “victim.”

Pundits continue to cast Wilson as the aggressor and speak of Brown in reverential tones, as if he died gloriously on the battlefields of Iraq. Due sympathy for the family has morphed into tedious sanctimony, with pols competing with each other to see who can show more empathy.

President Obama said anger at the grand jury’s verdict is “understandable,” even though the evidence pointed to a perfectly understandable act of self-defense by Wilson. Apparently one of the “lessons” police officers should learn from what happened in Ferguson is that criminals have a right to overpower them.

Michael Brown committed a theft, manhandled a clerk, got into a confrontation with a police officer in which he struck him and grabbed for his gun, resisted arrest after repeated warnings, and charged the officer “like a football player, according to an eyewitness.” Yet Wilson was the danger to society, according to the Left, while Brown is worthy of monuments. Wilson apparently was supposed to let Brown tackle him and take his gun. Wilson apparently should have known that his life and the community’s safety count for nothing next to the rights of the racially aggrieved, one of which is the right to attack police officers without resistance.

One of the “changes” from the controversy was already evident on Monday night, as thugs and looters took advantage of the space an emasculated police provided them. They torched police cars and destroyed businesses. Few were arrested. The media praised the police for its “restraint.”

It is considered a positive change by the Left when the police are more sensitive to arsonists than shopkeepers. While Obama and the liberal media were piously praising the Brown family for its message of peace, Brown’s stepfather was exhorting agitators to “burn this bitch down.”

Wilson will be cast into the outer darkness, never to work in law enforcement again in all likelihood. But Sharpton and company, exposed as reckless liars, won’t pay any price for their rabble-rousing. They will even get to oversee the “changes” society is supposed to learn from the riots they provoked. Obama’s idea of racial healing has been to treat Sharpton as a valued White House adviser.

“Progress” will consist not of eliminating the causes of criminal behavior but of imposing a culture of lies on law enforcement to the detriment of the law-abiding. It is a future of emboldened criminals, timid police officers, and a cowering public. The rioting on Monday night provided a fitting image of that future: torched police cars under a banner of “Seasons Greetings.”

George Neumayr
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George Neumayr, a senior editor at The American Spectator, is author most recently of The Biden Deception: Moderate, Opportunist, or the Democrats' Crypto-Socialist?
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