If one accepts every premise advanced by the authors of National Review’s coverage, including the most dubious–if we treat the Michael Brown investigation as a cynical pretext; presume Eric Holder hates every white cop in America; ignore statistics about racially disproportionate stops as inconclusive; and presume that people are being mistreated wholly due to their poverty rather than their race; even then, it remains the case that hundreds of Americans have had their Constitutional rights or basic liberties violated by governing elites with perverse incentives to cite, fine, and jail them as often and as expensively as possible.
That is an outrage. And what amounts to the exoneration of Officer Darren Wilson–itself a legitimate news story, from the subset of self-described witnesses who lied about what happened in the altercation with Michael Brown to the media treatment Wilson received–should not be treated as more important than all injustices that hundreds of poor, disproportionately black Ferguson residents experienced. Having criticized the protestors who brought the nation’s attention to Ferguson and the DOJ investigators who’ve done more than anyone to document serious abuses there, how would conservatives suggest uncovering and remedying egregious Constitutional violations in municipalities like it?
I’ve never seen the question answered well. And I can’t help but wonder if the America’s Fergusons would be ignored entirely if conservatives were running the country, just as present day injustices tend to be downplayed or left out of conservative media when they cut against the conservative counter-narrative on race.
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