Watch as America gets the Ferguson anniversary wrong

August is a month for anniversaries of note. Today, for example, is the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Later this month we will mark the anniversary of the notorious events at Ruby Ridge. It’s also the month when the King died. (Elvis, not George) The death of Elvis aside, it’s amazing how quickly time can distort some of these landmark moments and how distorted they can become through the lens of time. I see all manner of cautions from liberals today about how Hiroshima should have taught us humility and served as a warning about the evils of military superpowers. These same groups remember Ruby Ridge as the birth of “right wing extremism” against the lawful government.

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It’s all fairly sickening. We might wonder how so many could forget that we were in a war with Japan because of their cowardly attack on us at Pearl Harbor and that we prevented millions of additional deaths in a land war by forcing the Japanese surrender when we dropped those bombs. As to the incidents of August 21st and 22nd of 1992 at Ruby Ridge, there is too much to encapsulate here. Suffice it to say that the charges against Randy Weaver were utter nonsense, or at a minimum a lack of paperwork which failed to justify a military style assault and ambush. But his family paid a terrible price at the hands of federal authorities who had run amok.

Now there is another anniversary to be noted in August. On the ninth of this month it will be one year since Officer Darren Wilson had his fateful encounter with Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And how will this date be remembered? The media is already instructing us. There are mass demonstrations planned and the purpose is clear. (Reuters)

Civil rights activists, religious leaders and others from around the United States are converging on the mostly black community of about 21,000 to commemorate the life and death of 18-year-old Michael Brown and call for improvements in relations with police.

The events, many organized by Brown’s father, include marches, concerts and a moment of silence at midday on Sunday on the street where Brown was killed on Aug. 9, 2014.

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We are being regularly treated to interviews with Michael Brown’s mother who is more than happy to go before the cameras and declare that Darren Wilson is evil. She’s a national civil rights leader now, you understand, and her word is beyond question in interviews.

We’re being similarly prepared for all of this by articles such as this one from Lisa Gutierrez of the Kansas City Star who asks, where are the Ferguson key players now? She pays particular attention to the current whereabouts of Brown’s friend, Dorian Johnson.

Johnson’s eyewitness account of how his friend raised his hands into the air as Wilson approached him with a gun gave rise to the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” mantra.

In an interview this week with the Riverfront Times in St. Louis, Johnson talks about how he still fears retaliation from law enforcement and vigilantes. “Dorian Johnson has found little peace in the year since Brown’s death,” the Times writes.

In twelve short months history has been entirely rewritten. Gone is the finding that Michael Brown was actually the aggressor in the confrontation and that not only a grand jury, but Eric Holder and the Obama Justice Department found that Officer Wilson acted correctly. Wiped out is the repeated discovery that Dorian Johnson is a serial liar whose every statement given on the events of the day turned out to be complete fabrications designed to cover the fact that he was only there because he and his friend were on the way back from a strongarm robbery when Brown assaulted Darren Wilson in his squad car.

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Instead, Johnson is heralded today for having given the quote which led to the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement, with the chanting of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” This is a fantasy which has been so widely discarded that even that most liberal of writers, the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart, was compelled to write a column titled, Hands Up Don’t Shoot Was Based on a Lie.

And yet here we are, a scant twelve months later, and Michael Brown – a criminal who attacked a police officer – is heralded as a hero and the anniversary of the crimes which led to his death are being treated like a national holiday.

Why? Because Michael Brown is a hero, of course. We all know it now. We know it the same way that we know the evil Americans attempted genocide on the well meaning people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We know it in the same way that we know that Vicki Weaver had it coming when a federal agent put a bullet through her brain as she held her ten month old baby in her arms.

It’s just what we know. History is a very fluid thing.

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