OPINION:
A new documentary — and remember, that word’s been used in recent years to prove Al Gore right on climate change and Michael Moore similarly correct, that capitalism is racist — purports to prove Michael Brown, the 18-year-old black man whose story sparked a militant national movement called Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, was innocent of the crime that led to his killing.
That he was just happening along the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, thumbing the pages of his Bible, when the evil Caucasian police officer known in Whitey World as Darren Wilson pulled out his gun and shot the crap out of him. Motive? Crime of Being Black.
Well, maybe it doesn’t paint all that — but it’ll come, don’t worry. The media, after watching “Stranger Fruit,” which made its debut at the SXSW festival over the weekend, will start the spinning and it won’t be long before the whole Wilson self-defense story, already backed by separate investigations at local and federal levels and found to be fact, becomes overshadowed by the more creative creations that mark liberal minds.
In case you don’t recall the events of the day All Hell Broke Loose in Ferguson, here’s a quick trip down 2014 memory lane, when Brown entered a store and, according to lawyers for the store, walked out with several items without paying. The call then went out to police to be on the lookout for the robbery suspect. Officer Wilson, in his patrol car, came across Brown and attempted to stop him for questioning — only Brown didn’t want to be questioned, or apprehended, as it turned out. Instead, he wrestled with Wilson and then, according to the officer’s statements, which were consistent with local and federal findings, the teen reached for his service weapon. Wilson, in self-defense, shot and killed Brown — thus setting in motion the whole minority community mantra that quickly spread nationwide, called Hands Up, Don’t Shoot. Too bad the premise for this mantra — that Brown had been walking away from Wilson, hands in air, a.k.a. a don’t shoot pose, was based on a lie. The mantra made sense, at least in leftists’ minds, and therefore that’s all that matters. Perception is reality, as they say. Besides, it was soon-after replaced by another, even better movement and message: Black Lives Matter.
But back to Ferguson. A new film from Jason Pollock — oh, OK, Documentary — puts forth the notion that Brown didn’t steal from the store.
Rather, he was simply engaged in a little drug-dealing. And for proof, Pollock has some previously unreleased video.
Pollock describes the contents of the video in Reuters.
“Mike,” he begins, eschewing the more formal “Michael” for the pet name — kind of like when Jesus renamed his beloved after they shed their bad boy images. Saul to Paul, remember?
“Mike, traded the store a little bag of weed and got two boxes of cigarillos in return,” Pollock illustrates, explaining video clips of a much more friendly looking Brown engaging in a simple product-for-product transaction with store employees. “He left his items at the store and he went back the next day to pick them up. Mike did not rob the store.”
Michael — maybe. But Mike? No. Mike wouldn’t do that.
And we know this documentary to be true because Brown’s mother makes an on-camera appearance to double down: “There was some type of exchange, for one thing, for another.”
Now attorneys for the store still insist Brown was a robber.
As Reuters noted, attorney Jay Kanzler said, “The reason he gave [anything] back is he was walking out the door with unpaid merchandise and they wanted it back.”
That makes sense, too. And if this was a simple film, or movie, maybe Kanzler’s remarks could be taken at face value, and considered truth. But this is a Documentary, and Documentaries tell sides of stories that others don’t see — like polar bears gasping for last breaths on floating pieces of ice — and that means they can’t be questioned.
The overall message this Documentary is trying to send, of course, and why it’s a political fire-starter, is that Brown wasn’t a robber, and that since he wasn’t a robber, police had no reason to engage with him. And if police had no reason to stop and engage Brown, he’d still be alive.
The elephant in the room is the assertion that the only reason police were called, and the only reason Brown was stopped, was he was black. Follow that train of thought to its logical conclusion and you get this: Brown was an innocent teen targeted by white police for killing just because he was black.
OK. But what of Brown’s struggle for Wilson’s gun?
That right there is called an Inconvenient Truth — and it’s a real inconvenient truth, not the type used by another documentarian to spread, in a movie of the same name, Gore’s propaganda visions for climate change throughout the world.
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