Some Clarity On The Ferguson Grand Jury

Yesterday Andrew McCarthy posted an article in the National Review Online about the Grand Jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson.

Mr. McCarthy sums up the story as follows:

All very reasonable, but let’s not pretend reason has anything to do with what happened in Ferguson this week. In Liberal Fascism’s focus on myth, Jonah recalls Mussolini’s assertion, “It is faith that moves mountains, not reason. Reason is a tool, but it can never be the motive force of the crowd.” The crowd in Ferguson was moved to riot on the article of a false faith that condemns America and its police forces as incorrigibly racist. It is from this condemnation that all purported “reasoning” proceeds.

Such reasoning dictates that our constitutional right not to be indicted in the absence of just cause should be subordinated to the mob’s demand for a public trial. Succeeding in that legerdemain, it next dictates that our constitutional right not to be convicted in the absence of proof beyond a reasonable doubt be subordinated to the mob’s demand for a guilty verdict.

Such a verdict that would have had only the most tangential connection to the tragedy of an 18-year-old’s death or a police officer’s well-founded fear for his life. But it would have fed the myth.

The article reminds us that the American Left has fostered the myth that white policemen kill black teenagers. There is no reference to the amount of crime committed by black teenagers, we are simply supposed to buy the myth at face value–it is useful for manipulating crowds.

The article points out that the discussion of Grand Jury rules and procedures was irrelevant:

As it turns out, there was no need to thumb the legal treatises of Blackstone or Joseph Story. If you were going to hit the books, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism would have served you better. Brilliantly illustrating modern liberalism’s roots in 20th-century progressivism — a movement as comfortable marching lockstep with Stalin as it was borrowing copiously from Mussolini — Jonah homes in on the centrality of myth. It is irrelevant whether an idea around which the Left’s avant-garde rouse the rabble is true; the point is the idea’s power to mold consciousness and rally the troops.

It is unfortunate that a young man is dead. It is also unfortunate that the young man chose to rob a store and attack a policeman. (The forensic evidence confirms the fact that Michael Brown did attack Darren Wilson.) However, it is also unfortunate that a good policeman has resigned the force and had his life negatively impacted by simply defending his own life.

The mob mentality here is right in line with Saul Alinsky‘s Rules for Radicals. The article explains:

Darren Wilson was a white cop and Michael Brown was a black teenager killed in a violent confrontation with Wilson. Therefore, Brown was the victim of a cold-blooded, racially motivated murder, Q.E.D. That is the myth, and it will be served — don’t bother us with the facts.

Once you’ve got that, none of the rest matters. In fact, at the hands of the left-leaning punditocracy, the rest was pure Alinsky: a coopting of language — in this instance, the argot of grand-jury procedure — to reason back to the ordained conclusion that “justice” demanded Wilson’s indictment for murder. And, of course, his ultimate conviction.

What the ‘protestors’ (thugs and criminals) gained from destroying their own city I don’t know. I wonder if the Nike sneakers were worth the fact that there will no longer be a place to buy sneakers in the town. Very few of the violent protestors were actually from the town, which tells us that this whole scenario was a planned show to manipulate the low-information voter by using the low-information media. The really sad part of this story was that innocent people had their businesses destroyed and their lives ruined by the actions of people driven by rage caused by misinformation they were given. They were played.