The “Freedom Summer” of 2014 started with a bang but appears to be ending with a whimper. Before the investigation had even begun, the progressive narrative of the death of Michael Brown had crystallized: A white police officer murdered a young, unarmed black man trying to surrender with his hands up — the latest example of the systemic racism that renders black Americans de facto second-class citizens.

But that story has all but collapsed. Darren Wilson, the police officer who fatally shot 18-year-old Brown in early August, recently told investigators that he was pinned in his vehicle and feared for his life when Brown reached for his gun. FBI forensic analysis has confirmed that, as Wilson claims, two shots were fired in the car, and Brown’s blood was found in the vehicle, on Wilson’s clothing, and on the gun. The Washington Post reports that “seven or eight African American eyewitnesses have provided testimony consistent with Wilson’s account” that he fatally shot Brown when the young man moved toward him in the street. And, according to the official court autopsy report, Brown probably did not have his hands raised in the “Hands up, don’t shoot” position that has become the defining meme of the protests in Ferguson, Mo. An eyewitness who claims to have seen the shooting from beginning to end further corroborated Wilson’s account in an anonymous interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

What happens next in Ferguson may well be, to quote Al Sharpton, a “defining moment,” though not in the way he, other progressives, and Ferguson protesters mean. To their minds, the case required little scrutiny: Michael Brown was a new Emmett Till; Ferguson, a new Selma. But that determination was made well in advance of a careful sifting of available evidence — evidence that shows that the events of August 9 do not lend themselves to a convenient racial parable. If the grand jury, having heard and weighed the available evidence, believes that Darren Wilson is not criminally culpable for his actions, they should not indict him. The judicial system cannot be used to assuage imagined racial grievances.

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History is repleat with examples of narratives promoted by the progressive Left, too juicy for them to wait for the facts to be gathered.
Does a rush to judgment serve their purposes? They seem oh-so-willing to run headlong into a racial narrative before the facts are gathered.

Tawana Brawley, The Duke lacrosse team players, George Zimmerman, and now Darren Wilson. This is the second rush in two years. They had a tough time maintaining Trayvon's cherub image, just like they did with Michael Brown. But the story did not change as the evidence came in to contradict it.

What's wrong with this picture? We have the President giving Muslims committing terrorist acts all kinds of time before rushing to any judgment at all! But let a policeman in Cambridge MA respond to a B&E call and get tongue-lashed by the black homeowner and there's the slanderous rush to call it an act of stupidity. Bigots want these narratives desperately to prove their case of racial inequality and hate. The news media scours the population to find people to interview who support their narrative.

Remember the interview with Sharyl Attkisson? "Often they dream up stories beforehand and turn the reporters into “casting agents,” told “we need to find someone who will say . . .” that a given policy is good or bad. “We’re asked to create a reality that fits their New York image of what they believe,” she writes. "Hey, kids, we found two more Americans who say they like their ObamaCare! Let’s do a lengthy segment." http://nypost.com/2014/10/25/former-cbs-...protects-obama/

"One of the most horrific of this autumn’s crimes was the grotesque beheading of Colleen Hufford in Oklahoma late last month by Alton Alexander Nolen (aka Jah’Keem Yisrael). Again, in the age when Obama references Ferguson to the UN, are we supposed to note that Nolen was black and Hufford white — especially given that Nolen’s freedom is emblematic of a flawed criminal justice system that released him early from prison after he was convicted of assault and battery on a police officer? Is this an occasion for a Trayvon Martin moment of presidential racial editorializing?" [Victor Davis Hanson on the same subject, an excellent read.]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/39...ollapse-editors