Opinion

Democrats Solemnly Commemorate The Sacred Birthday Of Saint Michael Brown

   DailyWire.com
Screenshot: YouTube.
Screenshot: YouTube.

By now we’re all painfully aware of how LGBT activists insist on having about 500 days on the calendar to celebrate themselves, from International Pronouns Day to Pride Month to the Transgender Day of Remembrance to my personal favorite, Gay Uncles Day. There’s clearly something pathological about all of this. But it’s also strategic at the same time. Leftists understand that to win, they have to completely flood the zone with their propaganda. They don’t want anyone have any kind of reprieve from it, even for a single day.

Unfortunately, as mind-numbing as this tactic is, it’s also effective — which is why it was never going to stop with the gender cult. And indeed, predictably, now the BLM movement is getting in on the action. They’re demanding that the death of Michael Brown — the criminal who attacked a store clerk, then charged at a police officer, punched him, and tried to take his gun — be memorialized on multiple days every single year. This was the martyr at the center of the “Hands up, don’t shoot” hoax, who kickstarted the rise of BLM.

It was less than a year ago, back in August, that I discussed all the different memorials for Michael Brown. Everyone from the city of St. Louis to the Biden administration decided to eulogize Brown on August 9th, which was the ninth anniversary of his death. That’s the big Michael Brown Day, during which we’re all supposed to pretend Michael Brown was a useful and contributing member of society. We’re also supposed to pretend that a white supremacist police officer shot him in broad daylight in cold blood.

But as of yesterday, August 9th is no longer the only Michael Brown Day on the calendar. This week we saw a renewed effort to mark the occasion of Michael Brown’s birthday, which apparently falls on May 20th. The NAACP, for example, tweeted, “Michael Brown should be celebrating his 28th birthday today. We will continue to say his name and fight for justice and accountability. Sending love to his family and friends.” NAACP president Derrick Johnson posted a similar message: “Black people deserve to grow old.”

These messages — as detached from reality as they are — were echoed all over social media yesterday. Veena Dubal, a professor of law at UC Irvine, wrote, “Rest in Power, Michael Brown. <3.” This is someone who allegedly teaches the law, celebrating someone who brutally attacked a law enforcement officer.

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For its part, the nonprofit called “Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights,” led by Kerry Kennedy, tweeted: “Michael Brown should be celebrating his 28th birthday. Today, we honor his life and legacy.” As for what that “life and legacy” entailed, that part was left unstated, for obvious reasons.

But congresswoman and BLM activist Cori Bush was a little more forthcoming. She uploaded this video to honor Michael Brown:

“We’re only left with the memories of who he was,” says Cori Bush. It’s supposed to be a sad line, I guess, even though all it does is remind us of the fact that Michael Brown roughed up a store clerk on camera, then attacked a cop.

For several years now, Cori Bush has simply ignored those inconvenient details. She’s been trying to make Brown’s birthday into a national day of mourning since before she was elected to Congress. In fact, Michael Brown is one of the main reasons she’s in Congress, as she’ll readily admit. But this week’s effort to promote a new Michael Brown Day was particularly embarrassing, for a few reasons.

For one thing, it’s hard not to notice how carefully worded Cori Bush’s statement is. She knows she has to steer clear of saying that Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown, actually did anything wrong. Even Barack Obama’s DOJ cleared Wilson, so in all likelihood, she’d get sued if she tried to do that.

As a result, Cori Bush (and her team of lawyers, we can assume) decided on the term “police violence” instead of “murder.” They probably figure that the term “police violence” gives them the wiggle room they need to insinuate that Darren Wilson is a murderer, without coming out and saying that directly. After all, the act of self-defense can definitely qualify as “violent,” even if it’s completely justified. 

That’s the level of word games and manipulation that we’re seeing from BLM activists in Congress right now. They’re choosing their words very carefully to elicit the reaction they want.

But somehow that wording about “police violence” was not, in the end, the most deceptive portion of Cori Bush’s video. Let’s listen on:

 

This is one of those statistics that, when you hear it, you immediately know it’s fake. You don’t need to use Google, you just recognize it intuitively.

She says that police killings of unarmed black people are directly responsible for, “50 million additional days of poor mental health days per year.” But she doesn’t define “poor mental health days” or explain how she’s concluding that police shootings are causing these “poor mental health days.” Or explain how we distinguish regular poor mental health days from the “additional” one.

That’s because the whole point of statistics like this is to shock you with big numbers so that you don’t stop to think about what they’re saying — which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. If you look into them — even for a second — you’ll realize they’re completely made up.

This particular statistic has been cited all over the place, including Howard University Law School. As best I can tell, it originates from a 2018 article in The Lancet entitled, “Police killings and their spillover effects on the mental health of black Americans: a population-based, quasi-experimental study.” Right away, that title is something of a red flag. We’re talking about a “quasi-experimental study” here, which doesn’t seem nearly as definitive as Cori Bush made it sound.  She made it sound like she had actual facts, not quasi-facts.

Indeed, if you read on, you’ll find that the researchers — who apparently took money from a foundation specializing in “health equity” — aren’t certain of their findings at all. The summary of the Lancet article reads: “Police kill more than 300 black Americans — at least a quarter of them unarmed — each year in the USA. These events might have spillover effects on the mental health of people not directly affected.”

Did you catch that? “These events *might* have spillover effects on the mental health of people not directly affected.”

That’s quite a hedge, and if you look at the methodology, you’ll understand exactly why they’re hedging. Apparently the researchers just looked at two existing data sources. First, they analyzed the U.S Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which is just a telephone survey system that asks people if they’re feeling okay. Then, the researchers looked at the dates of police shootings of unarmed black people (without regard to whether those black people, like Michael Brown, were attacking police officers when they died). And then the researchers checked to see how many people reported feeling sad within three months of a police shooting of an unarmed black person. They say they noticed a correlation where only black people seemed upset in the 1-2 months after these shootings, while white people didn’t care. This is a methodology so absurd and arbitrary that if a fourth grader used it for a science fair project, he should get a failing grade. And possibly be expelled. 

It’s not even worth going into detail about correlation and causation because everyone understands that this data is garbage. For one thing, you’d expect white liberals to be quite shaken up by the death of an unarmed black person, but that doesn’t show up in the data at all. But more importantly, there’s about a million other explanations for why these respondents might have been unhappy.

Even these researchers concede that point, which is why they hedge their findings in the summary. This paper only serves one purpose, which is to give Democrats like Cori Bush a talking point, and a bogus justification to waste more taxpayer money. In this case, she’s asking for $50 million to redistribute in the service of mental health “equity,” which inevitably will mean allocating resources along racial lines.

But Cori Bush and activists like her aren’t the only ones benefiting from these lies. Outfits like BET, which claims to be, “where black culture lives,” are also promoting the narrative. BET put out its own video for Michael Brown’s birthday, describing him as “courageous” and saying that, “Black boys should be able to grow into Black men in peace” — regardless of whether they attack other people, apparently. Watch:

As with the Cori Bush video, you’ll notice that they don’t want to talk about how Michael Brown actually died. It’s all about how activists “organized” and spread their message online. It’s about “what type of person” Michael Brown was, according to his mother.

All of these activists and organizations — from the UC Irvine law professor to Cori Bush to BET — understand exactly why Michael Brown died. They know he didn’t die in service of any higher purpose. He wasn’t a martyr or even a footsoldier. He was a violent criminal who somehow made living in Ferguson even more dangerous than it already was.

But all of these activists also understand that the Michael Brown hoax gave rise to the BLM era. That’s a mythology they cannot revise or reject at this point —  nor would they want to revise or reject it, because it’s given them so much power and influence. Therefore the perpetrators of the hoax are sticking to the script no matter what. They are simply ignoring all evidence that clearly contradicts their claims.

This is what you have to do if you desperately want to build a movement around a false narrative. You can never admit that the narrative was false. You just have to keep repeating the lie, over and over again, at every opportunity. They won’t stop until we’re celebrating Michael Brown all 365 days of the year. They’re betting that, eventually, the history books will reflect their manufactured version of what happened in Ferguson. That’s clearly their goal. And unless conservatives start telling the truth about that day — until they start defending Darren Wilson anywhere near as much as the Left worships Michael Brown — then eventually, through sheer repetition, activists like Cori Bush will get exactly what they want.

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The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  Democrats Solemnly Commemorate The Sacred Birthday Of Saint Michael Brown