You don’t know what happened to Michael Brown, so stop pretending that you do

Matt Walsh:

I don’t know what happened to Michael Brown.

Maybe something conclusive — solid, physical evidence, pointing in one direction or another — will come out within 15 minutes of this post’s publication. Maybe it will take another week. Maybe it will be a month. Maybe we’ll never know for sure.

I don’t know when we’ll know, or if we’ll know, or what we’ll know when we know if we ever know.

I don’t know.

But I do know this: it doesn’t much matter anymore.

Sure, it matters in the actual sense. It matters to God. It matters to honest people. It matters to mature adults who just want the truth, and who don’t show up at crime scenes with pom-poms and popcorn, rooting for one side or another to “win.” It matters to the rational, the reasonable, the thoughtful.

But that is a dwindling breed. As it rapidly fades into the ether, we are left with a society populated by frauds who simply don’t care about the truth at all. It’s almost pathological at this point. They don’t hate the truth, necessarily, they just don’t see it as a particularly compelling issue. They cast their die before the facts are known, and stick by their wagers in spite of whatever information comes to light. They play their assigned role in the Great Narrative, and they never, ever, under any circumstance, stray from the script. All of this, of course, perpetuated by a media that establishes its storyline and then “reports” only on events consistent with the plot. Sometimes they make complicated situations simple, and sometimes they make simple situations complicated. Whatever the case, they make it, and then eventually they drop it and move on to the next ratings stunt.

So that’s why, to many people, it doesn’t matter what actually happened to Michael Brown. This isn’t about Michael Brown anymore. It never was, really. It’s about a narrative — a story — and Michael Brown is useful so long as he serves it.

Does anyone think the protestors will go home and apologize if the officer is vindicated by the evidence? Will MSNBC retract every reckless conjecture and misleading statement? Will Al Sharpton shout “my bad,” and head home, never again to descend like a despicable vulture whenever news cameras and racial tensions meet? Will the looters return their stolen merchandise? Will the Twitter prognosticators tweet out their mea culpas? Will social media be flooded with humbled and humiliated concessions?

If Christ Himself spoke from the heavens and contradicted the established mainstream narrative, is there any way that any of these things would happen as a result?

No, definitely not. They’d just accuse Jesus of getting His facts from Fox News.

But maybe those who’ve rushed to judgment will finally, for once, get to puff up their chests and tell us that they told us so. Maybe they’ll be proven right. Maybe. I don’t know.

I’m willing to say I don’t know, even if it robs me of the opportunity to brag that “I was right from the beginning.”

The problem is that there’s little risk in being rash and reckless. These days, nobody remembers anything that happened before yesterday, nor dwells on anything once it stops trending on Twitter. Therefore, you can be wrong a hundred times a day, you can prophesy and proclaim and accuse, you can do it all without a modicum of reason or integrity, and you will never be held accountable for it. Your credibility is only ever damaged when you stray from the Established Truth, but not when you stray from the Actual Truth.

So this probably won’t do any good, but I’d like to try to break through this wall of false certainty. It’s not that I want to convince you to take a different side; I just want to convince you that you shouldn’t be on anyone’s side right now. I can only prove that nothing’s been proven. I can only show that not enough has been shown. Do what you will with the information — or rather the lack of information — but you must at least consider this:

– Michael Brown was shot six times, twice in the head. Much is being made of the fact that the officer hit him with six bullets, but there is nothing that can be immediately gleaned from this. Despite what you’ve been told, six shots are not automatically “excessive.” It’s particularly relevant in this case to note that Brown was shot in the arm several times, and that the first five wounds were survivable. This could mean that the cop riddled an innocent man with bullets, or it could mean that the cop was shooting at an aggressive, charging suspect, and he had to keep shooting until the suspect went down.

Police are trained to shoot “center mass,” which means they shoot until the threat is neutralized. Sometimes this takes two shots, sometimes six, sometimes ten, sometimes more. Sometimes they go overboard, but nobody with firearm experience would tell you that there’s any clear bullet limit; a number that, when reached, immediately renders each subsequent bullet “excessive.”

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