How to read history

A modest proposal

On August 9, 2014, police shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. Brown was high and had just committed a strong-arm robbery of a local convenience store. When he was approached by a police officer for walking in the middle of the road, Brown began to punch the officer, seated in his cruiser, in the face. A scuffle ensued and the officer fired two shots inside his vehicle, hitting Brown in the hand once.

Brown backed away and the police officer got out of his car. Then, when Brown began to move quickly towards the police officer, the police officer began firing again. A total of 6 shots hit Brown and he was killed instantly.

One would think that this incident would not cause such a big stir. There’ve been no doubt hundreds, if not thousands, of similar justified police shootings all across America both before and after this particular one. However, Mike Brown’s death ended up launching a nationwide rallying cry, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” that still lasts to this day.

Dorian Johnson was a friend of Brown’s who was with him before the shooting. After Brown’s death, Johnson gave interviews to several media outlets where he claimed that the police officer decided unprovoked to grab Brown, a 6 foot 4 inch 290 pound teenager, by the neck while the officer was seated inside his vehicle, setting off the initial confrontation.

Johnson then claimed that after the pair initially separated, Brown had turned away from the police officer and put his hands in the air. The police officer, Johnson claimed, shot Brown in the back after Brown said “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!”

This claim, which was completely fake, triggered a national firestorm. It was uncritically accepted and repeated by dozens of media outlets, which played interviews with Johnson countless times. The today multi-billion dollar Black Lives Matter movement, at the time a disconnected series of activist networks, professionalized as a direct result of the Ferguson controversy.

This was followed by massive amounts of unrest and violence in Ferguson. The town suffered three waves of rioting over the following year. Dozens were injured. The store Brown robbed before his death was burnt down.

Every single aspect of Johnson’s claim was not true. Brown initiated the confrontation. He did not have his hands up. He did not say “don’t shoot.” He was advancing towards the officer when he was fatally shot. All the shots hit the front side of Brown’s body. The FBI conducted a massive investigation where they concluded that the many witness who would come forward to claim Brown was executed by the police officer were, in fact, lying. It was a hoax that led to huge amounts of real world violence.

And yet, despite the fact that the entire story was fake, “Hands up, don’t shoot” soon became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement and the Democratic Party apparatus that sustains it.

For months and years afterwards, protestors would chant “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Politicians, too would make this gesture to symbolize their anger over racial issues. This was not some kind of street fad or ghetto rumor, this was an organized political effort with serious institutional and financial backing.

They just don’t care. The entire story was a lie, and yet they just keep on chugging. In 2017, a documentary called Stranger Fruit (a reference to the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” written by Communist Party member Abel Meeropol, who was a close friend and defender of executed Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) emerged that claimed Brown didn’t, in fact, even commit a robbery on the day he was shot.

Rather, the documentarians claimed, Brown had actually made a deal with a clerk at the convenience store the night beforehand to trade Brown’s weed for the store’s cigarillos. Instead of a strong-arm robbery people thought they saw on the surveillance footage, Brown was actually just retrieving the proceeds of a drug transaction. The documentarians claimed that the supposed robbery, lacking context, was used to prejudice the public against Brown and led to the wrongful clearing of the police officer who shot him.

The new footage in the documentary exonerating Brown, which generated so many headlines, turned out to be lacking context itself. Unedited footage was released that showed that while Brown attempted to pay for cigarillos with weed, the store clerk actually rejected his offer. He returned the weed to Brown and put the cigarillos back on the shelf. The story was fake. The documentary adding to the story was fake.

Of course, none of this actually matters. The police officer wasn’t even responding to the robbery, the police officer had no idea that it had even occurred. He was responding to Brown walking in the middle of the street and then Brown attacking him when confronted.

It really is stunning how shameless the whole process is: The store clerk gets robbed. He’s uninvolved in the shooting that follows but his store gets burned down in revenge anyway. Then, years later, someone decides to claim that he wasn’t even robbed to begin with based on a story that is contradicted by video evidence. Throughout history you see this same pattern over and over again.

This is how fake history gets made. There’s an initial claim that’s quickly disproven because it’s obviously a complete lie. Activists keep repeating the lie over and over again, undeterred. They confuse the issues and change the subject. They get emotional and sanctimonious. Old ladies and children are crying. They can’t believe the injustice you’re putting these innocent people through. Flashy media is produced adding “new wrinkles” to the story every few years. First it’s a book, then it’s a documentary, then it’s an Netflix adaptation. Eventually normal people lose interest and the will to actually investigate or dispute the dubious claims disappears. After all, it’s just one of thousands of outrage stories you’ll be exposed to.

A few decades later, the original story is forgotten and those curious only have liberal revision left to investigate. The lies become common knowledge. People will tell insane falsehoods about history and have no idea that what they’re saying isn’t true just because in course of their lives they’ll never encounter a reliable primary source or anything close to the real story.

The “Hands up, don’t shoot” slogan emerged yet again during the 2020 George Floyd Riots. This was probably the largest civil unrest that had occurred in the country in several decades, and led to billions in damages and dozens of deaths. They genuinely don’t care. Something can be totally false and still endure with millions of people.

These same people keep reappearing throughout history. Oftentimes they’re not just similar types, but directly related to each other. When you hear about the horrors of the First Red Scare, about how evil business owners and rightwing thugs concocted a fake communist conspiracy to create a national hysteria and crack down on liberals peacefully protesting for a better life, assume that the exact same tactics are at play.

You should just assume that everything these people say is a lie. That’s how it is today. If a liberal activist said it, he was not telling the truth. If a liberal historian wrote it, he was intentionally ignoring something important in order to create a fake narrative. If shocking new evidence or testimony emerges proving a historical liberal’s innocence, it was fake. If an impartial third party shows up to say that the liberals were actually in the right, he is just a fellow-traveler who will reveal himself later. The most basic elements of a story will be shamelessly lied about until the end of time. Liberals do this constantly today and they did it with even greater frequency in the past, when things like video evidence and the internet weren’t available to allow regular people to challenge their claims without extensive research in an archive somewhere.

Nothing these people say is real. They have been using and perfecting these tactics for decades, perhaps centuries. They do not give a shit. The only thing you can do in response is to ignore the things they say and work to ensure that they have as little control over your life as possible.

Lots of good people in the past wrote firsthand accounts of their experiences or reliable surveys of important events. Rather than having your history laundered through decades of “interpretation” by compromised activists and academics, conservatives should dig deep to rediscover these works and create a new narrative to build their future off of. I hope you enjoy our coming articles on this forgotten part of American history.