The recent riots in majority-black Ferguson, Missouri have seized the attention of the world. Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, universally described by the media as an “unarmed Black teenager” was shot and killed by a police officer. According to the police, he participated in a violent convenience store robbery and then resisted arrest, attacking a police officer and pushing him into the cruiser. Brown then struggled for the officer’s gun before being shot dead by the officer outside, on the street. According to Brown’s supporters, he was chased and shot by the police officer while having his hands in the air.

Immediately, before the local prosecutor even had a chance to consider the facts, Ferguson erupted into riots, with Molotov cocktails and rocks being thrown, and shots fired at the overwhelmed police. The local and county police responded in a swift, effective, militarized fashion, with machine gun-armed police officers on military-style vehicles and helicopters. Representatives of the media immediately started complaining about “heavy-handed tactics” and a “media blackout”. And libertarians like professional cop-hater Radley Balko started crying foul about the “militarization” of American police. But both the libertarians and the liberals conveniently forget that unlike in every other recent urban American riot, there were no fatalities in Ferguson. Seems like it was exactly the “heavy-handed tactics” and the “militarization” that prevented Ferguson from erupting into a 1992 L.A.

The mainstream media predictably blames “police brutality” and ceaselessly points out that 70 percent Black Ferguson has a “nearly all-White police force”. For some reason, the same talking heads do not complain about the fact that nearly all doctors and teachers in Black neighborhoods are White. There is also the inconvenient fact that the newly minted martyr Michael Brown was a member of the violent “Bloods” street gang and was pictured wearing gang colors and flashing gang signs. But do not expect these and other mere facts to stand in the way of the anti-police (read: anti-White) hysteria of both the liberal and the libertarian media. This is Obama’s America after all.