CRYING WOLF ABOUT RACISM:

Then there’s John Lewis, a legitimate civil rights hero who allowed politics to get the best of him when he stood by Andre Carson, a colleague who falsely told the press that tea party activists had repeatedly shouted racial epithets at him on Capitol Hill. The problem was that no such incident appeared on video footage. When challenged, Lewis clammed up but never apologized. Perhaps he thought that tainting political opponents with the racism label would avoid the need to argue the question of government overreach on its merits, but all Lewis did by clinging to an easily disprovable racism charge was to soil his own reputation.

Protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, after the August 9, 2014, police shooting of teenager Michael Brown, who had just robbed a convenience store. Civil rights activists claimed that police executed Brown after he had put his hands up and asked them not to shoot. Against the backdrop of such outrage, protests spread, millions of dollars in property damage occurred, and several police officers lost their lives in revenge killings in the anti-police fervor that followed Ferguson and other similar incidents. The problem was that the whole “hands up, don’t shoot” line was a myth, unsupported by eyewitnesses or forensic data.

Or to put it another way: