Nobody Believes Him

A 2:00am - ish news conference featuring Magic Negro Captain Ron Johnson. After a police chaplain sends up prayers, the MN C Johnson speechifies for a few minutes, reading haltingly from a prepared text announcing any number of falsehoods, tells the media not to interfere with police (by blocking an attack on the crowd for example?) and then shows off guns "confiscated near the media area" and a bottle of Colt .45 with a rag stuffed in it, claiming it's a "Molotov cocktail" -- something neither media nor crowd members say they've never seen thrown despite numerous claims by police of being subjected to rocks, bottles, gunfire and Molotov cocktails.

IMO, he's lying. Nearly everything he says is a lie from the moment he starts opening his mouth.

And then he ends it with an emotional plea to the media to work with the police to control and suppress the crowds -- rather than stand between the crowd and a roided and armored up police line like they did last night.

MN C Johnson repeats the constant litany of "outside agitators", "gunfire directed at police," "Molotov cocktails thrown at police," and "assaults on police" (who cry because they aren't allowed to whack some Negroes because of it) none of which has been witnessed by members of the crowd or the media.

It's all a fantasy/litany of tropes from the urban riot play book, and that's not, obviously, what's going on in Ferguson, as any honest reporter from within the crowds has documented. There have been repeated reports of "gunfire" that turn out not to have happened at all or to have been fireworks. There have been endless reports by the police of "Molotov cocktails" thrown at police that appear to be completely false, as there has never been -- NEVER BEEN -- any evidence whatsoever of any such thing happening. NONE. Nobody has ever documented a thrown Molotov cocktail, not one. The beer bottle displayed by MN C Johnson early this morning appeared to be partly filled with beer. You can't make a Molotov out of it. Every thrown bottle that's been witnessed by crowd or media is a plastic water bottle, either empty or with water in it, and they are few and far between, mostly launched by individuals in the center or back of a crowd, and who are widely believed to be plants, provocateurs.

The assaults and attacks -- from Day One -- have all been by police.

All of them.

The media has been in the midst of many of these attacks, as they were last night, but there were things going on that they were forbidden to see, areas they were prohibited from accessing, and last night, after the police line swept the area on W. Florissant between Ferguson and Canfield Drive, the media was ordered to leave and reassemble at the police command post at the Target parking lot on the Ferguson/Jennings border. They did so, and as they did, they knew there was something going on near the Quick Trip, but they couldn't see or document it. Tear gas had been fired, and there were many, many police and riot control vehicles down there, but that's not where the crowd had been. It is where "gunshots" were declared to have been fired, but there was no way to know. Someone was declared to have been wounded and was brought by private car to the police line at Ferguson Dr, very dramatically, during the standoff with police earlier in the evening, directly in front of the media scrum, but then he got out of the car and walked into the police control area and to the back of an armored vehicle. No ambulance was on scene, and so far as could be seen, no emergency vehicle transported this supposedly wounded person.

These details are noticed, and there is more and more skepticism of police accounts of "riot" in the streets of Ferguson.

Much of what's happening appears to be staged. And why not? This morning, MN C Johnson claimed that "outside agitators" from New York and California had been arrested. Some wag at the presser asked -- "were they media?" Numerous media personnel have been arrested, and many of their headquarters are in New York and California, so the question was reasonable. Further, the drama of the continual evidence-free announcements by police is very much a factor New York/California cop shows.

The lies and deceptions just keep piling up, day after day, night after night, and by now nobody much believes Captain Johnson or much of anything the police and authorities say.

Something else is going on, and I wonder if we'll get a better idea of what it is after Labor Day -- which seems to be the calendar's pivot point since 9/11.