Outside agitators are old news, but should have been the story

In 2014 a white police officer shot and killed a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. The shooting wasn’t recorded, but eyewitnesses insisted that the black teenager was killed with his hands up, begging the white officer not to shoot.

The “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative enraged the nation. Before any official investigation got underway riots broke out in Ferguson. Then it was revealed the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative was false. The police officer and the teenager fought over the officer’s firearm and the teenager ended up dead. If the rage over the teenager’s death was honestly produced by the belief that a cop gunned down a kid in cold blood, then the discovery of a false narrative should have altered the course of events, but the rage wasn’t generated by the situation in general, it was solely produced by race. The details of the actual encounter were irrelevant because the white officer represented the power structure, the black victim represented historical injustice, and the entire scenario was indicative of systemic racism. The black teenager’s death became a springboard for confronting “The System”.

The event also attracted a subversive element.

After a week of violence, Capt. Ron Johnson, the highway patrolman in charge of security in Ferguson, told reporters the…