After police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown last summer in Ferguson, Missouri, the media erupted in terror at the prospect of young black men being gunned down by over-excitable white cops.

The New York Times’ Charles Blow wrote that the “central issue” of Ferguson was that an “officer shot an unarmed teenager who witnesses claim had raised his hands in surrender when at least some of the shots were fired, which the family and its attorneys called ‘a brutal assassination of his person in broad daylight.'”

Over at Salon, Brittney Cooper said the Brown shooting proved that black people “are prey” — a charge so moronic even a Starbucks barista wouldn’t discuss it with you.

In a TV segment The Huffington Post called “searing,” a few weeks after the shooting, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry exposed the racism of contemporary America by quoting from Dred Scott — an 1857 Supreme Court opinion written by Roger Taney, appointee of the father of the Democratic Party, Andrew Jackson.

With pictures of Ferguson cops flashing on a screen behind her, Harris-Perry repeatedly quoted Taney’s statement — in 1857 — that black men have “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Oh, to be there when Harris-Perry finds out about the 13th Amendment!

After two separate, wide-ranging, phenomenally expensive, months-long investigations, including one by Eric Holder’s Justice Department, it turned out: Brown had attacked Officer Wilson, he did not have his hands up, he was charging the officer when he was shot, and Wilson acted in justifiable self-defense.

Instead of the “brutal assassination” of a black man, Holder’s big indictment of white America is that cops in Ferguson give blacks too many traffic tickets.

Even that feeble proof of racism is clearly false. The only two serious studies of driving habits by race ever conducted — one in New Jersey and one in North Carolina — found that blacks are far more likely to speed than whites, and at much higher speeds.

Indeed, the entire country is snickering at any report that treats as news the fact that blacks are arrested at higher rates than whites, whether in Ferguson the Upper West Side of Manhattan or anyplace else. Blacks have a higher crime rate than whites, ergo, they have higher arrest rates. Ice skaters have more skating injuries than tennis players.

Even New York City’s liberal former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, responded to complaints about the city’s “stop and frisk” policy by saying that, based on witness and victim descriptions of the suspects, the police were stopping “whites too much and minorities too little.” In liberal Santa Monica, blogger Steve Sailer reports, blacks are arrested at about three times the rate as in Ferguson.

Frustrated at their inability to locate evidence of the endemic racism in America we keep hearing so much about, liberals have turned with a vengeance on the kids. Instead of armed policemen gunning down blacks, we got a secretly recorded video of few drunk 19- and 20-year-olds at the University of Oklahoma singing the n-word. (Everyone assumes the students were racists, but my theory is they were trying to record their own rap video.)

Apparently, the new national sport is destroying the lives of young people.

Today’s adults are held responsible for nothing. The president and attorney general aren’t held accountable for ginning up frenzied mobs based on a lie, leading to two cops being assassinated in New York City and two cops being shot in Ferguson, in addition to the $250 million in property damage.

Hillary Clinton isn’t responsible for Americans being murdered at our embassy in Benghazi as a result of her incompetence.

Democratic senators aren’t accountable for passing Obamacare without reading it, and Republican senators aren’t accountable for promising voters they’d stop Obama’s amnesty and then voting to fully fund it.

Even people who commit violent crimes are given a second chance — especially if they’re athletes at the University of Oklahoma, as the Daily Caller has reported.

But 19- and 20-year olds must be punished without mercy for their drunken song using an ugly word. To quote Hillary Clinton, WHAT DIFFERENCE, AT THIS POINT, DOES IT MAKE?

Mr. Third Chance, David Boren, president of the university, proudly rushed to violate the First Amendment rights of these students. Even observers who condemned Boren’s laughably unconstitutional move felt compelled to vilify the louts.

Protesters have shown up at the kids’ homes in Texas to rail against their parents. (As always, I marvel at the protesters’ ability to get so much time off of work.)

I don’t remember adults caring this much about what college kids said when we were trying to get their attention with pompous editorials, manifestos and lists of demands. This wasn’t a college thesis — and even a college thesis wouldn’t be worth so much national angst. This was drunk college kids singing on a bus.

Is this the kind of society we want to live in, where a student can record his intoxicated friends singing a nasty song, and the whole country applauds the Nazi block-watcher and joins in the denunciation of his marks?

Liberals were hopping mad about Linda Tripp secretly recording Monica Lewinsky, but at least she was exposing the wildly felonious obstruction of justice by the president of the United States in a sex discrimination case. She wasn’t recording Monica to prove the president had used a bad word.

But no one objects to the aspiring Stasi member recording his friends’ drunken song, then broadcasting it to the world, allowing us a joyous round of universal condemnation.

Instead of judging society by the inebriated songs of 19- and 20-year olds, perhaps we should judge it by how cultural and political elites treat their young people.