It probably says something about the left that they want to believe that Michael Brown didn’t do anything to be deserving of death. Did he, perhaps, punch the police office in the face, struggle to take his gun, and then, later, attempt to bum rush him, as a friend of the police officer alleges? I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Even most of the eyewitnesses were too far away or arrived too late to see exactly what went on around the car.

What disturbs me more than this seeming lack of open-mindedness on the left is the opposite bias on the right. They desperately want to believe that Michael Brown battered a police officer and then tried to attack an armed man with his bare hands. Why?

Why do they want to believe that this homicide was justified? Would that somehow relieve them of some burden? Do they feel responsible for the actions of this cop, Darren Wilson?

There’s something psychologically twisted about this instinct to defend people who kill young black men. And that’s what it is. It’s an instinct. Someone black dies, and their first instinct is to try to justify it. The first instinct should be to try to find the truth. That goes for both the left and the right.

But there is a distinction here. The left feels that regardless of the particulars in the Michael Brown case, there is a problem in this country with how law enforcement interacts with the black community. If it turns out that Brown was responsible for his own death, that would step on that message but the issue would still be 100% valid.

It seems that the right, in contrast, thinks that the real problem is black criminality. If Michael Brown turns out to by guiltless in his own demise, that wouldn’t reflect one way or the other on the issue of black criminality, but the right acts as if it would.

In summary, the left sees an opportunity in the death of Michael Brown to highlight national problems with how black communities are policed and the right sees an opportunity to highlight black criminality. Both sides have a political agenda, but one is a positive one and the other isn’t policy-based at all. It’s just an attempt to ramp up fear of blacks in order to win votes.

This perfectly illustrates the difference between progressives and conservatives.