Way back when Jonah Goldberg was a regular at NRO, he would often promote the blogger Ezra Klein. He would respond to Klein’s posts and I think he did some podcasts with him. Jonah Goldberg is a bright guy and fairly sensible. I know, for example, that he regularly reads Steve Sailer and Peter Brimelow, but he cautions against mentioning them in public. Goldberg understands the media world and you don’t want to be associated with the fringe if you want to keep your career. At the same time, you better read these fringe guys if you want to know what’s going on in the world. Even though I don’t agree with Goldberg on a lot of things, I respect him as a chattering skull.

But, I never got his affinity for Klein. My read on Klein is he is a narrow-minded fanatic with a mediocre IQ. Like most bourgeois millennials, he is good at dressing himself up as an intellectual, but like most bourgeois millennials he lacks self-awareness and lacks any curiosity about the limits of his knowledge. Instead he does what all these guys did in college and that’s suck up to the teacher by repeating the lecture with more enthusiasm than the professors was ever able to muster.

Anyway, this latest letter from Ezra to whoever still reads him is getting lots of run. Most of it is mocking, and it deserves to be mocked.

We’ve finally heard from Officer Darren Wilson.

Wilson had been publicly silent since the events of August 9, when he shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And, even as the grand jury announced its decision not to indict him, he remained silent. He had his attorneys release a statement on his behalf.

But on Monday night, St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch released the evidence given to the grand jury, including the interview police did with Wilson in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. And so we got to read, for the first time, Wilson’s full, immediate account of his altercation with Brown.

And it is unbelievable.

I mean that in the literal sense of the term: “difficult or impossible to believe.” But I want to be clear here. I’m not saying Wilson is lying. I’m not saying his testimony is false. I am saying that the events, as he describes them, are simply bizarre. His story is difficult to believe.

The unintentional comedy here is hilarious. The always earnest Ezra Klein is saying he was so committed to the narrative peddled by his cult that he is now sitting in stunned amazement to learn it was all nonsense.

What happens next is the most unbelievable moment in the narrative. And so it’s probably best that I just quote Wilson’s account at length on it.

I was doing the, just scrambling, trying to get his arms out of my face and him from grabbing me and everything else. He turned to his…if he’s at my vehicle, he turned to his left and handed the first subject. He said, “here, take these.” He was holding a pack of — several packs of cigarillos which was just, what was stolen from the Market Store was several packs of cigarillos. He said, “here, hold these” and when he did that I grabbed his right arm trying just to control something at that point. Um, as I was holding it, and he came around, he came around with his arm extended, fist made, and went like that straight at my face with his…a full swing from his left hand.

So Brown is punching inside the car. Wilson is scrambling to deflect the blows, to protect his face, to regain control of the situation. And then Brown stops, turns to his left, says to his friend, “Here, hold these,” and hands him the cigarillos stolen from Ferguson Market. Then he turns back to Wilson and, with his left hand now freed from holding the contraband goods, throws a haymaker at Wilson.

Every bullshit detector in me went off when I read that passage. Which doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen exactly the way Wilson describes. But it is, again, hard to imagine. Brown, an 18-year-old kid holding stolen goods, decides to attack a cop and, while attacking him, stops, hands his stolen goods to his friend, and then returns to the beatdown. It reads less like something a human would do and more like a moment meant to connect Brown to the robbery.

Ezra Klein went to one of the safest public high schools on the planet. It may have the lowest NAM population outside of Reykjavik High. He grew up in the sort of neighborhood that has such a public school. He went onto college and life in super white American media. In other words, Ezra is a sissy without the slightest clue how violent men go about their business. Anyone who has spent time in the ghetto watched that video of the Gentle Giant shaking the life out of the Asian clerk and saw the familiar. It’s how ghetto boys roll.

Why did Michael Brown, an 18-year-old kid headed to college, refuse to move from the middle of the street to the sidewalk? Why would he curse out a police officer? Why would he attack a police officer? Why would he dare a police officer to shoot him? Why would he charge a police officer holding a gun? Why would he put his hand in his waistband while charging, even though he was unarmed?

None of this fits with what we know of Michael Brown. Brown wasn’t a hardened felon. He didn’t have a death wish. And while he might have been stoned, this isn’t how stoned people act. The toxicology report did not indicate he was on PCP or something that would’ve led to suicidal aggression.

Who do you mean by “we” Eloi?