Ten years ago today, in Ferguson, Missouri, a police shooting killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. The incident was followed almost instantly by a massive propaganda campaign and the first of many waves of deadly and destructive Black Lives Matter riots.

The propaganda campaign employed a tactic made notorious by both Communist and Putinist Russia: the “firehose of falsehood.”

This tactic, says the RAND Corporation, involves “high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”

Five years ago, Kamala Harris, then a candidate for president, kept the firehose flowing with a tweet intended to boost her campaign.

“Michael Brown’s murder,” she wrote, “forever changed Ferguson and America. His tragic death sparked a desperately needed conversation and a nationwide movement. We must fight for stronger accountability and racial equity in our justice system.”

Her statement was a blatant lie.

Michael Brown was not murdered. Brown was recorded on a security camera robbing a convenience store and assaulting a store clerk. He struggled with the responding police officer, who shot him to death. Highly publicized local and federal investigations, all led by Democratic officeholders, determined that the police officer had acted in self-defense.

Harris, a former prosecutor and state attorney general who was then a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had all this information and understood what it meant. She lied anyway.

To promote herself and to advance identity politics, Harris put forward the discredited narrative that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, a white man, had murdered Michael Brown, a young black man.

The previous Harris for President campaign had robust primary competition. In that environment, the liberal media were not easy on her.

A few days following Harris’s tweet, the left-wing news outlet Vox reported that her statement was false. Concerning Harris’s accusation of murder, Vox reported that “the evidence, including a report released by President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, says otherwise.”

A month later, the left-wing news and opinion site Slate also criticized Harris and other Democrats who called Brown’s death a murder.

“The original account of Brown’s death, that he had been shot in the back or while raising his hands in surrender, was false,” Slate reported. “The shooting was thoroughly investigated, first by a grand jury and then by the Obama Justice Department. The investigations found that Brown assaulted Wilson, tried to grab his gun, and was shot dead while advancing toward Wilson again.” In 2015, Obama’s attorney general Eric Holder personally announced the findings.

Slate continued: “Despite these findings, three Democratic presidential candidates—Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, and billionaire Tom Steyer—said last month that Brown was murdered. These candidates haven’t backed down in the face of press queries and fact checks. Warren even dismissed a face-to-face question about the DOJ report that cleared Wilson.”

Slate’s judgment of Harris was fittingly harsh: “Brown’s death was a tragedy, but it wasn’t a murder. When Democrats claim it was, and when they refuse to correct that mistake, they cast doubt on their commitment to truth.”

A year after Harris’s false assertion of Brown’s “murder,” and amid COVID lockdowns and devastating riots in St. Louis, a fringe figure—funded by George Soros and family—rode the firehose of falsehood to a seat in the U.S. Congress.

Cori Bush, whose sketchy background includes her claiming, without evidence, that she has cured cancer and paralysis as a faith healer, stunned political observers by defeating veteran U.S. Rep. Lacy Clay in the 2020 Democratic primary. General elections are meaningless in the district, which was drawn to favor Democrats overwhelmingly.

A prodigious fabricator, Bush won the congressional seat through her forceful repetition of the lie that Michael Brown had been murdered. As her 2024 re-election campaign website puts it, “in 2014, a Ferguson police officer murdered Michael Brown Jr., and it lit a fire inside her.” Bush became one of the most visible members of the far-left “Squad.”

Bush was the first Squad member to endorse Harris following President Joe Biden’s decision to end his re-election campaign. Harris endorsed Bush in her 2024 congressional primary.

But this week Bush lost her bid for renomination, to the most prominent target of her lies about Michael Brown.

The winner is Wesley Bell, an attorney from Ferguson, who won election in 2018 as the first black person to head the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office, in large part because of the unrest following Michael Brown’s death.

Bell pleased protesters by promising to re-open the Michael Brown case. He infuriated them 18 months later when, after a comprehensive reinvestigation, he announced that there was no basis for charging the police officer with murder or any other crime.

“The evidence isn’t there. It just isn’t there,” Bell told Politico during the closing days of the congressional primary. “And we can’t prosecute someone just because we just want to do it. That’s the definition of political corruption. And I won’t do that. Far too often, when prosecutors take liberties and issue charges on folks without the evidence, it’s minorities—black and brown folks—who are on the business end of that.”

Cori Bush’s defeat eliminates one of the liars who inflamed Ferguson and embittered racial relations throughout the nation. But Kamala Harris is still on the scene.

Five years after her false accusation of murder, Harris still has not retracted the falsehood. The tweet remains on Harris’s current X account.

Eric Holder, who vetted her choices for running mate, could tell her the truth about Michael Brown.

Before there’s another ritual of deception concerning that death 10 years ago in Ferguson, it’s time for Harris to speak the truth.