The important facts remain

A newly released video of Michael Brown has surfaced adding more fuel to a racial fire that has simmered in Ferguson, Missouri, for two years.

The video debuted at a film festival this weekend and shows Brown in the now-famous Ferguson convenience store the night before his shooting death.

The narrative of the new video is already being disputed by the convenience store owners, but it purports to show Brown apparently selling marijuana to the store employees in exchange for merchandise.

According to the filmmaker, the widely circulated video from the store the following day does not show an armed robbery but instead shows Brown returning to retrieve the merchandise he was to receive from the drug exchange.

The obvious problem with the much-hyped new video is that it has zero bearing on the interplay with law enforcement the following day that led to his death.

Brown was shot and killed because every ounce of evidence shows that he was attacking a law enforcement officer. On that critical and central point, there is no dispute.

So now we have a new narrative. Instead of armed robbery, Michael Brown was apparently a small-time drug dealer.

Following the video's release, there was the obligatory protest at the convenience store over the past weekend with the associated lawlessness that we have come to expect.

Whether Brown's actions in the store the following day were an armed robbery or the retrieval of merchandise from a low-level drug sale, the important facts remain.

Brown was identified as matching a description of an armed robber. He was stopped and refused the request of law enforcement. He charged the officer, putting that officer's life in jeopardy.

The race-mongers so desperately want Michael Brown to remain the poster child of police brutality against minorities.

They will continue to parade a narrative of a young man minding his own business who was profiled and killed by a racist cop.

That phony narrative spawned the Hands Up, Don't Shoot movement and the Black Lives Matter throng.

By diverting the nation's attention away from the actual incident and directing the focus in a different direction, the left hopes to create a wider gap in our society and bring more mayhem and chaos into our streets.

Michael Brown may well have been a good guy. Or Michael Brown may have been a thug and petty drug dealer.

The only thing that really matters is that Michael Brown made a fatal mistake when he attempted to attack a law enforcement officer. To be clear, that was the finding of the grand jury impaneled to investigate the incident.

As has been said on many occasions, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But everyone is not entitled to their own facts.

Michael Jensen is the publisher of the Standard Democrat in Sikeston, Missouri.