The biggest sign of a grifting liberal “fact-checker” is when they tell you something “needs some context.”

When you hear some permutation of those words, you can be guaranteed the fact they’re checking is, in fact, factual. It’s not misleading or deceptive. However, it doesn’t fit the narrative — so let them provide a bit of “context” that allows it to squeeze into the official storyline.

Such was the case this past week when Twitter owner Elon Musk discovered a cache of “#StayWoke” T-shirts at Twitter HQ, along with a closet full of other shirts with suitably woke expressions emblazoned upon them. A video of the closet quickly went viral:

Yes, T-shirts worn by the people who are guarded with keeping what Musk — not wrongly — described as “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” The left, now furious that he’s saved that town square from the woke rabblement and their active engineering of how we discuss those matters so vital for the future of humanity, is now insisting the real social engineering involves allowing the freedom of speech and ideas.

What caused bigger issues is the fact Musk noted the “shirts stem from the Ferguson protests” and that “Obama’s own DOJ proved” the policeman who shot and killed Michael Brown was justified.

“‘Hands up don’t shoot’ was made up,” Musk continued in a since-deleted tweet, noting the favorite mantra of the protesters — supposedly taken from the fact Brown had his hands up when he was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 — was proved to be a complete fiction.

When independent journalist Andy Ngî tweeted that the phrase was “one of the biggest hoaxes to come from the American left in the last decade” and “has inspired many to become radicalized and militant,” Musk responded, “True.”

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This is all a) entirely accurate and b) terribly inconvenient for the left. Thus, CNN’s Don Lemon took to the screen to pull out the old “needs some context” line.

“In a now-deleted follow-up tweet, Musk noted that the shirts came after the Ferguson protests, and repeated a right-wing talking point suggesting that the protests following Brown’s death were overblown,” Lemon said on Thursday morning.

“Facts first hear on CNN. Musk said that ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ was made up — the whole thing was a fiction. This needs some context.”

Now, what’s the context? That, uh, “hands up, don’t shoot” was made up — but did’ja know Obama’s Department of Justice issued a report in which they found “systemic racial discrimination” Ferguson, Missouri’s police procedures?

“So the phrase hands up, don’t shoot became a national rallying cry in 2014 in solidarity with Michael Brown, the black teenager who some witnesses said had his hands up to surrender when he was shot and killed by a white police officer, Darren Wilson,” Lemon said.

“In 2015, the Justice Department cast doubt on the ‘hands up’ account, concluding in a report that Wilson shot Brown multiple times only as Brown was moving towards the officer. This is what Musk is referencing in his tweets.”

“The DOJ did not find grounds to charge the officer. But in a separate report released the same day, it did find evidence of systematic racial discrimination in Ferguson at the hands of the city’s police department and municipal court,” he continued.

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“Now, the DOJ, in a scathing report, pointed to the statistics for proof. Black people in Ferguson are twice as likely to be searched during vehicle stops than whites. Though white people were found to have contraband at a higher rate than black people. At least 85 percent of those pulled over, ticketed, or arrested for traffic violations were black, and the Justice Department said it was money not public safety that the department and the city focused on. And black citizens paid the highest price.

“So remember, hands up don’t shoot, after Ferguson, became a nationwide protest symbol for police mistreatment of minorities. It was about more than the shooting of Michael Brown. This is about the pattern of police shootings and brutality in this country. And hashtag #StayWoke which Musk mocked, was how Twitter wanted called out racial injustice — how they wanted to call out racial injustice.”

So in other words, what Musk said was factual, but incorrect. Got it? Thanks, Don!

Full segment here:

Beyond the stench of Orwellianism that permeates any discussion about the shooting of Michael Brown, one is amazed at the tenaciousness with which the left defends “hands up, don’t shoot” at all costs. As Mark Finkelstein noted at Newsbusters, the DOJ’s report did more than just “cast doubt” upon the “hands up” narrative. Here was The Washington Post, awarding the claim “Four Pinocchios” in its own fact-checking:

“Investigators have overwhelmingly rejected witness accounts that Brown had his hands up in a surrender before being shot execution-style. The DOJ has concluded Wilson did not know whether Brown was armed, acted out of self-defense and was justified in killing Brown. The majority of witnesses told federal investigators that the initial claims that Brown’s hands were up were not accurate. ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ did not happen in Brown’s killing, and it is a characterization that deserves Four Pinocchios.”

Given that it’s a blatant lie and that Ferguson is hardly the racial flashpoint most supportive of the left’s characterization of America as a systemically racist society built upon police violence, you’d think Lemon and others would let “hands up, don’t shoot” go. Instead, it needs to be defended at all costs as a convenient, if blatant, lie.

It’s almost as if the whole narrative is built atop a structure of prevarication — and if you start questioning one of the fibs that undergirds it, the whole thing might collapse. Fear not, though: Don Lemon and the folks at CNN are working overtime to hold the whole thing up by providing “some context.”

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.