While liberals “leaders” were crowing for the cameras and pretending to pray, St. Louis conservatives were taking some positive steps toward actually helping the Ferguson community torn up by rioting.

The St. Louis Tea Party is organizing a “BUYcott” of businesses along the now-infamous Florissant Avenue where some of the worst looting took place.

It’s an idea that helps the people directly affected by the riots that followed the police shooting death of Michael Brown on Aug. 9, but it could also help change the media-generated image of the tea party nationally.

The national media, naturally, yawned, but the impact is real. And it’s still going on, with another event planned for this weekend.

St. Louis Tea Party leader Bill Hennessy described the first day of the “BUYcott” on the group’s Facebook page.

A gentlman (my age) in the salon (husband?) asked who we were with. I told him “St. Louis Tea Party.”

“Tea party?” he said. “You bad boys,” and chuckled. Then he looked at me, very serious. He said, “The tea party came up here to do this?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “we don’t want to see Ferguson go south.”

He laughed. And he looked at me. Then he was quiet, lost in thought for a minute. When he came out of it, he was like our best friend. Laughing, giving us crap about stuff, telling stories. He admitted baseball can be like “watching grass grow.”

In that moment of reflection, I’m sure he was trying to reconcile “tea party” with what he was seeing–four white people, ages 18 to 50, laughing, spending money, empathizing.

That moment made the whole event worthwhile.

In other shops, we’d get hard stares when we walked in and shopped. Once we told them “we’re with the tea party, and we’re here to shop,” these people actually shouted. “Thank you, thank you, thank you so much.” …

This wasn’t a big win in breadth, but it was monumental in depth.

To be needlessly fair to the media, the effort has gotten some positive local coverage, and there are no doubt no many, many groups – churches, fraternal organizations and the like – that are helping out Ferguson in ways we’ll never hear about.

But this is the St. Louis Tea Party, a branch of a national movement of everyday Americans that the mainstream media generally treats like the Second Coming of the Klan. It’s a mostly white group working to help the mostly black businesses that were almost destroyed by mostly black rioters – and since that doesn’t fit any mainstream media narrative, most of America will never hear about it.

The “BUYcott” is continuing this weekend, according to the St. Louis Tea Party’s Facebook page.