by Roger Kimball
I wonder what Derek Chauvin is thinking these days?
He’s the former Minneapolis police officer who became the Scapegoat Number One after George Floyd – sorry, St. George Floyd – died from a Fentanyl overdose while resisting arrest in May 2020.
As all the world knows, that is not how The Narrative tells it. Witness Wikipedia, that Great Repository of Approved Narratives. “George Perry Floyd Jr.,” it begins, “was an African-American man who was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected Floyd may have used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, on May 25, 2020.”
“Murdered,” eh? “May” have passed a counterfeit bill, you say?
Well, that’s what we were told.
It takes a long time for someone to be canonized in the Catholic Church. There is an official process to be followed. Some miracles have to be recorded. One moves from being denominated a Servus Dei, a “servant of God,” to the status of being Venerabilis, to Beatus, and finally Sanctus. It’s much easier and much quicker with our secular saints. All you need is a festering politically correct grievance, a compliant media, and a terrified justice system.
So it was with the woman-and-drug abusing felon George Perry Floyd Jr. His corpse was not cold before he was elevated to secular sainthood and became the mascot for the Black Lives Matter hooligans who, over the course of a year or more, inflicted more than $2 billion of property damage, injured or maimed scores of people, and released a mesmerizing, racially fortified toxin into the atmosphere that addled the minds and hearts of all the beautiful people who run the country and from which we have yet to recover fully. Last week, on the occasion of Floyd’s birthday, Joe Biden prayed at the shrine, issuing an emetic White House statement “to honor his life and legacy” and urge us “to redeem the soul of America.”
Back in 2021, Derek Chauvin, along with three of his police colleagues, were offered up as sacrificial lambs by Minneapolis prosecutors. Chauvin was slapped with federal and well as state convictions and, as I write, is rotting in an Arizona prison for the murder of Floyd.
Alas for The Narrative, a large wrench has just been thrown into the works. The wrench itself was fabricated by Amy Sweasy, a former prosecutor in Hennepin County where Chauvin and his unfortunate colleagues were tried. But the fuel that hurled the wrench was provided by that indispensable public servant, Tucker Carlson.
You won’t read about it in The New York Times or The Washington Post. Neither CNN nor MSNBC will devote airtime to the story. But other, less establishment outlets have it. Here, for example, is Alpha News, with the eyebrow-raising headline “Court docs reveal ‘extreme’ public pressure on prosecutors in George Floyd case.”
“New court documents,” the story begins, “expose the ‘extreme pressure’ prosecutors faced in Hennepin County to charge Derek Chauvin and three other former Minneapolis police officers in the death of George Floyd. Several attorneys opposed charging the ‘other three’ officers and withdrew from the case due to ‘professional and ethical rules.’”
Hmm. I’d wager Derek Chauvin would find that interesting.
But not as interesting as what follows.
During her deposition, Sweasy also discussed a revealing conversation she said she had the day after Floyd’s death when she asked Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker about the autopsy.
“I called Dr. Baker early that morning to tell him about the case and to ask him if he would perform the autopsy on Mr. Floyd,” she explained.
“He called me later in the day on that Tuesday and he told me that there were no medical findings that showed any injury to the vital structures of Mr. Floyd’s neck. There were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation,” Sweasy said, according to the transcript.
“He said to me, ‘Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn’t match up with the public narrative that everyone’s already decided on?’ And then he said, ‘This is the kind of case that ends careers.’”
It is worth noting that when he was testifying in court, Andrew Baker told a different tale, opining that Floyd’s death was a homicide.
Which version is true? “No medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation” or “homicide”? Watch Tucker Carlson unpack the episode together with the writer Vince Everett Ellison. The bottom line? “It turns out the whole George Floyd story was a lie.” What will happen? Nothing. The truth will be ignored, swept under the rug. discounted utterly. Derek Chauvin, meanwhile, will languish in jail.
Many people, myself included, like to prattle on about the importance of “the rule of law” and other such nostrums. The case of George Floyd’s demise reminds us that that we live in a country governed by the rule of narrative, an entirely different dispensation.
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Roger Kimball is a regular contributor to American Greatness.
