Derek Chauvin Did Not Murder George Floyd

with John McWhorter

In the documentary What Killed Michael Brown?, Shelby Steele coins the term “poetic truth” in order to describe the persistence of the myth that Michael Brown was “executed” by Darren Wilson. Steele calls poetic truth, “a distortion of the actual truth that we use to sue for leverage and power in the world. It is a partisan version of reality, a storyline that we put forward to build our case.” Poetic truth “thri[ves] more by coercion than reason,” accusing all who dispute it of complicity with the ineradicably racist system that governs and has always governed the country.

That Darren Wilson executed Michael Brown is one such poetic truth; that Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd is, I believe, another. Despite the aptness of Steele’s term, poetic truth is no truth at all, nor is it particularly poetic. It is power masquerading as fact, brute force in the guise of knowledge. The cities that burned across the country following Floyd’s death were expressions of such a truth, as was the incarceration of the police officers convicted of a crime they did not commit. The scramble to implement race-based policies and quotas, to elevate self-appointed gurus of “antiracism,” and to proclaim, against all evidence, the unreconstructed nature of American society were all tendrils of the same truth, which still threatens to assert itself whenever an incident emerges that fits its preferred pattern.

The cost in life, limb, and property incurred by this particular poetic truth would be bad enough. But I fear that, in the aftermath, when the embers have cooled and Chauvin’s name has been forgotten by everyone save his family, the true danger of the poetic truth of George Floyd will come to fruition. It will be written in books alongside uncontroversial facts, treated with the passive acceptance of any other historical occurrence, and absorbed into the storehouse of common knowledge that binds us as a culture. The deep epistemic corruption at the heart of the affair will become, if it goes unchallenged, imperceptible to future generations, simply more evidence that the world is as the poetic truth has determined it to be.

Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that YouTube has deemed this clip from my latest conversation with John McWhorter inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. Unless you’re 18 or older and logged into your YouTube account, you won’t be able to view it. If you see fit, please share it widely, as the algorithm won’t be doing it any favors. My team considered taking it down and hosting it on Substack instead. But I think it’s better that it stays as it is. Let it bear that mark of censoriousness, the better to remind us that the goal of truth’s suppression is not condemnation but forgetting.

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This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

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GLENN LOURY: We're talking about George Floyd because there has recently been released a documentary film called The Fall of Minneapolis. It's up at Rumble for free. Anybody can look at it. We'll put the URL in the description of this post. It raises a million questions. It's very well done. They have original body cam footage that's been carefully curated and edited and whatnot. It gives you a sense, the arrest of George Floyd, the trial of Derek Chauvin, the aftermath for the police department ...

JOHN MCWHORTER: Glenn, I want to interrupt very briefly. The body cam footage, you haven't seen, folks. This isn't just the people standing there with their cell phones. This is crystal clear 2020 body cam footage. It looks like a movie of everything that happened in the whole 20 minutes before that that makes all of it a very different story than what we've known. Anyway, go ahead.

I just was going to mention that, ironically, Derek Chauvin was attacked in a federal prison in Arizona, stabbed and injured seriously. A major medical threat to his life—22 stabs—just the other day. I mean, just within a couple of weeks of this film having been made public. And that's a coincidence that gives pause, that gives serious pause, because the film raises real questions about whether or not he got a fair trial in Minneapolis.

It raises real questions about whether or not the narrative that comes out of the so-called murder—I said “so called.” Oh, my God! How dare I? How dare I even begin to think critically about whether or not it's appropriate to say what happened to George Floyd was murder. And yet, if you watch this film with an open mind, you're moved to raise exactly that kind of question. So there we are.

Here we are in 2020. We talked about how every one of these cases of a white cop killing a black man turns out to not be what we thought. So, you know, it wasn't that George Zimmerman tapped Trayvon Martin on the shoulder.

Who, excuse me, was not a cop. He was not a cop. He was a citizen.

Yeah, that's an important point. Didn't tap him on the shoulder and they had an argument and George Zimmerman shot him in the face. That's not what happened. George Zimmerman shot him with Trayvon Martin on top of him, seeming like he might be about to kill him, which is just different. Mike Brown did not die with his hands up. He was trying to grab the gun of Darren Wilson and was lunging at him over and over again.

It's always like that. But I always thought that, with the George Floyd case, you couldn't argue with the basic facts. It seemed that this white cop had his knee on this man's neck, which seems so barbaric, but that's what the photo that you always see looks like, and that he couldn't breathe because the knee was on his neck, and that he choked and died of asphyxiation. That seemed to be the fact, with various people connected to the Minneapolis Police Force saying that they were unfamiliar with this move, this business of putting the knee on the neck, that that's not part of their training.

And so the issue was, why did that happen to George Floyd. Has something like that ever happened to a white person? In this case, it was Tony Timpa, who was killed in a very similar way, not too long before George Floyd. But I always thought, yes, I've been happy to see Derek Chauvin going to jail. I have written about him as a murderer many, many times. And then look at this. Once again, we've been lied to. And the sad thing, Glenn, is that nobody left of center is going to admit that any of this could be valid. Truth will not matter on this one.

I think that's a really important point, and I wish we'd come back to it. That is, that the epistemic dilemma that we're in, of being able to come to public agreement about what actually happened. And we're in a deep hole as a society, because that's a tough one.

But I wanted to just call to mind the scene in the documentary film that we're talking about, where the interviewer is with Derek Chauvin's mother, the mother of the cop, the murderous cop. He has a mother. He's locked away for some interminable period of time. I can't even remember now, but I mean, it's hundreds of months.

Over 20 years.

Yeah, it's a long time. And the mother is saying, “Here's the training manual,” the training manual showing a certain maximal restraint technique of immobilizing a recalcitrant suspect, which has a photograph in it of a man with his knee on the shoulder—not the neck, the shoulder—not in an asphyxiating but in an immobilizing manner. Just as when you see the body cam footage of Derek Chauvin in that position, it's very, very, very similar.

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This was not allowed to be introduced into evidence at trial! The judge, who is depicted as having been biased against the cops in this documentary film—I don't know if that's true or false. But there is a point of view in the film. I think we have to acknowledge that. It's not wrong for being a point of view, but I think it's a point of view. I don't know the details about the judge who heard Derek Chauvin's case enough to be able to comment on whether or not he really is biased. I don't know that, but the film does raise these kinds of questions.

A police officer of commanding rank testifies at trial that that technique was not a part of the training, when trainers who spent decades training Minneapolis cops affirmed that, of course, it was a part of the training. So, rather than a vicious, white, malicious, nigga-hating cop putting his knee on the neck of this poor, helpless man and strangling the life out of him, something different from that actually happened.

And if you look at the picture, you can think, if you're told that he put his knee on his neck, that it was the neck. But it's also the shoulder.

And people, this is the important thing. This is so important. He's saying, “I can't breathe.” Okay. There are three things. One, if he's saying it in that clear, strong voice, it would appear that he could breathe. Okay. So that was always a little strange, but maybe there's a point where you can say “I can't breathe,” but you're getting dangerously little air. But still, that stands.

Two, this is what's important in the body cam footage, which we've never seen. George Floyd was saying “I can't breathe” when he was standing up straight and just being coaxed to get into the car. What they were trying to do was take him somewhere to get treatment, because the drugs were severely addling his mind and he wouldn't get in the car. And he starts saying, breathing air, standing up, “I can't breathe, I can't breathe,” when nobody is anywhere near his neck or anything else. George Floyd was extremely high on fentanyl and meth to an extent that could have killed him sitting in a chair. If you're on fentanyl in particular, you get something called “wooden chest,” where you can't breathe if you've got that much in you. That's how high he was. Now, the issue is not the morality of him being high, but he was saying, “I can't breathe” long before anybody had him on the ground.

And then the third thing is this. What a lot of people are going to say is, “Look at the agony of his face in the standard photo. It looks like he can't breathe. He's in agony.” That grimace that we see is something that does move you. But if you look at the body cam footage we've never seen, George Floyd had that exact same look on his face when the cops just approached his car and said, “Get out.” He was really messed up that night. I'm not moralizing. Just because I'm wearing a cardigan doesn't mean that I don't understand the joy of drugs and liquor, but he was majorly fucked up.

It was during the day, it was not at night. But go ahead.

Yeah, I'm making it at night, but it's in daylight. The cops come up and he's just [saying], “Oh God! Oh! Don't shoot me!” and nobody has a gun. You know, “I just lost my mother.” His mother died years ago. They weren't threatening him at all. He was really, really messed up, and he had that same look on his face. So I don't think, unless this is faked--here we are in the age of AI. I mean, we have to allow that just maybe. But unless that body cam footage is faked, Derek Chauvin didn't kill that man. I never thought I'd be saying that. It appears to be true. Are we missing anything?

Do you remember Shelby Steele's film about Ferguson? Eli Steele the filmmaker and Shelby Steele the writer. I think they called it What Killed Michael Brown. And in it, Steel introduces this concept. I think he calls it a “virtual truth.” It was true in effect. A narrative that is so in coordination with a sentiment that's widely held in the public that people want to believe that it's true, because it provides additional evidence to what they've been telling you all along is the case about this country and about the lives of black people in this country becomes unassailable. It becomes, in effect, true.

It is ... poetic. That was his phrase. A “poetic truth.” I just love that phrase. And this is back to this question of whether or not you can actually say that Chauvin didn't kill George Floyd, because, I mean, think what that entails. That means all that rioting, looting, and burning, all of that civil disorder that has had and will continue to have political ramifications echoing down across the years: what was that for? Or what about imprisoning those police officers? I mean, for crying out loud, Derek Chauvin is locked away for a lifetime. And the other cops also got jail time, too. One of them is black.

That's another thing. The one who's K-E-U-N-G, and so you think he's Vietnamese or something? He's black.

And a veteran police officer who worked in the academy training other police officers said that he was probably the best recruit that he had seen in a quarter-century of service, just as an aside. But they were and are being punished unjustly, if indeed you conclude, as you have just done, that Floyd wasn't murdered out there. What about that? What about fueling a false narrative? What about giving further credence to a way of thinking about yourself within your country that is untrue to the reality of your condition? The cost here is inestimable.

You know, Glenn, also, if you want to push it, if you think about what happened in the first half of 2020, also the whole racial reckoning and the grievous excesses that it's led to that make people write books like Woke Racism, et cetera. I mean, frankly, we have to do it, we have to say it, and then we're going to move quickly on. The elevation of Ibram Kendi really was sparked in large part by George Floyd. He was known before that, but him being a phenom whose counsel is attended to by people cowering in their boots becoming amoral people if they don't follow it, that happens in the wake of George Floyd. And it was a lie. It was a lie.

I am still trying to grapple with the meaning of this. And so what it comes down to is George Floyd. He had serious heart disease. He wasn't an old man, but he had serious heart disease, untreated. He had serious atherosclerosis, untreated. He was very high on both fentanyl and meth, which is a lethal combination. Very high on them, probably taking more while he was in the car to hide it from the cops. He opens his mouth in the footage, and you see he's got something on his tongue. It's not a Chiclet. He's really, really high. He tested positively for COVID then. He had COVID. He smoked. He's a very sick man.

And then all of this happens. He's frankly out of his mind because of all of this. He couldn't help it, but he was. And you know, he was upset. He was agitated, his heartbeat probably pumping harder. Now I'm going into a medical expertise I don't have. But he was very agitated at being detained by the cops. And remember, they had a reason for detaining him. He was trying to pass counterfeit money. They were detaining him, and it got worse and worse. He couldn't understand that he needed to just calm down, despite being told to by his friends. “Stop resisting, Floyd,” one of his friends said. And so, it got the best of him and his heart stopped.

But it wasn't because he was asphyxiated. And the other thing is, there was no evidence in the autopsy report, which has not been shared with us until now—not the autopsy report that was suggested by George Floyd's relatives, but the first one. There was no evidence of asphyxiation of any kind.

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