We Were Too Quick to Praise "The Fall of Minneapolis"

with John McWhorter

John and I helped bring a lot of attention to the The Fall of Minneapolis, a documentary by Liz Collin and JC Chaix which argues that Derek Chauvin is not responsible for the death of George Floyd and that Chauvin’s trial was tainted by perjury and manipulation of evidence. We discussed the film on one episode and brought the filmmakers on for a second episode. John and I both came away convinced that Derek Chauvin hadn’t gotten a fair trial and that he may well be innocent. But a couple weeks ago, the journalist Radley Balko published part one of what he says will be a three-part series debunking The Fall of Minneapolis. It was an unsettling read, one that I found so convincing that it’s led me to question my own earlier support of the film.

It was not wrong to call attention to the documentary, nor was it wrong to talk to the filmmakers. But I do wish I had not been so eager to accept their conclusions. I’ve spent years decrying the outsized reaction to the death of George Floyd, the riots and the antiractist mania that followed, and the superficial moralism of progressives who claim to find white supremacy at the root of even the most minuscule social infractions. When I saw a documentary that claimed to locate real, empirical corruption at the heart of the George Floyd case itself, I was primed to believe it.

I’ve had to take stock of my reasons for going all-in on The Fall of Minneapolis without subjecting it to scrutiny befitting the magnitude of its claims. Certainly I was ready to accept those claims, but at some level, did I want to accept them as well? I cannot be certain that my desire to strengthen my argument against George Floyd’s canonization did not neutralize the skepticism that should kick in whenever a shocking claim is made, no matter its ideological implications. The documentary’s counter-narrative fit neatly with my own, which should have moved me to seek further verification rather than accepting it at face value.

As you’ll see in this week’s clip, John doesn’t think we erred all that egregiously. But I do. I pride myself on remaining open to evidence and reason, even if they disconfirm something I had formerly thought to be true. I think I’ve succeeded in that where Balko’s critique is concerned, but only to the end of correcting an earlier failure. I sometimes describe myself as “heterodox.” That means looking on all orthodoxies with a critical eye, including the personal orthodoxies we develop over time. Without self-reflection and introspection, heterodoxy risks becoming orthodoxy by another name, a shallow rebrand that betrays its own purpose. As John is fond of saying, that won’t do. I may have fallen short this time. But, as I’m fond of saying, God’s not finished with me yet.

Note: Part two of Balko’s series dropped moments before publication of this post. I’ll have further comment if it seems necessary.

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JOHN MCWHORTER: Glenn, we need to talk about this very important George Floyd issue, because our statements about George Floyd have stirred a lot of people to watch a certain documentary. And now there's been a response to the documentary. And we need to—what's the word smart people use? We need to contextualize Radley Balko's journalistic sleuthing in response to the documentary. What do you think?

GLENN LOURY: Okay, let me try to set it up then. So the documentary is called The Fall of Minneapolis. JC Chaix and Liz Collin, a Minneapolis conservative journalist filmmaking crew. Let's tell the police side of the story of what went down in the killing of George Floyd, including the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer who had his knee on Floyd's neck.

It's an exposé that alleges that Chauvin was convicted on flimsy evidence and through a biased court and process, and that he, in effect, is wrongly imprisoned in a federal prison in Arizona for the murder of George Floyd, didn't kill George Floyd.

You and I invited the filmmakers on to the show after we had discussed the film ourselves in a separate episode. That episode went viral. It got over a million and a half views and it drove a lot of traffic to the site where the film was being hosted at YouTube. And then we had the filmmakers on, and we questioned them about some of the discrepancies. We indeed had heard from Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison about this film and about our depiction of the film.

Which led us to have some serious questions.

And we did some due diligence, looking into some of the things and shared with our audience what Ellison was saying, confronted the filmmakers with questions about it and so on. We were involved in the discussion of the film and indeed put up posts with thumbnails like “We Were Lied To,” words to that effect, John, because they were your words in that particular instance, about the narrative that came out of the killing of Floyd and the reality of what actually happened up there.

Coleman Hughes also—the young Coleman Hughes, podcaster, Coleman's Corner, Conversations with Coleman—took this up and put up a big piece at Bari Weiss's newsletter, in which he took up the question of whether or not Derek Chauvin was rightly convicted of the murder of George Floyd. [He] decided in the negative and made the case, based on the film, largely, that the case was wrongly decided against Chauvin.

And in reaction to Coleman, Radley Balko ... now, can I describe him properly? He's a veteran crime and policing reporter, was with the Washington Post for a long time. You want to add to that, John?

I don't know that much about him, but he's an established name. He's a respected figure, by no means some sort of marginal partisan. And he has begun a very detailed response to Coleman's piece, and by extension, us. But he's taking Coleman's piece as the demonstration case for his purposes. And so far there's been one very lengthy post responding to the documentary, and he's promising more. For some reason in my head it's two more pieces, but maybe it's more than that.

He is very hard on Coleman. He's got a snide, kind of dismissive tone. “Coleman Hughes says he does his own research. If he had done his own research, he would know the following.” The following mainly being that the testimony of police leadership at the trial of Derek Chauvin to the effect that Chauvin was not deploying the standard technique of maximal restraint that the police officers of Minneapolis are trained to deploy. They testified that Chauvin was not in compliance with the maximum restraint technique, and the film alleges that was false. That testimony was false. The film, in effect, accuses these persons of perjury, because in the manual for police training, there's a photograph of a situation in which someone is kneeling on the back or shoulder or neck of the person being arrested in a manner very similar to that which Derek Chauvin was deploying with George Floyd.

Many people have leaned on the shoulder, which maybe extends into the neck. Chauvin has apparently done that many times and did exactly what he did with Floyd. Many people have used it. But the idea is to only use it quickly, like for say 30 seconds, as preparation to getting somebody into this hobble, which is a completely different thing and keeps them from being a harm to themselves, because Floyd needed to be restrained. So you're supposed to do that in order to snap somebody into the hobble, not to just hold them there on the street for minutes and minutes at a time.

That's what I took, especially, from Balko. They did not say that in the documentary, and that is extremely misleading. And I would be interested to know what the documentary maker's response to that is.

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But what I mainly got out of it is the filmmakers were dishonest in their depiction of the situation because they left the testimony of the police personnel, who were mainly trying to say Chauvin was off the reservation. His behavior was not consistent with the appropriate procedure. It made it look as if they were saying something different from what they, in the fullness of their full testimony, were saying.

And what I took from that was two things. Discrediting the filmmakers was also indirectly discrediting people who took the filmmakers at face value, like me and you and Coleman Hughes.

Glenn, on this I think we were within our rights to call attention to the documentary. I think that it's one thing to look at all of this blow by blow. It's another thing to look at what a conversation is supposed to be. And conversations, national conversations, are sometimes messy. For that documentary, as well made as it is, just in the objective sense, to be out there and for good-thinking, bien pensant people to simply ignore it because it was made by conservatives would not be the way conversations go. Somebody needed to call attention to it. And frankly, we were some of the only people who would do it and be able to make big enough a noise to get other people to look.

Now, this is the problem. It may turn out to be that this one was made by conservatives who were not well-meaning or who were incompetent or came in with some sort of seamy bias. That may be the case. But that's not true of all conservatives. And I think that we needed to bring it in. And then if Balko comes and basically refutes what they're saying, he has done a service, and we can move on. But for that documentary to sit there, gradually seen by more and more people, with various people thinking that's the way it really went, to simply not respond, I think is not constructive.

I feel enlightened by Balko's work here. If I could roll the tape back, I wouldn't have been so forceful in saying we were lied to. And frankly, I've looked at it. I do some hedges. I say, if this thing is true, et cetera. But still the takeaway from it is me saying, here we go again, it's more Trayvon, et cetera. That's the way it goes. I left the window open, but we are not wrong to have called attention to that piece of work. What's necessary is to refute it.

No, I don't think the question is, should the film have been acknowledged and recognized? I think the question is how it's interpreted. And I think the question for us is, were we too credulous? Not that we should have ignored it, but that we should have been more skeptical about it, particularly about its technical claims, which challenged the limits of our own expertise in terms of being able to evaluate them. So we're trusting the filmmakers to a certain degree when we do that.

You may want to reply to that. Let me just say another thing before you do. I've been asking myself the question, how could I have been so ... I almost wanna say “gullible”? How could I been so credulous? How could I have not had my guard up? And I think the answer is, well, I wanted a counter-narrative to the dominant narrative about what happened to George Floyd and the subsequent developments of the summer of 2020.

I didn't like that police station being allowed to be burned to the ground. I thought that the lionization of Floyd, the elevation of him to a heroic status, to the point that the president, than a candidate, of the United States could say—I'm talking about Biden in 2020—that Floyd's death resonated—I'm not quoting him, but this was the effect—on a global scale. There were demonstrations all over the world—Black Lives Matter and all of that—that resonated even more profoundly than did the killing of Martin Luther King in 1968. I hope I don't misquote here. But I definitely believe that then-candidate Biden said something to that effect.

It was a big deal. It was a big fucking deal, the killing of George Floyd. The country seized up on something. When the opportunity to question the narrative came along, I jumped at it, and perhaps incautiously. That's what I want to say.

Which raises a question in my mind more broadly. Being heterodox, being against the grain, anti-woke, being the black guy who said the thing that black guys are not supposed to say. You can inhabit that persona to such an extent that your judgment is undermined by it. And I take that as a warning. I'll accept what you say. No we didn't do anything wrong. But I'm still a little bit chastened by Radley Balko.

And what he does to Coleman, people can read this and see for themselves—Coleman, the youngish upstart conservative black intellectual—is really disquieting. He says he's way out over his skis. He says he's a propagandist, in so many words. And Bari Weiss takes a hit indirectly from Balko. What kind of outfit is she running over there? Is she subject to the same temptations that we are as we inhabit this role of anti-wokeness, to quickly embrace something that we ought to think twice about before we jump?

Glenn, you're harder on us than I would be. Frankly, the narrative about cop killings has been lies so often that I think I wasn't motivated by sitting in a heterodox groove and beginning to play the role. With all due humility, I check myself for that as much as I can. However, you can't always be a hundred percent sure. And given how strong the pattern is of stories of that kind being lies, I think I was quite reasonable in thinking, oh, good Lord, here's another one of these cases. I wouldn't be surprised, given the pattern. It isn't that I had some brief where I wanted to disprove the story of George Floyd. It's that I thought, oh no.

Because frankly, I had believed it like everybody else. But I was thinking, oh no, is this going to be another one of these things where what we were told we were seeing was not what was actually going on? And I think what's important is this, Glenn. When Ellison wrote us with his polite scorn, here's what really happened. Both of us went and looked at the whole report of that pulmonologist. Both of us watched it. I certainly watched the whole thing. It worried us so much that we called [Chaix and Collin] on. That's when we called them on. We asked them questions. By the end of it, we were not saying, “Ha, we were right!” At least I certainly wasn't saying it or thinking it.

There was a big question mark by the end of it. We did our job. And Glenn, remember, there are kinds of people who sometimes would even think of themselves as being in our camp—think about it—where they would have gotten the emails from Ellison with that tone of his—you can tell he hates us, but he's trying to do a service—and they would have dismissed it. They would have said, “Oh, fuck him. Forget it.” They wouldn't have wanted to dig in and keep going. Frankly, I'm going to pat us on the back. We both had the presence of mind to think, even if this person hates us, we need to look into this more. We did our job.

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