Conservative activists, led by Elon Musk and podcaster Ben Shapiro, are pushing to pardon former Minneapolis police officer and convicted murderer Derek Chauvin. Revising negative narratives — regardless of the truth — has become a runaway train in President Donald Trump’s second term.
This is yet another way for aggrieved white people to challenge the success of Black Lives Matter.
These are the facts in the case. On May 25, 2020, Floyd was detained on the allegation of passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a store in Minneapolis. That resulted in a call to police. A brave young woman videotaped the police encounter. That’s how a nation of eyewitnesses watched Chauvin kneel on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds with Floyd handcuffed and on the ground.
Rodney Kennedy
Not for a violent crime. Not for assault. Not for anything but the allegation of passing a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes.
Floyd’s plea of “I can’t breathe” is forever etched in our collective memory and became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement and a summer of racial reckoning in America.
Multiple police officers were present and later charged with crimes. Chauvin, the worst offender, was found guilty of murder by a jury of his peers.
Trump and other white supremacist revisionists tell a different story, of course. They claim Floyd had microscopic traces of fentanyl in his system.
“’I can’t breathe’ is forever etched in our collective memory.”
Even if he did, we all can see the video. He was not the violent aggressor. A person could be stoned on drugs and it still is a capital crime to murder him. Even if the murdered is a police officer in a city with a history of racial discrimination.
The revisionists — who also cheer Trump’s pardons for the January 6 rioters — have developed a sudden attraction to soft, easy forgiveness with minimum consequences for the sins of their people: “I don’t believe that (Chauvin) should be able to be in a place of authority amongst his peers and his community, but I do believe that he should not have his life stripped away based off of one mistake,” said Jordyn Joyce, a registered Republican who hails from Ocala, Fla.
The revisionists also bear down on the issue of race. They insist racism was not that big of an issue in Floyd’s case. Instead of accepting the jury’s guilty verdict, they concentrate on blaming Black Lives Matter. BLM took advantage of the situation to make millions of dollars for itself, they charge.
Again, this has nothing to do with the murder of George Floyd. It is revisionist history.
Another example of the same technique is the forced removal of the Black Lives Matter mural from a street in Washington, D.C., mandated by Trump from the White House.
A general view of St. John’s Episcopal Church surrounded by temporary metal fencing as seen from Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., on August 8, 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic. Ten weeks after the police killing of George Floyd on May 29, which ignited an international wave of protests against racism and police brutality, demonstrations continued in Washington as the country passed 5 million confirmed COVID-19 cases. (Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images)
How conservatives — typically literalists — became so passionate about symbols and slogans seizes the mind. For years now, MAGA has been agitated about the removal of Confederate statutes that stood as symbols to a false history, the Lost Cause.
Now Republicans, led by Trump, Musk and evangelicals, are revising events not more than five years old. It is not enough to perpetuate the Lost Cause or to continue to lie about Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. Now they seek to rewrite the historical events that happened in the runup to that election.
Operating in a truth-challenged culture, Trump and his MAGA allies have been putting the revised brand on events that make them look bad. They claim January 6 was not an insurrection but a peaceful protest by patriots. They believe Trump’s jury conviction on 34 felony counts was a “sham” trial. They believe President Joe Biden was mentally incapacitated and not making his own decisions.
The most dangerous revision, however, is Trump’s attempt to revise the Constitution and the balance of powers between Congress, the executive branch and the judiciary.
Trump’s followers don’t care when he does or says something wrong. They only care whether a different story can be told to make their hero look better. Every bad, wrong and evil act by Trump or his followers is seen as an opportunity to tell a different story that positions Trump and MAGA as better than others.
For example, House Republicans have passed a budget cutting Medicaid benefits to the poor. The revised version of this story, told by Jonathan Ingram and Paige Terryberry claims the states are to blame for “putting able-bodied adults ahead of the disabled and the elderly.” In this version, Republicans shouldn’t feel shamed when they are called cold, selfish and callous. Instead, they should blame the states for misdeeds and claim the moral high ground.
In this mindset, the truth becomes whatever the leader says it is. The role of Trump is not to advance truth but instead to shut it down by scapegoating, denying, oversimplifying and telling a different story; demagoguery correlates with lies as a kind of propaganda that takes advantage of a pre-existing culture of fear, mistrust and hatred.
“The images are forever seared on our minds. No amount of revision can take away the truth.”
His followers have an unmediated relationship with him, so whatever he says must be the truth. They then repeat the revised story and it becomes the new truth.
Here’s the problem for MAGA: Two of their revisionist attempts have been witnessed by millions of Americans on digital video that lasts forever. Millions saw, with our own eyes, what happened on January 6, and millions saw, with our own eyes, what Chauvin did to George Floyd.
These facts are not debatable. The images are forever seared on our minds. No amount of revision can take away the truth.
There can be no rewriting of the story except for those who traffic in dark web conspiracy theories, lies and misinformation.
What Trump is doing and MAGA is allowing to take place will not be good, not even for MAGA. No matter how much they hate Democrats, they are guilty of manifold wickedness if they continue to deny truth and offer a barrel of lies in place of the truth.
Nothing could be more scandalous than to voluntarily participate in the demolition of democracy based on self-serving lies. That will not only be murder, it will be suicide. The unity we have created in our nation’s history is too valuable to be sacrificed on the cross of partisanship.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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