By William Sullivan (American Thinker) The lie that George Floyd was murdered by racist police officers in Minneapolis has made its way around the world several times over, leaving countless violent riots and more than $2 billion in property damages in its wake, but it seems that the truth is finally putting on its shoes.

In June of 2020, 60 percent of surveyed adults deemed George Floyd’s death to be murder at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin.  As of last month, a little more than a third of Americans believe that.

That’s a stunning near-reversal of public opinion.  How did that happen?

The answer to the practical question as to what role the accused Derek Chauvin had in Floyd’s death will ultimately be determined by the courts in his ongoing trial, as it should be.  Unfortunately, that question is of far less societal importance than the larger question looming around George Floyd’s death.  It is a question that is rarely ever asked, and for which there is no such codified structure for honest investigation and judgment outside of today’s kangaroo court of public opinion overseen by politicians, celebrities, and the media.

That question is: What role, if any, did racism play in George Floyd’s death?

It has been taken for granted since the first video of Floyd’s arrest emerged that George Floyd was a victim of racial injustice.  It was, according to the president of Axios, Cliff Young, an “acute crisis” that brought “racial justice to the forefront.”

The notion that Floyd’s death was a “racial reckoning” advanced, seemingly without opposition in the summer of 2020, with few stopping to ask what evidence exists to support the narrative.  Rather than asking that question, millions mindlessly submitted to the explanation of systemic racism that was offered by Black Lives Matter, a well-funded organization that openly employs racial grievance as a substitute for Marxist class warfare, and which was supported by radical leftist politicians, celebrities, media outlets, and American corporate giants, all of whom later became apologists for, and, in some cases, accomplices to, the legions of arsonists, thieves, and violent criminals taking part in last year’s unprecedentedly destructive riots.

It was easy for the aforementioned parties to stimulate Americans’ imaginations toward understanding Floyd’s death as a result of racism.  The initial videos taken by onlookers captured only the final moments of the confrontation between Floyd and the arresting officers, but given that little was known about the events leading up to those moments and that myriad relevant facts hadn’t yet been reported, the public accepted the story that white racist cops had racially profiled George Floyd, and, without sufficient provocation, used an unconventional restraining tactic that strangled the life out of him as he begged for an opportunity to breathe.

That narrative is, and always has been, pure nonsense.

The four officers involved, not all of whom were white, only engaged Floyd in response to a reported crime, and not while proactively patrolling the community.  Racial profiling had nothing at all to do with this encounter.

The neck restraint used to immobilize George Floyd was not, in fact, a peculiar means of torture devised by Derek Chauvin to choke the life out of a minority, but a legal method of restraining suspects which was sanctioned by the Minneapolis Police Department, and which was only made obsolete after Floyd’s death.

And, despite the media’s curious lack of focus on this important fact, we also discovered very early on that George Floyd had a “fatal level of fentanyl” in his blood at the time of his death.  “If Mr. Floyd had been found dead in his home with no other contributing factors,” chief medical examiner Dr. Andrew Baker said last June, he would “conclude that it was an overdose death.”

But perhaps more than anything else, the body cam footage released last summer should have disabused any reasonable person of the notion that racism had anything to do with this incident.  In a concise and apt appraisal of the revelations to be seen in the released body cam footage, former ESPN sports writer Jason Whitlock wrote:

Here are the key takeaways from the footage:

• Floyd’s behavior escalated a routine arrest into a possible abuse of force.
• The George Floyd case is not a race crime.  No rational person can watch that footage and conclude the police were motivated by Floyd’s black race.
• It’s going to be virtually impossible to convict former officers Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao of any crime.
• It will be equally difficult to convict Chauvin of murder. [emphasis added]

To be perfectly clear, there has never been even a single shred of evidence that the officers involved in George Floyd’s arrest were motivated by Floyd’s race.  The released body cam footage simply made the absence of such evidence clearer.  But nothing, it appears, could have stopped this carefully crafted and ambitious falsehood that both spawned and justified the blind fury that became manifest in the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.

Today, large swathes of the American public have come to understand the aforementioned facts, despite the best efforts of the media to hide them.  Hence, far fewer Americans believe that George Floyd was the victim of murder today than last summer, while more believe that Chauvin may have been guilty of negligent behavior in exercising his duties, and more still now claim to not know what happened at all.

In our judicial system, and as it should be, the moral space between the crimes of murder and negligence is a vast chasm.  But the sad truth is that lawful adjudication for Derek Chauvin in court, where facts and evidence matter in shaping conclusions, will not matter to the millions of woke fanatics that have already concluded, without any consideration to facts or evidence, that George Floyd was murdered by racist cops.  If Derek Chauvin isn’t convicted of murder, and the woke mobs don’t get their desired vengeance through the justice system for the race crime they imagine to have happened, we all know that we can expect more arson, thievery, and violence against innocent people and their property in countless American cities.

And perhaps saddest of all, we can expect that radical leftist politicians, celebrities, the media, and woke corporations will continue to be complicit in the promotion of that deadly and destructive lie, and will continue to placate the rioters committing these horrible atrocities by defending their actions as justifiable outrage.

Powerful forces are allied against the truth, and are actively seeking to silence anyone espousing it.  But the truth remains, and while it may sometimes be slow to take hold amidst a moral panic like this one, it is relentless.  The truth matters, and the truth is that George Floyd’s death, while unfortunate, has precisely nothing to do with racism in America.  And anytime we hear others suggest that it does, we have a responsibility, however uncomfortable or impolite it may seem for us, to demand that they defend their wholly unsubstantiated belief with facts rather than emotional hearsay, however futile that may be for them.

David Gordon(MISES)

Gad Saad, a psychologist who specializes in applying evolutionary biology to the study of consumer behavior, has written a book of great value, and moreover, it is a book that required great courage to write. The book is filled with interesting ideas, and I have space here to mention only a few of them.

What most draws me to the book is that Saad has a philosophical turn of mind, and as such, he is concerned with fashionable attempts to deny the existence of objective truth. He says,

The central focus of this book is to explore another set of pathogens that are as dangerous [as biological parasites] to the human condition: parasitic pathogens of the human mind. These are composed of thought patterns, belief systems, attitudes, and mindsets that parasitize one’s ability to think properly and accurately. Once these mind viruses take hold of one’s neuronal circuitry, the afflicted victim loses the ability to use reason, logic, and science to navigate the world. Instead, one sinks into an abyss of infinite lunacy best defined by a dogged and proud departure from reality, common sense, and truth. (p. 17)

The mental viruses Saad has in mind are to a large extent those that deny that human beings have a biological nature. He says, for example,

Many idea pathogens share one common thread, a deep desire to liberate people from the shackles of reality. Take, for example, the blank slate premise of the human mind. It posits that humans are born void of any evolved biological blueprints and innate individual differences. Our eventual life trajectories are thought to be fully shaped by the distinct environment to which we’ve been exposed. (p. 70)

It is exactly here that Saad has manifested his courage, as the followers of many fashionable movements deny what he affirms and have been quick to boycott and blacklist dissenters. He tells us that the

idea pathogens on university campuses fall into several large categories. Postmodernism posits that all knowledge is relative (no objective truths)…. Social constructivism proposes that the great majority of human behaviors, desires, and preferences are formed not by human nature or our biological heritage but by society, which means, among other things, that there are no biologically determined sex differences, but only culturally imposed “gender roles.” Radical feminism asserts that these gender roles are due to the nebulous and nefarious forces of the patriarchy. Transgender activism purports that biological sex and “gender” are non-binary fluid constructs. Scientifically speaking, postmodernism, social constructivism, radical feminism, and transgender activism are all based on demonstrable falsehoods. (p. 69, emphasis in original)

Saad has placed great stress on the findings, as he takes them, of evolutionary biology, but how do we know these findings are true, and, moreover, so firmly established that resistance to them can be characterized as mental pathology? In a crucial passage, he says that evolutionary theory is supported by “nomological networks of cumulative evidence.” “This approach epitomizes the gift of the human intellect. It is akin to building a jigsaw puzzle. No single piece is sufficient to see the full image but once all of the pieces are placed in their rightful positions, the final pattern emerges clearly” (p. 146).

Saad, it transpires, firmly believes that science is our best means to attain objective truth. “Philosophers have offered many frameworks to define truth. Mathematical proofs, for instance, are axiomatic truths. Empirical truths, on the other hand, are sought by the scientific method” (p. 143, emphasis in original). Saad’s views about evolution and science merit careful consideration, but my aim here is to present them rather than evaluate them. I would, though, note one problem. When he says that the “scientific method is the universal epistemological framework for understanding the world around us” (p. 57, emphasis added), he is making a statement that he takes to be true, even though it is a philosophical statement and not a scientific one.

In his stress on the objectivity of logic and reason, Saad finds an ally in Ludwig von Mises, whom he cites:

The contemporary progressive mantra considers it laudable to argue that different races, cultures, or religions possess distinct ways of knowing. However, not too long ago, the idea that people of different races or classes possessed distinct ways of thinking and reasoning, was reserved for racists and other miscreants. Ludwig von Mises … coined the term polylogism to capture this exact folly. Mises differentiated between Marxian polylogism and racial polylogism…. Polylogism is an anti-science notion, as Mises well knew…. There is no “black mind” or “white mind,” no “white male way of knowing” or “indigenous way of knowing,” there is only one truth, and we find it through the scientific method. (pp. 59–60)

An objection might occur to some readers, but Saad has an answer to it. Saad says that there is only one way of knowing, not separate male and female ways of knowing, but doesn’t he also, against those he calls radical feminists, emphasize biologically based differences between the behavior of men and women? Saad would reply that there is no contradiction: there are evolutionary reasons for both universal logic and sex-based differences in behavior.

If science is to continue to progress, it is essential that all lines of inquiry be open. This openness ought not to give way to the demands of certain “oppressed” groups that controversial views that hurt their feelings should be banned:

Given that they are so wrong, how do the ideologues defend their idea pathogens? Under totalitarian regimes, the solution is direct. You criminalize if not violently suppress (or kill) any dissenting voices. In the West, the ideological indoctrination is subtler. It is achieved by an ethos of political correctness and best enforced by creating university campuses that lack intellectual diversity … intellectual terrorists instruct generations of gullible students to remain quiet in their classroom seats while they inculcate them with anti-science nonsense. (p. 92, emphasis in original)