If Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships, George Floyd was the convict who lit a thousand fires.
Helen is a myth. In many ways, so is George. Leftist America mythology.
Sunday marks the fifth anniversary of the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died in police custody. May 25, 2020 also marked the beginning of a violent revolution — an insurrection, if you will — led by opportunistic Marxists under the banner of Black Lives Matter bent on dismantling the last best hope of earth.
A jury would later convict former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, of Floyd’s murder. Floyd, who, according to toxicology results, had high levels of fentanyl, methamphetamine and cannabis in his system, repeatedly resisted arrest. He certainly didn’t deserve to die. But the convict with the long rap sheet became a patron saint for a leftist movement preaching chaos in an election-year power grab.
‘Fiery but Mostly Peaceful’
The Marxists, using the usual useful idiots in the accomplice media and the myth of George Floyd, nearly succeeded. Over the course of a very long, hot summer, the leftist revolution tore America and Americans apart in a sustained campaign to vilify law enforcement and subvert the rule of law. “You never want a serious crisis go to waste,” Obama apostle Rahm Emanuel liked to say. So the BLM revolutionaries, with the approval of the “systemic racism”-peddling Democrat Party, got busy laying waste to lives and public and private property — in the perverse name of “social justice.”
“In 2020, the United States was subjected to 574 violent riots which resulted in injuries to over 2000 police officers, looting of businesses, over 2 billion dollars in damage to property, and over 20 deaths including that of retired St. Louis Police Captain David Dorn,” the National Police Association noted in a press release calling on Congress to investigate the 2020 BLM/Antifa riots as they did the Jan. 6. 2021 Capitol riots.
Corporate media whitewashed it all as “mostly peaceful” protests over racial injustice, “civil unrest” in the land of “white privilege.” As CNN national correspondent Omar Jimenez reported live from the scene of a Black Lives Matter mob smashing up and burning down the Uptown neighborhood in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the infamous chyron at the bottom of the screen declared, “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING.”
The Kenosha riots followed on the heels of the August 2020 officer-involved shooting of Jacob Blake, another mythical character in the left’s war on the truth. A white police officer was ultimately cleared of wrongdoing in shooting Blake, who is black, after the suspect in a domestic disturbance repeatedly resisted arrest and threatened the officers with a knife. But that ultimately arrived more than a year after BLM and its leftist allies descended on Kenosha, looting businesses and burning down a full city block — again, under the false flag of racial injustice.
Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s far-left governor, only fanned the flames when he issued a knee-jerk statement incriminating police.
“Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin,” the Democrat said. “While we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.”
Evers’ incendiary comments drew the ire of the law enforcement he so quickly vilified. In a letter, Wisconsin Sheriffs’ Associations and Police Chiefs’ Association urged the governor to stop putting the lives of first responders in danger through his politically-motivated public comments.
The mayhem finally stopped a few days later, after a young man named Kyle Rittenhouse, facing down threats of violence, fatally shot two rioters and injured another. Rittenhouse, charged in the shootings, was ultimately found not guilty in a clear act of self-defense. But the damage had been done.
‘They Were Destroying the Neighborhoods’
When the smoke and dust cleared, Kenosha faced an estimated $50 million in public and private property damage. Sadly, ironically, the social justice warriors had burned through a low-income neighborhood filled with minority residents and business owners. Uptown, like just about everywhere else, was already struggling from the devastation of Covid and the government-imposed lockdowns that followed.
“I always think that people have the right to protest — to peacefully protest — but this goes beyond that,” Abel Alejo, owner of La Estrella Supermarket, told the Wall Street Journal while surveying the smoke and water damage to his business.
“They were destroying the neighborhoods that they want to protect,” the grocery story owner born in Michoacán, Mexico, told the news outlet at the time.
Kenosha wasn’t alone. Madison, Portland, Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and many more major U.S cities were engulfed in “mostly peaceful” riots. Minneapolis, where it all began, was taken over by a gang of thugs.
“What I want people to take away from my account of what I saw during my time in Minneapolis is that this was far from a series of protests,” Julio Rosas wrote in his definitive book on the 2020 riots, Fiery But Mostly Peaceful: The 2020 Riots and the Gaslighting of America. “Peaceful protests did occur, but there’s a difference between protesting and rampaging.”
“Not everyone understood that most basic point, particularly in the media.”
The scars remain.
As the New York Post reported earlier this month, Minneapolis is “still broken, divided, and suffering five years after George Floyd’s death.”
‘This is Social Justice?’
The Marxists were aided and abetted by the Democrats who run these cities amid a wave of initiatives to “defund the police.”
“Many mayors and governors are believed to have told their law enforcement officers to stand down, and many district attorneys and federal prosecutors refused to file charges, giving aid and comfort to those responsible for doing harm,” the National Police Association wrote.
Democrat prosecutors, many bought and paid for by George Soros’ social reengineering money, weren’t interested in holding life-threatening rioters accountable. Bronx and Manhattan district attorneys, for instance, shrugged off most of the looting and vandalism cases stemming from the 2020 George Floyd protests, the New York Post reported.
“In New York, people were caught on camera pulling up in SUVs, stealing goods by the trash-bagful, and driving off. This is peaceful protest? This is social justice? And yet Bronx DA Darcel Clark and Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. claim they can’t prove cases, so they are tossing them by the hundreds. BULL. They don’t want to put in the resources and work to see thieves and rioters get punished,” the New York Post Editorial Board summed up its outrage more than a year after the BLM riots began.
The same story played out in Dem-led cities across the country. The DA’s and state and federal prosecutors wanted nothing to with justice if it didn’t involve their twisted version of “social justice.” They were — and remain — steeped in critical race theory dogma that demands present injustices to certain Americans as reparations for past injustices to other Americans.
While most Americans “got woke” to the scam played on the country by the opportunistic left, the victimhood cult of personality marches on. The George Floyd mythology is being preached by the same people who carried his corpse like a cudgel in pursuit of political power. Five years after his death, the Marxists who made him a saint for their selfish purposes, are doing all they can to keep the myth of George Floyd alive.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
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