I have a confession to make.
Last month I surreptitiously slipped out of my silo of truth and righteousness, crossed the great divide, and slinked through the realm of malice and deceit (aka Foxistan) to brashly practice what I preach: Love your enemies, and if you can’t love ’em, at least listen to ’em.
Well, I don’t love the stooges in Foxistan and I really don’t want to hear ’em or even look at ’em, but now and then, a masochistic curiosity gets the best of me.
And that’s how I happened to watch The Fall of Minneapolis, a slick crowdfunded documentary from Alpha News. The film mischievously casts doubt on the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.
Millions have now seen it. It’s “a thing” on the other side.
Facts were suppressed. Floyd was not murdered. Chauvin was sacrificed.
I never believed that.
Still, the film rattled me.
(My inherent skepticism sleeps lightly.)
Well, what if?
I immediately sought refutation of the film but, alas, serendipitously found validation of it from two right-leaning (but not crazy!) African American academics—Glenn Loury (Brown University) and John McWhorter (Columbia). They, too, were rattled by “compelling new evidence,” especially since they had consistently affirmed to their podcast audience that Floyd had been murdered. Case closed!
But now this.
As it turns out, Loury and McWhorter had suspicions. They did due diligence. It took a while.
They interviewed the producers of the film and found them duplicitous, concealing strong biases—partiality toward police and negativity toward cities run by progressive Democrats. They also read the investigative journalist Radley Balko’s point-by-point refutation of the right’s new favorite Black intellectual, Coleman Hughes, who had endorsed the film in The Free Press.
(Balko is the author of Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. Hughes is the author of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America.)
Last week I happened across Loury and McWhorter again. They were contrite. They confessed that they had been too credulous, gullible.
(Good for them. Who ever owns up to a mistake these days?)
Anyway, I’m glad to be back on the righteous side again—wiser, or at least a little less dumb.
And here’s a belated “Thank you” to my readers who thought I’d gone bonkers. And said so.
But then, that’s what the comment window is for.
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In case you missed it, I was dithering in my February 4th post: The George Floyd Hoax.
Your intriguing blog reminds me of some lines from Mitch Albom’s novel, The Little Liar: “You choose a sliver of Truth here, a sliver there. You disregard the parts that displease you, and soon your plate is full. But just as ignoring proper food will ultimately decay your body, so will handpicking the Truth eventually rot your soul.”
It is so easy to do just that. “Cherry pick” the “truths” we want to carry with us. And I think it starts with where we get our information. So, again , always fact check with multiple data sources from different points of view. I appreciate this comment.
People on the left (a place where I live with pride) were too quick to believe that George Floyd was murdered. George Floyd was murdered, but you need to check it out. We live in a time when many people read the headlines but don’t read the articles; read the articles, but not the retractions. The damage is compounded by the reality that too many folk are willing to go to great lengths to package their “truth” to satisfy their own agendas. We all need to proceed with caution. I do read McWhorter with great respect though seldom agree. (He is this generation’s William Safire).
We saw Floyd being murdered in plain view! How can people think otherwise?
Yep
One of the gifts of getting older is that our mistakes hurt little except our pride. But those mistakes are damn good for the blessing of humility.
I valued your The George Floyd Hoax. I value your courage in writing about the hoax aspects to your audience. I was a journalist and journalists are subject to professional group cultural pressures as Noam Chomsky has documented. The piece created doubt in me so that I suspend opinion either way, a place I find myself let’s say about a third of the time, usually for want of time to research and sufficient facts. But being uncertain—while a partisan anathema—is a virtue, I think, when born of an absence of facts and not born of fear of commitment and fear of peer disapproval. I will write on point that belongs with the Floyd piece. It’s that the symbolic implication about society that the fraud implies is incorrect. Pointing out the fraud can easily be employed to imply that the pervasive hidden prejudices, systemic racism, is also fraudulent. Not that this is an honest use of one fraud, but we. sapiens are prone to irrationality and other primate destructiveness. So if liberals chastised you, I think it was in part because they fear giving the other side a point is to undermine a just cause, which it can do. Hence the loss of gray uncertainty, “negative capability” on both sides. Keats coined it “negative capability” and said it was the quality of a poetic mind. He was writing about Shakespeare. So lead on McDuff!
Uncertainty in our elder years does not find us on the spectrum of “dumb to less dumb.” It finds us wiser as we walk more confidently in the reality of non-duality, in the reality of our own accepted humanity of “both/and” rather than “either/or.” Just as Loury and McWhorter demonstrated without excuses. Besides, when did uncertainty ever lead us astray in search of deeper truths? It seems to me that yours was a stop on the hero’s journey and not on a fool’s errand. Peace be with you.
Listen and in the process, don’t start to let them rattle your foundations. In other words, your analytical ability to follow the facts to wherever they might lead. When you start to doubt yourself, getting rattled, as you say, keep in mind that you’re experiencing the first waves of being gaslighted. It’s one thing to listen and hear another person out, but it’s another to start to allow them to cast a web of doubt and suspicion about everything so that you can be emptied out and then refilled with distortions, prevarications, and other elements of reality bending. That’s what the gaslighting, and subsequent propaganda refill, is all about. Orwell taught us long ago that love is hate; war is peace; slavery is freedom; and education is ignorance. One must scout the perimeters, Doc! I salute your bravery. Nonetheless, it’s good to have you safe back at home, Ranger Randy! 🙂
Behind this documentary is Liz Collin, a reporter with conservative Alpha News in Minnesota. She had a 2022 book – They’re Lying: The Media, the Left, and The Death of George Floyd. She is married to former Minneapolis police officer/police union president Bob Kroll who seems to have been a racial lighting rod long before and during the Floyd murder trial.
In The Atlantic, Imbolo Mbue wrote, “…it is clear from their work that America had been slowly killing George Floyd for decades before Derek Chauvin pressed the last breath out of him.” It was part of her review of the 2023 Nonfiction Pulitzer Prize biography His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and The Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa.
Mr. Floyd’s great, great, grandfather was a former slave who worked 30 years to own 500 acres in North Carolina. That sounds like a chunk of generational wealth to pass down. It didn’t happen. In fact, a lot didn’t happen for a large swath of Americans, resulting from Republican and Democratic policies and programs that promote racism, poverty, and addiction.
I read the same misleading rants, & then settled on what I saw, with my own eyes & heart… such a stretch to try and debunk the truth… like January 6th… watching with my own eyes, listening with my own ears & heart… waiting for our “president” to DO something presidential… I trust my eyes, ears & heart… like you.
I appreciate your going “over there”, and giving them the benefit of doubt… welcome home!!