The sadistic lie that destroyed cities and careers, balkanized America, and gave a legion of race-grifters the bleakest of perpetual gifts
It's time for a real reckoning, this time with the fact that unseen evil actors are trashing the country—for racists, "anti-racists," and everyone in between who just wants to survive
The Wikipedia entry of George Perry Floyd Jr. identifies him as “an African-American man who was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota” on May 25, 2020 at age 46. Other than the outdated term “African-American” in place of “Black,” this description probably doesn’t strike many readers as controversial over three and a half years after Floyd’s death.
A Google search for the term “George Floyd” (with the quotation marks included in the search) limited to the website of Trail Runner produces around thirteen results. The same search within the domain of Women’s Running yields the same number. Outside Online’s website boasts 134 instances of the term, not including potential redundancies.
All three of these entities are properties of Outside. (I usually refer to this company as “Outside, Inc.” to set it apart from Outside Online or the print version of Outside, but I invented the term purely to add clarity.) Outside hosts a bevy of other fitness-oriented publications, but I surveyed just these three because they are ostensibly devoted to both the sport and the basic exercise known as “long-distance running.”
Runner’s World’s website, a shining digital monument to giddy epistemic failures overseen by semiliterate jellyfish, contains around 64 instances of “George Floyd.” The website of USA Track and Field—the sport’s governing body, a longtime leprous extension of Nike Inc., and a nonprofit organization that in 2022 blew through 93 percent of the $8.5 million in net assets it started the year with—includes roughly 27.
Nike, the world’s longtime leading maker of athletic footwear that enjoys an enormous market capitalization built on a salt-mines labor-force model and impressively Machiavellian corporate-image management, issued a press release a week and a half after the alleged murder. Without mentioning Floyd’s name, the release announced that swooshed-up figures Michael Jordan and Jordan Brand were donating $100 million to racial-justice causes.
Other running-shoe makers have ridden the wave. Just this May, adidas announced that it was partnering with the Philonise & Keeta Floyd Institute for Social Change, an organization run by George Floyd’s brother. (In Match 2021, the Floyd family was awarded $27 million after filing a wrongful-death lawsuit against the City of Minneapolis.) HOKA’s website includes an October 2020 post by Latoya Shauntay Snell, who observed that “George Floyd’s death sparked a huge talking point everywhere about racism but dialogue about runner safety for marginalized communities haven’t caught up.” At last notice, “dialogue” was a singular noun, and today Snell remains the company’s—and the running industry’s—leading race-and-obesity-grifter.
How closely a given person with no real-life association with the late Mr. Floyd insists on mentioning him is a rough metric of how eager they are to profit from his death. For example, a Google search for “George Floyd” “Alison Desir” (with both names in quotes) generates an impressive 81 results. Desir is a burbling FUCK WHITEY type armed with a master’s degree in melanospastic grievance-mining from Columbia University who has enjoyed a disturbing level of perverse social momentum in the post-George Floyd era.
The rise of dishonest slobs of color in citizen-level distance running is owed to the environment featuring an alarming number of harried but indolent shitlib women—almost all of them white, since running for pleasure is, after all, a pursuit limited almost entirety to America’s blinkered leisure class—who can’t get themselves in motion more than once every few weeks, yet for whatever dreary reasons insist on having a say in a sport that apparently only teases them by being too hard for them to actually participate in despite their having all the time and reasons in the world to try.
Finally, here on Beck of the Pack, I’ve mentioned George Floyd in roughly 13 posts. Although the universal point of these was to condemn the bullies and strife-lords who have used Floyd’s death as a naked excuse to extort money from whomever or whatever they can accuse of racism, I believed at least one thing all these sources also did: That a Minneapolis police officer killed Floyd. In relating what took place on May 25, 2020, I’ve used descriptions such as “George Floyd’s on-his-back, motionless death at the hands of a police officer” (July 13, 2021), “George Floyd’s murder” (June 30, 2022), and “the killing of George Floyd by a police officer” (March 1 of this year).
On June 11, 2020, Dave Chappelle, among my favorite comedians and in my view one of the most intelligent men in the United States, gave an unannounced performance near his home in Ohio to a small group of gawping yokels. He titled the twenty-seven minute performance “8:46,” which is how long, in minutes and seconds, George Floyd was reported to have been restrained on the pavement, being slowly choked out. While watching this, I teared up. This, as odd as it may seem, is not the very first time this has happened while I was watching Chappelle speak. But this time, of course it was different. He was different.
This terrible crime simply never happened.
There was never a knee on George Floyd’s windpipe. He was not murdered. He died because he was as high as a kite on fentanyl and methamphetamine and succumbed to what appeared to be cardiorespiratory arrest.
Instead, a far worse series of crimes surrounding this event were perpetrated by psychopaths—with the worst of these operating at a comfortable distance—on the entire free world beginning the moment it happened.
If you click on the image below, you’ll be taken to a page where you can view the 1-hour, 40-minute documentary The Fall of Minneapolis. If I offer so much as one editorial comment, I will have to go on for virtual pages, so I just implore readers to watch the documentary and count the number of times they find their jaws hanging somewhere around their sternums.
The entire thing makes me furious. Not at George Floyd. Not at the jurors. Not at the rioters, though this takes real work. Not even at the obviously compromised judge, jury, prosecutorial team, and witnesses in the four separate police-officer trials, who to different degrees were merely manipulated players in a scheme so stupefyingly, callously anti-human life that I resist accepting it for what it is even though there are no other possibilities.
As for those who do bear moral blame, I’ll get to them next time. But really, after watching this film and realizing that there really is no bottom to American society’s externally supported violent and needless involution, exactly what kind of actions do readers think the people behind this do see as a bridge too far?
Again, the only answer is obvious.
Nothing.
In the video below, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter react to the documentary.