The Day Derek Chauvin Killed George Floyd Is the Day Trump Won Re-Election in 2020
by Alexander Zubatov
This should have been easy. The footage of Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee pressing on a handcuffed George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes as the latter struggled to breathe had a way of bringing everyone together. Liberals condemned Chauvin’s actions. Conservatives condemned Chauvin’s actions. Other cops condemned Chauvin’s actions. Even Trump and Biden agreed on this one. If we’d left it at that and just made sure to keep the conversation going, what would’ve happened is the mobilization of lots of political momentum for some much-needed reforms on what is and what isn’t okay as far as the standards cops abide by in subduing perpetrators.
Instead, what we got is what are, as of this writing, days of nationwide protests infiltrated by Antifa thugs and turned into violent anti-police riots that have injured hundreds of people, killed three (which is two more than Derek Chauvin killed) and inflicted untold property damage in the form of lots of damaged real estate and vehicles and looted goods. The mainstream media, the same people responsible for radicalizing people by selling them an empirically baseless tall tale that cops were disproportionately killing blacks, naturally refused to call the riots what they were and buried their heads in the sand, pretending that the thugs and hoodlums destroying police property or just breaking into stores and stealing goods in places like Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills or New York’s Soho were driven by some higher calling for justice.
Now, what was easy — a simple and gross abuse of power by a cop in Minneapolis — is hard. Or rather, it’s become easy again … but easy in a very different direction. Despite what the media might be trying to tell us, Americans won’t have the wool pulled over their eyes this time. Calling angry mobs of violent, howling, hooting and looting thugs “protesters” isn’t going to cut it. Even while the powers-that-be in many of the states most affected by this violence were just recently breaking up small gatherings outside bars or in public parks due to the Covid-19 public health emergency or sending out the cops to break up mass gatherings at Hassidic Jewish funerals in Brooklyn, those same leaders have been doing little or nothing to stop the madness when thousands of shoulder-to-shoulder protesters-parade through the streets. The same media organizations that just so recently seemed to have no ability to muster up empathy for small bands of largely non-violent protesters against an economically crippling lockdown causing levels of unemployment unseen since the Great Depression have oodles of empathy for large mobs of dangerous thugs massing in the thousands all over our cities.
We know what we’re seeing, and this time, you guys won’t tell us otherwise.
We’re seeing hypocrisy in spades.
We’re seeing the extent to which the mainstream media is out of touch with the pulse of America, having become the foremost force advocating against civility and public order.
We’re seeing cops who had nothing to do with the events in Minnesota being demonized, their already difficult and stressful jobs being made still more stressful by baseless acts of vandalism, arson and physical and verbal aggression in spades.
We’re seeing the extent to which our local and state leaders have abandoned us and left us to fend for ourselves, as the powers-that-be continue giving their open or tacit endorsement to hoodlums rampaging through our streets, while making excuses to get us to believe that the bad seeds are all outside interlopers.
We’re seeing our own New York City mayor’s daughter having been one of the protesters who stepped out of line and was arrested for obstructing traffic and refusing to abide by police instructions to desist, and we’re seeing the mayor — whose sworn job it is to enforce the law and protect New Yorkers — respond with nothing but an expression of pride in his daughter’s actions.
We’re seeing our city that has already sustained so much economic and moral hardship due to the toll of the coronavirus crisis now — just on the brink of recovery — besieged again by selfish protesters taxing emergency response teams to the breaking point, bashing in windows and stealing merchandise from businesses that are already on the brink of collapse.
We’re seeing the usual parade of self-promoting, grandstanding politicians, athletes and celebrities issuing pompous proclamations of their #BLM sympathies, almost all without a word of sympathy for the present plight of the cops who put their lives on the line every day to protect Americans from crime or for the small business owners and others who have lost property or worse as a result of the riots that have shaken America.
We’re seeing all this, and we’re hearing you, and we’re digesting it all.
And when November comes around, we’ll let you know exactly how we feel!
— — — — — — — — — — — -
Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Quillette, mises.org, Tablet, Times Higher Education, Areo Magazine, Public Discourse, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, Front Porch Republic, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
