The "Mostly Peaceful" Lie That Shattered a Nation

On May 25, 2020, a 46-year-old man named George Floyd died in police custody. That much is known. What is not widely admitted, at least not in polite society, is that Floyd’s death was not a case of state-sponsored execution, but a tragic overdose amid an arrest. He died with a fatal dose of fentanyl in his system, an enlarged heart, and methamphetamines in his blood. But no matter. For a certain ideological contingent, Floyd was not a man, he was a symbol. And symbols, unlike men, cannot die. They can only be weaponized.

Floyd’s death, stripped of medical nuance, was rapidly presented to the American people as confirmation of an old and durable slander: that police routinely and wantonly kill black men. The media gave it a narrative, the activists gave it a mission, and the mob gave it fire. The result was the most destructive period of civil unrest in modern US history.

Let us first deal with the fact. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, stated that the levels of fentanyl in Floyd’s system were potentially fatal on their own. Had Floyd been found dead at home with those levels, Baker testified, he would have ruled it an overdose. Even the Armed Forces Medical Examiner, who ultimately attributed Floyd’s death to a combination of restraint, heart disease, and drug intoxication, did not point to asphyxiation alone as the cause. Dr. David Fowler, former Maryland chief medical examiner, stated under oath that Floyd died of a sudden cardiac arrhythmia, compounded by fentanyl and meth. The kneeling officer, Derek Chauvin, became the canvas on which progressive America painted its moral furies, but the medical record is stubborn and inconvenient.

The facts about policing also fail to support the narrative. Each year, police in the US fatally shoot around 1,000 people. Roughly a quarter are black. The vast majority of those individuals are armed or pose an immediate threat. FBI statistics, not activist group tallies, confirm this. In stark contrast to the narrative of unprovoked police aggression, approximately 60,000 officers are assaulted each year, and between 50 and 70 are shot and killed in the line of duty annually, according to FBI and National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund data. The real disparate impact is not in fatal police shootings, but in the death toll of fentanyl overdoses. Over 50,000 Americans die each year from fentanyl, and black Americans are nearly twice as likely as whites to be among the dead. The popular refrain that police "hunt black men" is unsupported by any credible empirical analysis. But when ideology hardens into dogma, data becomes irrelevant.

From that overdose, a mythology was born. The martyrdom of George Floyd ignited a revolutionary frenzy. Over the course of a long, hot summer, more than 8,700 demonstrations took place across the country. Of these, 574 devolved into riots, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association. The riots injured over 2,000 law enforcement officers and caused billions in damages with at least $2 billion in insured property damage, the highest in American history.

Twenty-five Americans were killed in protest-linked violence. Cities burned. Police stations were attacked and abandoned. Federal courthouses were firebombed. Armed mobs seized territory in places like Seattle and declared them "autonomous zones." One might have expected such events to be condemned with vigor. Instead, they were rationalized. The press declared them “mostly peaceful.”

The media, in what can only be described as a masterclass in euphemism, labeled arson as activism. CNN infamously ran a chyron reading "Fiery but Mostly Peaceful Protests" as buildings burned on screen. MSNBC insisted riots were “not generally speaking, unruly” even as flaming rubble lit the background. Orwell would blush. These weren’t just bad headlines, they were ideological opiates, designed to numb the public to the scale of what was happening.

That euphemism served a purpose. The George Floyd protests were the Left’s great leap forward. This was not civil disobedience in the tradition of Martin Luther King. It was insurrection in the tradition of Robespierre. The radicals saw their opportunity and seized it. Trained Marxists, in their own words, led the Black Lives Matter movement. Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza openly acknowledged their ideological formation. Cullors had studied under Eric Mann, a former Weather Underground member, and explicitly praised figures like Lenin and Mao as intellectual lodestars. They didn’t hide their radicalism. The media simply refused to report it.

BLM’s official platform included the abolition of police, the dissolution of prisons, and the disruption of the nuclear family. These are not reformist proposals. They are revolutionary fantasies. And yet, Fortune 500 companies sent millions to BLM’s coffers. Celebrities knelt. Politicians wept. Cities defunded their police departments. In Minneapolis, the City Council vowed to dismantle its police force entirely. And then, as crime spiked and murders soared, they quietly abandoned that promise. America’s only saving grace in this maelstrom was the greed and malfeasance of BLM’s leadership. Instead of deploying their newfound wealth toward further destabilization, key figures within the movement squandered millions of donated dollars on personal luxuries, buying homes, cars, and high-end amenities. The corruption blunted the movement’s momentum, turning what could have been a prolonged cultural revolution into a farcical grift.

No revolution is complete without prosecutorial abdication. Progressive district attorneys, many elected with the backing of George Soros’s Justice & Public Safety PAC, chose not to prosecute rioters. In Portland, over 500 protest-related arrests were made. Fewer than fifty led to charges. In New York, hundreds of looting and assault charges were dropped by Manhattan and Brooklyn DAs. In Philadelphia and Chicago, more of the same. The message was clear: the law is pliable when the politics are correct.

Contrast this leniency with the maximalist prosecutions of January 6 defendants. One riot, a national emergency. The other, a summer of progress. The discrepancy is not legal, it is ideological. The state now has a preferred mob. And when that mob burns your city, you are expected to understand, to sympathize, perhaps even to applaud.

All of this sprang from a single falsehood: that George Floyd was murdered because he was black. That lie was repeated so often it calcified into truth. But the real cause of Floyd’s death was far more banal, and far more tragic. It was a lethal cocktail of fentanyl, heart disease, stress, and poor decisions. It was the story of tens of thousands of Americans who die quietly every year, unfilmed and uncanonized.

We were told we must burn the village to save it. We were told that justice required arson, that peace required riots, that equity required the evisceration of law and order. We were told that to oppose any of this was to side with oppression.

But what we witnessed was not justice. It was a political seizure, cloaked in moral terms. The Left used George Floyd, not as a man but as a mask. Behind that mask was an ideology determined to remake America in its own revolutionary image. What began as a protest became a purge.

America remains scarred. Cities depopulated. Police departments demoralized. Racial tensions inflamed. And all for what? For a myth. For a story that was useful to the powerful but poisonous to the republic. We were promised healing. What we got was humiliation.

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