Cruising the internet today, you’re going to see a lot of stuff on George Floyd as a year passes since his death during that fateful interaction with the Minneapolis Police Department. One such article was written by Teresa Wiltz at Politico where she asks how a movement is measured and when does change equal progress?
After all that has transpired since that day the video released of Floyd dying under Derek Chauvin’s leg, do I think we’ve seen progress?
No. In fact, we’ve had nothing but regression.
In order to see this, we first must strip away the window dressing we’ve put around George Floyd and Black Lives Matter.
George Floyd was a ready-made martyr for a political cause that needed a spark to ignite the already-prepared explosives that would kick off another front in the war to get Donald Trump out of the White House. Anyone who used Floyd’s name was doing so as an excuse to do whatever heinous thing they desired to their fellow human beings. It was effectively a moral pass, especially when you paired it with the word “justice.”
Want to burn down an innocent local businessperson’s store? It was justice for George Floyd.
Want to loot a Nike store and get yourself a pair of free $500 shoes? It’s justice for George Floyd.
Want to target a specific group of people for violence, regardless of their guilt? It’s justice for George Floyd.
Repeat that phrase and politicians will kneel, media figures will clap along, and half-informed social media denizens will mob anyone who disagrees with you.
But did they care about George Floyd?
Not really. Black lives didn’t really matter to Black Lives Matter as was demonstrated time and again. It was even exposed by actor Terry Crews at one point, an event the left never forgave him for.
Floyd was to the left as Horst Wessel was to the Nazis. A martyr to push political angles, excuse every wrongdoing, and target a system they deemed as oppressive and to blame for every bad thing happening in the country. Under the banner of “justice for George Floyd,” the hard-left pushed radicalism to new heights in America and attempted to push communism into the American system, if not by the idea, then by force.
Black Lives Matter brought about destruction, death, and ruin wherever it went yet the media romanticizes it and Floyd at every turn. The truth is that Floyd wasn’t a good person. His rap sheet was rather long. At one point, he held a pregnant woman at gunpoint so he and his friends could rob her. During the fateful interaction with the police, Floyd had enough drugs in his system to kill a horse.
It’s horrible that anyone should die before their time, but if we’re going to sit here and pretend that Floyd’s own actions didn’t bring him to that moment, we’re fooling ourselves. If we’re actually going to sit here and say that the cops just felt like abusing and killing Floyd for no other reason than the fact that he was black, then you’re buying into a mass delusion.
It’s a delusion that Politico’s Wiltz bought into. She compares Floyd’s death to Rosa Parks not giving up her seat on the bus and Emmit Till’s murder, in that they all kicked off movements. She’s not wrong in that it led to movements, but she’s dead wrong in how important those movements were to America. The events surrounding Till and Parks led to changes in America for the better, especially when it came to civil rights. Floyd’s death triggered a ready-made Black Lives Matter moment during an election year, which ended up taking more black lives, destroying black neighborhoods, and ruining black-owned businesses.
Also, Till and Parks were innocent of any wrongdoing. Floyd wasn’t.
Like Wiltz, a lot of people reflect on all the events that resulted from Floyd’s death and are trying to trace how far we’ve come and what advancements we’ve made a society. Did the “change” equal progress?
Allow me to cure you of the delusion that we’ve progressed anywhere.
We now have open calls for resegregation from the radical left that aren’t being challenged by politicians or the media. Even political figures are openly saying they’ll only do interviews with black journalists and anyone calling this out for the racism that it is is being ignored.
Black Lives Matter calling for the defunding of police caused several major cities to reallocate funds away from police and toward other programs, resulting in surging crime rates in these cities. The majority of the victims during crime surges are black. In Minneapolis, where Floyd died, community leaders are encouraging everyday residents to get out and take back their streets from the gangs that have taken it over in the absence of police.
The relationship between the black community and the law enforcement community is as tenuous as ever, black unemployment is rising three times faster than white unemployment, and lawmakers are creating laws in states so that riots can’t tear their cities apart again.
They say George Floyd changed the world, but whose world?
The only two groups seeming to profit from Floyd’s death are Black Lives Matter leaders now purchasing fancy homes in white neighborhoods and the Democrat Party who managed to get Trump out and institute policies that hurt black people.
If you want real change then it starts with rejecting identity movements and embracing the simple idea that we’re all human and should be treated as such. It starts with the acceptance that being born a certain way doesn’t entitle you to anything be it money or respect. It starts by refusing to accept the mantle of “victim” by people in a position to profit off of your victimhood as it’s in their best interest to keep you in that state. It starts by ceasing to make saints out of people who don’t deserve that level of reverence and refusing to believe narratives that paint innocent people as evil based on shallow identifiers.
It starts with an embrace of reality, no matter how painful that might be. Once we all start doing that, then we’ll see change.
