You Wanted Body Cams. Now The Footage Won’t Fit The Narrative.

Or worse, because of racism—because we live in a deeply racist country charged with the air of white supremacy. That’s the narrative that Black Lives Matter has ingrained into the American mind as an unassailable truth.

It worked, but only because no one noticed how flimsy and detached from reality their framing really was. How could they, when the conservative whistleblowers calling out the lack of rigorous evidence were dogpiled, silenced, and dismissed as running cover for racist cops? This is a deep dive into the mass hysteria that was Black Lives Matter, an opportunistic movement based on lies and manipulative framing.

The Inciting Incident: Trayvon Martin’s Death

If we trace back the roots of the Black Lives Matter movement to its origin point to try to identify the pivotal case that sparked the “racist police brutality is an epidemic,” you’d be remiss not to mention George Zimmerman’s shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. It’s crucial that we go into the weeds on this case because it sets the stage for the shameless dishonesty that became par for the course for this movement’s rhetoric.

Narratives superseded evidence, always. Quite successfully, too. Trayvon Martin was the first modern flashpoint case of the unlawful shooting of an innocent black man by a racist police officer, exemplifying racist police brutality in the United States. Only, the man who shot him wasn’t even white, nor a police officer. George Zimmerman was a Hispanic (and not even a white-passing one at that) neighborhood watch volunteer who was driving to the store when he noticed a suspicious-looking man. That man was 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Martin was wearing a hoodie and walking back from a 7-Eleven, where he had just purchased Skittles and an iced tea, through the gated community of Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford, Florida. For some context, a serious wave of crime was affecting this gated community at the time. In a 13-year period starting in January 2011, the police had been called to the complex 402 times. The community saw a wave of burglaries, thefts, and even shootings in the year before Martin’s death, causing many residents to fear for their safety.

In response to this wave of crime, the homeowners’ association authorized the establishment of a neighborhood watch, with Zimmerman taking a proactive lead role. He frequently called the police to report shady characters—according to Sanford police, 46 times since 2001—to report numerous disturbances, break-ins, and suspicious behavior. Most of these were in the 18 months leading up to the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

Zimmerman claims he was on his way to the store when he noticed a “suspicious man” who was walking around the community in the rain, looking at houses. He called the non-emergency police line to report sighting someone who looked like he was “up to no good” or “on drugs or something.” On the call, the dispatcher asked if Zimmerman was following the man, to which Zimmerman affirmed he was. The dispatcher replied, “We don’t need you to do that.” Here is where accounts diverge. What we know is that George Zimmerman ended up shooting Trayvon Martin with the gun he was licensed to carry concealed, and that he was initially not charged because he claimed he shot Martin in self-defense after Martin attacked him.

Injuries sustained by Zimmerman were consistent with a physical struggle, including a broken nose and gashes on his head. His back was wet and covered in grass, suggesting he was pinned on the ground at some point. He claimed that after calling the police line, Martin walked past his truck and then doubled back to his vehicle while giving Zimmerman an intimidating look, so Zimmerman rolled up his windows to avoid a confrontation. Then, Martin began running between houses, which is why Zimmerman got out of his vehicle to try to locate where he went to inform the police.

If we trace back the roots of the Black Lives Matter movement to its origin point to try to identify the pivotal case that sparked the “racist police brutality is an epidemic,” you’d be remiss not to mention George Zimmerman’s shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

He stopped following Martin per the dispatcher’s instructions and was heading back to his truck when Martin reappeared to confront him. Zimmerman claims Martin said something like “You got a problem?” to which Zimmerman responded, “No,” and Martin said something like “Well, you do now,” then reportedly punched Zimmerman in the face, causing him to stumble and end up on the ground. That’s when he says Martin straddled him MMA style, repeatedly punched him in the face, and slammed his head into the concrete sidewalk multiple times.

Zimmerman claimed he yelled for help during the assault, but no one came to his aid, and Martin covered his mouth with his hands. About eight people called 911 that night, and in one of the calls, you can hear a voice crying for help in the background, though the person whose voice it was was never discerned. Zimmerman alleges that as he was pinned on the ground and being beaten, he reached for his gun, and when Martin saw it, he said, “You’re going to die tonight.” Zimmerman says there was a struggle over his pistol, but ultimately, Zimmerman was able to wrestle control of it long enough to shoot Martin in the chest one time, fatally.

After holstering his weapon, he climbed back on top of Martin and spread his arms out so he wouldn’t be able to reach for the gun again, and told a bystander who caught the end of the altercation to call 911. That bystander said he witnessed Martin mounted on top of Zimmerman “MMA style,” wailing on him, and heard a cry for help, which he believed came from Zimmerman. This corroborated the story that Zimmerman would tell police. As he was calling 911, he heard a gunshot and found Martin face down in the grass. No one witnessed the actual shooting.

Zimmerman was questioned for five hours by the Sanford Police Department, where police fed him a lie that the entire confrontation was caught on surveillance footage, which provided Zimmerman with relief. He was initially released with no charges because, per Florida’s stand-your-ground laws, the police can’t arrest someone claiming self-defense without evidence that disputes it. You’re allowed to conceal carry in the state of Florida and defend yourself with fatal force if your life is in danger.

The prosecution’s star witness was a friend of Martin’s, Rachel Jeantel, who claimed to be on the phone with him just before he was shot, alleging that she overheard the lead-up to the altercation and framed Zimmerman as the aggressor. However, she was discredited as a witness after she admitted to lying about being in the hospital the day of Martin’s funeral, had inconsistencies in her story, and came across poorly under cross-examination.

In 2019, Zimmerman accused her of being an imposter witness in a $100 million lawsuit filed against Trayvon Martin’s family, their attorney Benjamin Crump, prosecutors, HarperCollins Publishers (for publishing a book he claims defamed him), and others tied to the case. The lawsuit alleged defamation, abuse of civil process, and conspiracy, but was thrown out with prejudice (so he can’t refile) in 2020.

Because most of the men Zimmerman reported to police were black males, the prosecution argued that Zimmerman was racially profiling black men and looking for altercations by following Martin and making a comment about how “these assholes always get away.” The defense countered that Zimmerman wasn’t referring to black men when he said “these assholes,” but to the criminals plaguing their community with crime; that Zimmerman didn’t follow Martin—rather, it was Martin who cornered him, attacked him, and forced him to use his Second Amendment right to defend himself. On July 13, 2013, after 16 hours of deliberation by a jury of five white women and one mixed-race Hispanic juror, Zimmerman was found not guilty of both second-degree murder and a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter.

Regarding Zimmerman’s reporting of black men, you can see from the released call logs that Zimmerman made, including the one reporting Martin, that he never brought up the suspect’s race unless he was explicitly asked by the police, at which point he would provide a description. That’s not racial profiling. That’s a reversal of causation. The demographic of people committing crimes in the area, like burglaries, was disproportionately black males, so when Zimmerman went to report them, they skewed black male because that’s who was doing the crime. One neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous, told reporters, “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I’m Black, okay? These were Black boys robbing houses in the neighborhood,” she said, adding, “That’s why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin.” A fitting analogy for the larger context of the United States.

Weaponizing Sensational Videos & Narratives

By all accounts, it is a very reasonable assumption that Zimmerman was only ever charged with second-degree murder because of the public pressure placed on law enforcement by the media and the broader public in the form of mob justice. The narratives they manipulated to convince the entire country that Zimmerman was an avatar of white supremacy who premeditated the murder of Trayvon Martin are shameless and have poisoned the well of good-faith discourse on this issue ever since.

National civil rights leaders, including Al Sharpton, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and the president of the NAACP, traveled to Sanford, Florida, in March of 2012, demanding Zimmerman’s arrest, protesting among thousands of other protesters. They, alongside national media attention, rhetoric from President Obama stoking the racial flames of the case, a petition signed by over a million people, and protests that erupted around the country, led to the formal arrest of George Zimmerman on April 11, 2012, 44 days after the shooting.

Police charged him with second-degree murder, claiming they had enough probable cause to argue he profiled, pursued, and killed Martin without lawful justification. My goal here is not to convince you that Zimmerman is innocent, nor is it my goal to convince you that Martin’s death isn’t a terrible tragedy. What I am here to argue is the incredible murkiness of this case. No one witnessed firsthand, with unassailable proof, who initiated the confrontation, who escalated it, and whether reasonable force was exerted as a means of self-defense. We don’t know that Zimmerman continued to follow Martin after he was told not to. We don’t know if Martin was beating him within an inch of his life when he fired that fatal shot.

But that is not the business of the law when it comes to a legal defense. All we need to establish is that there is reasonable doubt; indeed, significant reasonable doubt that Zimmerman is guilty of being the racist vigilante the prosecution accused him of. In fact, Zimmerman’s version of events is not just plausible, but overwhelmingly supported by evidence, eyewitness testimony, and the broader context of the neighborhood’s history, as well as Zimmerman’s character.

He had spoken out against the Sanford Police Department two years earlier, after the son of a police lieutenant was videotaped assaulting a black homeless man. Zimmerman made outspoken comments on a community forum demanding accountability for the officer’s actions. “I would just like to state that the law is written in black and white; it should not and cannot be enforced in the gray for those who are in the thin blue line,” Zimmerman said to Sanford city commissioners. He demanded that the commission repeal the officer’s pension due to his “illegal cover-up in corruption in what happened in his department.”

The FBI conducted interviews with dozens of friends, neighbors, and coworkers and could not establish that he was known as a racist. He also reportedly mentored two African American teens from a disadvantaged community. Most glaringly, Zimmerman himself is of mixed race and grew up in a family with African ancestry; his maternal great-grandfather, father of the grandmother who raised him, is of Afro-Peruvian descent.

The Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation in 2012 to determine if the shooting was racially motivated and if Martin’s civil rights were violated. The case was closed in 2015 and announced no federal charges would be filed due to insufficient evidence that Zimmerman’s actions emerged out of racial bias, and found no pattern of racist behavior in his background that could prove that intent.

The disingenuous racialization of any spat between police and black citizens, no matter the context or the justification for neutralizing a threat, only serves to radicalize this cohort of American society further.

As left-wing media outlets painted Zimmerman as a “white” wannabe cop taking the law into his own hands and racially profiling black males while Martin was an unarmed, harmless teenager just walking around with Skittles and iced tea, conservative pundits questioned the whitewashing of Martin’s character, highlighting his history of disciplinary issues and photos of him posing with a grill and throwing up what they characterized as “gang signs” to paint Martin as a thug whose character was of a seedier nature than the media would like the public to think, granting plausibility to the narrative that he attacked Zimmerman unprovoked.

The characterization of Martin as a “thug” ultimately proved irrelevant to the case and was never shown to the jury, so it played no role in their decision, but the public discourse and racialization of the case turned it into a hot-button culture war issue that has politically polarized Americans and set race relations back because the Black Lives Matter movement is prefaced on a lie that they refuse to concede.

Everything is downstream of this lie, merely repeated like Groundhog Day year after year. The disingenuous racialization of any spat between police and black citizens, no matter the context or the justification for neutralizing a threat, only serves to radicalize this cohort of American society further. They have decided that it is true, and there is literally nothing you can show them to establish the contrary that they would accept. It is an unfalsifiable belief.

They assert that black Americans, and black men in particular, are disproportionately profiled and attacked by police. They are more likely to be stopped by police, searched without cause, subject to non-lethal force, arrested, charged, and convicted, and they overrepresent the American prison population. This is true, but a deceiving framing. While black Americans make up just 14.4% of the population, they make up 38.3% of the prison population. Why is that?

Black Lives Matter loves to highlight racial disparities in policing and homicide victimization, but they rarely mention disparities in the propensity to offend, especially when it comes to violent crime or who’s actually responsible for the homicides that claim so many black victims. If you show them incontrovertible evidence that young black men are disproportionately responsible for the majority of violent crimes per capita, they just attribute this disparity to “spatially concentrated urban poverty” born of “segregation, discrimination, and divestment,” which is presumptuous, to say the least.

Sure, black Americans have accounted for roughly 51% of robberies and 45% of homicides over the past decade, and most violent crime is intraracial (meaning black victims are overwhelmingly being targeted by black offenders), but we’re told this, too, somehow traces back to racism, despite the fact that black Americans murder whites at a rate several times higher than white Americans kill blacks. In 2023, the homicide rate for black persons was more than six times the rate for white persons.

It makes sense that black Americans account for a majority of arrests, charges, and convictions if they commit a disproportionate amount of crime, as the stats bear out. Likewise, it’s completely unsurprising—no, even expected—that communities plagued by crime have increased police presence and, as a consequence, increased police interactions, including police stops, searches, and arrests. It is ludicrous to expect otherwise. Let’s take this demographic data and apply it to something leftists are more inclined to accept: the disparity between men and women regarding the prison population and propensity to commit violent crime.

Ninety-three point four percent of the entire United States prison population is male, yet we hardly hear that this is a result of discrimination—that they’re unfairly, disproportionately stopped, searched, arrested, and convicted. That’s because it’s clear that men commit violent crimes at an exceedingly high rate compared to women, accounting for 90% of all homicides worldwide. Within the U.S., the male homicide rate is ten times that of the female homicide rate. I don’t see a lot of activists campaigning against systemic discrimination and unfair weaponization of the police, legal system, and courts against men.

More white people are killed by police every year than any other race. While black people are disproportionately killed by police per capita, this can be explained by their higher run-ins with police due to high-crime neighborhoods. Most police killings happen during armed or violent encounters, not unprovoked shootings. In an American cultural context, every interaction the police have with the citizenry is a potentially lethal one because any suspect has the potential to be armed. This raises the stakes of resisting arrest to one of life or death.

History Doomed to Repeat Itself

Despite Zimmerman being found not guilty, and despite the glaring lack of evidence of a racial motive in this case, there was widespread outrage and civil unrest in the wake of his acquittal, and Black Lives Matter cites this acquittal as the birthing moment of the movement. The day of the Zimmerman acquittal, activist Alicia Garza posted a love letter to black people, stating, “Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. Black Lives Matter.” Friend and fellow activist Patrisse Cullors added the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Writer and immigrant rights activist Opal Tometi reached out and began coordinating a communications campaign, transforming a viral hashtag into a modern civil rights movement.

#BlackLivesMatter circulated on social media whenever a black American’s death was framed as racially motivated. At first, it stayed within activist circles, but each new politicized case compounded attention, feeding into what was dubbed an epidemic of racially motivated police violence. Pew Research reported the hashtag had been used over 44 million times as of June 2023. The first big breakout was with the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson in August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. With the momentum of the Trayvon outrage still simmering, this case helped push BLM into national visibility. But it was propagated by another shameless lie.

The race-baiting left told the story of a “gentle giant” who “had never even been in a fight,” who was callously executed in the middle of the street for no reason. He was an innocent, unarmed 18-year-old about to go off to college, but a racist white police officer took his life from him because of racial prejudice. Officer Darren Wilson supposedly pulled over Michael Brown for walking in the middle of the street. Per the leftist narrative, Wilson pulled Brown (6'5", 290 lbs.) into his SUV through the driver’s window, but Brown broke free and ran away. As Brown was running away with his back to the officer, he then turned around, raised his hands in the air in surrender while shouting, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Wilson then, unprovoked and without any danger to his life, shot Brown in cold blood.

How could anyone defend that? Thankfully, we don’t have to, because it’s all lies. Firstly, the caricature of Brown as a pure, nonviolent saint was a fabrication. Here’s what actually happened. Officer Wilson saw Michael Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson blocking traffic and told them to move to the sidewalk. Wilson then took notice that Brown matched the description of a suspect in a robbery that had just gone down at a nearby liquor store. Surveillance footage and eyewitness testimony confirmed that Brown stole a box of cigarillos and shoved a store clerk who tried to confront him.

Officer Wilson, contrary to BLM’s narrative that he was harassing Brown for being black, had probable cause to stop Brown for blocking traffic and matching the description of a robbery suspect. Wilson claims he backed up and stopped his SUV to block them, and Brown came to his driver’s side window, where a physical struggle began. He alleges Brown punched him in the face through the window and reached into the vehicle, attempting to grab Wilson’s gun. Wilson then drew his weapon to defend himself, and a shot went off inside the car, grazing Brown’s hand (confirmed by forensics that Brown’s DNA was inside the car and on the gun). Brown and Johnson then fled, and Wilson chased them on foot.

At some point, Brown turned back to face Wilson, at which point Wilson claims he began advancing toward him despite his orders to stop, and then reached into his waistband, leading him to believe he was armed. Wilson fired multiple shots as Brown charged toward him, which struck his arms and torso. Brown, large in stature, allegedly kept moving forward and grunting, seeming unfazed by the gunfire, and as he leaned into a charging posture, Wilson fired the final volley of shots. There was a lot of outrage over the number of shots fired—twelve in total—characterized as egregiously excessive. However, only six shots actually hit Brown, and it was only the final bullet that hit Brown in the head that was fatal.

Gunshot residue and blood in the car corroborated Wilson’s claim that Brown reached into his vehicle and struggled with him over his weapon, and a bullet wound to Brown’s hand was consistent with a close-range shot inside the SUV. Despite the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie becoming a rallying cry still repeated to this day, it was proven to be a complete fabrication, both by autopsies (which confirmed Brown was shot from the front, not the back, as many claimed he was shot “while fleeing”) and by eyewitness accounts.

Despite the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie becoming a rallying cry still repeated to this day, it was proven to be a complete fabrication, both by autopsies and by eyewitness accounts.

Some witnesses who repeated the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie recanted their statements, and others were contradicted by more reliable witnesses. The Department of Justice, under Eric Holder, launched an investigation into the shooting and found that the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative was unsupported by evidence and that Wilson reasonably feared for his safety; therefore, he did not violate federal civil rights law and brought no federal charges against him.

Wilson was placed on administrative leave, and Ferguson erupted into a hellscape of violent protests, riots, looting, arson, and vandalism. The National Guard had to be called in to establish law and order, but the images of their use of tear gas, rubber bullets, and armored vehicles spread like wildfire, and journalists seized on the opportunity to paint the police as a militarized occupying force, to whom the arsonists and looters were resisting as brave freedom fighters on the front lines of a pseudo race war.

Wilson was cleared of all wrongdoing by the law and the DOJ, but activists, incited by the media and activists’ lies, refused to accept that. Brown’s family’s attorney, Benjamin Crump, who also represented the Trayvon Martin family, even boasted that the Brown family and supporters will not be persuaded by the autopsy report or witness statements that back Mr. Wilson’s account of the incident. “The family has not believed anything the police or this medical examiner has said,” Crump declared. “They have their witnesses. We have seven witnesses that we know about that say the opposite.” These are the bad-faith actors poisoning national discourse over policing.

Wilson was forced to resign from the Ferguson Police Department and go into hiding due to safety concerns. Following Brown’s death, countless black-owned community businesses were looted and torched, windows smashed in, the shelves ransacked, vehicles set ablaze—amounting to tens of millions of dollars in damages—wiping out livelihoods in an already economically struggling community. Ferguson never recovered. What happened next was dubbed the Ferguson effect. Black Lives Matter and protesters wanted to make it impossible for the police to do their jobs? They got their wish.

Police retreated from proactively policing the community following allegations of racism and excessive force. The result? Violent crime skyrocketed. Dorian Johnson, the friend who was with Brown the night he got shot, who originated the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie that swept the nation and destroyed the Ferguson community by inciting violent riots, was shot and killed a few weeks ago in what the police report was a “domestic incident involving a claim of self-defense” (not an officer-involved shooting). Maybe if the police were able to actually do their jobs, this wouldn’t have happened. But it sets the scene for what kind of community this was, where random violent crime proliferates and yet the police are expected to handle these interactions that can reasonably end in the loss of their lives with kid gloves.

I could sit here all day and list case after case of BLM’s false martyrs—people who resisted arrest, posed a lethal threat to police, were violent criminals, were victims of accidents entirely unrelated to race, or who were “victimized” by officers of color in these highly publicized, highly racialized witch hunts. Breonna Taylor was tragically killed by police because they had a valid no-knock search warrant after establishing probable cause in suspecting her ex-boyfriend was using her apartment for illegal activities. The New York Times reported the warrant’s orders were changed before the raid to “knock and announce.”

Police have maintained they announced their arrival and identified themselves before breaching Taylor’s apartment, though this remains heavily disputed. Her boyfriend at the time, Kenneth Walker, thought it was a break-in and fired a shot at a police officer. Police fired back, hitting Taylor in the line of fire, in an unfortunate tragedy and, arguably, an incompatibility of legal frameworks like no-knock warrants with stand-your-ground laws. To frame cases like these as racially motivated, however, is disingenuous.

Then there was Eric Garner, who was arrested for selling untaxed cigarettes, called “loosies,” and resisted arrest—mostly verbally and with some sporadic arm movements but not violently—which led to police aggressively placing the 400 lb. man, with preexisting conditions like asthma, heart disease, and morbid obesity, in the prone position, where he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. While restrained, he suffered a fatal asthma attack and cardiac arrest, and it was ruled a homicide with contributing factors (preexisting health conditions). The Department of Justice declined to charge the officer who restrained Garner with civil rights violations after a five-year investigation because they couldn’t establish willful intent to cause harm, though the officer was fired from the NYPD for using an unauthorized restraint.

Since 1993, the NYPD has banned chokeholds that apply pressure to the throat or windpipe in a way that restricts breathing. While the officer maintained that he used a “seatbelt takedown,” which is a standard grappling move that controls the upper body without targeting the neck, the findings from the medical examiner suggested Garner’s death involved neck compression. A debate ensued among use-of-force experts who disagreed over whether the takedown qualified as a chokehold.

Ultimately, the NYPD administrative judge ruled the maneuver violated department policy and terminated him. Garner’s death, too, then, is more accurately described as a freak accident arising from the unfortunate legal enforcement of a crackdown on low-level offenses than racism. It was Democratic mayor Bill de Blasio who ordered police to crack down on low-level offenses in a practice called “broken windows” policing in the first place, then later downplayed Garner’s offense as trivial and framed the incident as the inevitable result of “centuries of racism.”

Floyd Summer

“I can’t breathe” would really hit its stride six years later, when a similar case occurred in Minneapolis, Minnesota. George Floyd, a 46-year-old drug addict with a lengthy criminal record, including an armed home invasion against a pregnant woman, was arrested after attempting to pay for cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. The store clerk called the police, and Floyd was placed under arrest. The full body-cam footage is, thankfully, publicly available online.

As soon as the officer approaches Floyd in his car, he begins acting erratically. He’s visibly shaken, uncontrollably crying, and pleading with the officer to please not shoot him; that he “got shot the same way before,” referencing a previous incident where officers drew their guns after he failed to comply with an arrest in 2019. It’s a sad sight. He’s clearly distraught, scared, and making empathetic appeals—“I just lost my mom.” It has all the makings of a sympathetic, innocent man being unfairly treated by the police.

Only, Floyd did commit a crime for which he was rightly arrested, and he was resisting. It’s clear that Floyd’s belief that white cops are going to unfairly persecute and bring him harm is a direct result of the BLM rhetoric that has effectively brainwashed the black community. It’s, unfortunately, a significant factor in why he isn’t alive today. Floyd resisted arrest pretty much the whole way through, both physically and verbally, which is why the police called for backup, and Officer Derek Chauvin was one of the officers who showed up as reinforcement.

Floyd claimed he was too claustrophobic to get into the police squad car despite initially sitting in his own car. He also claimed he couldn’t breathe and voiced concerns about having a heart attack (as did his friend) before Officer Chauvin ever pinned him to the ground in the prone position, after Floyd threw himself on the ground, refusing to be put in the police car. A use-of-force witness testified that Chauvin’s actions were justified and in line with official policies.

The cocktail of drugs in Floyd’s system, including fentanyl and methamphetamine, evidently made him physically very strong and erratic. Officers couldn’t restrain him, and Chauvin placed his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes until he lost consciousness and, ultimately, his life. Throughout the nine minutes, he can be heard crying and pleading that he can’t breathe, though these claims predated his neck being knelt on. Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. He’s currently serving concurrent federal and state sentences, amounting to 22½ years’ imprisonment.

It’s clear Chauvin didn’t wake up that day wanting to kill anyone. He seems to have been trying his best to gain control of a large, strong, drug-intoxicated suspect who refused to comply with arrest and kept throwing himself all over the place. Multiple officers couldn’t get control of him. So, Chauvin pinned him to the ground using a knee restraint, which the Minneapolis Police Department is taught to use to control suspects for brief periods until they’re cuffed or compliant. The problem is, Chauvin used the restraint for too long and, as some testified, without good reason, and it cost Floyd his life. At least that’s the official narrative we’ve been given.

Destroying black communities as a way to own racists has long been the activism of choice for Black Lives Matter, but this time, because everyone was stuck at home and needed a uniting narrative, mass psychosis took the world by storm.

Judge Peter Cahill determined Chauvin acted with particular cruelty and showed abuse of a position of authority by pinning Floyd the way he did for so long and ignoring obvious signs of medical distress. The toxicology report raised some serious questions, revealing Floyd had fentanyl, methamphetamine, and THC in his system at the time of arrest, and suffered from severe heart disease. The medical examiner testified about his ruling on the cause of death.

Dr. Andrew Baker said, “Had Mr. Floyd been home alone in his locked residence with no evidence of trauma and the only autopsy finding was that fentanyl level, then yes, I would certify his death as due to fentanyl toxicity.” However, he listed those as “other significant conditions” because they were contributing but not direct causes. He further explained, “In my opinion, the law enforcement subdual restraint and neck compression was just more than Mr. Floyd could take, by virtue of those heart conditions.” When asked if the prone position on concrete is inherently dangerous, another medical expert testified, “With no other factors, as long as someone can breathe, no.”

Given Floyd’s claims that he couldn’t breathe before he was even seriously restrained, and both his and his friend’s verbal worry that he would have a heart attack, this raises some serious suspicions about the ultimate cause of death, which was ruled a homicide from cardiopulmonary arrest due to neck compression. But Chauvin, overnight, became the poster boy for institutional racism, was sent to prison for 22 years, and even faced an attack from inmates, where he was shanked 22 times. Despite the entire ordeal unfolding exactly as I’ve described it, the full-length, unedited body-cam footage was withheld from the public for two whole months—enough time for mass hysteria to consolidate around the BLM narrative distortions, for cities to burn, and for riots and looters to destroy businesses in mass “protests,” all during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we were being told that we couldn’t congregate in large crowds.

Saint Floyd, as some conservative commentators have sarcastically referred to him, was whitewashed and upheld as a pillar of the community, a martyr, and a hero of our modern times. The summer of 2020 was Ferguson 2.0 on steroids; only something was different this time. Destroying black communities as a way to own racists has long been the activism of choice for Black Lives Matter, but this time, because everyone was stuck at home and needed a uniting narrative, mass psychosis took the world by storm.

We were inundated with performative black squares on Instagram, kneeling during sporting events, misguided narratives from celebrities about race in America, but, most damagingly, the most visceral anti-police sentiment we’ve seen in modern history—and a huge push for illogical and harmful public policies. Suddenly, a movement to defund the police gained serious traction, instead proposing vague “community policing” alternatives.

In an attempt to eradicate “systemic racism in incarceration,” BLM advocates pushed for eliminating cash bail, arguing that poor and minority defendants were disproportionately jailed because they couldn’t afford bail. This policy resulted in a revolving door of repeat offenders back on the streets immediately, especially in New York and California. Property crime, assaults, and carjackings soared, and it directly led to repeat criminals like Decarlos Brown Jr., the man who killed Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, being on the streets and killing innocent people. Ironically, though, one of their most emphasized policy positions that Black Lives Matter has passionately advocated for over the years, with the implication that it would end police brutality and hold racist cops accountable, has been their greatest undoing: police body cams.

From the full footage of their sacred cow case, Saint Floyd, completely unraveling their rewritten narrative, to more recent incidents so absurd they’ve become memes, police body cams have done more to vindicate law enforcement and expose BLM’s lies than any Thin Blue Line activist ever could. Two recent cases exemplify the movement’s downfall in the age of body cams. The first involves “community leader” Deshawn Leeth, who was shot and killed after attacking an officer, stealing his squad car, and leading police on a high-speed chase. As Matt Walsh noted, the officer would’ve been justified in shooting Leeth at least a dozen times when he charged him like a demon, when he beat the officer senseless, or when he hijacked the cruiser and endangered everyone on the road.

Ironically, one of their most emphasized policy positions that Black Lives Matter has passionately advocated for over the years, with the implication that it would end police brutality and hold racist cops accountable, has been their greatest undoing: police body cams.

Yet at every step, the officer withheld lethal force, opting instead for a taser, then hand-to-hand combat, risking his own life in the process. Why? Because he knew what would happen if he pulled the trigger: a black suspect plus a white cop equals instant career and life destruction, no matter the context. The second case came last year, when Georgetown women’s basketball player Sydney Wilson was shot and killed after attacking an officer with a knife and charging after him with it. Though the officer showed incredible restraint and continued to warn her to cease her charges, she kept coming after him with the knife, and he had no choice but to shoot.

The shooting stopped what was seconds away from being a cop’s murder. Initially, people attempted to pull the same old perfect martyr gimmick with these “victims,” but the body-cam footage was so damning that they couldn’t get away with it once it was made public. This reality, coupled with BLM’s leaders being outed for financial mismanagement of funds that amounted to millions of dollars in donations unaccounted for, and up to $2 billion of property damage left in the wake of Floyd Summer, means we can finally pronounce Black Lives Matter’s great scam as officially dead in the water.