This All Sounds Pretty Familiar
The sun is up on another normal day in, pardon the flippancy, Midwesternville, America. Broad strokes here, folks. People are are going about their business, unaware that in the coming fifteen minutes, events are to unfold that will plunge the whole country into an enormous humiliation ritual. As it so happens, this is an election year, so the timing couldn’t be better.
A black man was involved in some suspicious activity at a nearby convenience store. The owner called the cops. They arrived. The resulting altercation resulted in the black man dead and the cop a national icon. Protests ensued. The protests, within the day, turned to senseless, undirected violence which, although the news was fain to admit it, were more obviously a cover for looting, theft, and general criminal activity than they were for expressing concerns over police brutality and so-called systemic racism in the force.
Long after the town is plundered and razed by marauding gangs of directionless minority thugs, the policeman is put on trial. By now, the whole nation—with some exception among card-carrying republicans—consider this man a murderer. The press considered him guilty the moment his name was released. The riots and protests coined a new phrase for the radically-Marxist BLM to chant while they blocked major highways, disrupted commerce, and vilified white people. Antifa had made their scheduled appearances. States of emergencies had been called. Curfews enacted. This cop moved his family several states away for their safety.
At the end of it all, he walked. It was a grand jury trial to determine whether indictment was worth criminal proceedings or not. Evidence was presented that showed, beyond reasonable doubt, that most everything the more popular witnesses had claimed about the shooting was false, that the press had contorted the narrative in order to heighten racial animus in the nation, and that the entire narrative behind the sloganeering of the riot-activists was actually the product of fiction. The coroner’s report was particularly decisive in the matter.
Predictably, the town burned again. This cop, a man so obviously guilty that the nation’s own attorney general had to weigh in on the case, who was himself a member of the afflicted minority class that was expressing it grievances with smashed windows and burnt-out car husks, walked out of the narrative free of charge. Clearly, the entire system was racist, if the guilt that the press assured us of could not be found in the facts. Clearly, the problem is that white people, and particularly cops, are so evil that the evidence itself would conspire to corroborate their likely stories.
I, like you, am old enough to remember the Mike Brown saga from 2014. I, like you, was thinking, “hey, this looks pretty familiar,” when the violence pursuing George Floyd’s death resulted in weeks and months of widespread carnage across America. And I, like you, am not following the Chauvin trail in any great detail.
For the most part, I don’t have to; what results from the trial is of importance, really, only to Chauvin and his immediate family and friends. He’ll be the one that has to live with being either behind bars in an extremely hostile environment or otherwise recognized on the street as the racist pig that didn’t get what the press alleges he deserves. For the rest of us, life will go on.
The body camera footage that was leaked last year, in addition to the coroner’s report, would be enough for a normal justice system to find him not guilty of the convictions that the prosecution is seeking. But then, a normal justice system would not be exerting the efforts of twelve prosecutors to seek a conviction over the death of a drug addict with a well-established criminal history, either.
George Floyd was no Mike Brown, his death was not a shooting, and his backstory was not that of a high schooler. Likewise, Chauvin’s trial is already a criminal trial, rather than a grand jury trial, and the state has a greater interest in putting him away than Missouri did even for Darren Wilson.
None of this, however, is the point. Again, consider Ferguson. The narrative is entrenched: Darren Wilson shot Mike Brown in the street. The rest of it doesn’t even matter anymore. If you bought the narrative, you don’t really care about the evidence presented at his trial; the failure to convict Wilson was the most obvious indication of the entire system’s complicity in white supremacy. If you didn’t buy the narrative, the failure to convict is supposed to come across as a reassuring breath of fresh air: see?—the courts aren’t compromised, the system still works, everything’s fine; justice has been served.
The narrative, coupled with the reality, ensure that the conflict is not resolved. Race-baiters in the media are not held accountable for spreading their disinformation, lies, and slander, for heightening tensions, and for legitimizing the questionable activity of bad actors. Conservative pundits, meanwhile, get to rest on their laurels and proclaim that the system still works. Right-wing political junkies galvanized by Obama-era race rhetoric are placated, left-wing racialist mobs are supplied another narrative; both are fed what they need to maintain the simmering tensions of a country in a state of informational civil war.
With this in mind, we can make some assertions about the Chauvin trial. Foremost of these to remember is, of course, that left has already gotten what it wanted. Chauvin is on trial. The narrative is entrenched. “I can’t breathe,” is a national slogan with more brand recognition now than it had even a year ago. This isn’t some grand jury hearing, the BLM riots of 2014 were not nearly as extensive and damaging as those of 2020, and the state of racial animus in the country has not gotten any better in the last seven years. The violence in Ferguson was a point along a curve that effectively began with Trayvon and has progressed to Minneapolis, and the only thing we can tell with certainty is that the curve hasn’t stopped plotting. Call it intensification, destabilization, or whatever other buzzword you want. That things have gotten worse and the stakes higher isn’t really up for debate.
So we can admit that the Chauvin saga is effectively over already. On one hand, following the pattern of almost all other BLM-backed racialist martyr-trials of the last decade, we can assume Chauvin is going to walk. After all, we can’t remain ignorant of the fact that the press—the PR department of the Regime—continually picks to be national subjects only those cases that are almost wholly indefensible. And this, despite the fact that police brutality, their somewhat habitual abuse of authority, and their insufferable sense of self-importance amid the crumbling domestic order remain so obvious in the public eye as to be self-evident. There are cases that the media could pick that very easily support the anti-cop narrative they want to push. One can only assume that they choose not to. Stating the opposite of what is observable, using the power structures of the social order to build a false consensus, and then openly pressuring for systemic change on false pretenses—one can only assume this is an open attempt to spit in the face of anyone who states that the emperor has no clothes. Conservative pundits tend to like the analogy, but they never want to admit that the emperor’s nudity is a flex, a taunt, rather than a mark of simple stupidity.
On the other hand, the Regime has been emboldened like never before. 2020 was an unprecedented year. The fruits of the COVID hysteria, the riots, the election, and the media’s role in all of it have resulted in a brazenly naked emperor: they managed to get a man very obviously suffering from mental degeneration into the White House, not only that, they subsequently packed his staff with people comically out of their respective elements. That there are twelve prosecutors working on the Chauvin trial and that the witness selection was such a crapshoot indicate that they’re really going for broke. They’re out for blood. And, if the opening statements are any indication, Chauvin’s defense might not be up for the job. Minnesota isn’t exactly a conservative stronghold at the state level, which contributes to the panicked air of seeking hard time, but there are also more pragmatic reasons for such a strong showing by the state.
Fearing mob violence after an acquittal, however, is the surest sign that they’ve lost control. Justice can’t be served by a court that fears mob retaliation, even if an appropriate end is achieved. The violence is going to come anyway, from the same people, and for the same reason. Chauvin walking or not has nothing to do with it. That train left the station the moment he was arraigned. The coverage of the riots ensured that.
This is all to say that the coverage of the Chauvin trial is the spectacle. It’s the coda to the humiliation ritual that played out last summer, a reminder of who is in power, what to fear, and an anticipation of what to expect for the future. This is what the Regime wants you to see: a race-infused conflict inseparable from the media narratives that surround it. They don’t want you to see Derek Chauvin, they want you to see the effigy of white supremacy that they’ve invented. Personalism and personality are the counter-tactics they fear; such tactics turn attempts at mass humiliation and psychological abuse on their head. Whether or not your know your neighbors, whether you can engage with people beyond mere shallow political talking points—this should become the right’s version of “go outside.”
We can say this at least about 2020: if no other good came out of the COVID hysteria, the cognitive dissonance experienced by Thin Blue Line supporters seems to have come to a head. The cops they thought defended them showed up to arrest their favorite bar owners, shut down their gyms, cart off their wives and mothers in handcuffs for taking their kids to playgrounds, and otherwise treated peaceful citizens like thugs, all over legally dubious lock downs that failed to either save lives or halt the spread of a coronavirus. Meanwhile, American cities were torched, looted, and destroyed by mobs of thugs eager to make history—or, at the very least, to score a new pair of Jordans and maybe a PlayStation or two.
What this means is that what happens at the top—the narratives, the hysteria, the race-baiting—does indeed affect those of us down at the bottom. It does leak into our every day lives. We can’t affect it so much, but we can’t ignore it, either. But what it also means is that we can’t rely on the instruments of the Regime to bail us out if things get bad. At the end of the day, the cops are just human beings; they need their paycheck as much as anyone else does, and most cops aren’t going to risk their livelihoods and family stability over dubious claims of unconstitutionality or vague accusations of authoritarianism—for one thing, that’s not their job.
The takeaway from this trial spectacle is that we shouldn’t be letting ourselves fall prey to the propaganda. Chauvin should be supported not because he’s a cop, but because he’s the most recent victim of an unaccountable media’s racialist-infused shaming parade. He’s our guy because he’s been cast as the effigy of what we all recognize is going on, not because the badge he carries somehow reflects the American order. Backing him just because he’s a cop plays into the propaganda. Intention is important.
The other takeaway here is that this will happen again. There will be another event like this. Maybe not this year. Maybe next. But it’s a certainty. And, like 2020, when the Regime puts their own enforcers in the cross-hairs, you can be sure that those enforcers won’t be so eager to respond to your pleas the next time BLM decides to start setting fire to your business. The Ferguson Effect is well-documented. Worse repercussions from this trial are practically guaranteed.
Consider this an excuse—or a wake-up call—to get to know your neighbors. Real communities are and always have been the foundation of safe societies. America seems to have forgotten that somewhere along the line.
