How the Right Has Reshaped the Narrative Around George Floyd

New York Times

24-05-2025

When the world saw the video of George Floyd taking his last breath under the knee of a police officer while onlookers pleaded for his life, the outrage was universal.
Republicans and Democrats agreed it was horrific, as did police chiefs and rank-and-file officers, and protesters of every race in towns large and small.
'It is important to recognize that everyone should be on the same side of this,' Ben Shapiro, the prominent conservative commentator, said back then, adding, 'It's police brutality, obviously.' In a televised trial, the officer, Derek Chauvin, was convicted of murder and sentenced to 22.5 years in prison.
Five years later, that consensus has disintegrated. The right-wing reshaping of the narrative of that day is in full swing, to the point where Mr. Shapiro is calling on President Trump to pardon Mr. Chauvin.
In the right's retelling, Mr. Floyd did not die from being deprived of air, and Mr. Chauvin was railroaded by a country that flew into a panic over race and did not consider the facts soberly. To build this case, conservatives have packaged misleading details from court documents, images of burning and looting during the protests, Mr. Floyd's criminal record and drug use, and legal theories that lawyers say are distorted.
Disputing facts that most people once agreed on has become part of a new political playbook, often employed by right-leaning pundits and politicians. But the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 was not just any news story. For conservatives, it was the catalyst for a kind of liberal mania that, some of them assert, led directly to racial hiring quotas, 'woke' curriculums in school and white guilt.
'President Trump's war on wokeness cannot be considered complete unless he addresses the fundamental injustice that started it all,' Mr. Shapiro said in March, in one of five episodes of his show 'Daily Wire' devoted to 'The Case for Derek Chauvin.'
Many prominent Trump supporters have joined the defense of Mr. Chauvin, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Charlie Kirk and Christopher Rufo. 'America will not be made whole until we receive justice for Derek Chauvin,' Jack Posobiec, the Trump loyalist and conspiracy theorist, told a cheering audience in December, adding, 'The truth must come out about what happened with George Floyd. It was a lie and it was always a lie.'
Mr. Shapiro started an online petition that his spokeswoman says has nearly 80,000 signatures. On X, Elon Musk said a pardon was 'something to think about.'
Brian O'Hara, the police chief of Minneapolis, has decried what he called an attempt to rewrite history, saying the goal was to undermine police reform. 'We all knew what we saw, and we all knew it was wrong,' he wrote in an opinion essay in The Minnesota Star-Tribune in February.
Misinformation began to circulate immediately following Mr. Floyd's death in 2020. A YouTube video amplified by the conspiracy group QAnon claimed the entire incident had been faked by the deep state, and that Mr. Floyd, who is buried in Texas, was still alive. There were viral social media posts alleging that George Soros, the billionaire who has become a punching bag for the right, was secretly funding the protests, which was not true.
As body camera videos and autopsy reports became available, right-wing news sites began to construct a counternarrative of the day of Mr. Floyd's arrest.
In these accounts, Mr. Chauvin was a decorated officer who was only following his police training. In fact, he was both honored for some actions and the subject of numerous complaints, and Minneapolis police officials testified that his treatment of Mr. Floyd did not conform to the department's training.
Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News commentator, said Mr. Chauvin was railroaded by mob justice that he likened to a Southern lynching. Other accounts suggest Mr. Floyd died not because he was pinned down for so long, but from other causes — a drug overdose, heart disease or maybe even a rare type of tumor.
At the trial, medical experts gave conflicting opinions on all three claims. The jury concluded that Mr. Floyd would not have died but for Mr. Chauvin's actions. In December 2024, in response to an attempt by Mr. Chauvin to overturn his conviction, a federal judge granted permission to run tests on medical samples from Mr. Floyd to determine if the tumor contributed to his death.
Mr. Shapiro and other right-wing commentators also argue that the jury was under intense pressure to convict, or was predisposed to do so.
These accounts purport to reveal the 'real truth' about what happened.
They rely heavily on autopsy reports, body camera video and other evidence that have been available for years and were presented to the jury in great detail. Many note the fact that the autopsy found no injury to Mr. Floyd's neck, though medical examiners say that a person's air supply can be cut off with no signs of injury.
In an interview, Mr. Shapiro said that he had changed his mind about Mr. Chauvin's guilt while watching the trial, and that he had waited to make a case for a pardon until after Mr. Trump took office.
Such a pardon would largely be symbolic. He was convicted of both state and federal crimes, and Mr. Trump has the power to pardon him only for the federal ones.
If he did so, Mr. Chauvin would be transferred from federal prison to Minnesota to serve out the rest of his 22.5-year state sentence.
In March, Mr. Trump said he was not considering a pardon, but Mr. Shapiro was undaunted.
'Concerned citizens speak out consistently,' Mr. Shapiro told his viewers. 'Eventually, those voices permeate the administration's awareness and influence what makes it onto the president's agenda.'
The narrative of the invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 went through a similar shift. At first, the event was met with bipartisan condemnation. But upon taking office in January, Mr. Trump pardoned the participants in what he called a 'day of love.'
Media analysts say that a strategy like Mr. Shapiro's can be effective. 'Repetition and amplification equals truth for our brains, so this is how bad actors can hack the media,' said Esosa Osa, the founder of Onyx Impact, a nonprofit that fights disinformation targeting Black communities.
Over the years the machinery of reinvention has cranked on.
In 2022, Kanye West, a vocal Trump supporter, attended the premiere of a documentary by a right-wing firebrand, Candace Owens, 'The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM.' He said afterward that Mr. Floyd had died of a drug overdose.
Another Chauvin defender was Liz Collin, a former Minneapolis news anchor who is married to Robert Kroll, the former head of the Minneapolis police union. Mr. Chauvin's first public comments appeared in Ms. Collin's documentary, 'The Fall of Minneapolis,' released in 2023. He called the trial 'a sham.'
In an interview, Ms. Collin said the idea that George Floyd was a victim of racist brutality had caused unnecessary strife. She blamed officials who she said were slow to disclose information, and what she called the media's failure to emphasize elements of the narrative, such as the fact that one of the officers who arrested Mr. Floyd was Black. These gaps, she said, created a 'dangerous and divisive narrative that we're still living with the consequences of to this day.'
With the fifth anniversary of Mr. Floyd's murder on Sunday, Minnesota officials have braced for unrest over a potential pardon. And the right and the left have accused each other of using the issue — and massaging the facts — for political advantage.
On his podcast, Tim Pool, the conservative influencer, said Democrats were exaggerating the possibility of a pardon to attack Mr. Trump. On the other hand, Larry Krasner, the liberal prosecutor in Philadelphia, warned his Instagram followers that they should not fall into the trap of rioting if Mr. Chauvin is pardoned.
'What they're trying to do is, they're trying to get people in the cities to engage in unrest so they can bring in the military,' he said.