How the Right has reshaped the narrative around George Floyd

Boston Globe

24-05-2025

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 Shapiro is calling on President Donald Trump to pardon Chauvin.
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In the right's retelling, Floyd did not die from being deprived of air, and 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, Floyd's criminal record and drug use, and legal theories that lawyers say are distorted.
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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 Floyd in Minneapolis 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' curricula in school and white guilt.
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'President Trump's war on wokeness cannot be considered complete unless he addresses the fundamental injustice that started it all,' Shapiro said in March, in one of five episodes of his show on the 'Daily Wire' devoted to 'The Case for Derek Chauvin.'
A protester and a police officer clasped hands during a rally calling for justice over the death of George Floyd, in New York, on June 2, 2020.
Wong Maye-E/Associated Press
Many prominent Trump supporters have joined the defense of Chauvin, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Charlie Kirk and Christopher Rufo. 'America will not be made whole until we receive justice for Derek Chauvin,' Jack Posobiec, a Trump loyalist and conspiracy theorist, told a cheering audience in December. 'The truth must come out about what happened with George Floyd. It was a lie and it was always a lie.'
Shapiro started an online petition that his spokesperson said has nearly 80,000 signatures. On social platform X, Elon Musk said a pardon was 'something to think about.'
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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 Floyd's death in 2020. A YouTube video amplified by conspiracy group QAnon claimed that the entire incident had been faked by the deep state and that 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 Floyd's arrest.
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In these accounts, 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 Floyd did not conform to the department's training.
Ben Shapiro spoke during a Conservative Political Action Conference on Dec 4, 2024, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Tomas Cuesta/Getty
Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News commentator, said Chauvin was railroaded by mob justice that he likened to a Southern lynching. Other accounts suggest 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.
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At Chauvin's trial, medical experts gave conflicting opinions on all three claims. The jury concluded that Floyd would not have died but for Chauvin's actions. In December, in response to an attempt by Chauvin to overturn his conviction, a federal judge granted permission to run tests on medical samples from Floyd to determine if the tumor contributed to his death.
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 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, Shapiro said that he had changed his mind about Chauvin's guilt while watching the trial and that he had waited to make a case for a pardon until after Trump took office.
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Such a pardon would largely be symbolic. Chauvin was convicted of both state and federal crimes, and Trump has the power to pardon him only for the federal ones.
If he did so, Chauvin would be transferred from federal prison to Minnesota to serve out the rest of his 22 1/2-year state sentence.
In March, Trump said he was not considering a pardon, but Shapiro was undaunted.
'Concerned citizens speak out consistently,' 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, Trump pardoned the participants in what he called a 'day of love.'
Media analysts say that a strategy like 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, Ye, 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.' The rapper formerly known as Kanye West said afterward that Floyd had died of a drug overdose.
Law enforcement officers stood along Lake Street as fires burned after a night of protests in Minneapolis on Friday, May 29, 2020, following the death of George Floyd.
David Joles/Associated Press
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. Chauvin's first public comments appeared in Collin's documentary, 'The Fall of Minneapolis,' released in 2023. He called the trial 'a sham.'
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In an interview, Collin said the idea that 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 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 Floyd's murder 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, a conservative influencer, said Democrats were exaggerating the possibility of a pardon to attack 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 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.
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