Chamblee54

The Fall Of Minneapolis is a documentary about the death of George Floyd. It makes some claims that disputed the conventional wisdom. TFOM was enthusiastically recieved by some people, including youtuber “Black Guys” Glenn Loury and John McWhorter. A few weeks later, @radleybalko wrote a three part substack series, debunking the debunkers. one two three A lot of people, myself included, are just shaking their heads about it all.
Chamblee54 posted a commentary, The Fall Of Minneapolis. This piece was reasonably skeptical, with readers encouraged to “do their own research.” One paragraph is repeated below. Clearly, “the establishment” had details they did not want me to know. When this story was posted on reddit, there was a curious reply. u/Chamblee54 is permanently banned from r/JoeRogan.
One thing I wanted was a copy of the autopsy report. Recently, parts of it have been released. The report shows high levels of Fentanyl and Methamphetamine in GPF’s system. I googled “George Floyd Autopsy,” and found a lot of commentary. Next, I did the same search on duckduckgo. The top result was the HENNEPIN COUNTY AUTOPSY REPORT ME NO.: 20-3700. The document clearly states “No life-threatening injuries identified.”
The main takeaway I got out of the Glenn&John video was that Derek Chauvin’s knee was on George Floyd’s shoulder, rather than his neck. This changes the narrative 100%. Supposedly, the body cam videos from the officers show this. OTOH, in the documentary, only a few seconds of these videos were shown. It was not conclusive.
Glenn&John posted a video about TFOM, which piqued my interest. John said “once again, we’ve been lied to.” A couple of weeks later, Liz Collin and JC Chaix, the documentary producers, were guests of The Glenn Show. JC Chaix said “I would encourage anyone to look for the empirical evidence go back and find these body cam videos for yourself and look at several versions of them to dispel any of these myths or the idea of mythmaking here.”
Mr. Chaix did not supply links to these body-cam videos. Nor does the audience have the time to go through hours and hours of videos, to see the important portions. This is the job of the people making the documentary. At the same time, @radleybalko claims the body-cam videos have been available all along. One wonders why the inflammatory cellphone video was shown thousands of times, and the more nuanced body-cam videos are seldom seen.
To me, the key issue was: is the knee on the neck, or the shoulder? When the autopsy report said “No life-threatening injuries identified,” that threw a monkey wrench into the popular narrative. At this point, Radley Balko enters the conversation. After a few thousand words of polemic, Mr. Balko makes the point that the knee was not on the neck or the shoulder, but on the back. Mr. Floyd was in a prone position, and the knee on his back did not allow him to breathe properly. Positional asphyxia is the possible killer of George Floyd. This detail was not mentioned during the “George Floyd summer.”
I came to the conclusion that we simply do not know. The death of George Floyd is old news. The racial reckoning took place. While there may be appeals to Derek Chauvin’s conviction, the case is essentially over. The dirty dealings of police have come to light, as if anyone really had any doubt. There is also a backlash to the high octane rhetoric, and violence, of 2020. Meanwhile, Israel is trying to drive Palestine into the sea, with American assistance.
Mr. Balko was especially critical of Coleman Hughes. Mr. Hughes, a “black conservative,” is somewhat of a protege to Glenn&John. Mr. Balko makes a snide comment. “… his column promoting TFOM typifies how such self-declared heterodox thinkers have latched onto the conspiracies about Floyd’s death that true skeptics should have seen through with even the slightest bit of research.”
While all this was going on, @aaronjmate got into a tweetspat with @coldxman about Screams Without Words. This is the widely criticized NYT story about sexual violence on October 7. Mr. Hughes is an enthusiastic supporter of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign.
@coldxman “These is not an Israeli gov claim, Aaron. I knew you would dismiss it if it were. These are claims made by The NY Times—which, for all its flaws—tends not to invent photographs out of whole cloth. I’ll let you parse the difference between rape and driving nails into a woman’s groin. I see no meaningful difference in the context of 10/7. In other words: Whatever it would say about Hamas that they did the former, it would say the same about them that they did the latter. And you seem equally tempted to deny it in either case.” To paraphrase Mr. Balko, “… typifies how such self-declared heterodox thinkers have latched onto the conspiracies about _____ that true skeptics should have seen through with even the slightest bit of research.”
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.