Sunday marked five years since George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. That means that this entire week marks five years since the national reaction to Floyd’s death did untold damage to the country.
The outrage over Floyd’s death was itself understandable, but it very quickly exploded far outside the scope of the incident. It was not limited to the officer who killed Floyd, nor the other officers on the scene, all of whom were convicted of crimes from the incident. The outrage also wasn’t limited to the Democrats who run Minneapolis or even the Democrats who run Minnesota (In fact, both seemed to avoid blame completely for this incident, as both Mayor Jacob Frey and Gov. Tim Walz remain in power five years later).
No, the blame was placed on all of us as a society. We were all racist, we were told. Hundreds of thousands of police officers across the country who did not kill Floyd were especially racist, we were told, and so Democrats running major American cities stripped them of their funding. Rioters and looters burned down and robbed businesses in Minneapolis and other cities, given the seal of approval by Democrats such as then Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who promoted the bail fund that enabled their release immediately after their arrests.
The reaction to Floyd’s death led to activists, Democratic politicians, celebrities, major corporations, and liberal media to racialize everything in the country. The “diversity, equity, and inclusion” scam took off, ingraining itself in universities and corporations, promoting racial divisions and making race relations worse. The language police came out in droves, demanding you stop referring to “master” bedrooms and sports team “owners.” The NFL even segregated the national anthem at the behest of these DEI activists, adding a “black national anthem” to its pre-game festivities.
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The reaction to Floyd’s death also marked the death of public health “expertise,” as the experts who demanded rigorous quarantines and lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic said, during the heart of the pandemic, that massive crowds protesting racism were fine because racism was a worse virus. As we were told, “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.”
Trust in public health has not recovered since then. It took years for cities to rein in the crime crises that blossomed out of tolerating and promoting the riots we saw. The country has slowly clawed back the rapid advance of DEI through institutions and the culture. This should have been a local crime story, and it would have played out in court exactly as it did without being turned into a national indictment of America. Instead, we got a massive overreaction that led to five years of discord, division, and destruction (both cultural and literal).