2 + 2 = 5

April 12, 2021

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.” - George Orwell, 1984

There’s nothing more Orwellian than the alt-right’s response to George Floyd’s death. We all watched the horrific video of Derek Chauvin coldly squeezing the life out of George Floyd for approximately nine minutes, as Floyd repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe, and as the crowd of horrified bystanders pleaded with Chauvin to take his knee off Floyd’s neck. We all saw this video with our own eyes, and heard it with our own ears. We saw Chauvin’s defiant sadism as he refused to listen to the desperate witnesses who were begging him to not commit murder.

But when the alt-right media machine dangles an irrelevant toxicology report that paints Floyd in a bad light in front of their media consumers, that’s enough for them to disregard everything they’ve seen and heard. Right now a huge chunk of the U.S. population is enthusiastically throwing away the evidence of their own eyes and ears at the urging of the Murdoch empire and its talking heads like the Fishstick Heir Tucker Carlson.*

The Fishstick Heir’s version of 2+2+ 5 went like this: "Months later, we learned the story they told us about George Floyd's death was an utter lie. There was no physical evidence that George Floyd was murdered by a cop. The autopsy showed that George Floyd almost certainly died of a drug overdose. Fentanyl.” In other words, don’t dare believe your own eyes and ears, ladies and gentlemen. “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” – George Orwell, 1984

This tactic to try to convince people not to believe their own eyes and ears would be fascinating if it weren’t so terrifying, and if it weren’t so successful after decades of Fox propaganda. Yes, Floyd had a significant amount of fetanyl in his system, but so what? Whether or not a death is ruled a murder should not be based on how physically fit the victim was to withstand being murdered.

Let’s just use the Fishstick Heir’s logic for a moment. Would that mean that the death of anyone who has any substances in their system should be labeled an overdose? By that logic, if Donald Jr. and the shrieking banshee his daddy’s campaign pays $180K per year , presumably to give him the “girlfriend experience,” are walking along the streets of Manhattan, and incompetent movers drop a grand piano on their heads, their deaths should be labeled a drug overdose? (Because, let’s face it, based upon how they act in their public appearances, there’s not a chance there’s not at least some amount of cocaine flowing through their veins at any given moment.)

Or, if I were stumbling home from the bar one night and bumped into a knife-wielding psychopath on the street who stabbed me repeatedly in the gut, my death should be labeled alcohol poisoning? Would it be a valid defense for the knife-wielding assailant to claim that he thought I would bleed out more slowly since he hadn’t factored my alcohol-thinned blood into his actions?

By this logic, should it basically be legal to kill anyone, as long as that murder victim is found to have been under the influence of drugs/alcohol?

Using the fetanlyl in Floyd’s system to somehow exonerate Chauvin for choking him to death is equally absurd.

But too many people are too willing to deny the evidence they’ve seen and heard and to latch onto the Fishstick Heir’s version of events instead. It seems like this mindset is even more prevalent now than it was immediately after George Floyd’s murder. Back then, many of the “blue lives matter” social media warriors seemed willing to at least partially acknowledge that Chauvin’s actions were wrong. They responded to calls for police reform with comments that Chauvin had been arrested, and that should be the end of it. They seemed to be magnanimously stating that they were willing to throw Chauvin under the bus and allow him to be punished because he had broken the cardinal rule of racist policing by murdering George Floyd in the open, in front of traumatized cell-phone-wielding witnesses, instead of quietly out of sight in the back of a patrol car like he was supposed to. (Note, this is not a criticism of ALL police. It’s a criticism of the racist police tactics that police unions and racists have nearly always defended. It IS encouraging that so many law enforcement officers are now willing to go against this by testifying against Chauvin—by essentially testifying that 2 + 2 = 4.)

But now many social media warriors seem to be taking back even that token appeasement to the black community and to common decency, and instead are now pushing the obviously false narrative that Floyd’s death was an overdose. Even if this approach doesn’t completely work, it may be successful in convincing people that, because he had drug addiction issues, George Floyd’s life shouldn’t matter.

I just hope that the jury in Chauvin’s murder trial consists of people who still believe their own eyes and ears, and who aren’t swept into the “1984” mindset of thinking only what Big Brother—or the Fishstick Heir and the Murdoch empire—tell them to think.

*Note, in the interest of being factual, I’m Snopes-checking myself and stating that I realize that Tucker Carlson will not reap any Swanson's TV dinner money via the status of his heiress stepmother. However, I’m still referring to him as the “Fishstick Heir” as a nod to the fact that he is a soft, silver-spoon-fed dough-ball of privilege full of jeering, haughty entitlement.