The 2020 Moral Panic Was Stoked By Both COVID And George Floyd

I started following the Derek Chauvin trial without much interest or enthusiasm, but as I've heard from different bloggers and YouTube commentators, it's becoming clear that as details of Floyd's death in police custody come out in the courtroom environment, there's a great deal more to the story than the media presented ten months ago. And that brought to mind the recognition that last year's dumpster fire was driven both by COVID and l'affaire Floyd, and that in turn reminded me that the Floyd riots, stoked by media coverage, were an alliance of elite radicals and the Lumpenproletariat, a peculair mix.

I would normally look to someone like Alan Dershowitz for commentary, but although I assume he's following the trial daily, he hasn't been commenting on it regularly. His take as of last week is below:

As of then, he's mildly in favor of the defense strategy as it related to Floyd's girlfriend, who testified on Floyd's addiction, but he acknowledged that he didn't have a lot of information at that point. In the trial days this week,though, the defense strategy is becoming more plain: in cross-exmination, the defense is establishing, via prosecution witnesses, that Chauvin's actions that may or may not have resulted in Floyd's death were nevertheless within the scope of Minneapolis PD's use of force policy -- something which those witnesses were repeatedly forced to acknowledge in front of the jury.

Here's a summation from a blogger covering the trial who's a criminal defense attorney:

Today begins the 9th day of the prosecution in the Chauvin trial presenting their case-in-chief to the jury, and from the perspective of this small-town lawyer things don’t appear to have been going well for the state so far.

Indeed, things appear to be degenerating for the state, and badly.

. . . Unfortunately for the state, many of its own witnesses, especially its use-of-force and medical witnesses, whether existing MPD trainers or well-paid expert witnesses from out of town, have testified in ways that substantively undercut that narrative of the state.

So far in the state’s case we’ve heard the state’s own witnesses and experts testify that Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s back and shoulder blades, not his neck. We’ve heard them testify that not only was Chauvin’s force not excessive, he would have been privileged to use more force and declined to do so—a choice they characterized as de-escalation. We’ve seen photographs from MPD training materials showing officers being trained to place their knees on suspects in exactly the manner Chauvin had placed his knee on Floyd.None of that can be said to buttress the state’s still vague and ambiguous narrative of guilt.

. . . And the apparent trend to my eye is that the more the state talks about facts, the more their narrative of guilt begins to closely resemble the defense narrative of innocence.

It's starting to look as though, just like with the COVID narrative, the received version of George Floyd, a scandal driven by systemic racism in police departments everywhere, reflected in an in-custody death of a petty criminal, is breaking down.

This may be why Dershowitz has had little to say about this week's trial developments. From my point of view, things have gotten much more interesting.