
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
In 2019, the FBI recorded less than 17,000 homicides. After George Floyd died of a drug overdose while violently resisting arrest, we would not see numbers like that again.
4,870 more people were murdered in 2020. Those excess deaths meant that Floyd and BLM killed nearly as many people that year as AIDS. And those nearly 5,000 deaths were part of a total of nearly 14,000 more excess homicides in the FBI crime database since then. (And those numbers are still incomplete because of reporting changes made by the FBI.)
The anniversary of Floyd’s overdose death on May 25th, 2020 led to an outpouring of political
commemorations of his death and musings about the need for yet more ‘racial justice’, none of which accounted for the 2,000 more black people killed in 2020 than in 2019.
The Floyd reckoning killed more black people than Hurricane Katrina did. The real legacy of the BLM race riots were 2,000 dead black people. The real legacy of the fists and kneelings were entire cemeteries filled with dead black bodies over the course of only one single year.
And coffins being placed in cemeteries across the country, planted there by the ‘reckoning’.
More Americans died in the BLM wars than were killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined. Or at Pearl Harbor. To find a conflict that was more lethal to Americans, you would have to go back to Vietnam. Far more were killed by the BLM crime wave than perished in Hurricane Katrina, not to mention Sandy, Harvey, Maria, Ike and the California wildfires.
George Floyd’s death was the single deadliest non-drug or disease event of any war or natural disaster in the United States in the last 40 years.
The 14,000 dead, many of them black, are Floyd’s true legacy. Those 14,000 did not tour the nation in golden coffins. There were no multi-million dollar payments to their families. Members of Congress in cheerfully colored outfits did not kneel by their gravesides. Most simply disappeared and became footnotes.
In Floyd’s hometown of Minneapolis, 48 people were murdered in 2019. In the Year of Floyd that shot up to 82, then 94 in 2021, 82 in 2022, 70 in 2023, and 76 in 2024. That adds up to 164 more people murdered in the years since Floyd’s drug overdose. Shootings in Minneapolis increased 105% and the number of gunshot victims nearly doubled in 2020.
Five years later, Minneapolis politicians remember that one accidental death, not the 164 murders that they were complicit in while they promoted a ‘reckoning’ on racial justice.
Murders once again went up in Minneapolis last year even as politicians hail a safer city.
A cottage industry of pro-crime groups has spent the last 5 years denying that there’s a crime wave. The media will periodically run stories accusing the public of falsely believing that crime is a problem even as people are randomly slashed on the New York City subway and dozens of victims die in weekend shootings. The Biden administration tainted the FBI’s data collection so that it can no longer be trusted past a certain point, and yet the bodies do not go away.
The public expresses concern about crime in poll after poll. Voters came out for Trump in 2024 in part because of their worries about crime. The only counter-argument by a party that had told Americans that fighting crime was racist was to tell them that they were imagining the murders.
But no one imagined it when LA and San Francisco booted Soros pro-crime prosecutors.
Five years after their last reckoning killed nearly 14,000 people, caused billions in damage, destroyed small businesses and livelihoods and set back race relations decades, they want another ‘reckoning’.
Americans deserve a reckoning, not with the fictitious claim that racist police officers are roving the streets looking to choke black men to death, but with the forces behind a destructive movement that took a bunch of amateur activists and their hashtag, and used them to destroy the criminal justice system and unleash rioters and criminals on innocent Americans.
A political movement backed by top foundations, including the Ford Foundation, and leading corporations, led to the deaths of the equivalent of the population of St. Augustine, Florida.
That’s the reckoning that should be happening.
If the drug overdose death of one career criminal led to a national reckoning, what should the murders of 14,000 human beings lead to?
We don’t need more racial reckonings, diversity commitments and pledges to end policing that killed 14,000 people. What we need is a reckoning for the reckoning. We need a reckoning with the billionaires and foundations, like Soros and Ford, that led us here. Their radical tax shelters need to be stripped from them, their fortunes garnished to cover the losses suffered by families and shopkeepers across the country. We need a reckoning with every politician that tweeted, attended and enabled the violence that continues to claim lives every single day.
We need a reckoning with the “fiery but mostly peaceful” media that could position a reporter in the middle of a firestorm and still claim that the riots which claimed countless lives were peaceful. And finally we need a reckoning with prosecutors and law enforcement who practiced the two-tier policing that allowed violent criminals to run rampant across entire cities. The ongoing violence by Hamas supporters and whatever shape the riots of tomorrow take are a warning that while the BLM riots have ended for now, they legitimized the idea of rioting.
It will take a comprehensive national legal reckoning to shut down rioting once and for all.
A true reckoning with the 14,000 victims of George Floyd’s legacy will begin with unleashing the police to get back to enforcing the ‘broken windows policing’ and other measures that he[ped make America safe in the 90s, and filling the prisons with career criminals using measures like ‘three strikes’ to end the revolving door crime wave enabled by not only leftists or Democrats, but Republicans who went along with ‘criminal justice reforms’ promoted by the Kochs.
The reckoning of the 14,000 should bury liberal and libertarian pro-crime policies along with those bodies. We should never allow ourselves to be fooled into buying the idea that closing prisons and freeing criminals is a ‘conservative’ policy or good for America. The cost of prisons is cheap compared to the cost of a massive crime wave. The cost of preventing a crime is always cheaper than the crime itself. And when we forget that, criminals will remind us.
May 25th should not be the day we mourn a violent criminal who robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint, it should be the anniversary of the day we pledge to be merciless to criminals.
Because when we are kind to criminals, we are cruel to their victims. When we kneel at the coffins of criminals, they will bury us in them. Forget George Floyd, remember the 14,000.
Leave a Reply