The case of a police officer who lost his cool and killed a man who was resisting arrest. The defense argues that he was acting in self-defense and that he should not have been charged with second-degree murder because he was under the impression that the man was a suspect.
00:00:00.000As I see it, it's a grotesque miscarriage of justice, but I wouldn't expect there to be a great deal of justice in a period of modern rule.
00:00:11.360Feelings don't care about your facts, and religion, God knows, doesn't care about facts.
00:00:19.700And he arose to a kind of religious significance that will overwhelm any form of doubt.
00:00:30.000And so I'm not particularly surprised by it.
00:00:40.340I mean, it seems to be quite obvious that, first of all, second-degree murder is he intentionally, and with malice aforethought, but not in a premeditated or planned way, killed the person.
00:00:52.640So this implies that he didn't go out with the intention of killing George Floyd, but once he was on top of him, he thought, yeah, I'm going to kill him.
00:01:01.500There's no evidence that can be brought forth for that, other than that it is true that he was saying, I can't breathe, man, I can't breathe.
00:01:10.340But that is exactly the kind of thing that you would say if you were trying to escape apprehension in order to cause the person to loosen their grip so that you could try to escape.
00:01:35.140My understanding is that American law on murder, or at least the law of this particular state, seems to be more complicated than English law.
00:01:42.760You have all these different degrees of manslaughter and degrees of murder.
00:01:46.020Voluntary manslaughter, as I understand it, is things like a crime of passion.
00:01:49.620So you don't have a prior intention to kill, but you go in in such circumstances where you just you just lose it.
00:01:56.200Any reasonable person would become mentally disturbed.
00:01:59.400And on the spur of a moment, spur of the moment, they would kill because of that.
00:02:04.040Right. Is there any evidence that he is guilty of voluntary manslaughter, that he completely lost his temper with this person and decided to kill him?
00:02:12.200As far as I can see, he was completely calm and he was doing his job and he was engaging in a apprehension hold, which they are taught to do.
00:02:53.600If he has been taught that that is how you should apprehend somebody, that is how you should keep hold of a criminal, then that is not a negligent act.
00:03:04.500If that person is saying, I can't breathe, I can't breathe, it is quite reasonable in the circumstances for him to say, well, look, that's just an attempt to escape, you know, whatever.
00:03:14.920So that cannot be understood to be a negligent act either.
00:03:18.740So he hasn't engaged in a negligent act and the person has nevertheless died.
00:03:23.880So he's also not guilty of involuntary manslaughter based on the definition that you have under American law or under the law of that particular state.
00:03:34.220As I understand it, under English law, he may well be guilty of manslaughter.
00:03:38.740But then, on the other hand, he is acting.
00:03:41.720He has not put himself in that situation.
00:03:44.560And that makes a fundamental difference.
00:03:46.660He is acting on behalf of the government as an enforcer of the law.
00:03:52.380He has not put himself in that situation.
00:03:57.580And in that situation, it is understood that he has to follow the instructions.
00:04:01.740And if things go wrong, then the training.
00:04:04.760And if he follows the instructions and follows the training, then he should not be guilty of a crime.
00:04:11.860The best that could be said is that he is guilty of incompetence in his office, that he should have somehow intuited that this person was losing consciousness or whatever.
00:04:26.860If you bring in a rule where they're not just guilty of incompetence, but they can be sacked for that, understandably, but they're guilty of a crime, then you bring in a situation where no reasonable person would want to become a police officer.
00:04:42.580Because if you become a police officer, then you will put yourself in those kinds of dangerous situations where you have to make split second decisions that are life and death or can result in serious violence if it goes wrong.
00:05:02.000And that's what happened in that case.
00:05:05.320And so that's why, in general, in America, you don't have that system, which we do have in England, by the way, where you can sue police officers in civil court.
00:05:15.960Now, it's the worst of both worlds in America if they bring that in.
00:05:20.160Because at the moment, in America, police officers are paid badly, but they have certain, compared to Britain, they're paid very badly.
00:05:30.540I mean, being, look, I don't buy this right-wing thing that, like, no white person will become a police officer ever again after this or anything.
00:05:44.840I absolutely do think white people will become police officers, and that's the problem.
00:05:48.140So I think that this is a matter of total injustice, and we shouldn't be surprised it's a matter of injustice.
00:05:55.540Firstly, the judge should have sequestered the jury for the entire time, so they couldn't have been aware of any of the coverage of this trial, let alone of this insane congresswoman basically calling for violence.
00:06:09.060Secondly, the jury would have been, even if he hadn't done that, would have been so intensely aware of this,
00:06:14.960and would have been so intensely aware of the potential consequences of delivering the wrong verdict,
00:06:19.160and would have been so sort of indoctrinated, potentially, that I don't see how this could be anything other than how it could be possible to get a fair trial.
00:06:27.180And the guy's attorney raised that issue, and weirdly, the judge said that this might be a matter for you to appeal on, that it's a mistrial,
00:06:37.640but I'm going to rule it out here, which is most peculiar, because if it's a matter on which he can appeal,
00:06:42.400then it's a matter that's a fundamental problem with the trial, which should come before him there and then.
00:06:47.560So really, you've got almost sort of jury-nobbling, sort of de facto jury-nobbling.
00:06:51.400There's no way he could get a fair trial.
00:06:52.840These people were under intense psychological pressure.
00:06:55.520Right. There's also, at the very least, a reasonable doubt on the cause of death.
00:07:04.120There was actually a man who was quite authoritative, maybe even charismatic,
00:07:14.060who was discussing the cause of death as effectively strangulation, lack of oxygen, to the brain.
00:07:22.620The fact is, there really are very serious issues about what happened in the sense that George Floyd
00:07:29.540had, I believe, twice the amount of fentanyl in his bloodstream that could cause death by itself.
00:07:41.940There's also an issue of his drug dealer refused to testify.
00:07:46.900He pleaded the Fifth Amendment, which is your ability not to incriminate yourself effectively.
00:09:11.360I mean, obviously, you can't take these things so far, you know, in the sense of if there's a 90-year-old man in a swimming pool and you start dunking him underwater like you would a teenager and he dies and you say, well, I was just having fun.
00:09:53.720But I just think there are so many reasons to believe that Chauvin's direct action did not cause anything.
00:10:03.860And he actually did things like he and his team called an ambulance and so on for him that it's just it cast much more than reasonable doubt.
00:10:14.640But I would say that in this kind of thing, the facts don't matter, really.
00:10:19.940And I don't believe that this case now spells the fact that all cases across the country are going to be mob justice and that, you know, if you're white, you're guilty.
00:10:38.080I don't think that is going to at all be the case.
00:10:41.380I do think that that kind of mob justice has an effect in these particular instances when a case rises from just another, you know, police shooting of a black man.
00:10:56.380And it rises to this religious like import for Americans, which the George Floyd case did.
00:11:02.560You wrote an excellent piece on the BLM protest that followed immediately after George Floyd and its relation to the coronavirus pandemic.
00:11:15.600The fact that people were cooped up, that they had anxiety due to this, you know, worldwide pandemic and death and so on.
00:11:22.980And it also is related to a replacement religion in the sense that these times of stress, anxiety and insurgency will bring about a greater deal of religiousness.
00:11:36.360And what we have to understand about George Floyd is, again, you know, feelings don't care about your facts and the religion God knows doesn't care about facts.
00:11:50.680And he arose to a kind of religious significance that will overwhelm any form of doubt.
00:12:00.860And they were asking on the news, they were asking this woman who used to be his girlfriend or something, you know, what would this white woman, what would George Floyd want?
00:12:12.020Oh, George Floyd want peace and justice and all this.
00:12:14.520No, George Floyd held a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach demanding money for drugs.
00:12:18.820That's the kind of person George Floyd is.
00:12:21.720George Floyd is a horrible, nasty person, a criminal, a violent criminal.
00:12:27.180And so the idea that you could with some people, you can try and make them into a saint, perhaps.
00:12:31.360But it's more than more difficult with someone like George Floyd.
00:14:02.280But because of you and because of thousands, millions of people around the world who came out for justice, your name will always be synonymous.
00:14:14.020And again, yeah, yeah, that's where we are.
00:15:22.160And they're going to forget about the really bad stuff like the point.
00:15:25.460I have heard that pointing a gun at a predicate woman.
00:15:27.400I mean, that seems kind of you can't come back from that one, but he will.
00:15:32.860And I this is at least my kind of cynical view of it is that it is really like it's it was a religious thing.
00:15:42.600It was probably impossible for the jury not to have gone this way, particularly given the circumstances of not being sequestered and so on.
00:15:54.240And we now have this myth, but the myth can kind of support the system itself.
00:16:03.560So Nancy Pelosi can say, like, the son of man, George Floyd, sacrificed himself for our sins.
00:16:14.700None of them want to say this is actual justice, like this is accountability.
00:16:17.820We're approaching, you know, approaching that big platonic good up in the sky called justice.
00:16:25.800But by turning him into a religion, it kind of like helps support the status quo in this way.
00:16:33.380I mean, Joe Joe Biden disbanded a some committee on defunding or radically changing the police.
00:16:42.000The idea that the police are going to be defunded in major cities strikes me as totally ridiculous.
00:16:48.780It's just simply not happening. I think it will change.
00:16:51.500There's probably more social work involved.
00:16:53.640But these right wingers who think that, like, whites are going to quit on mass.
00:16:58.120They're going to defund the police and we're going to have just endless chaos in American cities.
00:17:02.320That is not going to happen. That's reactionary nonsense.
00:17:05.300Not yet. I think you're right. The defunding the police, that, as I argued at the time or implied at the time in my article for Radix, that was the popular reformation.
00:17:14.600That was that was a motion getting too far.
00:17:17.200That was we need to think about a time of radical change, a time of breakdown.
00:17:21.680And when you have breakdown, you have all kinds of chaos that happens.
00:17:24.460And then it's reined in into a new dispensation.
00:17:28.000Think of it in terms of Thomas Kuhn and scientific theories.
00:17:30.560You have the scientific theory falling apart. You have all kinds of scientific theories being suggested.
00:17:35.640You have the new scientific theory taking power. And then that's it.
00:17:51.740George Floyd, as you say, is the son of man.
00:17:53.620There is a degree they're trying. And it's fascinating that people in power who have invested financially and socially in this system are trying to suggest that there's some sort of substitutional atonement in the death of George Floyd,
00:18:08.140whereby, as you say, we are closer to the platonic ideal of justice, of racial justice, which we worship and of equality.
00:18:15.360And therefore, it doesn't matter that Nancy Pelosi is a hereditary politician rolling in money.
00:18:23.280That doesn't do it. We can look over that because her lack of equality, her greed, and the fact that she manifests everything that is unfair about the racial system in America,
00:18:35.840if you want to say, a very, very rich white woman of unbelievable privilege, an aristocrat, that she's atoned for now.
00:18:46.060Her sins are atoned for by her mask wearing, obviously, but also by the sacrifice that George Floyd gallantly made, laying down his life so that upper middle class, virtue signaling white people could feel better about themselves.
00:19:00.580Exactly. In other words, the strong will use the strong will use the weak or let's say the strong will use a religion of the weak to their own benefit and to maintain the status quo.
00:19:13.760And I think that's, in some ways, where we are now with the whole Biden administration, in which he, in a grandfatherly way, will kind of talk the talk of racial justice.
00:19:29.360But he won't do it in a kind of edgy, hard way, like we need to tear down the white family or something.
00:19:35.580He'll do it in a kind of grandfatherly way of, you know, we need to get better as an American and this is unfair and blah, blah, blah.
00:19:41.220But they, again, have their cake and eat it, too.
00:19:45.740They ultimately worship this religion, but they're ultimately going to maintain the status quo.
00:19:52.100And this religion is a kind of functional ideology for the current order.
00:20:02.300The religion can only be understood as a genetic battle between two types of white people.
00:20:08.420Between individualistic type white people and, well, not just two, but let's say two individualistic type white people and group oriented type white people.
00:20:18.500Between rich white people and poor white people.
00:20:22.480And the religion assists the individualistic type white people who make a coalition with the non-whites to abstain and attain power.
00:20:30.500And it helps the white people that are already basically wealthy and rich to maintain power because they're intelligent enough to realize the brilliance of this system.
00:20:40.680And they realized it very early on that in the wake of World War II, racism, that's the thing we can use.
00:23:14.660So to go back real quick, I mean, I think you're, you're like referencing Jonathan Haidt or Haidt, however you pronounce his name.
00:23:23.860And so like individualism and binding values.
00:23:27.960So when I, the way I look at it is that we, we have these every few months, some kind of event like this that might very well, you know, otherwise be a kind of quotidian event that no one talks about or cares about.
00:23:43.520I mean, the fact is there, there are police shootings and killings every day, but this one really struck a chord.
00:23:51.900It struck a chord because of the video, mainly just the image.
00:23:55.840It struck a chord because it came at a very particular time right at the pandemic.
00:24:00.060I mean, everything kind of the world kind of conspired to make this into a religious event and not just a quotidian or pedestrian terrestrial event.
00:24:09.520But so, and I think we, we kind of can understand polarization when we see people, it's like this becomes a left, right issue and it becomes a red, blue issue in the United States.
00:24:25.400And, and just because the United States is so big and media apparatus is so huge, this becomes a left, right issue across the world.
00:24:33.120I mean, one of the most remarkable things, there were BLM rallies in Finland after the death of George Ford.
00:24:40.040Poland, in Berlin, I don't, maybe Russia, I don't know.
00:24:44.940And I don't know how far afield it went, but definitely in the Western world, people just freaked out about this.
00:24:50.980And they thought that they had something at stake in Black Lives Matter, which is this just kind of stupid American thing.
00:24:59.420Like, why are you even talking about this?
00:25:01.900But it really impacted them because it impacted them on a religious level.
00:25:07.460But what I guess what I was saying is that, you know, with conservatives, you, you see a lot of rationality and kind of deconstructing of this event where you can find some good content from conservatives where they're, they're talking about,
00:25:21.600Oh, well, you know, how exactly did he die?
00:25:28.560But I kind of agree with the left criticism in the sense that, you know, all of those things might very well be true.
00:25:37.580But at the end of the day, it's that you support the police, because, you know, whatever kind of individualism you have, and I think there's actually a lot of individualism and harm avoidance among conservatives, this freak out of her mask being an example of that.
00:25:54.400But you ultimately want order, and you ultimately support the police, and you ultimately identify with the state.
00:26:03.620And conservatives can't, they're having a harder and harder time identifying with, say, the bureaucracy, that's not the deep state, or the, their local newspaper, oh, no, liberal media, or even certainly the president, you know, oh, crazy, the radical left, blah, blah, blah.
00:26:20.960But they do identify with certain things, they still identify with the military, they can still identify with the police, they basically still identify with the badass, violent wing of the state, the police and the military, maybe a few other things in there.
00:26:35.900But they want, this is the backup, this is the background of this left-right divide, is identifying your state with order, culture, and the state, identifying yourself with order, culture, and the state.
00:26:53.180And then on the left-right divide, and then on the left-hand side, this kind of insane obsession with harm avoidance, where, you know, even this just kind of thuggish, you know, generally awful person, George Floyd, the fact that he was, he might have been abused in some way by the police,
00:27:16.680it just expresses this, it just expresses this sin, this, you know, this almost like endless sin, that goes back to slavery and Jim Crow, and it's still infecting all of the, all institutions, are still kind of, you know, still attacking blacks, using this residual history.
00:27:35.520And this is the divide of polarization.
00:27:38.060Yes, it's that they, that they find this, well, it, I suppose what the, the thing that I see as the underlying mechanism is basically neuroticism and mental instability.
00:27:51.340So if you have low self-esteem, then you identify with those that are outcasts, and you, and you feel a strong sense of guilt and negativity, and you feel unhappy with life,
00:28:05.540and you, and you feel everything's unfair, and all this.
00:28:08.540So it's, it's those kinds of people, what William James called the religion of the sick soul.
00:28:14.220And those are now very much the people on, on the left, and there's many, many studies that I have found on this,
00:28:21.540whereas those on the right have a high self-esteem, and are content, and are happy, and are mentally stable.
00:28:28.200And it is having those individualistic values, that is being harm avoidance and equality, those are associated with being neurotic,
00:28:37.840because being neurotic is this adaptation to this unstable world where you've just got to survive.
00:31:16.540And so, so you, you, you, you have got people like that and you, you, you've got to remember, well, that among these, these leftists, you do get people that are narcissistic and that are Machiavellian.
00:31:26.280But on the other hand, it could be argued that being Machiavellian is an expression of being left-wing because if you feel, or being neurotic, because if you feel that the world's out to get you and are, then you want to have power because you want to control things.
00:31:38.600You want to control things because everyone's out to get you.
00:31:40.320So you, it could be that Machiavellianism is inherent to being an individualist and thus inherent to being a left-wing at the moment, or in general.
00:31:50.340Indeed, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, argued precisely this in his, in his manifesto.
00:32:28.800And the other thing I wanted to mention, though, when we were talking about the police and white people becoming police officers,
00:32:35.100is I do think that this won't stop them from doing so, because I think that we get to a point where, what are the jobs you can do if you're about average IQ or a bit less?
00:32:47.680Like, what can you actually do as everything gets outsourced, as there's no farming anymore, there's no factory work anymore, there's no internet, there's no shops anymore.
00:33:01.660And one of the things, in a society of declining intelligence and polarisation, you're going to get more and more violence, so you're going to need more and more security guards, and you're going to need more and more policemen.
00:33:14.720And so there'll be, it doesn't matter, there'll be way more people that will want to do this than there will be demand for it.
00:33:21.660And there'll be a growing demand for it, but then increasingly, there'll be nothing else you can do if you can't do science or whatever, there'll be nothing else you can do as a man.
00:34:17.660And this guy is a convenient sacrifice.
00:34:20.080From what I've heard about him, of course, they've dug up lots of things about his personal life and stuff like that.
00:34:25.100And I guess they could do that with anybody, and they could slant it so that it looks bad.
00:34:29.980So some people have tried to take it from me.
00:34:35.360Not for someone safely like me, but perhaps for you and Derek Schulman.
00:34:39.160The fact that he's married to a former Miss Minnesota makes one, who's also East Asian, makes one think he's a bit of a fast life history strategist, if you know what I mean.
00:34:52.060So, but anyway, it's unfair because you could do that with anybody.
00:34:56.080But they've certainly made it come across like he's callous, you know, like he hasn't apologized.
00:35:00.740And he perhaps he should have seen fit to do that and to beg for forgiveness.
00:35:05.340And then it might it might have helped.
00:36:48.660And they might say that they're glad he was convicted because he's a cop murderer and so on.
00:36:55.020But the real reason is that they can go to their favorite sushi restaurant tonight and so on that you kind of have to this religion has incentives based into it.
00:37:08.700Like if we're just a crazy new version of Christianity where we're worshiping, you know, black drug users and killers and so on, that that wouldn't work.
00:37:18.180But if there are incentives to you leading your middle class suburban or urban life and it going along more smoothly because you sacrifice the occasional Derek Chauvin or you express white guilt or wash the feet of a, you know, BLM activist, etc.
00:37:38.140It's worth it because one thing we haven't looked at, I think is germane to this is that it's not new this if you look at romanticism and the romantic nationalist movement, what you're worshiping is peasant culture.
00:37:52.300Yeah, it's a defanged peasant culture.
00:37:58.000If you know anything about the actual lives of these peasants in 19th century Europe, these aren't nice people necessarily.
00:38:06.660I mean, if you're high in general factor of personality, you tend to go to the top.
00:38:11.060And if you're low in general factor of personality, you're low in intelligence, you're a peasant.
00:39:48.980Those people are the ones who are, like, either benefiting from Derek Chauvin's of the world or the ones supporting him.
00:39:55.500Or so it's those people have villainized and they've chosen the target of their romanticization is urban African-American culture, which, you know, quite a feat that they've accomplished this.
00:40:16.860And the other thing I'd note in a different way, and the other thing I'd note is some people have said to me, oh, romanticism, well, no, that's different.
00:40:22.840We shouldn't compare that to Marxism or to these other multiculturalism or to these other Christian ideas because it's beneficial to the race, you know.
00:40:50.840So it was people from the different ethnic group, from the upper class ethnic group, playing for status by fetishizing the poor and saying that I'm on the side of the poor.
00:41:32.180I mean, it's a little, it's, I think it's a, I think it's kind of a residue of a paternalistic aspect towards African Americans.
00:41:42.720I mean, when I would talk to my grandparents, both of whom lived in the South, they would very often say something to the effect that race relations were better because we would kind of take care.
00:41:57.480It's this paternalism and you could say they knew their place.
00:42:01.460Like you had a maid in your house who actually was taken care of in many ways.
00:42:07.380She, she was treated decently, no question, and lived a very good life and got some money out of it.
00:42:15.180And, but she also very much knew her place and was subordinated.
00:42:19.300Um, and I think in some ways there was a kind of idea that they are kind of magical, that there may be inarticulate, but wise, that they'll, they'll give you a little saying here and there.
00:42:29.980It's a kind of Oprah, um, God that lives in your kitchen.
00:42:45.260There, there are many versions of this, but, uh, or your caddy on the golf course who, you know, uh, you, you just lost your job.
00:42:52.780And, but he says, you know, um, sometimes when you're lost, you shouldn't be found or just some true, you know, truism that exactly, exactly.
00:43:05.540I think it's, I, I, and, and yeah, we, we've, we've always had this.
00:43:11.360And I think in some ways you could say that the magic Negro, George Floyd is, is almost a kind of new version of this, a continuization, a continuation of this kind of paternalism and fetishism.
00:43:26.440Um, so, so yeah, I, I think that it's, it's a deep thing in American culture that doesn't quite, uh, work so well elsewhere that you have the magic Negro and that's what he is.
00:43:35.920He's the magic Negro, but he's very, he's more than magic though.
00:43:38.600Cause other ones like Morgan Freeman or Oprah or whatever, they've got like a bit of magic, whereas he's got like super deep.
00:43:49.060Hispanics can't be magical in this way.
00:43:52.640Um, Asians can't be magical in this way.
00:43:55.120Native Americans might a little bit in the sense that there's long been a kind of romanticized talk about Native American culture, but it seems to be.
00:44:03.800Mr. Miyagi, Mr. Miyagi, Mr. Miyagi, Mr. Miyagi.
00:44:06.440I'll, I'll grant you Mr. Miyagi, but, um, it's, it's, it's a particular African thing.
00:44:13.140I, and I don't, there, there's probably some reasons for that, but I don't think other ethnicities can be, Jews can be magical a little bit.
00:44:20.960The local spells the mugwai in Gremlins.
00:44:22.980And I think, I think, I think you do have, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you do have a magic element with the, and even Indiana Jones's voice.
00:44:34.380So I think, I think maybe there is that element with Asians to some extent, but it's, it's more, as you say, it's more than eclipsed by black.