Of all the things that the occasionally interesting Kanye West has said over the course of the past week, the one that can’t ever be called sociopathic or pathological is what he said about George Floyd, patron saint of Hennepin County.
But of course, the historical revisionism of Floyd’s death is an enduring priority of the Democrat Party. They can’t justify their political violence without it. So that West more or less told the truth about Floyd has the corrupted national media (a.k.a. the Democrat Party) performing emergency clean-up for their cause.
Like almost everything West says in interviews, his remarks on Floyd on a show last weekend weren’t delivered with much precision. “They hit him with the fentanyl,” he said. “If you look, the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that. When he said ‘mama,’ mama is his girlfriend. They said he screamed for his mama. Mama was his girlfriend.”
The bulk of that is demonstrably true, but Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson falsely claimed this week — lie! lie! lie! — that, “None of that is true.”
A separate news article in the same paper said Kanye had made “false claims about the Black man’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police.”
An NBC News report also referred to West’s “false claims” related to Floyd.
Let’s take them one by one.
It’s a fact that Floyd had lethal levels of fentanyl in his blood. The medical examiner’s report said at the time of his death, there were 11 nanograms of the drug per milliliter. That report noted that “severe respiratory depression” — trouble with breathing — is a common symptom of fentanyl toxicity, and that fatal blood levels of the drug have been recorded at as low as 3 nanograms per milliliter. Floyd had nearly four times that.
Also present in his system were methamphetamine, other opiates, and morphine, which the report said, have the effect of “respiratory depression” as well.
West’s assertion that Derek Chauvin’s knee “wasn’t even on his neck like that,” is likely a reference to a line of defense put forward by Chauvin’s legal team. At trial, defense attorney Eric Nelson zoomed in on video from Floyd’s run-in with the police. Nelson suggested that the images showed Floyd’s neck was, at least for some period of time, not in direct contact with Chauvin’s knee, and that when it was, the applied pressure was justifiable for the circumstances. The jury didn’t buy the defense, but the medical examiner’s report said there were no injuries to Floyd’s neck nor to the cartilage of his larynx. There was no bleeding or bruising on his neck. There were, in fact, no injuries to any of his organs at all.
That Floyd referred to his girlfriend as “mama” is also just a fact. And we know that because his girlfriend and drug buddy, Courteney Ross, said so in court. I know that it’s more romantic and thus useful for the media to claim Floyd used his final gasps to call for his mother, but she died in 2018, two years before the incident.
What West didn’t say in the interview was that Floyd also had “severe” heart disease, with some of his arteries blocked by up to 90 percent. His heart was enlarged, and he suffered a history of hypertension. And that leads us to why the medical examiner declared Floyd to have died of “cardiopulmonary arrest,” triggered by the stress of contact with the police. And it’s no small point that the contact was made after the 6’4”, 223 lb. Floyd, hopped up on drugs, attempted to purchase a pack of cigarettes with a counterfeit bill. When police showed up, he was panicked, delusional, and either unable or unwilling to cooperate with police. Maybe it was both.
In the end, the medical examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, did determine Floyd’s death to formally be a “homicide,” though the term in his profession simply means another person was a factor. At trial, Baker said, “In my opinion, the law enforcement subdual, restraint, and the neck compression was just more than Mr. Floyd could take, by virtue of those heart conditions.” In other words, Floyd would have survived the incident if not for his severely compromised heart.
Guess who had no clue that this giant man had a sick and fragile heart before that fateful day? Precisely no one, least of all the police who were tasked with subduing his massive frame in his erratic condition.
Kanye West made no false claims against our lord and savior George Floyd. He told the truth, as sad as it may be.
