George Floyd Meets Rodney King

Noni Olabisi’s mural Freedom Won’t Wait was inspired by the 1992 Rodney King riots.

2,318 words

George Floyd most likely never met Rodney King. They are both dead. Their lives really “made a difference.” It would be good for them to meet. Comparatively speaking, that is.

The difference these particular agents of the feral underclass made was to turn race-rioting on a colossal scale into a form of “righteous” self-expression — but only for a chosen people. Rodney and George got the major fireworks started by just being themselves: drugged-up criminals resisting policemen.

“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made,” is attributed to Otto von Bismarck. That quip could be aptly paraphrased: “Arrests of violent criminals are like sausages, it is better not to see them made.”

Unfortunately for us, parts of one of the many arrests of Rodney, and George’s last, were captured on video. The social justice priests, never themselves having to do this kind of dirty work, recoiled in horror and put on their vestments of self-righteous outrage. They recited their hermeneutical abracadabras with a vocabulary and reasoning that transformed collective arson and looting into a form of self-affirmation and vicious criminals into civil rights martyrs. The Rodney King-inspired-rioting was one of the big steps down the slippery-slide to today’s American-style apartheid. White folks obey the law, follow the rules, behave themselves. Black folks are free to break the law, flaunt the rules, and behave without consequences because they are black and whites owe them. Think of it as “black privilege.”

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For decades, “racism” was what enlightened, well-meaning whites peddled as the reason for black underachievement, under-socialization, and an occasional orgy of looting and arson, as in Watts in 1965, Detroit in 1967, and many other American cities during the turbulent Vietnam War era.

Affirmative action, EEOC, civil rights holiness, Martin Luther King Jr. worship — all of these, and more gestures of atonement, were white-sponsored, guilt-trip “start-ups” in the 1960s. The idea was that in the business of judging black people, “the color of their skin” would give way to the “content of their character.” “Racism” was the naughty doing of white people, but with understanding and the provision of “equal opportunity,” the status of black folks would rise with their achievements, and racism would wither away.

By the 1990s it was becoming painfully obvious that the content of their character tended to be a conspicuously unwholesome reflection of the color of their skin. Skin color was the problem: white skin color. “Racism” was not the forgivable sin of white people who would repent, and then go and sin no more. It was a permanent fixture of their character — “a perverted form of the Calvinist doctrine of Absolute Depravity in contemporary social justice rhetoric,” as Paul Gottfried so aptly put it.[1]

On to the world stage stepped 25-year-old Rodney King. The content of his character was manifest in a major personal achievement that occurred two years before:

On November 3, 1989, King robbed a store in Monterey Park, California. He threatened the Korean store owner with an iron bar. King then hit the store owner with a pole before fleeing the scene. King stole two hundred dollars in cash during the robbery. He was caught, convicted, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. He was released on December 27, 1990, after serving one year in prison.

On Sunday morning, March 3, 1991, to prove that his year of “correction” at taxpayer expense was a waste of money, King decided to go for a joy ride. Speeding drunk in his Hyundai Exel on Interstate 210 down Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley at 117 MPH, two officers in a California Highway Patrol cruiser began pursuing King, who also happened to be on parole at the time. When he finally pulled over and emerged from his car, four LA policemen had arrived on the scene. An amateur videographer captured 90 seconds of them beating the hell out of King from his nearby apartment on his Sony camcorder.

The 90-second video was turned over to a local LA TV station. It went viral. The following year, the four policemen were acquitted by a jury for the beating, and one of the worst riots in American history broke out:

Widespread looting, assault, and arson occurred during the riots, which local police forces had difficulty controlling due to lack of personnel and resources. The situation in the Los Angeles area was resolved only after the California National Guard, United States military, and several federal law enforcement agencies deployed more than 5,000 federal troops to assist in ending the violence and unrest. When the riots ended, 63 people had been killed, 2,383 had been injured, more than 12,000 had been arrested, and estimates of property damage were over $1 billion . . .

Such a spectacular explosion of mindless destruction got the attention of the governing class and their minions in the so-called fourth estate, who disseminate the correct opinions about important matters. In this case, the important matter was: Who was responsible for a riot that destroyed a large part of Los Angeles and killed dozens of people?

Here are some undisputed facts, seemingly deemed unimportant, that pointed toward an honest answer that was “scrupulously” shunned.

The initiating event was the action of a former felon driving drunk in a crowded city in excess of 100 miles per hour, endangering the lives innocent people.

The 90-second video of the beating that caused the outrage and the frenzied violence captured only a small part of the arrest’s circumstances, in which King resisted the officers, and the subsequent beating.

Additionally, it is a widely-embraced norm of civilized conduct that being frustrated and upset about events out of your control does not justify criminal acts like arson, looting, and assault.

With these facts in mind, an honest answer to “Who was responsible?” might have sounded something like the following.

The riot and its destruction would never have occurred:

1. If a certain individual had not committed the following crimes: violating terms of parole, driving drunk, driving 117 miles per hour down the highway, not pulling over when signaled to do so by the police, and resisting arrest. That makes five crimes committed by a man recently released from prison for armed robbery and assault.

2. If leaders of the black community — pastors, educators, and black politicians — would have used their authority to tell black people: work hard, study hard, marry, be good models for your children, and be law-abiding citizens. Instead, it was: white people regard and treat you as inferior, and law enforcement is the racist whip they use to show you who is boss. When they use that whip, it’s okay to make a fuss about it;

3. If the mainstream media had not inflamed tensions with non-stop, tendentious coverage using the video clip:

Coverage was extensive during the first two weeks after the incident: the Los Angeles Times published 43 articles about it,^\ The New York Times published 17 articles, and the Chicago Tribune published 11 articles. Eight stories appeared on ABC News, including a 60-minute special on Primetime Live . . .[2]

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If political leaders had not given the green light for incitement to riot by publicly denouncing the jury’s acquittal of the officers. Black LA Mayor Tom Bradley immediately went on the airwaves after the announcement of the verdict to say that “Today, this jury told the world that what we all saw with our own eyes wasn’t a crime. Today, that jury asked us to accept the senseless and brutal beating of a helpless man.”[3] (Note: After the O. J. Simpson trial’s verdict, no white politician publicly announced, “Today this jury told the world that murdering your ex-wife and her friend is acceptable.”)

Instead, the message from the people who got to decide who to blame could be summed up in a single word: “racism.” Bradley, who did his best to incite the riot, formed the “Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department.” It came to be called the “Christopher Commission” because it was headed up by Christopher Warren. Warren soon after became Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, who talked about non-existent black churches that were burned down while he was growing up in Arkansas during his administration. The Commission’s role was to have the LA Police Department take the fall for the riot:

[The Commission] later concluded that a “significant number” of LAPD officers “repetitively use excessive force against the public and persistently ignore the written guidelines of the department regarding force.” The biases related to race, gender, and sexual orientation were found to have regularly contributed to excessive force use. The commission’s report called for the replacement of both Chief Daryl Gates and the civilian Police Commission.

Scapegoating was the official strategy to avoid a real “national conversation on race.” In violation of the Constitution’s double-jeopardy clause, the US Department of Justice obtained grand jury indictments of the four LA police officers on civil rights violation charges. Two of the four men went to prison.

Following the riots, King was arrested many times for charges ranging from drunk driving, trying to run over an undercover policeman, and battering his wife. King finally died from downing in his own swimming pool. A combination of alcohol, cocaine, and PCP found were found in his system and were said to have contributed to his death.

The race-grievance professionals were temporally mollified. Then came the “first black President,” Bill Clinton, and then later Barack Obama. The mainstream media gave us: “Hands up, don’t shoot!”, “White Hispanic,” “white privilege,” “The 1619 Project,” and constant reminders of the “Saga of Emit Till.” “Racism” was “in our DNA” and metastasized into a myriad of presentations that culminated in “systemic racism” with the ascension of Donald Trump to the White House. He was proclaimed to be a “racist,” along with millions of his supporters by columnists from the New York Times and Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Then, in May 2020 Groundhog Day II was released starring George Floyd as Rodney King.

Floyd was perfectly cast as King. Floyd, like King, was a very big man — over six feet tall and over 200 pounds. Like King, he was a lifelong criminal, and a violent one. Like King, he was an alcoholic and drug addict. Both men died around the age of 47 in circumstances in which they were drugged up. Both men were showered in the aftermath of their arrests with taxpayer cash (Floyd, posthumously). King sued the City of Los Angeles and was subsequently awarded $3.8 million. The city of Minneapolis paid George Floyd’s family $27 million in a civil rights, wrongful death settlement.

Some creative license was taken with this production. Floyd, unlike King, died, and he had an even more impressive rap sheet than King. But much of the script of the remake followed the original one: A short video by a bystander captured a white policeman subduing a black man who had been resisting arrest by putting his knee on Floyd’s throat. The video went viral and the riots began. The mainstream media, as it did with King, stoked the fires with the themes of “excess force by racist policemen” and “systemic racism.” It downplayed the chain of agency-causality that led to Floyd’s death: being high on a potentially lethal, illegal drug; being in the commission of a crime; and resisting arrest.

In the end, white police officers were put into prison for subduing violent criminals. Derek Chauvin, Floyd’s arresting officer, was convicted by the jury of three separate murder charges. Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill permitted the prosecution to request a greater prison sentence for Chauvin after finding that he treated Floyd “with particular cruelty.” There was to be no mistake about the message that was being sent to white policemen who attempt to arrest black criminals.

The response of the federal authorities and the mainstream media to Floyd’s death, as well as the viral video, show how far the religion of anti-racism has penetrated into the ruling class’ organs since the 1991 LA riots. The riots that broke out across the country were treated by the national media organs as “mostly peaceful protests.” They scapegoated the police and cowed the feds, who gave the BLM criminals a free reign of terror in American cities. “Black Lives Matter” signs dot the lawns of good whites out in the safe suburbs. The feckless Vice President, Mike Pence, eager to burnish his “hostility to racism” credentials, sent a condolence letter to Floyd’s family.

In the riots’ aftermath, George Floyd, plucked from the dregs of the black criminal class, became a worldwide object of veneration: tributes, statues, and all. White Americans were declared by the incoming Biden administration to be the official “enemies of the people.”

During the LA riots, with his attorney present Rodney King appealed to the public: “People, I just want to say, can’t we all get along? Can’t we all get along?” 30 years later, we all know the answer, Rodney. It’s in the pages of Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political.

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Notes

[1] Neema Parvini, The Populist Delusion (Perth: Imperium Press,2022), Kindle edition, p. 123.

[2] “US District Judge John G. Davies accepted much of the defense version of the beating. He strongly criticized King, who, he said, provoked the officers’ initial actions. Davies said that only the final six or so baton blows by Powell were unlawful. The first 55 seconds of the videotaped portion of the incident, during which the vast majority of the blows were delivered, was within the law because the officers were attempting to subdue a suspect who was resisting efforts to take him into custody.”  See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King

[3] See footnote 2, and Lew Cannon, “The King Incident: More Than Met the Eye on the Video Tape,” Washington Post, January 25, 1998. This long article provides important details on the circumstances of the arrest and the beating, including observations that Rodney King appeared to be “dusted” on the drug PCP. PCP is an arresting officer’s “worst nightmare.” Those under its influence are often wildly out of control, stronger than normal, and impervious to pain.