A lot of people have been asking why I’ve focused on the pardon of Derek Chauvin. After all, he’s convicted on both federal charges as well as state charges.
There are a few reasons.
The first and most obvious reason is that there is a likelihood he serves less time if the federal charges are relieved because federal inmates can earn good-time credit that reduces sentences. That happens at a much lower rate at the federal level than it happens at the state level. With Chauvin’s concurrent sentences, he has roughly a 22.5-year sentence on state charges and 21 years on federal charges.
But under Minnesota state sentencing structure, inmates usually serve about two-thirds of their sentence behind bars and one third under supervised release. So he would serve roughly 15 years of the 22.5-year state sentence in actual confinement under the state charges, thus less time in jail.
But the second reason I have focused on pardoning Chauvin is that when someone believed to be not guilty is languishing in prison, that is the time when the President of the United States ought to either commute his sentence or pardon him.
Chauvin is the perfect example. It is immoral to allow a person whom you believe is innocent to languish in prison just because that person was made into the face of American racism. With no evidence of such a claim, Chauvin was made the face of American racism before his trial. Every media outlet in the country decided he was guilty.
The governor of Minnesota decided he was guilty. The mayor of Minneapolis decided he was guilty. The presidential candidates on the Left side of the aisle at that time, including Joe Biden, decided he was guilty. Thus, it was necessary for the jury to convict him in order for an entire narrative structure to be created.
That was wrong.
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There are many people who object to all of this. One of those people is Steven A. Smith, a loud-mouth on ESPN. When I say loud-mouth, I mean the man does not have a volume that goes below eight on the spinal tap scale. I’m not sure that there is such a thing as a normal Stephen A. Smith voice, and I say this as a long-time viewer of ESPN. Every time Smith comes on the TV, you have to turn down your volume significantly.
Smith is very angry that I have suggested that Chauvin ought to be pardoned. He said on his show, “Would you have taken that position if George Floyd was a Jewish person? A white Jewish person? If a black cop had his knee on a white Jewish person for over nine minutes, Ben Shapiro, would you have called for that individual to be pardoned?”
First, let’s start with this: I don’t know why he believes that it would be important, even in his stupid example, for it to be a “white Jewish person” as opposed to just a Jewish person.
His claim is that I am a tribal identitarian; thus, I would be just fine with the wrongful prosecution of a cop if a Jew died under the knee of that cop — even if the cop was not responsible and the fact patterns were exactly the same — and George Floyd’s name had been Harold Bernstein (or something equivalent), and the cop had been named George Floyd, a black man.
That is intensely stupid. It’s intensely stupid for a variety of reasons. Why don’t we begin with the first? This would not have been a national news story if that were the case. The reason this entire story was national news is because of the race of the people involved. In fact, when black people were routinely beating up Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, it was covered up by the New York Times. It was not a national story.
The reality is that this was made a national story specifically because the media had a preexisting narrative of race in America, and this fulfilled their narrative, even if the facts didn’t match.
Second, if, in fact, the facts had matched, and this was a Jewish person who had been arrested for counterfeiting (for passing counterfeit bills), had been high on fentanyl with a preexisting heart condition, and then had died under the knee of a cop, would I have said that the cop was innocent?
Yes, because if the cop is innocent, the cop is innocent. That’s the way this works.
The race or religion of the pseudo-victim is irrelevant to the question of whether this person was in fact murdered or not.
Stephen A. Smith is one of the deepest racial identitarians in our society. He does it all the time. All the time. He does it when he talks about sports — all the time. If you’re talking about Nikola Jokić, the greatest basketball center of our generation, he’ll talk about how Jokić should not be included in conversations for MVP specifically because of his race.
The reason Smith makes these kinds of statements is because he is projecting. He is projecting a racial conversation where none exists. I’m a Boston Celtics fan, so the following example with Smith from just a couple of years ago springs to mind.
Danny Ainge was the chief of basketball operations for the Boston Celtics; then, Brad Stevens was elevated to fill his position. Stevens is a really good president of basketball operations. How do we know this? The Celtics won an NBA championship last year, and he’s been one of the most successful NBA executives in all the NBA over the course of his tenure.
But Smith was firmly convinced the only reason Stevens was elevated was because of his race, saying, “It’s moments like this where I get on people’s nerves, particularly white America and the NBA community specifically, because I point out it’s beautiful to be a white guy. It’s just beautiful. You know, you’re a question mark as a coach in some people’s eyes, including in Boston. But somehow, someway, you’re moving upstairs.”
It’s worth noting that “it’s beautiful to be a white guy in America” has not precluded Smith from a five-year $100 million contract for ESPN, a failing network with plummeting ratings.
The reason that Smith is exercised over the George Floyd situation is specifically because of a racial narrative that is not predicated on facts. Now, he’s projecting that onto me as being some sort of racist for suggesting the racial narrative should not predominate. This is the whole reason that Black Lives Matter was such a mistake and failure, because it was racializing of a question that was not, in fact, racial.
This is just more evidence that what I’m saying about Chauvin is true, that the reason that Chauvin is in prison right now is because he was the wrong race and George Floyd was the wrong race. Because of that, Chauvin is in prison.
Here’s the dirty little secret: It never would have been a national news story if the races had been reversed, or if both people had been white or both people had been black.
And that means the officer would have been assessed on the facts of the situation rather than the racial narrative that people like Stephen Smith were propagating.
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