NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE A ppropriately enough, given the Aztec-priestly attitude of at least the American Left toward issues such as climate change (“Our foe-men are changing the weather!”), the U.S. just witnessed a human sacrifice.
Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao, one of four sworn officers present during the May 2020 death of George Floyd, just received a 57-month sentence for “aiding and abetting” a felony crime — the restraint that led to Floyd’s death. The minority lawman gave a passionate and biblically loaded speech before the final verdict came down, refusing to admit to guilt, which he persuasively argued that he should not feel. However, the presiding judge — liberal Gopher State jurist Peter Cahill — remained unmoved, giving Thao the stiffest sentence received by any cop involved with the Floyd death other than Derek Chauvin himself.
This was, objectively speaking, an extremely bizarre outcome, whatever one might think of the lengthy sentence in Chauvin’s own case. Even there, little doubt exists that the behavior of external players such as Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters, who flew to Minneapolis during the policeman’s trial and demanded that he be found liable specifically for murder, had some impact on Chauvin’s unusual conviction for both murder and manslaughter. And relevant new details of that case have become public knowledge following distribution of the Hennepin County coroner’s report on social media. However, no one would describe Chauvin’s knee-neck-hold restraint of the heavily intoxicated Floyd as an example of ideal policing.
Thao’s situation is very different. Thao quite literally never touched George Floyd. During the entirety of the fatal arrest, he was standing several yards away from Floyd and Chauvin, handling crowd control and directing traffic. The “abetting” charge reflects the fact that he did not physically force Chauvin — technically speaking, his superior officer — to stop restraining Floyd, or alternatively to allow unknown civilians into an active arrest scene to provide the arrestee with medical assistance. But it is difficult to imagine any on-the-job law-enforcement officer ever doing this. And, as noted, Thao’s sentence was longer than two of the three terms given to those cops who did restrain George Floyd — perhaps, one more than suspects, because of his defiant final speech to the bench.
Thao does not stand, or sit in jail, alone. Per all data, quite a few high-profile recent legal cases (mostly, but not entirely, brought from the political left) strike most citizens as partisan kabuki shows. Most obviously, Donald J. Trump currently faces no fewer than 91 separate felony charges in several different legal jurisdictions. Some of these are serious enough, even potentially crippling for the Donald: He did have those damn papers, after all. But others, such as hyper-partisan New York City district attorney Alvin Bragg’s attempt to stretch a campaign-finance law far enough to cover a years-old five-figure payment from Trump to a porn-star lover, are correctly seen by taxpayers as partisan nonsense.
Across the aisle and within the country’s second most prominent political family, the current president’s son was recently offered a deal on felony tax and handgun charges so lenient that it was derailed by tough questions from the first judge to hear it fully outlined. Per a whistleblower familiar with the full case against Biden fils, agents from the IRS and other agencies were also explicitly prevented from even investigating other aspects of the widely publicized “Hunter laptop” scandal — such as the identity of “the big guy” to whom the younger Biden made financial payoffs and his rampant enjoyment of crack cocaine and the charms of various prostitutes.
Many levels down the national power rankings, as many as 548 of the individuals arrested and charged with crimes following the 2021 Capitol riot — 1,033 total arrestees minus 485 final sentences so far — still simply remain in jail. Few on the right sympathize with rioters and public brawlers of any stripe, but it is hard not to contrast this treatment with that of the hundreds of black-clad Antifa fighters picked up during the 2020–21 Black Lives Matter riots — which did $2 billion or so in total damage — many of whom had their cases quickly tossed out of court by “blue”-city DAs’ offices.
Speaking as a political scientist, I can attest that a lack of institutional trustworthiness as blatant as what we currently seem to be seeing generally has significant consequences for a nation. To give one example: An under-discussed reality is that “J6” itself was in large part the result of nearly a decade of public and law-enforcement toleration of rioting, dating back at least to the Michael Brown riots in 2014 Ferguson. Between 2012–13 and 2020 in the United States, the African-American murder rate nearly doubled, murders overall rose above 20,000 per year, and public disorder was almost never harshly punished. Famously and absurdly, Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake once described at least part of her riot-control strategy as giving youth mobs “space to destroy.”
For that matter — while on the subject of trust, and without endorsing the man’s zany theories about “Krakens” and other sea life — one thing that potentially fueled Donald Trump’s assertions that the 2020 election was stolen from him was the reality of extensive bipartisan gamesmanship with the election rules throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Thirty states, including California, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, greatly expanded opportunities for fully healthy citizens to vote by mail in 2020.
Most also allowed more of the third-party vote-collection practices collectively known as “ballot-harvesting,” often on legally dubious grounds. Partly as a result, remarkable videos trended throughout the 2020 campaigning season — such as the famous viral clip of a self-proclaimed campaign operative from Ilhan Omar’s Minnesota congressional district driving around in a car visibly packed chock-full with ballots. “I have 300 ballots in my car right now,” he unsubtly proclaimed. “Numbers don’t lie. You can see my car is full. All these here are absentee ballots.”
This Chinua Achebe–style “failure of the trustworthy systems” is dangerous — imagine an actual conviction and jailing of Trump in NYC — and almost certainly a cause of the toxic “national divorce” talk citizens have heard for the past several years. It has to be stopped. Actually fixing the perception and reality of major American institutions will be a tough task — although the recent Ron DeSantis strategy of using executive power to simply fire people who refuse to do their job and enforce agreed-upon rules certainly represents one potential path forward.
However, such repair is also a necessary job. Should our national center in fact fail to hold, we will see many more martyrs than Tou Thao.