George Floyd was a career criminal who, among many of his other crimes, held a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach during a brutal home robbery.  By dying while a police officer had a knee across his shoulders, though, Floyd instantly became a Black Lives Matter and Democrat party martyr.  Now, however, the accruing evidence shows that he was not a martyr who died because of police brutality.  Instead, he was a self-destructive man who probably overdosed despite police efforts to save him. 

As Malcolm told the King in Macbeth when speaking of the Thane of Cawdor's death, "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it."  Alive, Floyd wasn't of much use to anybody; dead, he was a living symbol of the brutality that American police allegedly and constantly visit upon innocent black men.

For those not swept up in the rapture of the Black Lives Matter movement, it was immediately apparent that the statement about systematic, anti-black police brutality was a lie.  In early June, Tucker Carlson debunked the narrative about the police slaughtering black men across America:

Additionally, the toxicology report on Floyd emerged.  We learned that, in addition to severe heart disease, Floyd had massive amounts of fentanyl and methamphetamines in his body, as well as pot.  (Regarding that heart disease, to the extent Floyd claimed recently to have had the Wuhan virus, that too could have affected his heart.)

The final piece of evidence in George Floyd's death was full footage from one of the arresting officers' body cameras.  It shows Floyd resisting the police, complaining from the beginning about an inability to breathe (so that the police called an ambulance), and foaming at the mouth.

Former federal and state prosecutor George Parry looked at all the evidence about Floyd's arrest and wrote a must-read article explaining that, whatever else the police did that fateful night, they didn't kill George Floyd.  George Floyd killed himself with an accidental overdose, something no doubt made worse because of his chronic heart disease:

[T]he evidence proves that, when he first encountered the police, George Floyd was well on his way to dying from a self-administered drug overdose. Moreover, far from publicly, brazenly, and against their own self-interest slowly and sadistically killing Floyd in broad daylight before civilian witnesses with video cameras, the evidence proves that the defendants exhibited concern for Floyd's condition and twice called for emergency medical services to render aid to him. Strange behavior, indeed, for supposedly brutal law officers allegedly intent on causing him harm.

Similarly, the evidence recorded by the body cameras worn by the police conclusively establishes that Floyd repeatedly complained that he couldn't breathe before the police restrained him on the ground. As documented by Floyd's autopsy and toxicology reports, his breathing difficulty was caused not by a knee on his neck or pressure on his back, but by the fact that he had in his bloodstream over three times the potentially lethal limit of fentanyl, a powerful and dangerous pain medication known to shut down the respiratory system and cause coma and death. He also had in his system a lesser dose of methamphetamine, which can cause paranoia, respiratory distress, coma, and death.

I urge you to read the whole article here.

There's something sick, ironic, and unhealthy about the fact that our country has been torn apart, not by an innocent victim of chronic police brutality, but instead by an ex-con who overdosed in front of the police, who, by calling for paramedics, tried to save his life.  Floyd was a self-inflicted dead man walking by the time the police got to him.

This is not the first time the left has used propaganda to make martyrs out of pathetic people whose lifestyles inevitably led to their deaths.  In 1998, Matthew Shepard became a living symbol of the gay rights movement when he was found near Laramie, Wyoming, tied to a fence post, having been tortured and then beaten almost to death.  He died six days later.

Shepard's death was awful and tragic.  What it wasn't, though, was a case of ugly American homophobia taken too far.  Stephen Jiminez, a gay journalist, wanted to write a book about Shepard's martyrdom, only to discover that Shepard dealt methamphetamines and that the man who killed him was one of his occasional lovers.  You can read Jimenez's findings in The Book of Matt.

The left doesn't deal in facts; it deals in narratives.  The facts are always more interesting, more complicated, and more likely to support a conservative worldview over the one that the leftists advance.

Image: The Last Mile Of The Way, by 2C2K Photography; CC BY 2.0