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Every adult American should watch Candace Owens' new documentary.
The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM | Frontpage Mag
Every adult American should watch Candace Owens' new documentary.
Candace Owens’ October, 2022, 80-minute documentary, The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM, a Daily Wire production, is an agonizing watch. Beginning in spring, 2020, destructive and deadly riots broke out across the United States. These riots self-advertised as being all about a “racial reckoning.”
If you were a leftist living in a comfortable suburb far from the arson, looting, and public torture, you could look on and cheer the apparent downfall of the country and the value system you benefit from, and that you irrationally and hypocritically hate. If you were, like me and millions of others, living in a majority-minority, low-income city already burdened with high murder rates, 2020’s riots felt like a terrifying, demoralizing death spiral. We never knew when our homes would burn, when our grocers would be looted and permanently closed, when our fragile economies of immigrant-run mom-and-pop shops would be cut off at the knees, when our banks would shrug, give up, and leave town, when our cars would be incinerated, when our property values, already low, would plummet, when our black and Latino police officers would be shot dead, and when we would be the bystanders whose random death would add to the body count. In addition to those killed in the riots, 2,457 more black Americans were murdered in 2020 than in 2019, “marking the largest single-year increase in killings since the agency began tracking the crimes.” Anti-policing policies and attitudes and increasing lawlessness are to blame for these deaths and thousands more, research has shown.
Money is less of a concern for rich leftists than it is for those of us who are living on the edge. The poor know that poverty can be a death sentence. As we watched looters empty stores, especially stores in neighborhoods like ours, majority minority, economically weak urban enclaves, we knew: everything is about to start costing a lot more. Someone has to pay for the CVS, the Walgreens, and Walmarts being emptied out. The looters aren’t paying, so we will. The over-the-counter medications we rely on for chronic illnesses, drugs not covered by insurance, will take income away from our food budgets. Insurance rates will skyrocket, as will inflation. The little money we have will be worth less.
No, if you were a comfortable leftist living in a safe suburb you didn’t have to confront the consequences of your support for BLM. I just had a quick look at the pages of Facebook friends who posted wall-to-wall BLM support during 2020’s riots. One is now posting updates on the performance of her thoroughbred horses in various show competitions. One, who sobbed over the death of Queen Elizabeth, is now visiting Buckingham Palace. One has gone back to posting her scores in online word games. Another posts stunning photos of her expansive gardens. Their BLM passion was as short-lived as it was shallow.
Clearly, rich leftists have moved on to the next fad. We in blighted urban neighborhoods will never move on. Riots scar a city for generations. Capital, jobs, and safety depart and move to greener pastures. Newark has yet to recover from the riots of the 1960s. One estimate of the total cost of the George Floyd riots is $2 billion. That number is too low, for a few reasons. The Foundation for Economic Education explains. “Seventy-five percent of US businesses are under-insured and about forty percent of small businesses have no insurance at all. Their untold millions in losses don’t show up in the $2 billion figure … riots leave a lasting shadow on a city that haunts its economy for decades. The afflicted areas face higher insurance rates, lower property values, higher prices, reduced tax revenue, and decreased economic opportunity.” Finally, the damage done to human bodies and souls is not factored in to the $2 billion tab. An elderly man attempted to defend a property. Rioters broke his jaw. His pain and suffering, and subsequent sense of isolation and insecurity, and that of thousands of others, inevitably produces an economic drag, one it is difficult to estimate, but is no less real.
And all for nothing. Every last looting spree, every last rock thrown at the head of a beaten, bleeding white man lying helplessly in the street, every defaced synagogue, every not just ignorant but insane tearing down of a statue of a martyr to abolition like Hans Christian Heg or Abraham Lincoln, was for absolutely nothing. As Heather MacDonald, Roland G. Fryer, John McWhorter and others struggled to communicate, America is not racist, and there is no statistical support for the claim that there is an epidemic of white cops shooting unarmed black men to death for no reason. Officer Derek Chauvin was arrested four days after the death of George Floyd. He was rapidly charged, convicted, and imprisoned. In mainstream and social media, Chauvin was universally condemned, by both the left and the right. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, beloved by police officers, famous as a tough-on-crime icon, roundly and repeatedly condemned Chauvin on his WABC radio show.
Owens’ The Greatest Lie Ever Sold adds to the agony with simple truths. I want every American to watch this documentary, even though I know that watching it may well hurt.
The film opens with a quote from Malcolm X. “The Media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and the make the guilty innocent.” I differ from Owens on this point. The media includes Candace Owens, and the media includes this review. The media is vast and consumers can select what media they support.
Next we see video of Floyd purchasing cigarettes with a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. The employees in the store are clearly minorities themselves. Cup foods employee Mike Abumayyaleh explains that they only call the police if the person using a counterfeit bill refuses to pay with other tender. George Floyd, apparently, when confronted, refused to pay with a real bill. In his refusal to use real money, even when confronted, Floyd made one of many choices that preceded his death. Officer Thomas Lane’s bodycam shows Floyd in a car with his drug dealer, not cooperating with the police. A caption reports that he resisted being placed in a squad car for eight minutes. Derek Chauvin was called in as backup. Had Floyd not resisted arrest, Derek Chauvin would never have been on the scene.
The film cuts to Candace Owens’ June 3 video. Owens, a black woman, rejected worldwide hysteria turning George Floyd into a Messianic figure. “I do not support George Floyd and the media depiction of him as a martyr for black America.” She cited Shelby Steele, paraphrasing him as saying that blacks are unique in that they “cater to the bottom denominator in our society.” Jews, whites, and Latinos, she said, would not hold up a felon as a culture hero. Owens made clear that she was not defending Derek Chauvin and she hoped to see Chauvin receive appropriate justice. She said also that the family of George Floyd deserves justice for the “way that he died.” “But I’m not going to accept the narrative that this is the best that the black community has to offer.’ “It has become fashionable for us to turn criminals into heroes.” “The only way you can be black is to say that this person was amazing. I’m not going to do that. George Floyd was not amazing.” “Everyone agrees that the police officer was wrong and the police officer has been arrested. That’s not something that has been misconstrued in the media.” Any black person who does not go along with the celebration of criminals is labeled a “coon.” Condoleezza Rice, Dr. Ben Carson, Larry Elder are all, in this understanding, “coons,” because they are educated high achievers.
Any fair minded person watching Owens’ June 3 video immediately realizes two things. The first thing a fair-minded person realizes is that Candace Owens is a straight-shooter and a person of depth and conscience. She is struggling to be as fair as possible in a very difficult situation. She never says that Floyd deserved to die as he did; she says quite the opposite. She never defends Chauvin; she says he deserves “justice.” No matter how hard Owens works to state a simple truth – she does not believe that black people benefit from making criminals their heroes – the viewer knows that Candace Owens will be vilified, threatened, and damned for what she had the courage and decency to say.
