I am, it is known, a fan of a good
conspiracy theory. But such a theory must hang together at its joints, and the one going around could use some patching up. To be specific: last week,
a Texas woman named Cynthia Brehm got in some proverbial hot water for sharing on
Facebook her
belief that the
murder of
George Floyd was possibly "A Staged Event" -- her theory, removed from its original posting place, but preserved on
Twitter (of all places, ironically):
I think there is at the very least the 'possibility,' that this was a filmed public execution of a black man by a white cop, with the purpose of creating racial tension and driving a wedge in the growing group of anti deep state sentiment from common people.
Now, it bears mention at this juncture that Brehm isn't just any passing
citizen. No, she happens to be the
Bexar County Republican Chairwoman!! And her proposition to this effect was echoed in this discussion by several of her regional Republican Party colleagues. Naturally, then, Brehm pinpoints the source of this supposed op as liberal
George Soros, a common
target of such suppositions.
But let's step back a bit, because Brehm isn't the only Republican tied to this story. The cop who so nonchalantly knelt on the neck of George Floyd until the latter was dead is named Derek Chauvin. And he, as it happens, owns property in
Florida (yes, there
had to be a Florida connection), such that
Orange County, Fla., voting records list Chauvin as an active voter affiliated with.... the Republican Party of Florida.
But not quite so fully affiliated with that party as an associate of Chauvin's, Bob Kroll the head of the Minneapolis police
union --
who, as it happens, spoke at a Trump rally in 2019, praising the President for delivering cops from the restraints of the previous administration. So here we have a straight line from Trump to Kroll and Kroll to Chauvin.
It is further known that Chauvin -- oh, wait for it -- worked a second job as security at a Minneapolis
nightclub which employed.... George Floyd. It has been questioned whether they actually knew each other, but in a business with at most a few dozen employees, not hundreds or more, it strains plausibility more to suggest that they
didn't.
So here's a conspiracy theory which hangs together. Donald Trump, down in the polls due to a pandemic and tens of millions of people out of work and a tepid response mostly involving massive bailouts to big corporations, chooses to
change the subject. So he uses his connection to some of his most fanatical supporters, who happen to be police force members inhabiting a "blue" city in a "blue" state. Even better, a cop who had been "let off the hook" for earlier asserted overindulgences in violence by none other than
Amy Klobuchar, thought to be a high-level name in the Vice Presidential Sweepstakes contemporaneously being run by
Joe Biden. And so Team Trump simply arranged to indeed "stage" the blatant public execution of a black man by a white (and GOP-loyal) officer, carried out in broad daylight and recorded.
Again, I'm not
creating the conspiracy theory here, simply cleaning up the holes in the one circulating the Internet and being given breath by those Texas folks and the like-minded.
Now, some have suggested that the recording by a passerby was a coincidence which could not have been planned for, but for such an act carried out in the middle of the street in urban America in 2020, it's almost a certainty that someone will record on their phone, and in fact the crime was recorded by multiple people from different angles, with the one happening to give the clearest view being the one most rebroadcast.
Others have insisted that a cop wouldn't commit so blatant a murder because of the personal consequences they would suffer. Except, naturally, for the fact that the very locus of thought motivating these protests was that cops who kill
don't suffer consequences, with the number of police involved in similar incidents and thereafter continuing in the positions without penalty is more than can be counted. Chauvin obviously didn't think, as he was kneeling on Floyd's neck, that he would end up being fired and charged for what he was doing, so why ought he have thought any more about that if the killing was planned further in advance?
And as a last detail, the protests-cum-riots themselves. There is plenty of footage of protesters more-or-less peacefully chanting slogans in the street, when for example
some clean-cut looking White male with a hammer or similar implement in one hand and an umbrella in the other suddenly appears, looking as if he just stepped out of the local
Chamber of Commerce meeting and donned a
gas mask and a
hoodie, and starts smashing windows or setting fires. And then just as quickly disappears before any authorities show up to investigate the now riotous scene. Given the speed with which protests started after the murder, it seems quite plausible that these provocateurs were positioned even before Floyd George's death, which is quite some op-planning indeed!!
UPDATE: The man with the hammer and umbrella who smashed windows and urged protesters to steal stuff was indeed
identified as a White Supremacist affiliated with the "Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood," an organization of that bent, who had previously brushed with the law for harassment of a Muslim women. So.... an element of the conspiracy theory proved?