Louie Verrecchio
“One of the most important conversations I’ve had this entire campaign,” Joe Biden said in his DNC acceptance speech, “is with someone who is too young to vote.”
He went on to explain, “I met with six-year old Gianna Floyd, a day before her daddy, George Floyd, was laid to rest.”
That would have been on June 8, when, according to Biden, “I leaned down to speak with her, she looked into my eyes and said, ‘Daddy changed the world.’”
Did she really? Maybe so, but it’s every bit as likely that this is just Joe Biden doing what plagiarists do.
Six days earlier, on June 2, former NBA player Stephen Jackson, who has known Floyd since they were kids, posted a video on Instagram showing Gianna sitting on his shoulders saying, "Daddy changed the world."
What are the chances that Joe Biden saw that video and appreciated the power of the moment so much that he decided to, shall we say, borrow the experience and make it his own? Based on his history, I’d say the chances are rather good.
Stephen Jackson, speaking with NBC on June 4, described the circumstances that led to the viral video:
“I didn’t teach her that,” he told TODAY, adding that the moment came after the 6-year-old saw pictures of her dad everywhere while he carried her on his shoulders amid the demonstrations.
“And she’s like, ‘My daddy’s everywhere.’ I said, ‘Yeah, your daddy changed the world.' And she just screamed it. ‘My daddy changed the world.’
It’s not entirely clear why Jackson found it necessary to deny having taught Gianna what to say, only to confirm that the child was simply repeating after him, which is essentially the same thing. You can watch the video for yourself HERE.
When it begins, Jackson is still helping Gianna rehearse the line. For exactly how long this went on before the camera started rolling is anyone’s guess. The person making the recording then prompted the child, “He did what?”
And then it happened, lightning in a bottle: “Daddy changed the world.”
It’s not quite as impactful when the set-up is known, at which point it seems rather obvious that this innocent, smiling little girl is being used as a prop by opportunistic adults. This, presumably, is why the version that was played over and over by so much of the national media was edited to begin after rehearsal time was over.
Not to be outdone by its morning show rival, Good Morning America aired its own heart tugging piece about Gianna Floyd and her “daddy,” who they described as “a man who spoiled his daughter and moved here to Minnesota so he could better provide for his family.”
The only thing missing from the segment was a proper intro: “Once upon a time…”
As CNN spun the tale, “George Floyd moved to Minnesota for a fresh start — an opportunity to better himself and to be a better father.”
The #FAKE news media’s nominee for “Father-of-the-Year,” George Floyd, moved to Minnesota from Houston, the place where Gianna was born and continues to live with her mother, when the child was at most one-year old. The year was 2014.
In addition to landing work in Minneapolis as a truck driver, a security guard and a bouncer – not exactly the sorts of jobs a man has to move 1,000 miles away from his beloved family to find – Floyd also evidently discovered an opportunity to try his hand at passing off counterfeit currency in exchange for a pack of smokes.
The NY Times, in an Op-Ed written by Marilyn Mosby, State’s Attorney for Baltimore City, attempted to rewrite the story, with George Floyd starring as a modern day Jean Valjean:
Mr. Floyd was detained for allegedly buying groceries with a counterfeit $20 bill.
Embellishments aside, stealing goods with fake money is a crime, even in lawless Baltimore. This is what led to Floyd’s regrettable encounter with police on May 25, the outcome of which is celebrated by no one but exploited by many.
According to the County Medical Examiner, the toxicology report from Floyd’s autopsy showed that he had fentanyl, along with methamphetamine and cannabinoids, in his system when he died.
This, according to the make-it-up media, rounds out the portrait of a man who “turned his life around.”
The truth is that George Floyd—a troubled man, who, according to any number of credible accounts given by those who knew him well, had some good qualities too – had a long history of drug dealing and substance abuse. He also had the kind of rap sheet that usually goes along with such things, one that includes a number of convictions for possession with the intent to distribute, multiple convictions for theft, and most recently a conviction for holding a woman at gunpoint during the robbery of her home.
While there’s no doubt that he will be missed by certain family members and friends, among the ways in which George Floyd changed the world includes the fact that he left a trail of crime victims in his wake. He also left a trail of children that were raised with the burden of having been abandoned by their father—five of them in total from various women. He also left behind two grandchildren, at least one of whom is a three-year old girl that he’s reportedly never met.
About those abandoned children…
In the many encomiums written about George Floyd since his passing, precious little is said about his presence in Gianna’s life. In fact, a detailed biography of Floyd published by the Associated Press, dated June 11, doesn’t even mention the child by name. It does, however, tell us:
Floyd kept his connection to Houston, regularly returning [from Minneapolis] to Cuney [the projects where he grew up].
When Houston hosted the Super Bowl in 2017, Floyd was back in town, hosting a party at the church with music and free AIDS testing. He came back again for his mother’s funeral the next year … Floyd was planning another trip for this summer.
And yet, conspicuously missing from the campaign to paint George Floyd as a Gianna’s doting daddy are any photographs of him with his youngest daughter beyond her earliest months. If any such photos existed, there can be no doubt that the media and their taskmasters in the Democrat Party would still be displaying them nearly non-stop in their laughable effort to portray Floyd as a family man and martyr, all with an eye toward increasing racial tensions.
As it stands, all indications are that Gianna’s “daddy,” the one that allegedly “spoiled” his youngest daughter, is a man she barely knew.
For Joe Biden, this is just the business of politics as usual. In fact, Joe is rather comfortable with make-believe biographies, including his own. As readers may recall, in 1987, during the first of his failed bids for the Democrat presidential nomination, he was caught lying about his academic prowess, claiming that he received scholarships he was never awarded and a degree he never earned.
What matters most to race-baiting hucksters like Joe Biden isn’t the truth – not about George Floyd, much less about black lives in general – rather, their priority is seeing to it that the opportunity to leverage Floyd’s unfortunate death for political gain is exploited to the very fullest. If their lies incite riots, cause cities to burn, and innocent people to be beaten and killed, so be it; it’s a price they’re willing to see all of us pay.
You see, the effort to create civil unrest and division – whether by gender, by class, or by race – lies at the very heart of the Democrat-Marxist-Globalist game plan. It’s their chosen pathway to political power. This explains why Black Lives Matter, the founders of which are self-described “trained Marxists,” played such a prominent role at the DNC Convention.
It also explains why Joe Biden was at such pains to use his acceptance speech to paint America as a place of “racial injustice,” saying that we must “do the hard work of rooting out our systemic racism.”
Yes, you read that correctly, he said our systemic racism, which is somewhat appropriate since racism is an evil with which Joe Biden is personally familiar.
This is the same man who, in 2007, described Democrat presidential primary candidate Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.” He’s also the same guy who recently told a black journalist, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
With this in mind, one wonders if perhaps he was thinking of his own deep-seated biases when he asked near the end of his speech, “Will we be the generation that finally wipes the stain of racism from our national character?”
Systemic racism. Racial injustice. A racist national character.
This is what Joe Biden thinks of America. This is what he wants us to believe about ourselves, and worse, this is what he is pleased to lead other nations to believe about the United States as well.
Unfortunately, far too many people are falling for it, but make no mistake; it’s a wholesale lie. The claim of systemic racism, in particular with regard to law enforcement in the US, is a leftwing fabrication created solely for the purpose of fomenting unrest and seizing power.
In a June 2 Wall Street Journal article, Heather MacDonald, a criminal justice expert and the author of the book The War on Cops (2016), shared a number of indisputable facts that lying liberals like Joe Biden would prefer that no one even consider.
Miss MacDonald set the record straight, writing:
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database.
Get that? A Washington Post database; one of the leftist media’s own, and yet they continue to push the false narrative about unarmed blacks routinely under police attack.
MacDonald further revealed that police officers fatally shot a total of 1,004 people in 2019, about 25% of whom were black. That ratio – which indicates that three times as many non-blacks as blacks are shot and killed by police annually – has held true every year since 2015.
This invites an important question:
Why do black persons, who account for only 13% of the population, account for 25% of fatal police shootings?
At first glance, it would appear that blacks are over-represented, and the truth is they are in a sense, but not for the reason dishonest Democrats want you to believe.
As reported by Miss MacDonald, in 2018, the latest year for which such data is available, black Americans made up 53% of all known homicide offenders in the US, and a similar percentage of all robbery offenders.
These statistics are all the more stunning when one considers that these crimes are committed almost exclusively by males, which means that roughly 6% of the total population is committing about half of all the murders and robberies in the US.
Is it racist merely to point this out? Of course not. Data isn’t racist. It’s neither leftwing nor rightwing, liberal nor conservative; it’s simply data, and in this case, it provides crucial context.
Obviously, the police only engage in potentially volatile confrontations with those who are either committing, have committed, or are suspected of committing a crime, and the fact of the matter is that more white people are killed by police per engagement than black people are, including suspects both armed and unarmed.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one of the ways in which George Floyd’s death changed the world was by calling attention to the truth about race and crime in this country, no matter how inconvenient that truth may be?
Better still, wouldn’t it be grand if it exposed the primary cause of the disproportionately high crime rate among black persons?
The most violent American cities, each of which have a very large black population, have a number of other important things in common, starting with the fact that they have been mismanaged by Democrat politicians for generations on end.
They also share the fact that their public schools – which are treated as the private piggy bank of the teachers’ unions, the same that serve as arms of the Democrat party – have been failing the citizens of these communities for decades. The math and reading skills of their students are consistently subpar, and yet every time the possibility of offering real school choice to hard working inner city families is suggested, the Democrat Party and their union benefactors protest vehemently.
What follows next is obvious, poverty. For children that receive a poor education – which is the majority of those stuck in inner city public schools – a dearth of desirable economic opportunities as an adult naturally follows.
And then there is the fact that over 70% of black babies in this country are born to unwed mothers; i.e., they grow up in a fatherless home just like George Floyd’s five children.
Speaking of black babies, in New York City, more black babies are aborted each year than are born alive! No surprise, I suppose, given that Planned Parenthood – another arm of the Democrat Party – favors strategically placing their genocide mills in predominantly black neighborhoods.
The message that this sends to the kids who grow up there (and elsewhere) is simple; human life is of little value; in fact, it’s expendable. And we wonder why the murder rates are so high in our cities?
All of these leftwing achievements add up to the perfect recipe for producing generations of downtrodden people who, all too often, turn to a life of drugs and crime.
George Floyd grew up in just such a place, one of the poorest parts of Houston, TX, to be exact. Sure, he changed the world; we all do in some way or another. But let’s be perfectly clear, liberal Democrat politics changed his world first, and not for the better.
No matter how you slice it, what happened on May 25th in Minneapolis was a tragedy. Anyone who is genuinely interested in the truth about George Floyd’s death would do well to view the police body cam footage, which, I must warn, is extremely difficult to watch.
What you will see is a man, obviously high on something, struggling with police and speaking incoherently. His companions can be heard in the background, urging him to “stop resisting” and to get in the police car.
Floyd tells the officers that he’s claustrophobic and continues to struggle. An officer tries to calm him, saying, “I’ll roll down the window.” Over the course of the next several minutes, Floyd declares many times while continuing to resist, “I can’t breathe.” This is well before Floyd is taken to the ground, at his own request, after telling officers, “I want to get on the ground.”
The methods used by the officers to restrain George Floyd once on the ground that day should be closely scrutinized; so too should the training they received, and everyone involved should be held accountable. No reasonable person disagrees with this.
While it likely comes as a major disappointment to race-baiting liberals, the body cam footage provides exactly no evidence whatsoever that racism played any part in the matter. There is absolutely no indication at all that Floyd was being treated any differently than a white, Asian or Hispanic person would have been treated had they been behaving the same way.
One cannot help but wonder why it took the Minneapolis Police Department months to release this footage, knowing damned well that it destroys the racism narrative entirely, even as their city burned at the hands of rioters.
Could it be because Minneapolis is another of those American cities that, for the past four-plus decades, has been held hostage by Democrats who rely on racial division and identity politics to win votes?
We should all hope and pray that the unadulterated, non-politicized truth comes out in this case so that authentic justice can be served – for George Floyd, for his family, for the policemen involved, and for the nation as a whole.
May all concerned receive exactly what they deserve, including those slimy individuals who are shamelessly seeking to parlay this sorrowful event into a personal political payday.
© Louie VerrecchioThe views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.