The War on the Woke Trumps the Truth for Many Heterodox Thinkers

Their flagship publication, The Free Press’, failure to correct an error-filled defense of George Floyd’s killer demonstrates that they are just another partisan tribe

The first time I started to see references to the documentary The Fall of Minneapolis, it was in blue-check replies to unrelated posts of mine on X—formerly Twitter—last fall. The documentary—and that’s a generous description—billed itself as an expose of a corrupt system that bowed to woke mob demands and manipulated the evidence to wrongfully convict Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for murdering George Floyd. I didn’t pay much attention, because it seemed to come mostly from white supremacist, unapologetically racist, far-right accounts. But it soon started popping up on law enforcement sites, too. Then Tucker Carlson picked it up. Then Megyn Kelly. Then "heterodox" personalities like Bret Weinstein. Before long it was all over Fox News.

The problem with responding to propagandistic projects like The Fall of Minneapolis is best captured by Brandolini’s Law: It takes hours more time, research, and writing to debunk misinformation than it takes to spread it. But then the film was amplified on the libertarian-leaning Fifth Column podcast co-hosted by my former Reason colleagues, and by Glenn Loury and John McWhorter on Loury’s podcast. (To their credit, both have since changed their minds about the documentary). Finally, it was promoted in the former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss’ publication The Free Press by a young African American writer, Coleman Hughes. Hughes has, in short order, become a star in center-right circles for suggesting that the real racists are woke progressives who, abandoning the ideal of a color-blind society, dabble in identity politics. Andrew Sullivan heaped praise on 27-year-old Hughes’ first book, The End of Race Politics, noting, “Like him, it’s methodical, clear as a bell, reasoned, and temperate.”

At this point, longtime readers and friends started sending me clips and podcast links and asking me to respond to this retconning. It finally seemed clear that there was a need for a thorough analysis of the movie. So I decided to dive in and, using Hughes’ column as a vehicle, examined the documentary’s claims.

What I found in researching the series, publishing it, and the subsequent reaction is that for all their claims to be independent-minded alternatives to a mainstream media tethered to ideology and "woke" orthodoxy, publications like The Free Press (motto: Think for Yourself) are just as guilty of the groupthink for which they consider themselves the remedy. They’re just as likely to be captured by ideology, and just as unwilling to admit their mistakes.

My series ran at about 30,000 words which, admittedly, is pretty long. But I thought it was important to not only publish a well-sourced, thoroughly documented debunking of the movie, but also provide some historical context to explain why the documentary’s effort to retroactively justify the most witnessed murder in U.S. history, and to undermine the protests, social change, and reforms that followed, was so dangerous.

Hughes is regarded as a civil, good faith public intellectual who isn’t blinded by partisan dogma. And The Free Press positions itself as an independent, freethinking antidote to partisan tribalism. But I found several factual errors—and errors of omission—in Hughes’ piece. Yet, his and, so far, The Free Press’ refusal to admit any of them, in my view, belies their branding as dispassionate truth seekers.

Here’s a quick summary of the documentary’s most glaring mistakes to cast doubt on Chauvin’s conviction, many of which Hughes amplifies:

CLAIM 1: Chauvin used a restraining technique on George Floyd that the Minneapolis Police Department specifically taught. Therefore, Chauvin could not have committed a crime in using it to subdue Floyd.

The technique in question is called the Maximum Restraint Technique—MRT. The evidence offered by Chauvin’s defenders that this technique was taught by the Minneapolis Police Department basically consists of one slide.

At first blush, the mockup in the slide does appear to show an officer kneeling on a suspect. But one key difference is that in the slide the officer’s weight is mostly on his back foot. But Chauvin’s weight was on Floyd’s neck. Also, the slide includes text warning officers that putting their weight on prone, handcuffed suspects can be fatal. Most importantly, it recommends that MRT is to be used only for a couple of minutes at the most until a restraining device called a hobble—a sort of ankle brace, in many cases—is put on the suspect. Then, the suspect is supposed to be rolled onto his side into the "recovery position" as soon as possible.

But Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s back and neck for nine minutes, including nearly three minutes after Floyd lost consciousness, without putting a restraint on him or rolling him to his side. He ignored warnings from bystanders, other officers, and Floyd himself that Floyd couldn’t breathe, even continuing to kneel on Floyd for another three minutes after Floyd lost consciousness.

Yet Hughes tells his readers that none of what Chauvin did is a departure from training instructions. He even failed to offer a link in his piece to the MPD manual that lays this out. (He told me in a private email that this was because he didn’t know how to upload and link a PDF without revealing his email address!)

The documentary—though not Hughes—also repeatedly claims that Minneapolis police brass "lied" when they testified at Chauvin’s trial that they weren’t trained in MRT. This too is false. The officers testified that MPD didn’t train them in whatever technique Chauvin was using on Floyd.

CLAIM 2: Floyd’s death was likely caused by a drug overdose or heart disease—not Chauvin’s restraining technique.

The documentary and other Chauvin defenders make this argument explicitly. But Hughes takes a "just asking questions" approach, throwing out claims about Floyd’s "potentially lethal" fentanyl levels and heart disease to argue that both raise reasonable doubt about whether Chauvin’s actions caused Floyd’s death.

In truth, Floyd’s fentanyl level was lower than that of the average person convicted of driving under the influence of opioids—in cases that did not result in an overdose death. It was 50% lower than the average overdose death. The form of fentanyl in his blood was also mostly norfentanyl, which is what the body produces after metabolizing the drug. Overdoses occur before metabolization. The symptoms of an opioid overdose are lethargy and unresponsiveness. Floyd was active and agitated in the minutes before his death.

As for heart disease, it’s certainly possible that Floyd’s condition made his heart weaker. But the law in these circumstances is that you take your victim as you find him. And as pulmonologist Martin Tobin told the jury, even a healthy person would likely have died if subjected to what Chauvin did to Floyd.

CLAIM 3: The official autopsy on George Floyd doesn’t mention that Chauvin’s knee caused asphyxia or any "life-threatening injuries"—so Chauvin’s use of MRT could not have killed Floyd.

The prosecutor argued in the trial that Floyd died of positional asphyxia, a condition in which the diaphragm is restricted to the point of only allowing for shallow breathing. Shallow breaths don’t move air deep enough into the lungs for the body to exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide. But positional asphyxia doesn’t typically leave any telltale signs of injury and doesn’t restrict the airways in a manner that choking someone with your hands or a ligature would. So it isn’t surprising that the initial autopsy report didn’t find injuries or mention asphyxia. It wasn’t until the medical experts for the state looked at the cell phone footage of onlookers and body cam video of Floyd and compared his body language and actions to the autopsy report that they concluded he had died from a homicide.

The threat of positional asphyxia has been taught in police departments around the country since the 1990s. But Hughes never mentions the term in his column—an example of an error of omission. (He refers to asphyxia more generally, and only in the context of disputing how long Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s neck, as opposed to his back!)

In other words, he failed to inform his readers of one major piece of evidence that led to Chauvin’s conviction.

CLAIM FOUR: The only official autopsy on George Floyd performed by the only official medical examiner does not implicate Chauvin.

Hughes spends a lot of word count building up Andrew Baker, the official medical examiner, as the only person qualified to have an informed opinion about Floyd’s death. The documentary goes a step further and claims that Baker never even mentions the word "homicide" in his autopsy report, which is supposed to cast “reasonable doubt” on Chauvin’s culpability.

This reveals an ignorance about the autopsy and death investigation process and the difference between cause and manner of death. Baker’s original report was strictly a medical autopsy that documented his findings in the autopsy room and reached a conclusion about cause of death. Cause of death is the medical process by which someone died. Manner of death is the mechanism of death–whether a death was a homicide, suicide, or accident. Baker didn’t reach a conclusion about manner of death until after viewing the videos. He subsequently issued a supplement to the autopsy report concluding that Floyd’s death was a homicide. Neither Hughes nor the documentary mentions this part of the official autopsy.

Hughes also fails to inform his readers that Baker testified for the prosecution at Chauvin’s trial—not the defense.

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But Hughes is content not only with mischaracterizing the evidence against Chauvin to cast doubt on his conviction—he also misleadingly portrays the documentary maker, Liz Collin, a former local news anchor in Minneapolis, and her husband, Bob Kroll, former president of the Minneapolis police union, as victims of woke mobs who “intensively canceled” the duo. He implies that Kroll and Collin both lost their jobs for telling the truth. As Hughes tells it, Kroll was canceled because he bravely defended the four police officers who arrested Floyd, highlighted Floyd’s long rap sheet, and condemned the rioters protesting Floyd’s death.

Hughes fails to alert his readers to Kroll’s own long rap sheet, though. Kroll had a long and sordid history of police brutality and misconduct, including allegations of racism. Activists demanded his resignation not to censor him, as Hughes maintains, but because they were outraged that someone with his record should be in his position. As head of the Minneapolis police union, Kroll could have pushed for transparency, accountability, and discipline in the city’s police department. Instead, he was part of the problem. The circumstances under which Collin left the station haven’t been fully aired—but one allegation is that she was reporting stories about the police without disclosing her relationship to Kroll.

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The reaction to my series was encouraging. Dozens of people tell me that it changed their mind about the documentary. McWhorter and Loury also released a podcast in which they walked back their endorsement of the film. But the reaction from Hughes and The Free Press has been less encouraging.

After the last installment of the series went up, the only reaction from Hughes and Weiss was to invite me to their podcasts to debate. I’m not opposed to debating issues like police reform or systemic bias in law enforcement. But when a publication is credibly accused of serious factual errors and reverently amplifying clear falsehoods, the proper response is to either acknowledge and correct the mistakes, or to explain why a correction isn’t necessary. It is not to invite the person who points out the mistakes to your podcast.

I, finally, reluctantly agreed yesterday to discuss these issues with Hughes on a podcast hosted and moderated by Reason magazine. I previously covered the criminal justice system for Reason and it is serious about police brutality. However, it has also been supportive of Hughes’ work on identity politics, so it seemed like a fair-and-balanced forum.

But far from making any concessions, Hughes doubled down. He insisted that nothing in his column of any material importance was false or misleading. He dismissed my criticisms as mere points of honest disagreement worthy of debate. When asked if he’d change anything if he could write the column again, he said that he’d make it longer so critics like me couldn’t take him out of context.

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But the Hughes piece is not the only deeply misleading piece about crime and policing in The Free Press. Last week, it published another problematic piece by Joe Nocera, a business journalist and former New York Times columnist, about the Democratic primary for district attorney in Austin, Texas.

Nocera claimed that under José Garza, a reform-minded progressive incumbent, Austin had experienced a substantial increase in all major crime categories. But from 2021 to 2023, per the Austin Police Department’s own statistics, murder, rape, robbery, arson, and burglary were down. And while aggravated assault was up, the increase was hardly “substantial.” Some crimes did go up from 2020 to 2021, Garza’s first year. Then again, most crimes went up from 2017 to 2020, during the term of Garza’s predecessor.

It’s doubtful that these increases were due to policy; rather, they were likely the result of whatever factors drove up crime all over the country—in both rural and urban areas, red and blue states, and in jurisdictions with progressive prosecutors as well as law-and-order types. If Garza’s policies really were unleashing rampant lawlessness in Austin, we would expect to see a spike in crime as his policies took effect. Instead, crime largely fell over the last two years, as it did in the rest of the country. I wouldn’t credit Garza for the fall. But you can’t blame him for an increase that started under his predecessor but refuse to credit him for a drop on his watch.

Nocera also places significant weight on the fact that, according to FBI data, Austin’s crime rate is 40% higher than the national rate. But since there’s always more crime where there’s more density, the crime rates of large cities are always higher than the national average. It’s also worth noting that the FBI changed its reporting methods in 2022, and many police departments no longer report crime data to the agency at all. Consequently, those that do—and Austin is one of them—are likely to see an increase in their relative crime compared to the rest of the country.

In 2020, Republican Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick laughably called Austin “one of the most dangerous cities in America.” Austin is actually remarkably safe. At the end of 2022, two years into Garza’s term, Austin’s crime rate was half that of Houston, whose district attorney is far from a progressive. It was also about 30% lower than Dallas, and 40% lower than San Antonio.

Nocera, at one point, concedes that Austin was named one of the 15 safest large cities in the country, but instead of letting that result challenge his article’s overarching thesis, he bizarrely laments that Austin “ranked last” on that list. That study considered 265 cities, and deemed Austin the 15th safest. The city only “ranked last” in light of the authors’ arbitrary decision to cut the list off at 15.

When Weiss, The Free Press’ editor-in-chief, promoted this piece on X claiming “crime in Austin has soared under a progressive DA,” a community note was affixed to her post. It helpfully reminded readers that, actually, violent, property, and total crime had seen a decrease from 2020 (the year before Garza took office) to 2023. That’s perhaps why voters didn’t get taken in by the propaganda about his crime record and reelected him by a 2-1 margin.

Incidentally, during this contest, Garza was outspent 12 to 1 by a challenger funded by billionaires, tech interests, and private equity moguls. One mailer sent to Austin residents claimed Garza was “filling the streets with pedophiles and killers,” an attack so demagogic that Garza’s primary opponent publicly denounced and disavowed it. Why didn’t The Free Press, which cites “doggedness” and “fearlessness” as its editorial calling cards, consider it important to investigate the shadowy interest group, not even registered in Texas, that stoked fear and division in one of the safest cities in the country?

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The Nocera piece’s attacks on a progressive district attorney and Hughes’ piece amplifying a clearly propagandistic documentary puts The Free Press squarely within the new genre of heterodox punditry. Broadly speaking, this is the cadre of pundits and thought leaders that Weiss once dubbed the "Intellectual Dark Web.” They aren’t MAGA, but, by their own admission, they are just as skeptical of mainstream media outlets and "wokeism" as of Trump—although they arguably tend to spend a lot more time and energy fighting the former than the latter. The Free Press has positioned itself as the group’s flagship publication.

The heterodoxists bill themselves as skeptics who are immune to the trappings of tribalism, partisanship, and the status quo. They alone can see through all the cant and pieties and get to the real truth. They believe that only those with an appropriate loathing of wokeism and a sneering contempt for consensus can see things for what they really are. They dislike elites and are suspicious of experts.

This is how someone like Hughes, who writes and debates about race in the U.S., can become an overnight expert on a complex case about police brutality and, without an iota of humility, second-guess its verdict by discarding reams of expert witnesses, forensics, and other evidence based on a conspiratorial documentary. Or how a business journalist like Nocera can make confident pronouncements about crime and policing. But a posture that approaches issues from the standpoint of overturning conventional wisdom and offering edgy takes isn’t any more conducive to truth seeking than what the heterodoxists rail against, which is perhaps why these pieces are so often riddled with errors and misunderstandings. Yet, for them, the mainstream media’s lapses are part of an agenda, while their own lapses are just part of the debate.

This attitude is deeply destructive of any hard-won social consensus for sensible reforms to fix rampant problems and injustices. I’ve observed this up close and personal on criminal justice issues, the beat I’ve covered for 20 years.

From the mid-2000s to about 2015, there was a pan-ideological consensus that the criminal justice system was deeply flawed and in need of repair. There were still law-and-order types on the right who favored a tough-on-crime approach, but there was an emerging coalition that acknowledged the systemic problems in policing and that mass incarceration was doing far more harm than good.

Then came Trump. His retrograde views on crime and public safety seemed perpetually stuck in the early 1990s. Despite inheriting the lowest homicide rate of any president in the era of modern crime statistics, Trump campaigned as if the country had been overcome by violence and anarchy. He cemented that view in his American Carnage inaugural address.

Initially, after he assumed office, the strength of the existing consensus around the need for sentencing and policing reforms forced even him, despite his hawkish law-and-order instincts, to sign the First Step Act. The law, commendably, took a small but meaningful stab at sentencing reforms by giving judges flexibility to hand less harsh sentences than statutorily required.

But then MAGA sucked criminal justice, incarceration, and policing into the broader culture war, and the coalition for reform began to splinter. Trump himself tried to undermine First Step, and later told aides that he regretted the law.

Since then, the consensus for reform has unraveled considerably and heterodoxists, unfortunately, have played a part. They have turned screeds against progressive reformist prosecutors who are allegedly turning many cities into all-but-uninhabitable cesspools of crime and filth into a genre all its own. That’s what partly paved the way for the absurd spectacle of Tucker Carlson jet-setting to Russia and holding its cities as an example for the woke-captured United States.

Incidentally, California has been a particular focus of heterodox mythmaking. For example, they have used the Golden State as an example of a national surge in shoplifting due to progressive polices. They claim that a 2014 ballot initiative effectively "legalized" shoplifting with progressive prosecutors refusing to even prosecute the crime. But there is no statistical evidence of a shoplifting epidemic. The panic was driven by viral videos and data from national retailers that the retailers themselves have since acknowledged was wrong. And despite what you may have read, that California law—which raised the minimum value of shoplifted merchandise needed to charge a felony—had little impact on shoplifting, and is still lower than the minimum in states like Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming, as I have reported.

It isn’t that all the heterodox types have gone full MAGA. It’s just that they seem to loathe racial and social justice activists much more than they oppose Trump, or favor reform. So any time a counter-narrative emerges, they tend to ditch their avowed skepticism and latch onto it.

In the end, despite heterodoxism’s claims to be a tribeless, iconoclastic way of thinking that gives it some special powers to get to the truth, it’s really just a different sort of ideological tribe, with the same biases, preconceptions, and vulnerability to audience capture as any other.

Once you’ve let your opposition to orthodoxies define you, you’re just another orthodoxy.

An earlier version of a sentence, above, said “police officers.” It has been changed to “police brass” for accuracy.

© The UnPopulist, 2024

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