I should have come up with this quiz without a nudge from Ben Shapiro and Elon Musk, but I didn’t. I am ashamed.
Conservative gadfly and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro called on President Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, the white, former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murder in the 2020 death of George Floyd in a petition published on Shapiro’s website. (I don’t think it was murder, and I don’t think murder was ever proven, much less “beyond a reasonable doubt”.)
In his entreaty to the President, Shapiro declares, “We write to urge you to immediately issue a pardon for Officer Derek Chauvin, who was unjustly convicted and is currently serving a 22-and-a-half year sentence for the murder of George Floyd and associated federal charges.”
Shapiro accurately describes the incident as “the inciting event for the BLM riots,” which he says “set America’s race relations on their worst footing in recent memory.”
Most importantly, Shapiro says that the guilty verdict was tainted by the “massive overt pressure on the jury to return a guilty verdict regardless of the evidence or any semblance of impartial deliberation,” and that elected officials “pre-judged the outcome of the trial and took to national media to create pressure on the jury to go along with their preferred narrative.”
This, in my view, should be beyond dispute. I last posted on the way Chauvin was sacrificed in December of 2023, here. “Under these circumstances, there was no opportunity for blind justice to work, and a man is now rotting in prison because of it,” Shapiro concludes.
I concluded in part,
“The contrast between how Chauvin has been treated and the wall of protection erected around the black Capitol Hill cop who shot and killed an unarmed (white) January 7 rioter in 2021 is striking. From the beginning, the case against Chauvin lacked convincing intent, causation, or proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I keep seeing in various documentaries regarding other “true crime” stories rote statements by lawyers, prosecutors and judges about how in the United States, all citizens are presumed innocent and treated equally. If this equal treatment can be withheld from Derek Chauvin, and it has been, then it can and will be withheld by others who are deemed sufficiently unpopular. As [Professor Glenn] Loury writes, the result tells us that “the deep epistemic corruption at the heart of the affair will become, if it goes unchallenged, imperceptible to future generations, simply more evidence that the world is as the poetic truth has determined it to be.” Who will challenge it now? Who has the integrity and courage today to stand up for justice a “racist” who was profitably used as the excuse to advance such marvelous revolutionary movements as critical race theory and “diversity, equity and inclusion”?
Chauvin was convicted in two separate trials, state and federal, and is simultaneously serving a 21-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights along with a 22.5-year state sentence for second-degree murder. He has tried to appeal his conviction numerous times, including to the Supreme Court. He has no plausible avenues to pursue now except a pardon.
Shapiro argues in a video that although Trump cannot pardon Chauvin in the state murder case, it is important for Chauvin be pardoned on federal charges anyway.
“Make no mistake—the Derek Chauvin conviction represents the defining achievement of the Woke movement in American politics. The country cannot turn the page on that dark, divisive, and racist era without righting this terrible wrong,” Shapiro said in the letter. Elon Musk, not knowing when he should “tend to his own knitting,” posted about Shapiro’s petition on Twitter/X yesterday saying, “Something to think about.”
OK, I’m thinking.
Your first Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of March, 2025, is…
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