Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted in April 2021 of murdering George Floyd, but on Tuesday night Fox News host Tucker Carlson insisted that Chauvin didn’t murder anyone, complaining that “we have to pretend” like he did.
Speaking to Fox colleague Laura Ingraham, who was in Minneapolis and had spoken with a pair of police officers, Carlson asked about conditions in the city more than two years after the protests and riots in the wake of Floyd’s murder.
“I was stunned at how bad it is in certain parts of Minneapolis,” Ingraham said, adding later that the situation was “all too predictable.”
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“[In the] 3rd Precinct, [officers] are still operating out of a school,” she said. “They don’t even have a permanent presence, a permanent building structure in Minneapolis to this day. This is like 26 months after Floyd was killed, and you can feel it in the officers. They are trying to put on a brave face and they are great people.”
Carlson then suggested that companies like Nike, Google, and Facebook should help rebuild the city since, as he put it, “big companies pay for” the riots that occurred in May and June 2020.
Ingraham responded that some have helped, but small businesses “get the short end of the stick.”
“I am shocked,” she continued. “One diner I’m going to take people to—Derek Chauvin actually worked… in the club above it—that was burned to the ground. So I go to that same location and I said, ‘Where is the rebuild?’ It’s just weeds, a lot of weeds now. Nothing, nothing has been done. Shocking.”
Carlson, who claimed last February—months before the Chauvin verdict—that Floyd’s death was an “utter lie” and a “carefully concocted myth,” apparently still hasn’t accepted the verdict.
“So they destroy the city, they put this cop in prison for the rest of his life, we all have to pretend he committed murder—which he didn’t, but whatever, we have to pretend it—and then they leave and they move on to the next thing to destroy,” Carlson whined.
Earlier in the segment, Carlson insisted that “the medical examiner apparently determined” that Floyd died from a fentanyl overdose, when in fact the Hennepin County medical examiner and experts hired by Floyd’s family each determined that his death was a homicide.
Derek Chauvin, who is serving a 22-1/2-year sentence for Floyd’s murder, also pleaded guilty last December to federal charges of depriving Floyd of his civil rights, resulting in a 21-year sentence to be served concurrently.
