Shortly after the video of George Floyd’s death went viral in May 2020, a popular conservative pundit released an online video in which he decried Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for kneeling on Floyd for “four straight minutes,” even though Floyd, bystanders and even other police officers told Chauvin that Floyd couldn’t breathe.
This pundit pointed to video of the incident to dismiss the argument that Floyd was resisting arrest. It’s “really ugly and really bad,” he said, adding that Chauvin should be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law” and should “go to jail” and that “everyone should be on the same side of this.” Several days later, the same pundit wrote in his syndicated column that Floyd’s death at the hands of Chauvin and other Minneapolis police officers should inspire Americans to “rally” against such “obvious evil.”
That pundit was the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro. This week, Shapiro called on Donald Trump to pardon Chauvin on the federal charges he faced for causing Floyd’s death.
Even as he condemned Chauvin’s brutality, Shapiro also scolded activists, racial justice advocates and protesters.
As you might have guessed, I’ve left out some important context to Shapiro’s 2020 condemnation of Chauvin’s brutality. The problem is that the context doesn’t help — it makes it all a lot worse. Even as he condemned Chauvin’s brutality, Shapiro also scolded activists, racial justice advocates and protesters for claiming that what Chauvin did was commonplace or racially motivated. He chastised critics who argued that police brutality is systemic. George Floyd’s killer would be prosecuted, Shapiro promised, and that would prove the system works.
Shapiro seemed particularly offended at the very idea that other police officers or conservatives like him would defend Chauvin. Everyone condemned Chauvin’s actions, he assured us — from him to police groups around the country to President Donald Trump. The mere fact that so many people on the right had condemned a white cop for killing a Black man was, he argued, in and of itself proof that systemic racism is a myth.
What a difference five years makes. Now Shapiro claims that Chauvin’s trial was a farce and that his “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.” Other conservative commentators and politicians have also come to Chauvin’s defense, but Shapiro’s plea achieved particular significance after it was amplified by Elon Musk, Trump’s unofficial co-president and his largest campaign donor.
That conservative pundits like Shapiro now defend Chauvin isn’t surprising. It follows a familiar pattern after high-profile incidents of police brutality spark large protests. Those protests are rarely only about the precipitating incident itself. They tend to happen in places with long-established police abuse and racism. And as the 2023 Justice Department report documented, there was plenty of both at the Minneapolis Police Department.
The campaign to retroactively exonerate Chauvin and reverse the progress made by George Floyd protests began with a video produced and co-written by a former TV host who is married to the former head of the Minneapolis police union. It was then distributed by a far-right advocacy group that poses as a news organization. Among other risible claims, the documentary accuses the FBI of pressuring Minneapolis officials to manufacture evidence to implicate Chauvin. You know the FBI. Always looking for reasons to smear cops.
Nevertheless, the documentary slowly gained purchase in online right-wing culture, first with MAGA influencers on social media, then with far-right personalities like Megan Kelly and Tucker Carlson and finally with more mainstream, “heterodox” and right-of-center podcasts and publications.
As with most lies perpetuated by the far right, the truth is there for those who want it. In a long three-part series, I documented in detail how its producers duped gullible pundits and columnists into amplifying claims that were false, misleading or wholly made-up. But as is also the case with far-right mythology, the true believers aren’t interested in reality. They want validation. So the “documentary” is now MAGA canon.
Shapiro’s demand has nothing to do with the alleged injustice done to Chauvin. It’s purely symbolic.
The video depicting George Floyd’s murder hasn’t changed in five years. It’s as harrowing as ever. Bystanders, other police officers and Floyd himself plead with Chauvin. They tell him Floyd isn’t breathing. They cry out to Chauvin that Floyd doesn’t have a pulse. Chauvin callously ignores them. And George Floyd dies.
What has changed is the right’s posture toward racism and political violence. The gutter politics of people like Laura Loomer, Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Nick Fuentes is now part of the Republican Party’s core. People who were too racist for the first Trump administration have been rehired or promoted in the second. It’s now acceptable to tell vicious lies about immigrant groups like the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, to Venezuelans in Aurora, Colorado. Pizzagate propagator Jack Posobiec now advises Trump Cabinet officials like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and accompanies them on official trips. The sitting vice president wrote the foreword to Posobiec’s book — a book in which, right in the title, Posobiec declares his political enemies to be “unhuman.”
Donald Trump has always valorized political violence. He has spent the last decade dehumanizing immigrants, defending police brutality, celebrating the violent suppression of dissent and boasting about the bikers, soldiers and cops waiting to spill blood on his behalf should he ever need them (as they already have). The political right has now fully embraced that ethos. When Kyle Rittenhouse lugged his guns into a volatile protest zone and killed two people, those deaths were treated not as tragic but as legally justified. They were celebrated. A year after Daniel Perry was convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pardoned him at the urging of right-wing voices like Tucker Carlson. And when, in one of Trump’s first acts after his inauguration, he granted clemency to the Jan. 6 rioters, including those who violently attacked Capitol Police officers, those on the right praised the pardons and commutations. Shapiro himself acknowledges that Trump can pardon Chauvin only on the federal charges of violating Floyd’s civil rights. The more serious charges came in state court, where Trump has no clemency power. This means Shapiro’s demand has nothing to do with the alleged injustice done to Chauvin. It’s purely symbolic: Shapiro wants validation for his argument that Chauvin was wrongly convicted. He wants the president to refute the notion that Shapiro himself advanced in 2020: that Chauvin’s treatment of George Floyd was “really ugly and really bad” and “obviously evil.” When we contrast the two Ben Shapiros, five years apart, the right’s grim trajectory over that time comes into focus. The 2020 Ben Shapiro argued that the right’s near-universal condemnation of Chauvin was proof that his side takes police brutality seriously, that its support for the prosecution of a white cop for killing an unarmed Black man was proof that it isn’t racist and that Chauvin’s inevitable prosecution was proof of its belief that the criminal justice system is fair and just. The 2025 Ben Shapiro — along with much of the right — now says that Chauvin’s killing of Floyd was justified, that his prosecution should never have happened and that his conviction was political and vindictive. However flawed his arguments, the 2020 Ben Shapiro was at least eager to defend the right from claims that it is racist, oblivious to injustice or eager to embrace violence. The 2025 Ben Shapiro seems hell-bent on proving him wrong. CORRECTION (March 26, 2025, 8:10 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misspelled the first name of a podcast host. She is Megyn Kelly, not Megan.
Radley Balko
Radley Balko is a writer and investigative journalist who publishes the newsletter The Watch. 
