Show notes
Writer and podcast host Coleman Hughes published a column in The Free Press in January entitled, "What Really Happened to George Floyd?" in which he analyzes a documentary called The Fall of Minneapolis, which has racked up more than 6 million views on YouTube and Rumble. The documentary makes the case that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin may have been wrongly convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020. In his column, Hughes ultimately concluded that it's time for Americans to "consider the possibility that Chauvin was not a murderer, but a scapegoat." Later in January, investigative journalist and former Reason staffer Radley Balko began publishing an extensive three-part rebuttal on his Substack The Watch, which he concluded earlier this month. It's entitled "The Retconning of George Floyd," and he takes apart errors and what he says are outright lies in the documentary. He also heavily criticizes Hughes and The Free Press for failing to consult experts or include research that he says could've helped them avoid serious mistakes. Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe hosted Hughes and Balko on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions. Balko argued that Hughes and The Free Press missed or misrepresented key facts about the killing of Floyd and Chauvin's trial. Hughes defended his skepticism of the felony murder verdict. They also discussed their opposing views of the protests and police reforms that followed Floyd's death. Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher. Sources referenced in this conversation: "What Really Happened to George Floyd?" The Free Press "The Retconning of George Floyd," The Watch Minneapolis PD Use of Force Policies, The Law of Self Defense Autopsy of George Floyd Minnesota Felony Murder in the Second Degree, Sec. 609.19 MN Statutes Police Executive Research Forum staffing National violent crime rates, 2012–2022 50 years of officer-involved shooting data, Peter Moskos Department of Justice report on Minneapolis Police Department post–Floyd killing This is a rush transcript. Please check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Zach Weissmueller: Who's right about the death of George Floyd? Just asking questions. And on this show we do ask many questions, but we also try to provide answers when we can, and hope to today. I'm Zach Weissmueller, senior producer for reason, and my co-host is Reason Associate Editor, Liz Wolef. Hey, Liz. Liz Wolfe: Hey, Zach. Weissmueller: Today, we're hosting a conversation between journalist Radley Balko and writer Coleman Hughes. Hughes published an article in The Free Press in January called, "What Really Happened to George Floyd?" in which he analyzes a documentary called The Fall of Minneapolis, which has racked up more than 6 million views. The documentary makes the case that police officer Derek Chauvin was wrongly convicted of Floyd's murder. Hughes ultimately concludes that it's time for Americans to consider the possibility that Chauvin was not a murderer, but a scapegoat. Balko disagreed strongly and began publishing an extensive three-part rebuttal on his Substack "The Watch". A series called the retconning of George Floyd dismantles the purported errors and outright lies in the documentary, and also heavily criticizes Coleman and The Free Press for failing to consult with experts or include research that Balko says could have helped them avoid serious mistakes. I'm grateful to both of them for agreeing to come on our show. I am fans of both of their work, and glad that we're here to have what may at times be a difficult conversation, but I hope it will also be a productive one. Radley, let's start with you. This documentary dropped in November 2023, but it seems to be Coleman's column in particular that really provoked you to respond. Why? Radley Balko: Yeah. Well, I think it's because The Free Press is considered sort of a skeptical non-partisan publication, or at least it positions itself that way. And I don't believe Coleman and I have ever met personally, but we have a lot of colleagues and friends in common who speak highly of him. And I had watched this documentary gain a lot of momentum on the far right and among police advocates, law enforcement advocates. And it wasn't until it started gaining momentum in right of center, libertarian, centrist circles… I know the Fifth Column Podcast talked about it in slightly skeptical, but mostly in a way of endorsing a lot of its claims, or at least giving credibility to them. And then Coleman, I think, really pushed it into the mainstream. And a lot of people who have read me for a long time started sending me Coleman's column and asking if I had a response to it. When the series went up, Coleman's response and Barry Weiss' response in The Free Press was to basically to invite me onto their podcast to discuss it. And I agreed to do this podcast because I have history with Reason. I will say though, the response to someone pointing out factual errors and errors of omission and publishing something that's, I think, deeply misleading is not to debate and discuss those issues. It's to either issue a correction or retraction, or to explain why you don't think a retraction or correction is necessary. And so far, the first installment of the series went up well over a month ago, I think the last one was 10, 12 days ago, and there hasn't been a response. So I'm happy to discuss policing issues. I debate people who disagree with me all the time. I'm not really interested in having those discussions in the absence of good faith. And I think to establish good faith, or as a demonstration of good faith, I think I need The Free Press or Coleman to address what I think are clear errors in the column Before we go any further. So there's the maximal restraint technique problems in Coleman's column that amplify what I think are clear errors in the documentary. There are mistakes about positional asphyxia, the idea that that because it's not mentioned in the original autopsy report, it couldn't have been the cause of death, which is not true at all. Coleman really builds up Andrew Baker, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy on George Floyd, but he never mentions that Baker said that Floyd samples was homicide and testified for the prosecution at Derek Chauvin's trial. When Coleman talks about Bob Kroll, the former union head, and his wife, Liz Collin, who is the narrator and produced the documentary, he talks about how they were intensively canceled but doesn't mention Kroll's long history of abuse and allegations of racism and abuse. I think you could very plausibly argue that that's an error of omission because Kroll was in a policymaking position. He was head of the Minneapolis Police Union. He formulated a lot of the policies that allowed Minneapolis police officers to have bad apples, the worst apples to continue to abuse people without consequence. It was the union negotiated contract that allowed for a lot of those policies. Then finally, he talks about Floyd's health. We've had exchanges on Twitter about this. He claims he'd never wrote that Floyd died of an overdose or some sort of heart condition. He certainly implies that those contributed to his death, or those might have contributed to his death. And we know, and we can talk to addiction experts and emergency medical technicians, they'll tell you that the symptoms that Floyd was exhibiting or the way he was behaving in the video that we see are not consistent with somebody who's dying of an overdose or in the midst of an opioid overdose. You basically become lethargic and sleepy, and you basically just kind of drift off. Floyd was animated. He was agitated. And multiple people who write about addiction have said that there's no evidence that that Floyd was in the midst of an overdose. Coleman also writes that it had fatal levels of fentanyl system, and this is a claim we've seen often from the right and from law enforcement sources. And it came out in trial that is levels of fentanyl were actually below the average level of people who were brought in for DWI charges, for driving while under the influence of opioids in non-fatal cases. So his fentanyl levels were lower than those cases. And there's also evidence that the fentanyl that was in his system was metabolized fentanyl. When you die of a drug overdose, it's shortly after you take the opioid, the fatal amount. If most of the opioid in your system has been metabolized, that's a good sign that you aren't in the midst of an overdose. In his ratio of fentanyl to norefentanyl, which is the metabolized form was one point something, I think the average fatality, is over nine. So he had high levels of fentanyl compared to someone who has never taken opioids, but people build up a resistance to opioids when they take them regularly. And so there is no real fatal level of opioids. Jacob Sullum has written a lot about this for a reason, about people who take high dose opioids for chronic pain. Some of them take 20, 30 pills a day, an amount that would pretty much instantly kill any us, but because they built up a resistance… And we know that Floyd had a lifelong drug problem. So I think these are the issues that I think need to be addressed, and I hope that Coleman and The Free Press will address them directly. We were talking before Coleman came on here. I've been in journalism for 20 years. I've made a lot of mistakes over the course of my career, and I've found that when you acknowledge them and correct them, there's a hesitancy, I think to run corrections because people think it erodes their credibility, but I think it actually adds to your credibility when you admit to mistakes because we're all human. We all make mistakes. But so far I think the reaction, I think has been a little bit disappointing. Wolfe: That makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate you laying out the case, Radley. You laid it out very well in the three-part series, but I also think that this is a pretty concise version for those who aren't going to read the entire thing. Coleman, is there anything that Radley has changed your mind about? Coleman Hughes: Well, I want to first address some of the things that were said there, if you don't mind, at least in the abstract. Maybe we can later go point by point and maybe in more detail, but broadly speaking, The Free Press piece that I wrote was intended to be op-ed length, ended up being a little over 2000 words. And of necessity, I triaged information. Radley's response has been something like 30,000 words if you combine everything, and I think that should be the first signal for people that what you're talking about here aren't simple factual matters, right? A simple factual error. So for example, Radley made a minor and insignificant error just by getting my age wrong. It's correctable in a single sentence. The disagreements that we have here are generally matters of actual debate. And so I'm glad that we're doing this, but the fact that The Free Press hasn't issued a correction is not because we are hesitant to admit simple errors here. Radley has done a kind of masterpiece of misreading of my Free Press piece. And I really encourage everyone to just actually read it because it's not very long. And there are just many claims and interpretations of it that make very little sense to me and things that I absolutely don't claim and never wrote. So for example, the idea that Floyd died of an overdose, you'll find that just nowhere in my piece. Wolfe: But there are two suggestions. I want to engage with this with some depth. There are two suggestions, I believe, in the text of your piece, Coleman, that do mention possible fentanyl overdose, which I don't know, that sure seems like a suggestion that that is the explanation or is a possible explanation. Hughes: So let me back up. OK? In a normal debate each side has a symmetric task, right? I try to summon more evidence than you that say, "Guns are good." You try to summon more evidence than me that "Guns are bad, right?" And to bring up remote possibilities constitutes a kind of grotesque just asking questions routine, not to name check the show. But in the context of a criminal trial, the task assigned to each side is highly asymmetric on purpose, right? It's not enough for the majority of evidence to indicate guilt, and it's not even enough for guilt to be highly and substantially more likely to be true because the clear and convincing evidence standard. It has to be the case that there's no other reasonable explanation that can come from the evidence presented at trial. That's the key concept of reasonable doubt. Now, when you make the debate asymmetric in that way, what would amount to a kind of "just asking questions" routine in another context becomes a perfectly legitimate line of thinking. Now, I want to actually zero in on what I said about fentanyl because I did not use the word overdose, I don't think anywhere in the column. What I said is that he had a potentially lethal dose. Now, the average dose found in someone that dies of fentanyl is 25 nanograms per milliliter. Floyd was found with 11, and overdose cases have been seen as lowest three. So he's around the 25th percentile of what you would expect if it were an overdose death. So to call it a fatal dose would suggest that anyone would die of it. That's why I didn't call it a fatal dose. But to call it a potentially fatal dose, it's a statement of fact. Now, in the context of what I was actually saying, and you can go back and read the column, I say that it's not unreasonable. I'm always speaking and talking through the language of reasonable doubt, not through from the point of view of giving a definite version of events, right? So I say that it's not unreasonable to think that Chauvin killed him, right? I actually say this in the column. Where Radley takes me to be saying that Chauvin's actions definitely didn't kill him, in fact, I say the opposite. I say it's not unreasonable to think that, but it's also not unreasonable to think that there's another explanation of events here. And overdose was not actually the claim there. The claim was that it's not unreasonable to think that he died of a mix of pre-existing conditions, drugs in his system, and adrenaline caused by the arrest, which was, when push to shove, that was Andrew Baker's theory of the death. And so overdose appears nowhere. The idea that he could not possibly have died of positional asphyxia because it didn't appear in the autopsy, again, just appears nowhere in my column. In fact, I say it's not unreasonable to think he did die of Chauvin's actions. That's almost an exact quote. And so there's a kind of masterpiece of misreading of my column here, and I think not understanding that I'm looking at it from a reasonable doubt perspective rather than a normal debate is at the core of that misreading. Wolfe: Radley, how do you look at that? Balko: This is kind of the way Coleman has reacted to this entire exchange from the first post that I put up. He is literally just asking questions. That's what the whole column is. It's designed to sow doubt about what actually happened and to make people think that Chauvin was somehow railroaded. But there are clear factual errors. For example, he says that the maximal…
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