On Tuesday, writing for Mother Jones, left-wing writer Eamon Whalen criticized far-right activist Candace Owens' documentary "The Greatest Lie Ever Sold," which purports to expose that George Floyd was never really murdered and died of a fentanyl overdose instead.
The documentary making this claim was produced by the Daily Wire, the outlet of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who has also produced the film "What Is A Woman?" and has been trying to create a right-wing version of Hollywood that boosts Republican cultural causes.
"We hear from Ron Martinelli, a forensic criminologist who tells us that Floyd’s true cause of death was a drug overdose, not asphyxiation. This goes against what pulmonologist Dr. Martin Tobin painstakingly narrated during Chauvin’s trial, when he pinpointed the precise moment of Floyd’s death," wrote Whalen. "Martinelli, like just about every talking head in the film, is presented as a straight shooter with 'no dog in this fight,' he says. Ignore the anti-Black Lives Matter book he published in 2016; forget that he told NPR at the time that BLM is 'a black nationalist revolutionary Marxist movement that is tied into a much larger international movement referred to as One World One Struggle.'"
"Owens did see a sympathetic figure in all of this: Derek Chauvin," wrote Whalen. "She speaks with Chauvin’s mother on the phone off-camera and pleads with her to participate in the film. She declines, but Owens tells us she 'felt her pain.' She speaks with retired Minneapolis police Sergeant Joey Sandberg. He describes Chauvin as levelheaded and quirky. She talks to retired Lieutenant Kim Voss, who explains that Chauvin did not have a racist bone in his body. This ignores almost everything we know about who Chauvin was. In 2017, Chauvin struck a 14-year-old boy in the head with a flashlight two times. Chauvin knelt on his back for 17 minutes as the boy’s ears began to bleed. During the trial, prosecutors on Chauvin’s case attempted to introduce seven other incidents where Chauvin held someone in a prone position or used a neck restraint for an unreasonably excessive amount of time."
According to the report, Owens also goes after the Black Lives Matter Global Network, a nonprofit group whose leaders have come under criticism for alleged personal use of activist money — but that isn't even the main focus of her ire: "As she goes through their tax forms with a fine-toothed comb, Owens is much less focused on the substantive criticisms leveled at BLM Global Network by other BLM chapters and parents of the movement’s martyrs like Michael Brown Sr. or Samaria Rice. She reserves her outrage for the revelation that trans-rights organizations received donation money from the BLM Global Network."
"What seems to eat at Owens the most is that so many people across the country had compassion," wrote Whalen. "She genuinely can’t believe that so many took to the streets on behalf of a flawed human being, a stranger. This solidarity — fighting for someone you don’t know — seems foreign to her. It can only be explained by manipulation."
