House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday responded to Derek Chauvin’s murder conviction with a bizarre tribute to the man a jury found he killed.
The moment: Pelosi, speaking at a news conference on the steps of U.S Capitol, praised George Floyd and his family and called on the Senate to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
- “Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice. For being there to call out to your mom — how heart breaking was that? — ‘I can’t breathe,” she said.
- “But because of you and because of thousands, millions of people around the world who came out for justice, your name will always be synonymous with justice.”
Floyd’s cries of “Momma” and “I can’t breathe” while pinned under the knee of Chauvin, then a Minneapolis police officer, have become icons of a national racial justice movement inspired by his May 25 death.
The reaction: Pelosi’s remarks stunned and outraged Twitter users on the right, but especially on the left.
“What in the actual f,” wondered New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz.
“Oh, that is very bad. Very, very no,” GQ reporter Julia Ioffe said.
“thank you George Floyd….for being murdered?” asked New York Times politics reporter Astead Herndon.
“Nancy Pelosi thanks George Floyd for being murdered,” declared HuffPost editor Philip Lewis.
- “For those saying she wasn’t nefarious in her comments: this was *actually* a Freudian slip. The quiet part said out loud. George Floyd isn’t a martyr.”
“No. This is not it,” said one racial justice advocate in a reply that went viral. “Black people are not sacrificial lambs. He was killed because of injustice not as a symbol of anything.”
Left-wing pundit Hasan Piker recalled when Pelosi and other congressional Democrats knelt in kente cloth stoles to honor Floyd — a moment that elicited bipartisan cringes.
Other progressive commenters saw Pelosi’s problematic panegyric as evidence that “systemic racism” extends beyond the right and that Chauvin’s conviction had not brought justice.
- Some pointed to news reports that members of Congress feel less urgency to pass criminal or police reform thanks to the verdict.
More: Pelosi wasn’t the only prominent liberal to face backlash from the left for leaning into Floyd’s martyr image following Chauvin’s conviction.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, who has struggled to accommodate demands to “defund” the local police, was dinged for saying Floyd’s life ultimately “will have bettered our city.”
Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis took responsibility for what some deemed his NFL franchise’s insensitive Twitter celebration.
Pelosi, too, sought to clarify her controversial comments later on Tuesday.
- “George Floyd should be alive today. His family’s calls for justice for his murder were heard around the world. He did not die in vain,” she tweeted.
- “We must make sure other families don’t suffer the same racism, violence & pain, and we must enact the George Floyd #JusticeInPolicing Act.”
