THE POLICE murder of George Floyd has sparked the largest protests the US has seen in decades, and President Donald Trump, along with many conservative politicians and commentators, has criticized the protesters who have engaged in looting, arson, riots, and clashes with the police.
However, not many criticized Floyd himself or claimed that it was his own fault that a police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes.
That is, until the controversial African-American conservative Candace Owens posted a video in which she confronted activists who, in her opinion, turned Floyd into their hero and martyr of their movement, known as the Black Lives Matter movement.
"George Floyd was not an amazing person"
Owens did not justify Floyd's murder in her video message. However, she described him as a criminal who was committing a crime at the time of his arrest.
"For whatever reason, it has become fashionable over the last five or six years, for us (African Americans) to turn criminals into heroes overnight. It's something I find despicable," Owens says in the video.
"George Floyd was not an amazing person," she added and listed his criminal record, which includes several convictions for possession of small quantities of cocaine and two armed robberies, the latter involving breaking into a house and threatening a pregnant woman, also African-American, with a gun. He served several months or several years in prison for each of these crimes.
Owens then stated that it was obvious that Floyd had not "started fresh," as some media outlets portrayed it since he was last in prison in 2014. She pointed out that he'd had drugs with him, used counterfeit banknotes, and had been high on fentanyl and methamphetamine.
"Racially motivated police brutality is a myth"
This black right-wing activist has repeatedly distanced herself from Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed Floyd, claiming that she hopes Chauvin will be prosecuted and that George Floyd's family will get the justice they deserve. Still, she makes a distinction between white people who "don't pretend Chauvin is a great human being" and black people who supposedly do it for Floyd, though she doesn't substantiate her claim with concrete evidence.
In the second part of the video, Owens goes on to argue that "racially motivated police brutality is a myth," and backs it up with certain statistics for which she generally cites no sources – stating, for example, that a violent white criminal is 25% more likely to be killed by police than a violent black criminal.
"It doesn't matter what percentage of the population you represent, it matters what percentage of the violent criminal community you represent. And, unfortunately, the black community commits a disproportionately high crime rate compared to the white community," Owens stated, adding that black men, who make up 6% of the population, commit 44% of murders.
The video quickly went viral
However, as we have already written, research conducted on this topic confirms that black people are disproportionately targeted by police violence, as well as that police murders are not necessarily in correlation with community crime rates.
Her video, released on June 3, quickly went viral and was viewed more than 90 million times in less than a week.
Owens then gave an interview to the right-wing host Glenn Beck, who became known for his Fox News show filled with conspiracy theories. It is especially interesting that the video of the interview, which Beck posted on Twitter, was retweeted by Trump.
31-year-old Owens has previously gained considerable popularity among American right-wingers, as well as Trump's favor, for being a black conservative activist who fiercely attacks American liberals and the left-wing, and advocates mass abandonment of the Democratic Party by black people, for which she coined the name - "Blexit".
On May 28, she accused the "Democrat George Soros" on Twitter of having violent protesters who looted, burned and smashed things in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, "on payroll". The fact-checking site PolitiFact reported that this was not true.