On March 21, a 26-year-old black man named Dexter Reed was pulled over for a seatbelt violation by four plainclothes Chicago police officers. When Reed refused to comply with orders to roll down his window, the officers surrounded the vehicle and instructed Reed to unlock the doors; in response, Reed pulled out a gun and began shooting, hitting one officer in the forearm. The police returned fire, and Reed was killed. The entire interaction was captured on police body cameras, the footage from which was released to the public last week. The Chicago Office of Police Accountability, a law-enforcement civilian oversight board, confirmed after a review of the footage that Reed “fired first,” and that a handgun was recovered from the front passenger seat of his car.
Reed’s killing set into motion a familiar ritual. Community activists called for the scalps of the officers involved in the shooting. Left-wing activist groups and local legislators — including Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson — rushed to express their shock and outrage at the scourge of police brutality and systemic racism. Protests mobilized on the streets of Chicago, clashing with law enforcement and blocking an intersection outside a police station. (Reed’s brother was arrested at the protest.) Tearful family members recounted stories of Reed’s angelic innocence to a swarm of sympathetic journalists, and they appeared alongside local activists at a press conference, brandishing Justice for Dexter Reed! signs:
The media, never one to miss the opportunity to fan the flames of racial hostility, went to great lengths to portray Reed as a faultless victim — another tragic casualty of a racist, unjust system. “Seat belt violation ends with a Black man dead on Chicago street after cops fired nearly 100 bullets,” declared a USA Today headline. “Deadly Chicago traffic stop where police fired 96 shots raises serious questions about use of force,” the Associated Press reported. A Washington Post piece, titled “Police fire 96 shots in 41 seconds, killing Black man during traffic stop,” opted for a photograph of the 26-year-old at his high school graduation, rather than a mugshot from a prior arrest just five months ago. (As did the New York Times.) From the opening paragraphs of the Post report, one could be forgiven for thinking that Reed was mercilessly executed in cold blood:
Dexter Reed’s mother remembers the last time she saw her son alive. “Mom, I’m going for a ride,” he told her, before heading out in the car that he had purchased just three days earlier.
Reed, 26, was killed that same day, when tactical-unit police officers fired 96 bullets at him within 41 seconds, according to Chicago’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability, or COPA, which investigates allegations of police misconduct and police shootings. “He was just riding around in his car,” Dexter’s mother, Nicole Banks, told Fox 32 Chicago on Tuesday, as she broke down in tears. “They killed him.”
It wasn’t until the eighth paragraph of the piece that the Post saw fit to inform readers of the proximate cause of the shooting — i.e. that, according to the civilian oversight review, Reed belligerently refused to follow orders, drew a (unlawfully possessed) handgun, and began shooting at police.
Of course, the widely repeated shibboleth about police brutality toward black men is, as an empirical matter, nonsense. According to the Washington Post’s own police shootings database, a total of 162 unarmed black men have been shot by police from 2015 through 2023 — an average of 18 a year, in a nation of more than 330 million. Well over 2,000 police officers were killed in the line of duty over the same time period, according to the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund.
But that hasn’t prevented the mass mobilization of left-wing forces, based on the fraudulent premise of systemic racism, in the past. Black Lives Matter in 2020 represented the largest protest movement in American history — and it achieved something akin to a revolutionary coup in many of the nation’s power centers. At numerous junctures, this was enabled by conservative complicity. When an orgy of violence, rioting, looting, and destruction broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Republicans were dazed. Some, such as Sen. Tim Scott, took the opportunity to enthusiastically affirm the BLM narrative. Others, such as Sen. Mitt Romney, marched with BLM themselves. Across the country, Republican leaders watched silently as radicals marched through their institutions. As I wrote last year:
That summer [of 2020], many of the official levers of government — the executive branch, the Senate, and 59 state legislative chambers — were controlled by Republicans. But the Black Lives Matter movement’s influence extended to red and blue states alike. Many leaders in churches that had long served as the backbone of the religious Right embraced BLM, roiling denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention in ideological and theological unrest. Regardless of local and state political affiliations, baseball and football teams knelt for the national anthem, echoed denunciations of “systemic racism,” and pledged generous indulgences — often financed with the ticket money from their largely conservative fan base — to groups and causes of the activists’ choosing. Those who dissented from the prevailing racism narrative were swiftly disciplined and often issued retractions and apologies within a matter of days.
With all of that said: The Left might pine for a George Floyd redux. (We’re only six months out from an election, after all; and these days, what’s an election year without a few good old-fashioned race riots?) But they shouldn’t hold their breath. The simple fact is that the conditions that enabled the rolling revolution of 2020 were specific and unique — and while they may have left a legacy that endures to this day, they are unlikely to fully resurface anytime soon.
The most obvious of those novel conditions was the pandemic — and specifically, the fact that the spark that lit the wildfire came during the most draconian period of lockdowns, when large swaths of the country had been marinating in something akin to mass solitary confinement for months. Another factor was President Donald Trump, who invited a unique hatred from the left-wing base and an unprecedented hysteria from left-wing elites, and who served, in the minds of both demographics, as a constant, ever-present reminder of America’s white supremacist evil. (Once Democrats took back the White House, of course, the U.S. miraculously became a good and decent country again).
But the most interesting difference lies in the disposition of the Right. For all its impotence, the conservative movement is unlikely to tolerate another summer of love on the scale of the George Floyd riots — or, at least, to tolerate it to the extent they did in 2020. What happened during those fateful months has, in many ways, shaped both the GOP base and the conservative elite’s worldview in profound and enduring ways. America is not the country it was in January 2020. In many ways, it’s worse for the wear. But the Right today is more angry, more radical, and more unforgiving of weakness on behalf of its elites than it has been in my lifetime. Perhaps that means we have a fighting chance.
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