Firehose #84: Did We Really ‘Mostly’ Endorse ‘The Fall of Minneapolis’?

And is issuing a mea culpa the "only honest and graceful thing to do"?

Until now, and hopefully after I hit “publish” on this post, The Fifth Column’s main role in the weeks-long contretemps between Radley Balko and Coleman Hughes over the Derek Chauvin trial has been to inform the many interested listeners and readers here that the feud exists, while linking to everything relevant. Both men have previously been on the podcast (Balko in Episode #68, Hughes in #121, #144, #181, #188, #201, #379, #412 & #442), both have done valuable work over the years, both have been professional comrades (I first met Radley when Coleman was in elementary school, and used to be his editor and boss).

But this week we became bit players in Balko’s brief, so that merits a quick response.

First came this comment just after the two-minute mark of Radley’s joint appearance Thursday with Coleman on Reason’s Just Asking Questions podcast with Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller, in which he explains why it wasn’t the November 2023 appearance of the crowdfunded conservative documentary The Fall of Minneapolis that moved him to write what became a 30,000-word critique, but rather Hughes’s Fall-based January piece in The Free Press concluding that maybe Chauvin was “not a murderer, but a scapegoat”:

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 I had watched this documentary gain a lot of momentum on the far right and among sort of police advocates, law enforcement advocates. And it wasn't until it started gaining momentum in kind of right-of-center, libertarian, centrist circles—I know The Fifth Column podcast talked about it in slightly skeptical, but mostly in a sort of 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.

Emphasis mine, for later examination. Then on Friday, writing for The Unpopulist, a newsletter founded by another ex-Reason colleague, Shikha Dalmia, Radley elaborated:

The first time I started to see references to the documentary The Fall of Minneapolis, it was in blue-check replies to unrelated posts of mine on X—formerly Twitter—last fall. The documentary—and that’s a generous description—billed itself as an expose of a corrupt system that bowed to woke mob demands and manipulated the evidence to wrongfully convict Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for murdering George Floyd. I didn’t pay much attention, because it seemed to come mostly from white supremacist, unapologetically racist, far-right accounts. But it soon started popping up on law enforcement sites, too. Then Tucker Carlson picked it up. Then Megyn Kelly. Then "heterodox" personalities like Bret Weinstein. Before long it was all over Fox News.

The problem with responding to propagandistic projects like The Fall of Minneapolis is best captured by Brandolini’s Law: It takes hours more time, research, and writing to debunk misinformation than it takes to spread it. But then the film was amplified on the libertarian-leaning Fifth Column podcast co-hosted by my former Reason colleagues, and by Glenn Loury and John McWhorter on Loury’s podcast. (To their credit, both have since changed their minds about the documentary). Finally, it was promoted in the former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss’ publication The Free Press by a young African American writer, Coleman Hughes. 

We will get to the notion of amplification later. Let’s go back to this:

The Fifth Column podcast talked about it in slightly skeptical, but mostly in a sort of way of endorsing a lot of its claims, or at least giving credibility to them.

Is that a fair characterization? Please fire up #435, from mid-December, listen from around 16:00 to 53:00, and judge for yourself.

Here’s my own judgment: That is not even close to a fair characterization.

“I have a lot of problems with it. I think the film misses in a lot of ways,” Moynihan says near the beginning of his assessment. “I thought there were some really clumsy bits of it. I thought they ignored some stuff, which was very problematic.” Witness testimony was cherry-picked to prove theses and ignored when inconvenient; glaring conflicts went undisclosed; the filmmakers engaged in “weird sleight-of-hand.” It was, he concluded, “a counterpoint documentary, rather than a let’s-look-at-the-evidence documentary.”

Nothing “slight” about that skepticism.

I called The Fall of Minneapolis “one-sided,” “basically … the cop-centric point of view,” and complained that you have to do “a lot of backfill and research” just to answer the trial-related questions that the filmmakers raise. It was “not a great documentary.”

Kmele, who unlike Moynihan & me had actually followed the trial pretty closely, said “I don’t know that there are a lot of facts about the case that were surprising to me.” Those facts—even amid various complicating and contextual factors, the misleading media narratives, and the real possibility that Chauvin was “scapegoated” into a longer sentence than warranted—continued, post-viewing, to lead Kmele toward the conclusion that the cops involved bore some legal culpability for George Floyd’s death.

Far from “endorsing a lot of its claims” about the Chauvin trial, all three of us emphasized that the documentary’s main value lay outside the courtroom. “I think the most powerful thing of the film … separate from the guilt or innocence of Derek Chauvin, was the way the city dealt with the aftermath,” Moynihan opined. I concurred: “[The] whole process of explaining what got introduced as evidence … the movie’s not good for that…. What it is good for is showing a whole bunch of cops talking about … how screwed up that day/week/etc. was.” Even when I mentioned how one particular trial-related argument seemed persuasive to me “as presented,” I also regretted that we could not trust in the honesty of the presentation.

It is hard for a fair-minded person to misconstrue our conversation in #435 for an endorsement of the legal claims, or of the documentary itself, beyond saying that people who are interested in the subject should watch it—a standard that I and we have used for Bowling for Columbine, Leaving Neverland, TraumaZone, A Compassionate Spy, and likely dozens more. The Fifth Column’s 37-minute discussion about The Fall of Minneapolis was a discussion, on a media/politics podcast, about a piece of flawed journalism concerning an important subject of particular interest to our listeners. I listened to it again on Friday night, and with hindsight regret nothing.

Part of the basic objection here is that we had this discussion at all. In Balko’s telling, the film was safely ignorable at first, since initial references to it “seemed to come mostly from white supremacist, unapologetically racist, far-right accounts,” followed by secondary attention from the Tucker Carlsons and Megyn Kellys of the world. “But then the film was amplified on the libertarian-leaning Fifth Column podcast.”

Amplified is one of those increasingly popular terms (like platformed) among certain practitioners and theoreticians of journalism. “To amplify Trump? Or not to amplify? There’s actually a good answer,” went the headline on a representative Dan Froomkin Press Watch piece last October. The gist of this approach is to treat publishing/broadcasting/podcasting venues as possessors of an inherent potency that, if misused, may persuade the gullible, activate the malicious, even threaten the very liberal order. (Not an exaggeration, as you’ll soon see.) All of these bad outcomes can potentially be unleashed via the mere act of insufficiently denunciatory engagement—not just with one-sided documentaries, but with once and future elected officials.

As I summarized last September after a burst of media-crit reaction to a Donald Trump appearance on Meet the Press,  

"It's arguable that, at this juncture, there is really no need to interview Trump," posited CNN media writer Oliver Darcy. "Just a colossal mistake to showcase this sociopath," tweeted American Enterprise Institute emeritus scholar and Atlantic contributing editor Norman Ornstein. "Downright dangerous journalism to legitimize this guy—in the name of having a 'talked about' premiere," charged former New York Times media reporter Bill Carter. "Is it possible," an exasperated former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob wondered, "that journalists who platform lying fascists don't know they're undermining democracy?"

I do not subscribe to this journalistic point of view, as I have written (and we have discussed) at considerable length. Bad politicians and documentaries do not disappear by ignoring them. News organizations do not get better at truth-verification after declaring swaths of subject matter and audience to be beyond the pale. The mere expression of ideas is almost never “dangerous”—not even the increasingly popular if genuinely puzzling journalistic P.O.V. that “dangerous” speech needs to be suppressed by government. True danger is connected to power and risk; speech is connected to voices and fingers.

At any rate, “amplified” was clearly a negative enough characterization that Balko included it in a piece under the headline, “The War on the Woke Trumps the Truth for Many Heterodox Thinkers.” So are we part of that truth-trumping group? Radley does not come out and say so directly; near the bottom of his piece he broadens out his Free Press complaint into an entire category, “the new genre of heterodox punditry,” who he then criticizes at length without naming names.

Kmele, perhaps unwisely, felt strongly enough that we were being presented as guilty by implication that he privately DM’ed Unpopulist Publisher Shikha Dalmia to object to our inclusion and suggest a “formal apology.” (We have all known each other since forever; for me and Dalmia, going on a quarter-century.) Shikha promptly tweeted the ask out, which Kmele followed with some broader context, and before you know it the publisher of a piece about how tribalism warps truth started flinging falsehoods faster than Donald Trump at a bank meeting.

“They buy that Chauvin did things by the book,” she tweeted. WRONG! “They buy it’s MRT narrative.” NO APOSTROPHE, NO BUYING! “They spend a great deal of time indicting Floyd.” WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN. “And they claim that on another planet not crazed by woke mobs, [C]hauvin would have been acquitted.” THAT WAS MOYNIHAN; ALSO, IT WASN’T ANYTHING LIKE “CRAZED BY WOKE MOBS”; IT’S REASONABLE TO SUGGEST THAT THAT PARTICULAR CITY AT THAT PARTICULAR TIME WAS PRETTY HARD-PRESSED TO PRODUCE AN IMPARTIAL JURY.

Then Shikha’s tweets to Kmele somehow got even more embarrassing:

1) “If you valued ‘exactness’ and ‘accuracy’ you'd do a mea culpa like Loury and take back your respectful discussion of the film. Here is an ‘exact’ and ‘accurate’ word to describe your characterization of your discussion: Disingenuous.”

2) “PS: And you'd demand Weiss and Hughes to do a similar mea culpa. Bye now.”

3) “Your capacity for self delusion is really quite remarkable. The revisionist narrative you are trying to peddle about your comments on your podcast is proof. Do yourself a favor and do a mea culpa, like Loury. Only honest and graceful thing to do.”

Take back your respectful discussion!!!, says the president of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. Alas, we only correct our errors of fact, not of (alleged) tone.

People—even people who I have edited, who I have done non-insignificant favors for, of whom I have never once publicly spoken false or unfair words—are welcome to try their level best to tell us what subjects The Fifth Column should and should not talk about, within whatever presumedly acceptable gradations of opinion. All such recommendations will be handled by our Top Men.   

* Here is the whole, quite polarizing (per Chat) Just Asking Questions debate:

And to cleanse the palate after all that unpleasantness, here’s a bit of Walkoff F.U. to this guy and the desiccated media corpse he rode in on, in proper celebration of the dearly departed: