The Truth Isn't as Simple as 'The Greatest Lie Ever Sold' Pretends (2024)

When the video of George Floyd being slowly suffocated by a white policeman on a nondescript Minneapolis street made its way around the globe, many Americans, especially whites, sought innocence from the horror they just witnessed. They wanted innocence from America's legacy of racial atrocities conjured up by the image of the knee on the neck.

Conservatives like Candace Owens have long critiqued leaders of Black Lives Matter as hustlers for offering white liberals an unearned pathway to innocence—a donation or mere sign is enough to put them on the right side of history. Patrice Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, recently revealed that she could not believe how much "white guilt" money had poured in. However, after watching Owens' new documentary, "The Greatest Lie Ever Sold," I couldn't help but wonder if Owens was guilty, too, of offering this same illusory innocence to her largely white conservative base.

The film, which curiously credits no filmmaker other than Owens, opens with a Malcolm X quote: "The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent."

Owens then delves into the character of Floyd as well as that of the man who killed him, Derek Chauvin. It is not a secret what Owens thinks of Floyd and she spends time showing him to be a criminal and a drug addict. There are favorable insights from Floyd's former roommates, but the lasting impression is of Floyd as a man doomed by his own choices.

The film takes on a starkly different tone when Owens turns her eye to Chauvin. As she pleads with Chauvin's mother on the phone to appear on camera, she doesn't hide her bias in that she believes she is helping the true victims in this tragedy. She interviews Chauvin's friends and colleagues who paint the now-imprisoned officer as a "quirky" guy who would never harm a soul. But innocence by association proves nothing—even some of Jeffrey Dahmer's neighbors thought him a good guy.

It may be true that Chauvin was a solid guy in the past, but as I watched the attempted rehabilitation of his character, I couldn't help but think of how he had his hands in his pocket and a bored look on his face while his knee pressed on Floyd's neck for nine long minutes.

When my father, Shelby Steele, and I released our documentary, "What Killed Michael Brown?" we received emails that often contained praise followed by a but. The "but" was that my father was wrong in his assessment that Chauvin was responsible for Floyd's death. We were told in detail that Floyd had drugs in his system and that if he had been left alone, he would have died.

But this was nothing more than speculation at the end of the day. Speculation that ignored many facts, including trial testimony that when Floyd's pulse faded, Chauvin instructed the less senior officers to keep restraining—as opposed to performing CPR—until the ambulance arrived. Yet this speculation fuels the entire narrative that Owens banks her film on.

As I watched the film, I wondered why Owens was so insistent on the narrative of Chauvin's innocence. I couldn't help but be reminded of how Michael Brown's parents found a coroner and other experts to "substantiate" their narrative that their son was executed in cold blood by Officer Darren Wilson. Or how they painted their son as a "gentle giant" while tarring the officer as racist.

Was Owens' insistence on this narrative a way to avoid the far more difficult question of why America and the Western world exploded after the Floyd video went viral? Was it a reaction against Black Lives Matter and the liberals who ran away with the systemic racism plot line before facts were known?

Or was Owens, in the words of Malcolm X, using her power in media and social media to "make the guilty innocent?" (So far, it seems to be working: Kayne West recently said, "The guy's knee wasn't even on his neck like that.") If Floyd was indeed responsible for his own death and Chauvin was truly innocent, then what happened afterward was the greatest lie ever sold. It is this innocence—this dissociation from this tragedy—that Owens offers her base, giving her a tremendous fount of power in today's culture wars.

But this innocence is nothing more than an illusion.

In one of her last "thinking out loud" sessions, Owens concludes with a straight face that the story of what happened on that Minneapolis street was ultimately the story of addiction—Floyd's drug addiction—and nothing more. Yet people stormed the streets in unprecedented anger and the question of why they did is one that Owens ignores completely as she embraces ideology over facts.

Toward the end of the film, Owens imitates filmmaker Michael Moore and his attempted confrontation with Charlton Heston in "Bowling for Columbine" when she visits Cullors' home. As I watched the film cut awkwardly between Owens standing outside the home's gate and Cullors crying inside her home, I realized I was watching two women who had mastered the art of hustling innocence from America's horrific racial legacy, and that is the irony here.

Eli Steele is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose latest film is "What Killed Michael Brown?" Twitter: @Hebro_Steele

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.