After Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, many Americans expressed the hope that Donald Trump will now have cover to pardon this country’s political prisoners. The incoming president already indicated that he will make a “case-by-case basis” review of the Jan. 6 protesters a priority for his administration and there is reason to hope he will simply pardon them all now.

He talked of using his power to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht and perhaps pardon Julian Assange—both libertarianan darlings—as well as his former trade advisor Peter Navarro. One name curiously absent from his list is that of the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

There is no popular movement calling for the release of Chauvin. A move to pardon his federal crime conviction—the only one over which the president has any commutation power—would be largely symbolic because he is serving his federal term concurrently with the Minnesota state one. But a purely symbolic move is important because that sentence itself was largely symbolic, sadistically deployed to cement a narrative of guilt.

At the end of May 2020, when Americans were nearly half a year deep into the COVID lockdowns, a video of Chauvin arresting George Floyd, went viral. Cooped up and glued to their screens, media consumers gobbled up the narrative that the black man resisting arrest died screaming “I can’t breathe!” because a racist white policeman kept his knee on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds.

In the days immediately following the release of the viral material, not a soul came to Chauvin’s defense. The narrative of his guilt crystallized thanks, in part, to the unfortunate coincidence that neutralized conservative influencers who normally could be counted on to speak up for an unfortunate cop. In an earlier essay, I pointed out that the Waco miniseries dropped on Netflix weeks prior to the Minneapolis event. The film dramatized the real-life story of federal agents entrapping and murdering a religious sect. Consequently:

“Opinion makers on the Right were already incensed about being under house arrest for dubious public health pretenses. Sympathy for all institutions of the state, including the law enforcement, was low. Now they were treated to the show of federal law enforcement apparatus viciously abusing power. Every conservative’s libertarian tendencies awakened.”

Meantime, the Democratic establishment pounced on the opportunity to advance the woke agenda—and to shape the dominant narrative for the presidential election. The former president and self-appointed racial consciousness of the nation, Barack Obama, urged Americans not to go back to normal. When many obeyed and rioted, then California Senator Kamala Harris fundraised to bail out Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters. In the presidential election, Democrats rode the wave of civic unrest to the point of even staging a BLM-themed national convention.

Because a white cop’s guilt was a necessary feature of the Democratic narrative, prejudicing the nation against Chauvin was inevitable. No explanation can be offered in public for what happened that Monday in Minneapolis other than the, by now cartoonish explanation of so-called “racist rage.” For instance, in his statement Obama affirmed the Chauvin’s guilt when he talked of Floyd “dying face down on the street under the knee of a police officer in Minnesota.” Legacy media echoed his sentiment and social media, then controlled by woke techie algorithms, exploded in indignation. “To ask an unpopular question, can Derek Chauvin get a fair trial?” I wondered at the time.

What happened in the physical world was even more consequential than what occurred in the digital dumpster fire. After spending months under house arrest, people were, (probably not coincidentally) granted permission to go out into crowds. They did so with the encouragement of the elites: It was for a good cause, they said—to protest endemic racism, police brutality, and the all-around wickedness of the United States of America. Bloody riots rolled through urban centers: Targets were looted, car dealerships burned, and monuments to the founders dismantled—but at least the youth had something to do.

Hysterical self-righteousness, the worst angel of American nature, reigned supreme. In 2020, a vengeful mob converged to deprive us of our rights, but Derek Chauvin became the most hated man in the nation, the face of the racist white working class.

In that poisoned atmosphere it didn’t matter that the incident was distorted by the media. The man resisting arrest was not some innocent bystander, but a career criminal, previously incarcerated for putting a gun to a pregnant woman’s stomach. His body had been weakened by decades of hard living and an autopsy revealed three times the lethal dose of fentanyl in his bloodstream. The arrestee had been screaming “I can’t breathe!” while antagonizing the cops and long before Chauvin descended on his back. Although it was unclear from the viral video, the cop’s knee was not on the man’s neck for the duration of the attempted apprehension. The maneuver he performed was adopted by the Minneapolis Police Department and, as the documentary The Fall of Minneapolis showed, the drug user was alive when the ambulance arrived but EMTs appeared to fail in properly resuscitating him.

Nevertheless, the presumption of innocence was summarily discarded. In April 2021, following a televised trial in a courtroom surrounded by menacing mobs—U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, instructed the rioters to “get more confrontational” and “stay on the streets” in case the jury returned a not guilty verdict. Chauvin was convicted on two state charges of murder and one state charge of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison.

Then in 2023, a judge slapped a concurrent 10.5 year term for federal civil rights violations—to which the, by now broken, defendant pleaded guilty. In the plea bargain, Chauvin admitted guilt in exchange for a concurrently served sentence. Also in 2023, the Minnesota Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal and the former policeman became the victim of a prison stabbing attack requiring hospitalization for serious bodily injury.

None of it did any good to the black citizens of this country. Sure, the family—or families, to be more precise—of the individual who died in custody raked in megabucks. So did Black Lives Matter leaders and wokeness professionals of various races. But I still see ordinary black people from a nearby town flocking to my Safeway because they are not safe to shop in their own neighborhoods. They are more than welcome to come here, but I find it depressing that people must go out of their way just to buy a carton of eggs.

Because Chauvin was convicted on three state charges, we will need Minnesota elected officials to be on the same page as Trump if we hope to empty out the American gulag. Trump can’t liberate Chauvin, but he can change the tone of the conversation and, we can hope, it will one day lead to a full pardon. COVID hysteria and the racialist moral panic that accompanied it will never be dealt with properly as long as the cop who became the focal point of the madness remains incarcerated.