Back in the spring of 2020, Minneapolis became ground zero for a national firestorm. George Floyd, a 46-year-old man with a troubled past, ended up dead during an arrest gone wrong—or so the story went. The ex-cop at the center of it all, Derek Chauvin, knelt on Floyd’s back for over nine minutes as bystanders filmed and shouted. What followed wasn’t just a trial, but a spectacle that tore through the city, sparked riots across the country, and left businesses in ashes. Five years on, Chauvin sits in a federal prison in Texas, serving time on state and federal charges. But now, he’s fighting back with a new petition that could crack open the whole narrative.
Filed last month in Hennepin County District Court, the 71-page document from Chauvin’s lawyer, Gregory Joseph, demands his second-degree murder conviction be thrown out. It calls for a new trial or, at minimum, a hearing to dig into the evidence again.
“While the postconviction relief stage of many criminal cases is generally something of an afterthought, this Court is removed from the hysteria of the day and can finally look at the facts and evidence through a clear lens,” Joseph wrote.
The core of the argument? Flawed expert testimony on how Floyd actually died. The Hennepin County medical examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, ruled it a homicide despite heart disease, fentanyl, and methamphetamine in Floyd’s system—and no clear signs of asphyxiation from the restraint. Yet four prosecution doctors leaned hard on bystander video to push a different story: that Chauvin’s knee caused low oxygen levels leading straight to death. Chauvin’s team says that’s junk science, cooked up to fit the moment. They point to autopsy records ignored by prosecutors, records that paint a picture of a man already in cardiac arrest before things escalated.
Add to that the police training angle. Three Minneapolis officers took the stand and swore Chauvin’s knee-on-neck hold broke department rules. But since then, at least 34 current and former cops have come forward with sworn statements saying the department taught exactly that technique for certain situations.
The petition ties this directly to the 2022 book *They’re Lying: The Media, the Left, and the Death of George Floyd* by journalist Liz Collin and Dr. J.C. Chaix, which first aired those claims. It’s the kind of detail that makes you wonder: Were witnesses coached, or just scared of the mob outside the courthouse?
Jury instructions come under fire too. Chauvin’s lawyers argue Judge Peter Cahill botched them, feeding the panel a version of the law that boxed them into guilt. All this, they say, stripped Chauvin of due process under the 14th Amendment. It’s not the first swing—Chauvin lost appeals in 2023, including one shot down by the Supreme Court. His federal civil rights plea deal sticks, landing him 21 years concurrent with the 22.5-year state sentence. Release? Not till 2037 or 2038, depending on good behavior. He even survived a brutal stabbing in Arizona’s federal lockup back in 2023, stabbed 22 times by another inmate.
The case reeks of a rush to judgment, fueled by streets on fire and a media blitz that turned Floyd into a symbol overnight. Riots cost billions, lives were lost in the chaos, and cops nationwide pulled back, letting crime spike in the years after.
Floyd’s toxicology report showed fentanyl levels that could fell an elephant—3.0 nanograms per milliliter in his blood, per the autopsy—right alongside meth. Baker himself noted in testimony that those drugs and Floyd’s enlarged heart were “major” factors. Yet the trial zeroed in on that video clip, looped endlessly, as if nine minutes of restraint erased everything else.
Whispers persist that the fix was in from the start. Why else would top brass flip on their own training manual? Or why did Baker hedge on asphyxia until the pressure mounted? The Fall of Minneapolis, Collin’s documentary, lays it out cold: suppressed bodycam footage, overlooked evidence of Floyd’s resistance, and a narrative steamrolled by activists. It’s easy to see a setup—sacrifice one cop to douse the flames, damn the facts. If even half of Chauvin’s claims hold water, it wasn’t murder; it was a man with a badge doing his job in a split-second call, amid a suspect high as a kite and fighting back.
The Minnesota AG’s office has until January to respond. No ruling yet from the court, but the stakes couldn’t be higher. A new trial wouldn’t just free Chauvin; it’d force a reckoning on how far the justice system bent to appease the crowd. Families still grieve, communities still heal unevenly, but truth doesn’t bend to timelines or torches. If Chauvin gets his day in court away from the frenzy, maybe we’ll finally get answers that stick. Until then, the doubts hang heavy, a reminder that justice rushed is justice half-done.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
