Explaining Britain’s ‘Sickly Reversed’ George Floyd Moment | Victor Davis Hanson

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:18)
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Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There was a murder in Britain in the town of Hampshire that's got worldwide news because it's kind of iconic of the whole problem of immigration and DEI in the western world. The facts are not in dispute. A young man who was a student, Henry Nowak, was walking and encountered another, I think young person, I think he was 23, Vickrum Digwa, who was a Sikh immigrant, either first or second generation wasn't specified. Apparently, they exchanged words and they had some confrontation. We'll wait to see what surveillance cameras show, but Mr. Digwa pulled out his ceremonial Sikh sword and used it as a weapon and stabbed Mr. Nowak repeatedly, apparently fatally in the chest.
When police arrived, Mr. Nowak was on the ground, bleeding out, clearly bleeding out and muttering, I'm dying. What was the reaction of the police? Did they render immediate first aid and restrain Mr. Digwa? No. No. What they did was they acute Mr. Digwa, then made up a lie, and we'll get to that later, that he had been a victim of racism, that Mr. Nowak had exchanged words that were racial in nature to him that prompted the stabbing. So what did the police do? They put handcuffs on the dying young Mr. Nowak. And of course, he died with the handcuffs without any medical attention at all. Then Mr. Digwa apparently went back to his home, and his mother and I guess members of his family were somebody he and his mother then hid the murder weapon in the house. And at some point, the police finally caught on after Mr. Nowak died or they had surveillance or they had witnesses, that there had been no racial taunts, that that was a complete lie. And they had watched and in some ways, abetted the death of Mr. Nowak, who was a white male and was on the wrong side of the oppressor-oppress binary apparently.
What are we going to make of this British insanity? We've had our version here too. You know, in a very strange way, it is sort of a George Floyd in a really sick reversal.
Mr. Nowak, unlike George Floyd, was not a career criminal. He was not being handcuffed because he was passing counterfeit currency and high on fentanyl and resisting arrest as Mr. Floyd was. He was dying. He was bleeding out.
It's a little easier to see someone as an extremist when they say, I'm dying and there's a pool of blood around them than Mr. Floyd when he said, I can't breathe. That's not to excuse Mr. Chauvin necessarily. But it's far more egregious for police to handcuff a man bleeding on the ground than to use a standard approved measure to restrain a suspect who's resisting arrest that went south when he stopped breathing.
More importantly, what was the reaction of the public in these two different cases? In the case of George Floyd, you had a career criminal committing a felony, passing counterfeit currency, actively resisting arrest and under the influence of drugs, who tragically died when Officer Chauvin put a knee on his neck, which arguably had been a protocol that had been approved in a number of police departments in the United States. What was the reaction? The United States blew up for four months. Four months, $2 billion worth of damage, 35 people killed, 1,500 officers, injured, arson, federal house, courthouse torched, police precinct torched, iconic church torched, luminaries like Camilla Harris bragging that this will not stop, these demonstrations will go on, they should go on, blah, blah, blah, blah. What was the reaction in Britain to Mr. Nowak? Silence. Silence. What can we learn from all this? We've talked about the problems with DEI. DEI not only destroys meritocracy and promotes people who did not earn that admission or that hiring based on widely accepted criteria that everybody accepts. We are an equal opportunity Western civilization. We are not a mandated equality of result, at least we weren't until recently.