Eric Nelson

Today we are proud to announce the release of American Scapegoat: How a Corrupt Justice System Sacrificed Derek Chauvin to the Mob by former federal prosecutor T.J. Harker (@TJ_Harker). Six years ago today, George Floyd died while in custody of Minneapolis beat cop Derek Chauvin, sparking the most destructive riots in our nation's history and becoming the pretext for an era of mass political hysteria that threatened to rip apart the very fabric of American life. Cities burned. Floyd's body was paraded around in a gold casket. Every institution was made to bend the knee to BLM. Ordinary white Americans, represented by the person of Derek Chauvin, were called to account for three centuries of racial grievance. All most Americans saw of that day was the grainy cellphone footage of Officer Chauvin's knee restraining the back of George Floyd's neck. Few bothered to learn any other details about the case, and by the time the trial rolled around, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. An innocent black man had been killed by a racist white cop, they were told. And for America to atone for its original sins, that racist white cop had to pay the price. What they didn't know was that Chauvin's knee did not prevent Floyd from breathing. They didn't know Chauvin was following procedure by the book. They didn't know Floyd had taken lethal amounts of fentanyl minutes before being restrained. They didn't know Floyd had a pre-existing heart condition. They didn't know the autopsy report had been revised under threat of professional harm. They didn't know the original prosecutor removed herself from the case after seeing all of the evidence. They didn't know the subsequent prosecutors had to abandon their theory of the case just days into the trial. They didn't know the prosecution never established a cause of death, let alone that Derek Chauvin was responsible. In American Scapegoat, author T.J. Harker breaks down what happened on that fateful day six years ago, analyzes the thousands of court documents manipulated and recontextualized to achieve the trial result Minnesota politicians demanded, and relives the trial itself in thorough, painstaking detail to definitively show that Derek Chauvin did not kill George Floyd. Never in modern American history has our justice system been so corrupted by public mass hysteria than in the case of Derek Chauvin. This is the story of that trial. This is the story of how a man was sacrificed to the mob. American Scapegoat is available for pre-order now. Coming Fall '26.