On the Oct. 20, 2023 episode of Tucker on X, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson regurgitated the racist lie that George Floyd had not actually been murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin, and had died of an overdose. His guest, Vincent Everett Ellison, smeared Floyd as a man with a “slave mentality,” which he blamed on Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.

In his show’s opening monologue, Carlson declared that it had been conclusively proven that George Floyd was not murdered and instead died due a drug overdose.

“Did, for example, a racist white cop actually murder a man called George Floyd — a civil rights leader — in Minneapolis on Memorial Day of 2020?” he sneered. Carlson said that the belief that Floyd was murdered led to a litany of (mostly imaginary) problems, including “decriminalizing stealing,” “defunding the police,” and “the ceasing of hiring all white men in corporate America.”

Carlson added that “they also sent a cop called Derek Chauvin to prison for more than 40 years,” mockingly referring to Chauvin as “the racist white devil who murdered George Floyd.”

Chauvin was convicted of murder in a state trial and sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison. He also pleaded guilty to federal charges of violating the civil rights of George Floyd and a 14-year-old whose back he knelt on in a 2017 incident, and received a separate sentence of 21 years in prison. However, these sentences are set to run concurrently, and Chauvin will not spend 40 years behind bars.

“But the question is did he actually murder George Floyd? And the answer is, well, no. He didn’t murder George Floyd,” Carlson declared. “We’re not guessing that. We know it conclusively thanks to a new court case now underway in Hennepin County, Minnesota.”

The court case Carlson is referencing is a sex discrimination suit filed by Hennepin County prosecutor Amy Sweasy.

Sweasy was one of four prosecutors removed from Derek Chauvin’s murder case by the presiding judge, Peter Cahill, following a motion by Chauvin’s attorney. They had allegedly met with the medical examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, without an attorney present, which Judge Cahill said was “sloppy.”

In Sweasy’s deposition, she “describes a conversation that she had with the county medical examiner, Andrew Baker, right after George Floyd died,” Carlson said. According to Sweasy, Dr. Baker told her over the phone that there “were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation.”

Carlson concluded that “George Floyd, according to the official autopsy, was not murdered,” and that he died of “what we used to call natural causes, which in his case would include decades of drug use, as well as the fatal concentration of fentanyl that was in his system on his final day.”

This is false. The Hennepin County medical examiner’s office ruled that Floyd’s death was a “homicide” caused by “cardiopulmonary arrest” following “law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression.” The autopsy does not mention “asphyxia” or “strangulation,” but this was noted in the criminal complaint against Chauvin.

Conspiracy theorists have posited that the presence of fentanyl and methamphetamines in George Floyd’s system meant that he actually died of an overdose, but this claim has been rejected by medical experts.

One expert told the Associated Press that the amount of meth in Floyd’s system was “trivial.” Another noted that Floyd did not exhibit the signs of an opioid overdose, stating that such people “fall into a sleep-like state,” “have shallow breathing,” and “stop talking.” Their “face turns ashen or their fingertips turn blue and their lips turn pale.”

Carlson then brought on his guest, Vincent Everett Ellison — a right-wing author who called the Democratic Party “a cabal of perverts, liars, psychopaths and anti-Christian bigots.” Carlson said George Floyd’s life was a “disaster” and that he “never added anything.” He then asked Ellison, “Why would you want more people like that?”

“Because he votes for the Democrat Party. And then he teaches his children to vote for the Democrat Party,” Ellison said.

“And then these white Democrats can feel superior to him. He can be controlled by them. Just like — think about the old slave plantations, talkin’ back in the day. How they wanted their slaves to act: subservient, obedient, ignorant, doin’ what he was told. Not asking any questions. Having a slave mind. Being dependent on them.”

Ellison said this “started in the civil rights movement” with Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. He told Carlson that King’s speech “turned the Declaration of Independence on its head,” and faulted King for seeking rights from the government and from “the white man.”

“And so Black people heard that speech, and said that we were not free in America,” Ellison said. “And we make our children recite that speech every single year on King’s birthday. And they say in that speech ‘the Negro is still not free.’ George Floyd was a slave in his mind. And the civil rights movement caused him to be a slave in his mind. And today they’re still marching.”