‘George Floyd Square’ To Remember Him With Gift Shop

Also a restaurant, bar and self-cleaning toilet

On Memorial Day, Minnesota Democrat officials, including Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, dumped the troops and headed to the eyesore known as ‘George Floyd Square’, an epicenter of the BLM riots, to groove along with the ‘Brass Resistance Band’ and a DJ in honor of the fallen violent criminal who had died of a drug overdose while resisting arrest.

“Today, we remember George Floyd,” Mayor Frey tweeted. “The weight of what happened is still with our city six years later – and the responsibility to keep moving forward together is too. I know we can keep building a Minneapolis that is safer, more accountable, and more worthy of the people who call it home.”

Initial plans for ‘George Floyd Square’ were to make it an Antifa-BLM secessionist no-go zone and then there has been an effort to turn it into a pedestrian mall. (“There on the right is where they set all the fires and there on the left you can get a Fendi handbag for only $3,000.”)

And the BLMers and assorted racial grifters obviously weren’t going to be kept out of the deal.

The battle is now on between the Minnesota Agape Movement and other groups over how to best develop the ‘People’s Way’, the site of a destroyed gas station off ‘George Floyd Square’ in a way that respectfully pays tribute to a thug who robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint.

The Minnesota Agape Movement (“transforming street energy into community energy through advocacy, empowerment, and education”) proposed taking the gas station that had been torched during the BLM riots and putting up a building with a gift shop (“get your George Floyd memorabilia right here, t-shirts, caps and COVID masks stamped with “I Can’t Breathe”), cafe (Fentanycinnos), restaurant (the George Floyd Overstuffed Brisket Sandwich Special) and bar (The George Floyd: a bold, highball cocktail that hits hard, builds pressure, and leaves you fighting for your next breath) and rooftop garden. And that proved to be the winning proposal.

This may be a better replacement for what is currently there, a contaminated spot where junkies have been dying of fentanyl overdoses in what may be an excessively on the nose tribute to Floyd, but not everyone feels that its properly captures the essence of his sacred memory.

The other competitors included Rise & Remember (“The Blueprint is us: no permission needed), another George Floyd nonprofit that was lucky enough to land members of the Floyd family and hosts a ‘Rise & Remember Festival” and the “George Floyd Memorial Design Competition”.

The “George Floyd Memorial Design Competition” proposed a memorial garden with regular “pilgrimages” to the site and a “self-cleaning public restrooms” because the pilgrims can’t be expected to handle basic hygiene when overcome with grief and outrage for BLM’s saint.

But despite representing Floyd’s family, the self-cleaning toilet lost out to the gift shop.

Not only did George Floyd die, but his Memorial Design Competition couldn’t even succeed in George Floyd square, which exists only because he died of a drug overdose there.

Other proposals from the P3 Foundation (“a group of highly qualified professionals in the financial industry who possess a wealth of knowledge in taxable and tax-exempt and financings”) called for an art gallery and “native plants and benches” (you know how much George Floyd cared about native plants) and Urban League Twin Cities (“an unapologetic voice and catalyst for social justice”) had proposed a George Floyd Museum, an “indigenous garden” (whatever that is) and “a free-standing 24-hour public restroom, called ‘The Portland Loo.’”

Perusing the design documents, a reporter gets the sense that while George Floyd may be the pretext, what George Floyd Square needs most is an end to public urination and defecation.

While everyone is dutifully (and inappropriately) capitalizing ‘Black’ and talking about how the area needs to ‘center’ black people, and black organizations are offering their proposals for ‘George Floyd Square’ and the ‘People’s Way’, how black is the Floyd memorialization?

The Floyd family organization, was working with Professor Anjali Ganapathy, Heather Willy, Vora Limpaphayom, Ryan Yin and Julia Gerloff although NEOO Developers, a black firm, was on board as consultants. The Agape proposal featured the Landon Group, almost entirely run by white women, and Victoria Yepez, P3 turned to a California real estate developer best known for building upscale high rises and Urban League to Nawal Noor: a Somali “entrepreneur”.

And none of this (except perhaps the self-cleaning toilets) will solve the real problems here.

The Minneapolis murder rate is still far higher than it was the year before Floyd’s drug overdose death was used as a pretext for massive race riots and so far this year there have been over 4,000 assaults, 800 burglaries, 4,577 thefts, 2,392 stolen cars, 303 robberies, 341 sex offenses, and 1,578 shots fired. This isn’t the story being told to the public by the media in headlines like “Twin Cities see drops in violent crime, but perception remains an issue”. Over 10,000 crimes targeting individuals before the summer has even arrived isn’t a “perception” problem.

But media narratives continue perpetuating the pro-crime lie that the surge in BLM violence was somehow caused by the pandemic and that the only problem in Minneapolis is “perception”.

The ‘perception problem’ also led to an exodus from Minneapolis (or perhaps the exodus itself is a perception problem and the city is both safe and growing even though numbers show the opposite) by its native population even as it’s become more ‘diverse’ courtesy of Somali mass migration. As CBS News summed it up, “Minnesota’s population is getting older and more diverse, but earning less and leaving for other states”. Unless they’re shot in Minneapolis.

But when given lemons, Joseph-Louis Proust created lemonade and when given race riots, Frey and the city of Minneapolis are trying to turn ‘George Floyd Square’ from a mecca for violence into a tourist destination. Social justice tourism has kept 38th Street and Chicago Avenue (who knew a street named after one of the most violent cities in America would breed violence) busy while doing little to help the local black businesses who just wish that the freaks would go away and life would go back to normal. But Minneapolis only has so many tourism destinations.

And so George Floyd must be remembered by more lucrative means like a gift shop where social justice tourists can pick up Floyd bobbleheads, scented candles and molotov cocktails.

Because the struggle is real.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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