I've been thinking a lot about how the prosecution in the Derek Chauvin case has spent so much time establishing what anyone with two eyes and a working brain could tell you: That George Floyd died because a cop kneeled on his neck for 9 minutes. https://www.startribune.com/medical-expert-in-a-vise-george-floyd-did-everything-he-could-as-he-struggled-to-breathe/600043818/

I don't blame them, to be clear! They are reacting to a robust understanding that the defense is going to argue that Floyd killed himself, which is beyond ridiculous, but tends to get traction because those narratives have a long racist history. https://www.vox.com/first-person/22373806/george-floyd-trial-derek-chauvin-minneapolis-black-lives-matter

What is frustrating is that the defense — or Tucker Carlson, or any other right wing douchebag who is throwing this lie out there — doesn't believe this and certainly isn't trying to *persuade* anyone. Instead, this lie functions like most right wing lies: For rationalization.

This is where the concept of "permission structure" that campaign strategists use is so critical. Most people aren't persuadable per se, and certainly with evidence or rationality. There aren't people out there wondering how George Floyd died and needing more evidence.

Instead, what the defense (and right wing media) is betting on is there are people who already want to exonerate Chauvin, because ultimately they believe cops should be able to kill Black people at will. But they know you can't just *say* that.

What the "Floyd died of drugs" lie is there for is to give people who have already pre-decided to exonerate Chauvin a thing they can tell themselves — and reporters, and relatives, and friends — that makes them sound like they based their decision on evidence, instead of racism.

The prosecution's only choice then, is to make it clear that the evidence that Chauvin killed Floyd is so overwhelming that to say you think drugs did it is to hang a sign around your neck that says "hi I'm a racist idiot". And sometimes this kind of thing works.

On climate change, the evidence became so overwhelming that a lot of conservatives lost their taste for pretending to be too profoundly stupid to accept basic scientific fact. So a lot started to admit it was real, even as they found other excuses to reject mitigation.

I'm not a prosecutor, but I'm assuming the hope here is that the evidence is so overwhelming that no one in the jury room is willing to embarrass himself by claiming he doesn't believe it. But that's not about persuasion, per se, but about social permission.

So while I find myself sometimes despairing and frustrating that so much time and energy is put into establishing what is common sense, I get it. It's about boxing potentially racist jurors into a corner, so they are forced to either convict or admit out loud they are racist.

FWIW, permission structures aren't always about bad things. For instance, Democratic campaigns often offer "permission structure" arguments to people who live in conservative communities but want to vote Democratic and need something to say to get people off their backs.

The important takeaway here is the ranking of what persuades people to an argument goes like this:

1) What they want to believe
2) What people around them expect of them
3) And, a distant third, actual evidence

You can train yourself to be better at accepting evidence, but it requires cultivating two very difficult personality traits: Humility enough to admit you're wrong and a willingness to have people around you think you're being an asshole for saying unpopular things.

Both the defense and prosecution assume that there is at least one person on the jury who wants to exonerate Chauvin. The defense's strategy is to give that person an excuse to stick to his guns. The prosecution's strategy is to make doing so too humiliating for that person.

Anyway, what is deeply frustrating about the jury trial system is it's built around an assumption that simply isn't true: That you can present evidence and arguments and have people dispassionately weigh them and render a fair judgment based on facts.

Not sure what the solution is, but the fact that what is true can be rendered irrelevant because one randomly selected person is racist — which is statistically certain to be true in this country — is not great. I'm not sure how we fix this.