YouTuber Steven Crowder recreates the death of George Floyd for his channel

Controversial YouTuber Steven Crowder has recreated the death of George Floyd for his YouTube channel, using actors dressed as police officers.

At the beginning of the video, Crowder explains that he is recreating the death after observing the narrative that “anyone would die if you had a knee on your neck for nine and a half minutes”.

He then has the ‘officer’ kneel on his neck, explaining beforehand: “I know some of you are going to say it’s distasteful, well wait for it. And some of you will still think it’s distasteful, but we have to do it.”

The video, which is age-restricted and hosted on the channel which was demonetised in March, has been watched over one million times and currently has over 11,000 dislikes and 62,000 likes.

Despite the abundance of seemingly positive comments on the video itself, many Twitter users have reacted with horror to what one user called “ghoulish”.

George Floyd was killed on the 25th May 2020 after police officer Derek Chauvin, one of four police officers that were present at the scene, kneeled on his neck for over nine minutes. They were called after it was alleged that he tried to use a counterfeit note to pay for goods.

Steven Crowder has attracted criticism in the past after several of his videos have displayed content that skirts the edge of YouTube’s content guidelines.

In 2019, he came under investigation after calling journalist Carlos Maza a “lispy queer”, “angry little queer” and “gay Mexican”. Crowder responded by calling his remarks “playful ribbing”, but YouTube’s investigation resulted in the demonetisation of his videos.

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