American Thought Leaders - The Truth About George Floyd's Death: Liz Collin

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2“It wasn't so much what the jury was allowed to see, but what they were not. We even talked about this body camera footage—this is about an 18 minute interaction with George Floyd that day. It's 90 seconds in the end that the jury is allowed to see in trial.”In this episode, I sit down with Emmy Award-winning reporter Liz Collin, producer of the new narrative-busting documentary, “The Fall of Minneapolis.”“I went to the Minneapolis Police website, where they've always had their manual online for years, and there are two pages that are mysteriously missing from the manual at that time. So, I knew that something more was at work here,” says Ms. Collin.She breaks down what really happened the day George Floyd died, what the media left out, and what evidence was withheld at the trial.“To manipulate a story like this, to hide things from the public, it's really a testament to poor leadership I think as well, that nobody was willing to just stand up and speak the truth,” says Ms. Collin.She says that despite millions of people having already viewed her documentary, not one mainstream media outlet has reached out to her for an interview.“I think there's so much more to that encounter that people in power didn't want people to know,” says Ms. Collin. “I've just never seen corruption on this type of level before in my career.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The jury was allowed to see, but what they were not. We even talk about this body camera footage. This is about an 18-minute interaction with George Floyd. That day, it's 90 seconds in the end that the jury is allowed to see in trial. In this episode, I sit down with Emmy Award-winning reporter Liz Collin, producer of the new narrative-busting documentary The Fall of Minneapolis.

I went to the Minneapolis police website where they've always had their manual online for years and there are two pages that are mysteriously missing. So I knew that something more was at work here. She breaks down what really happened the day George Floyd died, what the media left out, and what evidence was withheld at the trial. To manipulate a story like this, to hide things from the public,

it's really a testament to poor leadership. Nobody was willing to just stand up and speak the truth. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek. Liz Collin, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor. You've made an astonishing film. You've liberally used this body cam footage from the police officers involved in the arrest of George Floyd, including Derek Chauvin, of course. Stuff that was withheld for a long time. But now most of what I think is in your film is public domain. Yet you put it together, telling a very different story than I think the world is aware of. Before I jump in, tell me a little bit about your background.

How did you get so deeply into this? Yeah, I like to say this isn't a story I ever set out to tell. I never wanted to or wished I had to, to be quite honest. But I was a member of the mainstream media for nearly 20 years, worked about 14 years of that at a CBS station in Minneapolis, where I was an anchor and reporter. At the time this all unfolded on May 25th, 2020, I was married and am married to the former union president of the Minneapolis Police Department. But myself, my career, our family got caught up in all of this. But more than anything, I was so troubled as a journalist seeing this unfold because the media really was privy to all of this information, public information, as you point out. And instead of actually trying to get the facts of the case pushed back against some of these narratives that

we knew simply were not true, instead there was this fear that sort of permeated the air in Minneapolis, and I think across the country as well, that you kind of had to go this one way and not even bother to care about facts and about what we saw happening with our justice system. And so that's just a bit of the background of how I got here a few years later. WILLIAM BRANGHAM You knew basically the day or the day after that these traumatic, I'll use the word, events transpired, that something was really off? It was really the very next day after this happened at 38th in Chicago in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was arrested. For the very first time, you have the mayor, the chief of police holding multiple press conferences.

Also, the chief I knew called in the FBI that very night, just hours after this unfolded. Clearly, I had a very unique perspective with my husband's job. But as a reporter, you have them holding press conferences and saying things like this, whatever's happening there at 38th and Chicago with George Floyd, this isn't a part of police training. We've never seen this maneuver before. What I observed was not training that I ever participated in, none that I observed other officers participating in. And just as a reporter, I went to the Minneapolis police website where they've always had their manual online for years, and there are two pages that are mysteriously missing from the manual at that time. And so I knew that something more was at work here. They also said that George Floyd had never been arrested before.

Minneapolis police never had anything to do with him. And that was also not true. A year earlier, he was the subject of an undercover drug investigation in 2019. And if you play the body camera footage next to the body camera footage in 2020, they're eerily similar as to what played out. But more than anything, it was the body camera footage from that incident in 2020 that they hid from the public. And that has never happened before in any type of critical incident. This is the point of body cameras on Minneapolis police officers that taxpayers paid for years ago

to increase transparency. So again, all of this was hidden and manipulated. And I knew that very early, very early on. Well, and with respect to this body cam footage being withheld, you knew that because your husband was head of the police union. And that's, I guess, some of the first people that get that footage. And he knew something was obviously off here, too, that the union wasn't allowed to view this. It was ultimately withheld for about two and a half months altogether. And I still think to this day, most people have never seen that entire encounter with George Floyd, which is why we wanted to start the film with just that. Well, why do you think the footage was withheld so long?

I think there's so much more to that encounter that people in power didn't want people to know. You have George Floyd who's very resistant from the very beginning. George Floyd is talking about how he can't breathe long before Derek Chauvin even arrives on scene. I'm not going to breathe. I can't breathe. You have a black officer who arrests George Floyd that day. Alex King is black. It didn't fit the narrative. And he'll be the first to tell you that in the film as well. You have also George Floyd, who's pulled out of a cramped vehicle at the time, narrative, and he'll be the first to tell you that in the film as well.

You have also George Floyd, who's pulled out of a cramped vehicle at the time, but yet he says he's claustrophobic and can't be put into the back of a squad car. You have Thomas Lane, who calls for an ambulance 36 seconds after George Floyd is placed on the ground. And I should say that George Floyd himself asks to be placed on the ground because he does not want to get in the back of that squad. George Floyd is also saying again and again that he didn't take anything. He's not on anything. And I should say also this MRT, they make reference to it in the body camera footage as well. So there's a reason that they tried to keep it hidden. So I want to talk about that briefly.

That's maximal restraint technique, right? MRT is standard usage. It's in all the manuals. People are trained in it. You have multiple police officers talking about that. And then you have footage of the chief of police on the stand saying that that method, which apparently Derek Chauvin used in a literally textbook way, is not part of what police officers in Minneapolis do.

When you saw that, how did you react to that? There was so much of this that I kept saying, they're lying. They are lying. I put a book out first about all this called They're Lying, The Media, The Left, and the Death of George Floyd. And this film is based on that. But I really couldn't believe all along, this dragged out not just for months, but for years, how people were so quickly to lie and then to go along with it. And nobody seemed to want to call them out. So you have the chief of police under oath say that MRT is not a part of police training. I must ask you, is this a trained Minneapolis Police Department defensive tactics technique? It is not.

You have the head of training then, Inspector Katie Blackwell, who says the same thing. Is this a trained technique that's by the Minneapolis Police Department when you were overseeing the training unit? It is not. Not just recently. This is training that dates back decades. We found a police training manual from 1993 that specifically talks about MRT. And I really think that the trial transpired 10 months after the death of George Floyd. But that really sent a message about the damage that lies can do.

Something that's also very stark that not a lot of people know about, but I think an increasing number have more recently, is that there were multiple autopsy reports. Yeah, I think that's why we wanted to lay this out in the film the way we did, just to give a sense of the timeline. You actually have George Floyd's autopsy finished within 12 hours of his death. George Floyd was a healthy young man. So keep in mind, this is long before any buildings burn in Minneapolis or across the country, for that matter.

But then all of a sudden, you have the FBI involved in interviews with the Hennepin County medical examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker. You also have prosecutors involved interviewing him multiple times as a week sort of goes by. And again, this is all part of public documentation, as this narrative changes a bit from the original findings 12 hours after his death. And we wanted to go into that a bit. And, really, the point of the film here too isn't so much that this is what you need to think about this. It's more, here's all the information that was

kept from you. Question why it was kept from you, and then you can go ahead and decide for yourself. You have no strangulation marks. There was no asphyxiation, no bruising to the neck. You have three times the lethal limit of fentanyl in George Floyd's system. You have George Floyd, who has a tumor that there are still questions as to why more testing wasn't done on that tumor. He has 75 percent blockage in one artery going to his heart. He recently recovered from COVID. We had many medical professionals for the book and film review his medical records, and they all describe him really as kind of a ticking time bomb in a way. There's so much going on. However, you have the autopsy, the official autopsy from

Dr. Andrew Baker released on the same day that George Floyd's family releases what they call an independent autopsy. And that's what the mainstream media went with. They called it an independent autopsy. But these were two medical examiners bought and paid for, essentially, by George Floyd's family, and they were released on the exact same day. So one also should perhaps wonder why that was. WILLIAM BRANGHAM Did they have direct access to George Floyd's body and so forth? DR. ANNE RADWAY No, they did not. It was not an actual official

autopsy. The only autopsy with the actual body of George Floyd was conducted by Dr. Andrew Baker. You also have Dr. Andrew Baker who admits, well, basically I should say there's some grand jury testimony that points to this, that he's asked if he faced any pressure to change his autopsy or come to a certain conclusion when it came to his autopsy. And he asks to first consult with his lawyer before he can answer that question under oath as part of that grand jury proceeding, and then comes back two hours later to answer the question. So there's a lot of things that happened that the public wasn't aware of. And this is a quote from testimony. It just happens that this is one of the things I pulled

that I think you put up on the screen. And Dr. Baker, and I quote, he said to me, Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn't match up with the public narrative that everyone's already decided upon? And then he said, this is the kind of case that ends careers. Yeah, so he's ultimately admitting very early on how much pressure his office is facing. And I also don't think that, I think that that pressure spread all over as part of this justice system, also within the police department, the public, the media. I think everybody was able to feel that it was certainly palpable at that time. But yeah, you're right. That comes from an actual deposition that recently came to light that talks more about the pressure that they were facing. And in fact, we know now because of those depositions that the two prosecutors who were basically the head of the

use of force department, if you will, within the Hennepin County Attorney's Office, did not want to charge the three other officers at all. They said morally and ethically they didn't feel comfortable going forward with charges. And this is when you have the attorney general of Minnesota sort of swoop in and takes over the case, and he ultimately charges the three other officers with aiding and abetting murder all within that week. It was so chaotic. A lot of people aren't aware of what was kind of going on each and every day. And that's kind of why we wanted to lay it out

the way we did. Let's talk a little bit about current events. Just a few days ago, the Supreme Court has refused Derek Chauvin's appeal. Yeah, the judge, Peter Cahill, in the case did not allow the MRT training slide to be used in trial. And so you have the appeal that was really based on this change of venue that was not granted. So keep in mind, Derek Chauvin is being tried within Hennepin County 10 months after the most damaging riots in Minneapolis history. And you have this jury that's not sequestered, that's paraded in and out of this courthouse every day, that has barbed wire all around it. National guardsmen are there on scene each and every day. I think we talk about sort of the message that sends through Derek Chauvin's current attorney,

but the U.S. Supreme Court was only taking a look at that appeal based on that change of venue situation. So there are still some more legal maneuvers here that I think they'll look at. They did consider the U.S. Supreme Court taking this case as a long shot, but obviously figured it was worth it. So it sounds like his attorneys, they were not too surprised that the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to take the case. It would seem that all of this evidence that was not considered in the trial should be considered at some point by someone. Yeah. And that's what I say about this case too. It wasn't so much what the jury was allowed to see, but what they were not. We even talk about this body camera footage. This is about an 18-minute interaction with George Floyd. That day,

it's 90 seconds in the end that the jury is allowed to see in trial, and that's it. And obviously, as we've talked about, it being withheld from the public as well. You have George Floyd's criminal history, which is very lengthy and dates back decades. That's kept away from the jury. Also, you have the arrest in 2019, when we talked about how similar his behavior was to what happened in 2020. For the most part, the jury isn't allowed to see much of that either. Well, the other thing that happened is that Derek Chauvin was actually stabbed in jail. And I don't know, do you have any information on that? Yeah, this was so troubling on so many levels. It was eight days after we released the film, and we sort of did so with little expectations.

But amazingly, millions of people had seen it already at that time, and we got this terrible news about Derek, who's in a medium security facility in Arizona where he's been without any problems for 15 months now. We got word that he was in stable condition, but the person that was giving word to the media and such was the actual man who put him behind bars in the first place, and that was the attorney general of Minnesota. So Keith Ellison is the very first person to make a statement at all about his health condition. His own family wasn't aware of what happened to him. And they were, in fact, told several days later. So we just know that he's

in stable condition. There's very little that federal authorities at this point have said about it, but they have said that he will survive, thankfully. But there are still so many questions surrounding that, for sure. I keep thinking back to the chief of police, and I guess I forget if she's the head of training or testifying that this standard technique that people are trained on every year is not a part of their approach to policing. Well, I think that's why we are where we are in Minneapolis now. You have a department that was nearly 900 officers at the beginning of May of 2020, which has dwindled to barely 500 at this point three years later. But you had so many lies. And I don't I think perhaps these leaders were so focused, you know, just perhaps on Derek Chauvin and these other officers. They thought perhaps they could feed them to the wolves in a way, not really realizing the ripple effects that those decisions would have.

And that's why we wanted to give a voice to these other officers in the film, too, because they'd never shared their stories before. Minneapolis really lost the best of the best when it comes to their police department. People who'd served, you know, 20, 30 years. This isn't how they obviously wanted to end their careers. But they would go to work each and every day, not even worried about losing their job, but their freedom in the wake of all of this. So I think that's hard for a lot of us to imagine to have to face such a thing each and every day, just going to work. And they loved this job. They believed in serving and protecting. And I think it's pretty heartbreaking to hear from them. Well, and just the whole, one of the big stories in their film is, of course,

the loss of the first precinct or the giving up or the giving to the mob of the third precinct. Yeah. And this, I think a lot of people weren't aware, was sort of a planned surrender of the third precinct. This is after the rioting had gone on for a couple of days in Minneapolis. And as crazy as it sounds now, they thought that giving this building to the mob would stop the rioting. So none of the cops who got word of this plan thought it was a good one. Of course, they had to follow their chain of command in this instance. But they talk about how earlier in the day, they are allowed to collect their personal belongings out of the third precinct.

A city bus pulls up and they can pull out all of their personal belongings, evidence involved in cases and such, if you can even imagine this scene. And then that bus is supposed to come back and get them later in the evening when they give the go-ahead to give up the building. And this is in the film when they're basically running for their lives. There's no real exit strategy. They have to meet this bus about a half mile away as they're running through the street as they're being struck with rocks and bottles. And they discuss that at great length. And then the bus is actually late to pick them up as they're waiting there to get a ride to their next location. It's really just absolutely horrific that this, you know, even happened in our country. And this really, again, was the reason that many

officers left in the wake of all of this. So you've been in the media, I think you said, 20 years. You've won a number of Emmys for some of your investigative work in the past. How does this investigation compare with others you've done, I guess? Yeah, I think this is another reason that we wanted to go forward with this is we're all still paying the consequences of these lies to this day. Again, not only in Minneapolis, I mean, you kind of pick the city, and that seems to be the case. And I really am a believer that if the truth was told about this very early on, it just didn't have to happen. Perhaps there would have been some fallout legally involving other things, and those would have been conversations.

But instead, to manipulate a story like this, to hide things from the public, it's really a testament to poor leadership, I think, as well, that nobody was willing to just stand up and speak the truth. So I've just never seen corruption on this type of level before in my career. I think for a long time, I thought, OK, somebody else is going to do something about this. But I knew that I also had a very unique perspective and I needed to do something. Have you seen Who Killed Michael Brown? I actually have not. It is on the list though, I've heard. Well, it reminds me of this other excellent film, which I would recommend people watch. The theme is there's a prescribed narrative.

Yeah. And I also think with my backstory, I never considered myself a political person at all. I really lived to be a journalist, really from the time I was like five or six years old. It's what I wanted to do. But this really became a fight against evil that I saw before my eyes. It seemed, you know, something I'd never seen on this scale before. So that was something that truly bothered me. And I think that was, you know, all the more important. And also, I think, to speak to, is this what we want our justice system to look like? Alex King speaks to that.

Again, he's the officer in prison for three and a half years after being on the job for three days, the black officer who arrested George Floyd. But he speaks to that. You know, don't fall for this race bait that the media peddles. And, you know, be a critical thinker. The street justice doesn't get us anywhere. And do we really want our justice system to be ruled by the mob? And I think it's something that every citizen of this country really needs to think about.

You know, I talk about this in the book more, my personal story with what the media was doing, because I saw it, obviously, where I was working. But we had mandates put in place very early on after this incident with George Floyd. Half the people we interviewed for the news had to be non-white or from a protected class. And so I was the only one saying, so we're now implementing racism? I really couldn't wrap my head around how we felt, how we were going to shape things and do things differently. And, you know, there was certain terms we couldn't use. We couldn't use the term rioting.

You had many reporters obviously standing in front of burning buildings behind them talking about how moving these peaceful protests were in the wake of all this. But just changing language and kind of pushing this poison, in my opinion, on the public to think a certain way really became, I think, quite dangerous. When you reported, there was a qualifier added, right, to whenever you were doing reporting. Yeah. So I, as I said, was married to Bob for several years before all of this with no issue, but the mob certainly came after me and our family also. But I saw that the station where I worked came to the mob, too. All of a sudden there was a disclaimer in every story about the Minneapolis police

that I'm married to the union president. The anchors would say that on the air every time they would talk about Minneapolis police, but that had never been done before. I didn't think I needed to start a newscast each and every night with who I was married to. I mean, what woman in this country would be told to do so? And I was never allowed to anchor the news again. I mean, I was demoted as soon as the incident happened with George Floyd. I finished out my contract, but basically in a closet for the last couple of years. But I could certainly see how the mob ruled the day in the media as well. Yeah. I mean, again, it's sort of astonishing, given that you were, I don't know if you were at the top of your game,

but you were somewhere around the top of your game, right? Yeah, I'm a Minnesota native. It's the station I grew up watching. I was the highest-rated anchor in the Twin Cities on the weekends. I really did. It was kind of the dream job that I landed and loved it. I certainly saw, though, the media changing in my time in it. But again, never on this scale, just seeing how much information we decided to hide. Officer King, you have his mother saying, I think if I recall correctly,

I'm really worried that he'll come out a changed person. I want him to remain himself or something in that vein. My greatest fear is that it's going to change who he is. I just don't know who he's going to be when he comes out. Yeah, and that was really the point of the film. We really wanted to give a voice to the people who had their voices silenced in all of this. And that's what's so sad. You have an Alex King's story, for example. This is a kid who grew up in North Minneapolis. He dreamed of being a police officer.

His mom, a longtime Minneapolis educator. She worked in several public schools in Minneapolis. This was the kid you wanted to be a cop in Minneapolis. And here he is again three days later being thrown in prison. And he, I can't say, it seems to me when I even talk to him, it's almost I'm more bitter than this guy is. But he really, you know, says that this isn't going to be the end of him. And he has a very good outlook and attitude. It tugs at your heartstrings even more because you're just aware of, you know, these are a lot of really good people who got caught up in this. And, you know, if the truth was told, it just clearly did not have to be this way.

What was the most shocking thing you discovered in your investigation? Gosh, that's hard because, as I said, I kind of just kept shouting this, their lying line over and over again. I lost my faith in humanity a bit through all of this, I'll be honest. I guess I'm a bit naive and think that people really do want to be good people and do what's right. So to me, that was shocking. And still to this day, the fact that I'm not sure how many of these people can sleep at night and feel good about what they allowed to happen.

Minneapolis is really a shell of itself. It was a lovely city before, but you have skyrocketing crime, crimes that never happened before in this Midwestern city, you know, record homicides, carjackings weren't even reported in Minneapolis before all of this, and there are hundreds that transpire each and every year. Just how many victims were created along the way through all of this? I will say it's been heartening again that people believe in the truth and that this film has done as well as it had. Another reason we wanted to offer it for free, so you have no excuses to not watch it. The truth should be free.

So tell me a little bit more about the making of the film. You said you're offering it for free. Generally, it's difficult, I can tell you from experience, to make films for free. So how is it made? Yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time. How hard could it be to make a free film? But what we actually did is, through the book and? But what we actually, we did is through the book and just some different book talks, we started crowdfunding just to say, you know, we're going to go ahead and put this documentary together. It's a pretty low budget as far, we didn't want it to come off that way, but many of us, it was just a passion project.

And we were obviously, you know, volunteering our times, our time and such to put this together. But I sort of worked as the reporter you see on film, but also the producer of the film, laying that out. And I had a wonderful director, Dr. J.C. Shea is his name. He's a former police officer, so he really felt strongly about this. and he's an educator also. And then we have a very young guy, Josh Phelan is his name, who took on the shooting of all of the interviews. He did the editing and the soundtrack. So it was really just the three of us that put this together. We were able to raise these funds in a pretty short amount of time, actually just a couple weeks.

And we knew once we sort of locked in the price, all right, we'll cover our expenses and we'll push this out in November for free. Well, an astonishing feat, I would say, for that level of effort, I can tell you just from a little bit of experience. Oh, thank you. And I was close to a lot of these people too and obviously had access. And putting the book out first sort of helped people have the courage to come forward, I think. Sometimes that can be scary to obviously, you know, be in front of bright lights and on a camera and such. But I think, you know, putting the book out sort of gave them a bit more courage to say, yeah, that they would, you know, sign up to do the documentary with us. How is it that you were able to get in touch with Derek Chauvin?

Because I know that he was very uninterested in communicating with media for a long time. Well, I think the media, we really saw how they portrayed him early on, just as this monster. He was really built up to be something that is so unlike really who he is. He's a very small, timid guy, I would say. He's a little shy, quirky. I obviously didn't know him before this, but he's basically kind of my size, 5'6".

And he, you know, he was sort of built up into this character. And I just approached him as somebody who was willing to, you know, listen to his side, you know, give him a voice. But this is someone who, you know, he'd served the city of Minneapolis for 19 years. He had 18 complaints in his past, which so much was made of that, which is actually a very low record of complaints. But I should say that they resulted in, you know, one was, I think, a written reprimand for report writing. They were so minor, you know, and I'm not here to say there aren't bad cops or, you

know, just as there are bad doctors and whatever. This is not even, but it's amazing to me what the media can do, their power to turn someone in to that. So it was actually, he was thankful, I think, that somebody was willing to put the truth out there. And that was the same with the other officers as well. Just someone who didn't see them right away as the bad guy because there was so much more to this story. I mean, obviously you've been watching from the inside for most of it what's been happening with the media. But what did you see and I guess, how did you see that manifest? Social media sort of became a part of the scene with the media. We're obviously competing all of a sudden for ad dollars there. And we sort of became beholden to big pharma, I felt like.

That was several years ago. You know, you could see where the ad revenue was coming into mainstream media. And that's why I did feel comfortable going into independent media, because it just felt like in the end, we were just fine pushing propaganda, not pushing back at all. Again, they're shaping our words and telling us who we can interview, what they need to look like. Is this something that you saw progressively happening before? That's the thing I wanted to just clarify. I think you touched on that it might have been, but... Yeah, I would say probably five or six years before all of this. And then it just kind of kept snowballing. We were hiring journalists right

out of college rather than letting them sort of work their way up. And I also think that that's because salaries went down because ad revenue went down for media stations. So I think all of that was hand in hand. But no, this certainly wasn't just a, you know, after George Floyd, it had been COVID was a huge eye opener for me as well. Not so much what we were telling the public, but what we were not. And we were, again, privy to information through people who were calling us about certain issues that we just didn't seem like we cared to reflect a certain side of the story. One of the things that was revealed by Dr. Fauci when he was talking about his decision-making around changing the guidance he was offering around masks. Initially, he said,

you shouldn't wear them. He said, you should. He basically said that we did it because we wanted to make sure that people didn't, there wasn't a run on masks or this thing. But what this kind of exposed was this idea of as the leaders of the country or as the policy setters, we don't tell people the truth. We tell the people the thing that will el as the policy setters, we don't tell people the truth. We tell the people the thing that will elicit the correct behavioral response, the behavioral response we want, i.e. we take the agency, right, so to speak, for ourselves as the leaders. And then we lay out something else. And I'm just wondering, is that something that you have thought about? Oh, absolutely. I mean, you saw these

mantras being created in the wake of George Floyd, whether that be, you know, Black Lives Matter, obviously, you have that we'd be living on the right side of history. That was something that was repeated over and over again. But all of these, you know, specific things when it comes to language and how they were sort of selling this to the public. That was very evident. That policing is racist. It's rooted in racism. We heard that again and again. It doesn't matter that George Floyd was arrested by a black cop. But if so, if you go back and see some of these things they were selling early on, I think that's very evident in the film exactly to what you're speaking to. Well, there's a number of people you show in the film

who actively talk about it and then double down on saying our intention is to dismantle the police completely. Our commitment is to end our city's toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department, to end policing as we know it. Right, and one particular councilwoman, I can't remember her name off the top of my head, but I remember her doing interviews about this topic

and explaining that it would be replaced by social workers and so forth, which is, you know, kind of nobody in the communities that require the most policing actually want because they can imagine what it would look like, right? Well, in Minneapolis, you have, I mean, it's always been a very blue city, controlled by Democrats for decades.

But they have moved into electing just outright socialists for their city council. Part of that is dismantling the police department. They really believe that. The woman you're speaking to, she decided not to run for city council after that, but certainly did damage. I mean, she was doubling down on dismantling the police department, which I would say they ultimately did. She moved out of town. She sold her house in Minneapolis and left and lives in another city in Minnesota now. But we saw that with many of these leaders pushing this on the public. And they're all paying for the consequences. And many of them have moved out of Minneapolis at this

point. This became the perfect place for this to happen. You had the perfect people in the perfect positions for this to play out, whether it be the attorney general of Minnesota, you know, the governor, the mayor of Minneapolis, also an outsider who was sort of hand plucked to come to Minneapolis in the first place. But Minnesotans really are a very good and honest people. And I knew that I wasn't crazy, you know, to believe, you know, that this, you know, simply didn't have to happen the way it did. Any final thoughts as we finish? No, I guess I would challenge people to share the film with as many people as possible.

I say that millions of people have watched it already. Not one mainstream station has yet to reach out for an interview. But that is sort of the state of affairs we are in the media, which is sad to me that it's come to this. But don't be afraid to engage in these conversations, especially when the facts are on your side. We have to be able to talk about this. And I hope this does change some hearts and minds. But again, decide for yourself after you're able to talk about this. And I hope this does change some hearts and minds. But again, decide for yourself after you're able to see things that you haven't seen before. Well, Liz Collin, such a pleasure to have had you on.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you all for joining Liz Collin and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellogg.