The Press Box - George Floyd, Minneapolis, and Beyond

Episode Date: June 1, 2020

Days of nationwide protests have followed the killing of George Floyd, who died while in police custody. Ringer writer Justin Charity joins Bryan Curtis, David Shoemaker, and Chris Almeida to discuss the situation unfolding before all of us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, media consumers. This is the press box. You've got Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here, joined by Ringer staff writer Justin Charity. Today's agenda is pretty obvious. We're going to talk about the killing of George Floyd and now six days of protest across the country that followed. Dozens of things to talk about today, guys, but I don't want to skip past George Floyd. He was a 46-year-old African-American man when he was arrested on May 25th in Minneapolis, a police officer named Derek Chauvin, pinned Floyd's head to the ground for eight minutes and 46 seconds during which time Floyd said, please, please, please, I can't breathe.

His killing was filmed by security cameras and onlookers. Let me start with you, Justin. Can you put us in your mind when you saw that video for the first time? What were you thinking and what were you feeling? Well, there are so many of these kinds of videos, right? These police brutality, police killing videos. And this one I thought was remarkable for the video itself. right, because the video captures Derek Chauvin, George Floyd.

It captures Derek Chauvin's colleagues. It also captures the bystanders at the scene, including the young, I think 17-year-old woman who recorded the incident. And it's kind of surreal how explicit the conversation between the police and the bystanders is, right? The bystanders are saying, you don't, this is excessive. and the police are like, listen back off. And it feels like they are very explicitly sort of reciting the conversations that have been happening for the past decade

about these videos inside the video itself. And I don't know, the whole time watching the video, there is, I just felt this profound sense of Black Lives Matter as an activist moment, sort of slipping through my hands, hand. I think that's the only way I can really put it, right? It's such a, it feels like we're back at square one of what all of the activism about police brutality and these kinds of videos has always been about. Because of just how elemental it was. Yeah. And just again, there's just so much talking in the video. There's just so much the police expressing their point of view on,

you know, don't question our policing and the bystanders being like, this is excessive. Again, it almost feels like I was talking to former ringer employee Cam Austin Collins. And the way I put it was like it feels like you're watching the director's commentary for this kind of video. And that's the thing that to me felt the most distressing about watching it. Absolutely. And I think the, I just think the explicitness of it in every form

made it pretty mind-blowing even by the standards of those videos. Yeah. We've had six days and nights of protests now, not just in Minneapolis, in New York City, in L.A., but in 75 cities across America, including Salt Lake City, Great Falls, Montana, and seemingly everywhere else. I think it's easy to dive head first into the TV and Twitter pictures that we're getting all day long and all night long. But, Justin, in your mind, what are these protests about? Well, I think that that's such a loaded question, I think, this time around, specifically because this is the rare case to my mind where a lot of people watch the video, the central provocation, right? Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd. And it seemed like lots of different kinds of people agreed that this was bad policing.

So in a sense, this feels on some level more straightforward. than other cases where you have all this what aboutism of like, well, we don't know what the police or, you know, we don't know what the procedure is. You don't know what it's like to be a police officer. We don't know what the footage showed the suspect doing 10 seconds beforehand that made the police react that way. This is such a weirdly politically straightforward case where lots of different factions say, no, that looks messed up, what happened. And so that makes it, I think, harder than normal to process the subsequent protest. that have emerged and unraveled to some degree because it feels like we started at a point of consensus. It feels like there's actually a pretty broad consensus about the video and yet you have this conflagration of what feels like you have civil rights protesters, you have associated looters, you have people speculating about

you know, how much of the crowd is really, you know, white left-wing protesters, how many of them are agents' provocateur sent by the cops? You know, you have resistance moms wondering whether Vladimir Putin has hired people to be in these crowds. Like, in a weird sense, I think it's very rapidly, our sense of what it's about is deteriorating

because of this super energetic and kind of unfocused political discourse, especially in social media that is jockeying for like jockeying for sort of the primary political standing in what began as a relatively straightforward argument about police misconduct. Well, it sounds like, I mean, it seems to me,

I mean, this is maybe a total sidebar from what really matters here. I guess almost everything that will come out of my mouth is, but that it's the, in some ways, the lack of comprehension of what we're seeing on the streets. And by the way, I think you're right. You said this is, this is a video that a lot that had a broad consensus at the beginning. But you said almost in passing, this is a video that almost everybody saw. And I think that because of the place that we are in quarantine right now, that it probably was more pervasive than a lot of the previous

videos have been, even if the conversation isn't more pervasive, but actual time spent sitting down and watching the first run video, I think it probably hit a lot more people. And to have everybody exposed to it in such a way, in the same way that the video was the initial George Floyd video, the real, the real just pain, the real evil of it was almost in its, just the normalcy evoked by the police and even by the people around them. It seems like there's a lot of, it's just this disconnect between what we say, what we profess to know to be true and what's actually what is true what what is happening in

reality and I guess it's a very long way of saying you have very very well-intentioned intelligent people who are looking out on the streets and saying I don't understand what's happening and so your mind immediately goes to Russian bots and to agents provocateur right I mean it's almost like we can't comprehend why this is happening and and I guess part of the lesson of the story is this should be very clear yeah and I think that that's been the case with other, I mean, that's always the case with civil rights protests. And it's certainly been the case with other Black Lives Matter protests, right, that you always have contingents of people. Like, I think usually the way we engage with that idea is,

you know, civil rights factions will point out factions on the right and sort of accuse them of playing dumb, right? And I think that this is a weird case because of, I think Trump is president. I think coronavirus is happening. I think there are a lot of things that lend the sort of broader national mood in the United States a more chaotic, freewheeling energy than usual, in general. And so, and I don't want to be woo-woo about it, but I just, I do think that it matters that before this particular incident, people have been stuck in their homes. And it matters. that, you know, Trump, Trump didn't cause anything,

but Trump speaks in a particular way that sort of is the thing at the top of American political culture that attitudinally sort of trickles down a bit. And I think it's part of the Patrick of America in general right now, feeling like misinformation and sort of subjectivity is just sort of,

it's making it really hard to have, have a really focus principled conversation about the real substantive political redress that people are seeking. And instead, it's become an argument about what it means to be the right kind of white ally, what it means to have an argument about riots for the 400th time since Ferguson. I think that's where we are. And I think that's largely because of the national character and not necessarily because of the particulars of this incident.

it. So when you talk about that chaotic energy, all kind of feeding into the same place, you got a couple of things there, right? You've got coronavirus, as you said, you've got the fact that everybody's been at home for 12 weeks or something like that because of coronavirus. You've got a number of, you've got Donald Trump in the White House. And then you've also got all these high profile incidents, right? Not just George Floyd, Amad Arbery in Georgia, jogging, killed while jogging. Brianna Taylor killed in a no-knock raid in Louisville. Chris Cooper in Central Park, right? Not to mention, was it

23,000 of the 100,000 coronavirus deaths in the United States have been African Americans, right? So all that feeds into this energy, chaotic energy is a real good war. It's also a presidential election year, right? Like, you just had a

very contagious Democratic president. Like, that's the thing. That's number five on the list. That's how many things are on the list is that we almost forgot to mention that the Bernie versus Biden, And, you know. There you go. Right.

Not to mention, like, the president was recently impeached. You know, maybe that's, like, number 51 on the list at this point. And by the way, everything that you listed before prior to the protests breaking out had been directly tied to, I mean, not initially, not necessarily, but it had been frequently tied to the election cycle, too, right? That all, like, we talk about coronavirus. We're talking about it in terms of Trump's reelection potential, right? And we talk, I mean, all of these tragedies. affect the way that people vote. And maybe it goes without saying that it's not just 23,000 of 100,000 COVID deaths

are in the African-American community. But I think that it's not going to surprise anyone when it shakes out that the African-American community was hit in ways beyond just death. I mean, there's a lot more effect. And especially like inner city communities and stuff like that in terms of the economic impact of the coronavirus. So there's a lot of, a lot of, yeah, contributing factors here. It's just a bad time.

Like, it's just a bad time. And this came at the worst time and a bad time, you know. I was interested, Charity, and asking you about the, this effort by both cable news hosts and politicians to separate the quote unquote good guy protesters from the bad guy protesters that you mentioned. Yeah. I'm not sure I've heard the words outside agitators this many times in my life. then does not come from a history book about the 1960s. What did you make of that whole effort and that whole exercise? I mean, again, this is outside agitators.

You're right that I think this time around it has become almost, it feels like it's subbed in for people talking about George Floyd. And instead we're specifically, it feels like a lot of corners at least are talking about outside agitators and rioters. And I feel a sense of dissent here in the sense that I just don't, think the conversation about rioting either way is interesting. I think the community, like, I think people who live in these communities have every reason to not want their neighborhoods to burn down.

And like, I just don't, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not going to sit a hundred or a thousand miles away from somebody's town and, you know, tell people to riot. I'm not going to do that. But yeah, I don't, I don't know. I do think it's that, it's that, again, these, These sort of protests were hard under the Obama administration, right? And it's just, I think the past nearly four years of talking about, you know,

misinformation on social media and sort of shadowy interference in our discourse, it's just, it's made it so that even talking about outside agitators, it just feels so, I can just sort of conclude that I'm never going to get to the bottom of this. You know, I'm never, yeah. It feels impossible. So many corners of our culture are defined by trying to isolate things that are otherwise shrouded in this kind of political misinformation. I just don't, I don't know.

To take a very narrow slice of it, I mean, there was that video that would seem to be everywhere in the span of about five seconds, the very, you know, a couple days ago of that white guy in a gas mask and with an umbrella who was just smashing the windows of the auto parts store window by window. It was very immediately labeled an agent provocateur. And to anyone that wanted to see that, you know, present company included. It was very, I mean, that was almost as perfect of, you know, as pristine video evidence as you could hope for. And so you're, so anybody's conspiracy theories are just immediately being backed up by the prevalence of video footage of everything online right now.

And I think that, I mean, to make a separate point, I think that the, I mean, chaos is the word that we've used, but just the general national anxiety. you know, charity, you said that, you know, you compared, you referenced the Obama administration and our anxiety during, during the protest during Obama's presidency, it can't be, it cannot be overstated how much the anxiety is increased right now, not because of anything Trump stands for, but just because there's no expectations. Like there's no, like we literally can't, you can't even say, well, at least the president's going to speak tonight. And that's like one of the signs of the, I mean, one of the, one of the, the signs of the cross or whatever.

You know, one of the, I mean, it's like, it's a, it's a necessary step in wherever we're going. We, there is no, there is no playbook for what, where we are in this country right now with our current president. And it's just, it, I mean, to me, that's, that, that's where a lot of my personal anxiety is, is housed, right? It's just like you look outside and see people protesting and you're like, I just don't even know what the, I don't know when this is supposed to end. I can't, I don't know if it ever will. I think that's sort of like my sort of, that's always been my take on something like Trump derangement syndrome, right? Is that sense of Trump being president has driven his opponent's crazy and they just are hysterical all the time. And I actually think, I think Trump derangement syndrome is a real thing, but I think it's a thing that's about. everyone. And I mean that in a more charitable sense than just being like everyone's stupid.

It's more like, no, I think, again, Trump is not, like, he's not responsible for this, but he speaks in this reckless, stupid way. And I think that just as the sort of the guy standing at the top of a political culture, it matters. I think that that energy does sort of allow people who are in his corner on others, other matters, and people who are against him in general. I think it's given everyone an extra sense of, I think, anxiety and sloppiness about all things political. And I think that's dangerous in a lot of context, but it's certainly unfortunate and dangerous in a situation like this, where you have all of these robocops, poor into the streets to, you know, stare down unarmed protesters and maybe also like some

crazy white people handing out bricks. It's just a bad dynamic. To go back to the point about early, we had earlier about thin slicing the protests, protesters and how hard that is. So we've had the like Russian bots bit, the Antifa sort of layer of this. We've also had the just very basic like these people are from out of town. How many times have you heard that over the last couple? And it turns out there was that stat in New York where there are more New York City police officers living outside the five boroughs than people who have a percentage of protesters who were living outside the five boroughs.

But that was a very weird one that had a very big life on Twitter and even liberal Twitter early on in this thing. I did find it funny when we talk about politicians doing this. And obviously Trump doing it with Antifa has a very specific purpose. but I saw this Matthew Zyland tweeted this. He says, I have no idea what the effect of anything will be, but the fact that the Marco Rubios of the world are specifically saying that Black Lives Matter are the good guys and should be listened to and respected is dot dot dot noteworthy. And I did notice that shift that a lot of Republicans attempting to kind of, you know, pivot in this.

We're saying, well, you know, listen, Black Lives Matters, they are the people out here with a legitimate point. It's these others. And I was like, wait, when did that? When did that scale switch? That's the first time I think I've ever heard that. Yeah. I mean, that's breathtaking, right? It's breathtaking, but it's also like that matters until that consensus reverses itself, right?

I felt that way. I feel like in the past few years with a lot of moments where it feels like the right and the left agree about something in some meaningful way. But I think within three days to a week, there will be some sort of backslide to form. on lots of kinds of issues where people sort of revert to whatever Trump's default position is on something we're like a week into this now

but I don't know I mean I think it depends on how the protests continue to play out I think it depends on how aggressively Trump wants to keep talking about looting and shooting but yeah I mean as cynical as I feel about a lot of this stuff

I feel kind of like a normie in how much I took some small brief relief in that in that initial Consensus that like Democrats and Republicans could agree that that video was horrifying But I don't know how long that consensus holds in a country where The protests are You know sort of reinforcing the the the divides otherwise I mean, it kind of looks like that's starting to slip already, right? You have Tom Cotton now tweeting that we should use like the 101st airborne to stop protests. And I mean, you have Trump now telling governors that they're weak.

So I feel like it's only a matter of time until all the Republicans fall in line with that, right? Yeah. Like I just, I sort of assume that's what's going to happen. But that's also one of the... That's one of the many things in American politics at the moment where I would love to be wrong about, you know, but I do assume that that's going to happen to some degree. Right. Right. And that's, and that points out to me another facet of this, which was a protest that started at least in part because of police brutality and overreach quickly became a showcase of police brutality and overreach. obviously the video from Brooklyn being I think the biggest one that we saw over and over again but what did you guys make of so many different incidents whether it was rubber bullets

whether batons that we saw from the cops over the last 48 hours you know the fact of how the cops look in every county in every city right where they're all in the most sort of They all seem like they have six inches of riot gear on. And, you know, I think about the original video of Derek Chauvin and George Floyd, and I think about, you know, I said this at the top, where they're explicitly talking through all of these issues about what the police are doing on the scene that feel like they're directly invoking every conversation that's been had about Black Lives Matter and had about these videos in every previous iteration.

And then you watch the violence from the cops. You look at the sort of outpouring of police officers on the scene at the protest. And it just feels like a weird historical cycle, right? Like the, not to get hung up on the optics, right? But there is this sense that you watch the police and you watch what the police feel to be proportionate, but appropriate sort of steps to restore civil order. and it all looks so over the top and like shooting people in the throat with rubber bullets

and, you know, I just, it seems like if the police actions that are happening in response to an outrage about police brutality look like this, I think that's the sort of thing that instills in people the sense that there is a deeper cultural problem with how America, police process their civic responsibilities. Because again, even the police actions

that are specifically in response to people being mad about a video about police brutality look so... Like, we get the protests so large and we get that rioting is happening. But I think just visually, it strikes a lot of people as confirmation that there just...

There's got to be a better answer It's not going to be about the police, you know, the police unions tweeting out, like, we saw this video and we recognized this is bad. It's like, no, there's a deeper structural problem that teaches the police that this is the appropriate level of aggression to meet unarmed civilians with. That's what I think is going on here. I think people feel discouraged by this dynamic. I think so, too. I mean, the New York Times had a headline today that everybody's seen by now, which is. is facing protests over use of force, police respond with more force.

And that's like the passive voice, you know, retelling of this story. I think, I mean, it's hard for me to look at the police response. And obviously, we're just getting really selective views on TV. And, you know, I'm sure there's some implicit bias just in the way that we view these things at this point. But it's hard to rationalize why the response. would be why there's not a plan B, you know, or why plan B isn't plan A? You know, like, how is this the best, how is after everything this country's been through, even over the last five years? How is this like super militarized response? Anybody's idea of a good idea? I mean, I guess there are, there are very, very, like, minor exceptions, which are like, have all gone viral on various platforms over the past couple of days, too. But like, so, so in some sense, you know, the, these, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, police phalanx or whatever that's like in the streets of Minneapolis or wherever else is competing against these little memes that have, you know, warm-hearted policemen in, you know,

brief instances around the country. But it does just, you're, I mean, you said you don't want to make it an issue about optics, but it is, it's almost entirely an issue of optics at this point, right? But it's also a matter of real politics, right, in the sense that people at the, you know, the final level of this, right, is people at least want to say, okay, you don't want us to protest, You don't want us to riot. Who do you want us to appeal to? Right? Like in New York,

there protests about this in New York. Bill de Blasio's daughter got arrested at one of the protests. And like New York is a great example. You, you know, the sort of polite or time-honored avenue you're supposed to seek for redress, if not rioting, it's supposed to be,

well, elections, vote. But no one in New York is under the impression that Bill de Blasio is in control of the NYPD. You know what I mean? And I think that's the similar situation in Minneapolis, right, is that there seems to be a breakdown of political accountability between the people who are actually elected officials and the people to whom the police are ultimately politically accountable. And I think that breakdown, that breakdown in politics, the fact that you actually don't have a very straightforward way of voting out the person who oversees police abuses in whatever your community is, that breakdown in political accountability is how you end up with everything that's been happening in the country for the past week and everything that's been happening in this country of the past decade. That was an amazing facet of this to me.

New York City and Minneapolis, both elected lefty police reformers as their mayor, right? Both of their current mayors ran on a platform of police reform. And yet, what Justin talks about, the futility, the seeming futility of that process, right? The unaccountability of that process.

And the thing with de Blasio's daughter was absolutely incredible. Yeah. I mean, just absolutely. incredible. I do want to circle guys back to Trump for a second. There was an amazing image of Donald Trump, literary image anyway, in today's New York Times. On Friday night, you had protesters near the White House. Donald Trump was rushed to the underground bunker of the Times reports that is used when there's a threat of a terrorist attack. And from there and from his metaphorical bunker in the rest of the White House, he is tweeting things like law and order. And there's this joke. right that newspapers are always saying Trump is quote increasingly isolated we may when we get to the all caps law and order tweet uh from the bunker we may have actually reached nixonian isolation yeah we really have sunday night and then sunday night last night they turned off all the exterior lights to the white house late at night yeah after which uh NBA writer Zach harper tweeted handling protests

against police brutality across the country like you don't want any more trick or treaters at your front door. What do we make of Trump's just really complete physical absence if not total digital absence during the last several days? It's true to form for him in the sense

that immediately before they turned the lights off, he was trying to solve this by talking shit. He was trying to solve it by doing the whole like, I wish in protesters would show up, my MAGA guys are going to show up and meet you guys out there and they're going to be bigger and stronger than you. That's the thing that actually seems characteristic of Trump is that he's tried to diametrically opposed approaches to this. He's tried the really dramatic tough guy and he's tried the, I'm just going to go into my bunker and blame the governors

and hope this sorts itself out with military force. Yeah, I just think it says a lot about how I think apart from processing things in terms of who he thinks doing whatever will help him in November. I just don't, this is the kind of moment where Trump is just not interested in being a political leader in the way that one might want him to try to be. Because again, people weren't happy with Obama

during the Black Lives Matters protests. They weren't happy with the Obama administration. Obama was a really, ambivalent guy and he felt at the end of the day some responsibility to sort of be that

to express those formal law and order perspectives of you know we don't condone X, Y, and Z but even Obama I think it's just like at least Obama tried to thread the needle

that Trump is just he's throwing it up the window that's just what he does he always in a moment where you would ideally want to see somebody with some real convictions and some real sense of moral clarity. Trump doesn't have moral clarity about anything.

So you just get this kind of... It's like he's trying out material in front of a microphone. He's like doing stand-up material, but there's no moral clarity there. And I don't think anybody expects there to be. I mean, even judging by his own history and is whatever the Trumpian, the most pro-Trump metric you could come up with is, it does seem

like he's, I feel like he's, he might be trying out material, but he's screaming into a just vacuum now more than ever, right? Because as isolated as he is, it just seems like there's no audience for this, right? And there's no, there's no test market. Like, people are out on the street, you know, people are living this. And Trump has locked himself in a closet. So, I mean, it's, it just seems so, it just seems so beside the point. I get what he's doing, I guess, but it's like if you, you really feel like if you just have nothing to say and no interest in saying anything, then you just log off, you know? I mean, it's, I mean, I guess it doesn't help anything to say it on this podcast, but I just, it's, I can't get past it. Yeah, Tom Skoka tweeted,

at least now we have the answer to what if the pet goat lasted an entire weekend, referring, of course, to George W. Bush. A couple of stages of the Trump reaction. A couple of there were the formal remarks he gave in the Rose Garden on Friday when it looked like he was going to say something about this. And instead he just talked about leaving the World Health Organization and then left without taking any questions. Then he did switch to Twitter on Friday calling the protesters in Minneapolis thugs, quote unquote, using that now infamous formulation when the looting starts, the shooting starts, a phrase that was quickly traced back to Miami Police Chief Walter Headley in 1960. and then George Wallace in his 68 presidential campaign went back to that well one more time

when protesters started got close to the White House on Friday and he said they were going to be quote greeted but with the most vicious dogs and most ominous weapons I have ever seen that's when people would have been really badly hurt I said that was amazed by this one it goes

what both of you guys were saying from the Washington Post it says Trump and some of his advisors calculated that he should not speak to the nation because he had nothing new to say and had no tangible policy or action to announce yet. I mean, that's wise. That's wisdom. Can we find out who was giving him that advice? And then just as we were coming on to this podcast today, he's then talking to on a conference call to the nation's governors and then ramping back up the aggression. Quote, you have to dominate, Trump said, if you don't dominate, you're wasting your time, they're going to run over you. You're going to look like a bunch of jerks.

Jerks. You have to dominate. Also said he was going to activate Bill Barr and activate him very strongly, whatever that means. Okay. I mean, listen, vicious dogs and ominous weapons, despite its racial baggage, is just maybe just the pinnacle of Trump tweets. I mean, there's just like, it's just entirely bullshit and we're in just his addled wordsmanship that it's, I don't even

know what to say about it. But I don't even think it's just a wordsmanship thing, right? It's that it's it's pure anime. He's just doing anime, right? There's no moral dimension. There's no moral dimension to talking about vicious dogs and ominous weapons. There's nothing there. It's just a guy who's only, his only perspective on a problem like this is how can I look good solving it or else exacerbating it?

And I think that's what it means to credit Trump, even though, again, this isn't Trump's fault, but to credit Trump with the sort of general messiness and chaos to how a lot of stuff is getting worked through right now is the fact that the guy at the top has no moral dimension to him. He's just a guy who tweets things like vicious dogs and ominous weapons. And yeah, we're just sort of stuck. That's the environment we're stuck in. We're stuck in this environment of vicious dogs and ominous weapons and no real moral dimension to how partisan politics is going to process any of this, even though it is theoretically, police brutality is theoretically a political problem with potential political solutions. Yeah. And, and

And just to go back to Brian's timeline and to amend it slightly, I believe he made the, when the shooting starts, or the looting starts, a shooting starts statement or tweet or whatever, before his Friday press conference was scheduled. And I believe, if memory serves, the press conference was about the World Health Organization was postponed a half hour, an hour, or whatever, so that he could get out, so he could get out the walkback tweet about,

or the walkback statement explaining why he used that ridiculous and racist phrase. which goes to the, you know, the question, the further, the larger questions about the timeline and about Trump's lack of statement on anything. It did seem like he was preparing to face questions about it, right? He was trying to sort of put that one to the side so that he could face questions so that he could answer different questions or answer questions more broadly. And then he decided not to answer questions at all right then. And of course, again, it goes without saying that a president getting on, getting up in front of the microphone and, just like shit-talking China for 15 minutes and

and leaving the world, you know, withholding funds permanently from the World Health Organization might have been a little bit of a bigger story in any other moment in American history. But of course, this is Trump's presidency. And there's a lot more going on in the world. But yeah, I mean, listen, Charity, you're exactly right. There's just this moral vacancy, right? I mean, there's absolutely, there's no there and there's no interest there.

I mean, there's no, there's no, for someone who likes to talk, to reporters and likes to be combative and likes to hear his own voice and whatever so much like what a great moment to go out and say something sort of soaring and empty to the American public because you want to be president, right? This is your moment. This is the moment of your presidency people are going to remember. And he's and he's tweeting, you know, just nonsense in all caps. I mean, it's just, it's, he's such a baby. I mean, to have spent the entire coronavirus epidemic not doing a single thing and blaming. everybody else and pretending nothing was his fault.

And even if it wasn't, to be sitting there blaming everybody else, he's such a baby. And now to just not say anything, it's like, it's, it's almost mind-boggling, right? I mean, it's like you could watch, he could watch any movie about a president and have a better idea of what to do right now than what he's come up with. It's, it's really stunning. The, uh, where you guys is exhausted as I was when like five minutes into the protest, we went to will a law and order platform hand Donald Trump?

Trump, the election in November, the latest frontier in 5D chess that Trump is, this is the plan all along or this he will somehow turn this into an election victory? Yeah, I mean, but though, isn't that largely about how I think anybody working in political journalism loves the writing prompt that says compare Trump to the 1960s and 1970s? I think we're all sort of obliged to take a shot whenever, you know, bringing up like George Wallace and Nixon is available for a news cycle. But yeah, I was exhausted by it in a similar way. I just was like, no, no, no, please no. Well, I mean, yes.

I mean, the election conversation obviously takes us directly to, you know, Democratic presumptive nominee, sleepy Joe Biden, who is said a lot of the things that one would hope that the president of the United States would be out there saying, right, over the past few days. I don't know that I would call anything that he said soaring either. You know, I think that, I mean, maybe it's part of this, the chaos that we've been talking about, and maybe there's a lot more to sort of shake out. There have been a lot of, I've seen a lot of voices on the far, ugly right, who I would won't even name who have been loudly anti-Trump the past couple of days. I think it's been a little bit vague, but I think most of it boils down to his lack of action in the face of all

these protests and riots. And what, you know, what they see as a, you know, as a almost, you know, anarchic situation in the country. And on the left, I've seen a lot of people who have been very loudly, very vocally disappointed in Joe Biden in a way that they wouldn't, I don't think, be voicing their disapproval in another circumstance. And yeah, I mean, I think that it's impossible, as we said, the very top of the show to separate this entirely from the election that's coming up, right? I mean, this is a real thing and everything, every move on the chess board is going to affect, you know, who wins or loses at the end. I did, but it does seem, I don't know, I mean, to be disappointed in

Joe Biden and his statements or readings or whatever else, it just does seem a little bit beside the point right now. I think that he would certainly be doing a better job if he were sitting in the Oval Office.

But I don't know. It all just seems, it's hard to get too worked up about any of it when there's so much more to get worked up about. It seems important to like separate out this particular moment from the general state of being disappointed in Joe Biden.

which seems like it's going to be a pretty steady state from now until November. I mean, he went, what did he do? He gave an address in his basement there in Delaware. He went to the site of a protest in Wilmington and talked to people, which, which it seemed to me that no reporter actually saw. They just saw on Joe Biden's Instagram account. Not saying it didn't happen, but it was just kind of a funny thing. It was like, according to Instagram, Joe Biden went to a Wilmington protest, which is kind

of a strange thing. I think that's one of the few times Joe Biden has interacted with people. since the beginning of the coronavirus outside of his home and his family. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, the pieces that were interesting to me, and there's a post I have not read by Barack Obama on Medium this morning. But let me just give you one quote from it because maybe it provokes something interesting here. I've heard some suggest that the recurring current problem of racial bias in our criminal justice system

proves that only protests and direct action can bring about change and that voting and participation in electoral politics is a waste of time. I couldn't disagree more. What do we think? I mean, that also seems to me to be an issue that the Democrats are going to be thinking about or if they're not already thinking about over the next couple of days. What do you guys think about that? Well, think about it, we had just been talking about Trump, right?

And sort of Trump talking or not talking. And now we're talking about Biden and Obama. And, you know, Biden might be more responsible in his rhetoric than Trump, even though Biden has his own rhetorical problems. And then Obama, right? Obama seems like he's a more generally agreeable figure than either Trump or Biden. And I don't think Obama or Biden matter either. Like I think that's sort of what I mean when I talk about the cultural implication. of Trump's presidency and how the attitude and the vibe, frankly, trickles down is that

because you're not going to get any of that clarity from Trump, I think people just don't, I think in general, people aren't really going to be that receptive to a lot of the attempt to create moral clarity at the level of elected politics right now. Like, even somebody like Obama who has the rhetorical stopping power, it's Obama's trying to come back into this conversation in Trump's America. And I just think that that's the problem, you know? It's not to say that people on a community level, people who are on the ground at the protest, people who are trying to have these conversations, you know, at maybe local and state levels. Like, I think those people are going to make headway. I just think that the national climate is such that it doesn't matter if you subout Trump for Biden or Obama in this particular conversation.

I just think that people have been for several years now agitating sort of directly to the president about these civil rights concerns. And I think people's patience is just broken. And so, you know, Barack Obama popping up on medium, I just don't think is going to make anybody happy. Because Obama didn't make a lot of people happy when he was the person in the position to do the most. And I think a lot of people are going to see Obama pop back up and say, listen, I don't have the patience for this, you know. I mean, especially when what he's saying is what we were talking about earlier being directly refuted by all of this, which is, you know, I'll participate in local elections and, you know, small-scale democratic processes and all of these problems are happening. where, you know, theoretically people have elected Democrats to city council to mayor all positions to gubernatorial positions, right? Like, how is that message going to resonate

with anyone? Right. I agree with that. Yeah. I mean, and it seems, I mean, I think that what people are, at least the people that I've seen online and, and everywhere else, I think the people, what people are bristling against about the voting issue is that, you know, just vote is, has proven to not be an answer in and of itself, right? And to say it like, that's the solution. It's just inherently dismissive. I think that that kind of goes to the bigger issue here, which is that, you know, we can pass a law that makes it easier to prosecute cops,

bad cops, right? You can do, you know, you can do these things piecemeal. But I think that unlike any other issue, even the most serious issues our society faces, what we're seeing over. and over again is that a piecemeal approach isn't going to do jack shit, right? I mean, when we say it's a systemic problem, when we say it's like the original center of our country and it's baked in and everything else, this is what this is what people mean, is that like,

you can, sure, we do have to vote and voting is going to be, voting will, will affect it in some small way, but it's, but this is, this is a change that's going to, that necessitates a revolution almost, right? And that, I mean, that's what we're seeing in the streets right now. But I think it's not just the fact that I don't I don't think people are just bristling against the suggestion of voting and using electoralism as opposed to devolving into street violence right I think what people bristle against is the fact that it always seems like the people who weigh in with you know vote don't boo vote are doing it like they're the first person who's ever had that idea you know there's a sort of condescension in it of being like,

have you guys tried voting? It's like you're asking a bunch of, in a lot of cases, lifelong civil rights activists, whether they've considered the merits of voting. And it's not just this sense of, you know, telling protesters not to get out of hand,

but sort of insinuating that protesters are dumb on some level or that they just haven't thought hard enough about police brutality, despite the fact that, you know, these movements clearly include a lot of people who have spent more time thinking about police brutality than anyone else, including Barack Obama. And I just think that's sort of where the miscommunications happen. It's not just about the fact that you have people who really do want our civic institutions to be healthy and robust, but it's the fact that a lot of the time that people defending those institutions can get really sort of whimsical

and condescending when they try to sort of engage with protesters about why they're so dissatisfied with the outcomes that have brought us to this point in the first place. I want to talk to you guys a little bit about the cops versus the press, since this is ostensibly a media podcast. I saw a lot of intimidation and outright violence between police and reporters over the last weekend. Here's a partial list. CNN crew arrested by the Minnesota State Patrol.

Louisville reporter shot with pepper balls. Wall Street Journal reporter pushed to the ground in New York. Des Moines Register reporter was streaming while she was in custody. Detroit News reporter in Cuffs. Huff Po reporter detained and unheard from for hours. This is from Saturday night. Listen to the L.A. Times as Molly Hennessy Fisk explain how she and photographer Carolyn Cole were attacked by police.

Hi, so this is Molly Hennessy Fiske for the LA Times, and I just wanted to get this on the record that I was just at the fifth precinct with a group of media. There was at least a dozen of us there, TV, still photo and print. I had my notebook in my hand when the Minnesota State Patrol was advancing on protesters and us. We identified ourselves as press, and they fired tear gas canisters on us at point-blank range. I get hit in the leg. I'll post a photo of that. We asked them, I was saying, where do we go? Where do we go? They did not tell us where to go. They didn't direct us. They just fired on us. We got stuck myself and the photographer got stuck in a corner at a scale of brick wall and run into a random building where I'm now taking shelter. There's police walking along the street, you know, not allowing us to go out.

So I just wanted to get that on the record. Now, Wesley Lowry had a good reminder here, which you said, you're extremely non-examined. unpartisan newspaper person can't be seen sticking up for the rights of protesters because that would be taking sides. But they can be seen sticking up for the rights of the media covering the protest because that's a safe place from which to get mad. So with that proviso in mind, it does seem like there was quite a lot of this over the last couple of days. What do you guys think about the police and the press? I mean, I want to hear what charity has to say. My my reaction to all of it in real time was just utter disbelief because it just seems like it seems

like it I just don't I mean I can't understand what the thinking could have possibly been I mean but I guess that goes to the very basis I mean to one of the things it's at the core of this problem which is that like there was this hope that iPhone cameras would solve a lot of police brutality and and and you know a lot of the issues that are a lot of the resultant issues from the sort of institutional racism, and clearly it just hasn't been the case. And so, I mean, there's an extent to which, you know, for someone like me, it beggars belief, but, I mean, there is so many of these instances. It's just sort of hard to, hard to wave it off.

What do you think, Justin? I had only really thought about the media in, like the media on the scene in the context of that footage of the CNN reporter. or the CNN crew rather, getting arrested, I think early Friday morning on camera, like on live television. And, you know, that footage was interesting to me, right? Because the police in the video don't explain what's going on.

And, you know, that is a video where I was like, did I miss something? Was there a 10-minute conversation that happened before the police started cuffing the people and the CNN crew? Like, what is going on here? the police in the video are trying to avoid talking because they seem to be aware that they're on live television. So they're arresting the reporters.

The reporters are trying to figure out what's going on. The police won't say. They seem to not be saying because you're trying to figure out whether it's because that's just standard procedure in general, whether it's because they're on TV and are trying to limit some sort of liability issue. And then just watching that video of the CNN reporters getting arrested one by one,

I just had that thought of like, this is, this is the problem, is that everything that the police do in these, these levels of interactions, in these arrests, in various kinds of arrests, just seems inscrutable. It feels like they're not working from a sort of sensible guidebook so much as they're working from like an obscure religious text that dictates what it is appropriate for police officers to do. And despite the fact that the police officers, are ultimately accountable to citizens and are also responsible for the safety of citizens in various ways,

it's almost like the police are explicit about the fact that if you're a citizen, if you're just a basic normie citizen, whether you're a CNN journalist or whether you're an unarmed suspect in a forgery case, if you're just a normal citizen, you can't possibly begin to understand all of the intricate sort of esoteric,

Eidix that determine why the police do what they do, which is not how the law is supposed to work, right? Like, as a citizen, the whole point of following the law is that the law is supposed to be within your comprehension. And so you watch something like, again, either the George Floyd video or, you know, the cuffing of the CNN crew. And the fact that it's just very hard from a basic citizen perspective to understand what the police are even doing, that to me just sort of underscore. how out of touch or how much distance there is between the police and the people the police are theoretically accountable to.

Because so much of what they do in these videos is just absolutely inscrutable. Yeah. There's... It's impossible. I mean, I think that's what... And this is not to cut anybody in any slack. There are probably some well-intentioned,

you know, white folk out there who, when they... they've seen all these videos of police violence in the past, that's part of the disconnect for them. Because they do live in a world where the actions of police are mostly comprehensible, right? Because the police don't fuck with them ever. The police are very, like, with the exception of, like, speeding tickets on the highway are not a big part of their life.

And so to see a black guy getting arrested and whatever else, there's the assumption that what happened before the camera started rolling, there was an explanation for all this, right? because it's not their interaction with the police is not inscrutable. You see something like this on TV and I, I, it's actual, it's meaningfulness

I'm not quite there on. I don't, I don't feel like I know, Doreen-St. Felix, sort of beautiful piece in the New Yorker about it. That was, that dealt with a lot of this too about like what the, what CNN's broadcast actually means

to these protests and how this, how the arrest played against that backdrop. But you're right. It's it's it's just really hard. I mean, it's the inscrutability of the whole thing. It doesn't make, it doesn't make any sense. And it's really hard to wrestle with.

The CNN correspondent's name was Omar Jimenez. He, one of the amazing things about that clip, as Justin said, is he is saying in that clip, tell us where you want us to go, right? my crew is here to cover this and we'll, we'll walk to wherever you want us to walk to. And that doesn't work. Let's let's actually just listen to that.

I think it's worth listening to that. They are outside the wine and spirit shop that was the background of that incredible associated press photo in Minneapolis. Here's how they encounter with the CNN crew and the cops went down. Yep. We've got one person being arrested here. We've got, we're media. Yep.

We're good. Yep, hold on. I got you, I got you, hold on. They had us here, they had us here. We're speaking with State Patrol right now. Give us a second, guys. We can move back to where you'd like. We can move back to where you'd like here.

We are live on the air at the moment. This is the four of us. We are one team. Just put us back where you want us. We are getting out of your way. So just let us know. Wherever you'd want us, we will go. We are just getting out of your way. We were just getting out of your way when you were advancing through the intersection.

So just let us know and we got you. And this is a scene here playing out in Minneapolis. This is part of the advanced police presence that we saw come over the course of really minutes when the local police showed up at the fire department, or with the fire department, I should say, on that building we showed you that was burning. This is among the state patrol unit that was advancing up the street, seeing and scattering the protesters at that point for people to clear the area. And so we walked away. I'm sorry? You're under arrest. Okay. Do you mind tell me why I'm under arrest, sir? Why, why am I under arrest? The governor of Minnesota, Tim Walls, apologize and said, if the community sees a reporter being arrested, their assumption is it's because

there's something's going to happen that they don't want to be seen. And so that is unacceptable. I guess my, I guess my question here is to what extent should we understand things like this as actually some new or different sort of face off with reporters? Or is this just what Justin's saying, like a facet of the impunity of the police? And it's just another mystifying action that we just can't understand alongside a whole bunch of other ones. this is more of maybe this is more of a big picture comment but i think it's you know think it's okay to not have a really clear answer to a lot of these questions right now and it's and i think that that everyone could probably benefit from being comfortable or not comfortable i guess is the wrong word but to to accept the fact that that some answers

are going to be more difficult to come by um and to sort of embrace not embrace in a positive way again i'm just tripping over all my words but to sort of accept the inscrutability of the whole thing until we figure out the answer i don't think it doesn't make any sense. But there's a lot of, I mean, so much makes, I mean, it is, you know, things are more uncomfortable than they are knowable right now. And that's just, that's the way of the world, you know,

that's the situation that we're in. I think obviously people have, just in general, Americans, have different regard for protesters than they have for the rioters than they have for the rioters than they have for the media, certainly. I do think it's notable, though. And that CNN footage, you know, it's not just that the CNN reporter is saying, he's not saying, I guess we'll comply with what you want us to do.

He's trying to be his buddy as possible with the officers. I think there's the point where he's saying, we're just trying to get your message out. Right? Like, the guy, like, that is the closest in all footage of all of this stuff I've seen of somebody who's trying to play, he's trying to really humor the police officers in that moment. He's not just trying to comply.

He's trying to be on the right side of the cops in that moment. And even then, it got him arrested. It got his crew arrested. And I think seeing something like that, even though obviously we live in America, where people have very loaded, unflattering opinions about CNN in a more general sense, I think watching somebody who is really trying,

they're really trying to use their most polite voice and be on the right side of the cops and talk about how we know we're on live television, we're just trying to get your message out and the cops even arrest that guy. I think that just underscores to me the extent of that inscrutability. Because it really just seems like every time something, every time you see footage like that,

it just creates another band of distance between the average person, like the average person's understanding of what the police are for versus what the police seem to believe that the police are for. Yeah, I mean, I thought it was really interesting earlier when you were saying

that their actions are kind of like the deciphering of a religious text, right? Because like when I see something like that, my first thought is just that, you know, they like optics be damned they're going to do whatever they want right but that wouldn't even make any sense right like that just that's not even a good play for them it's just whatever the calculus is in their minds it's just so far away from what the average viewer can understand that like i don't know i just don't know where you can get with that yeah and it's like it is kind of

like the Chauvin Floyd footage in the sense of that arrest that guy in his crew on a whim. They didn't just do it at the drop of a hat and it's a 30 second clip. Like it took it took like 10 to 15 minutes to arrest that guy. Like they thought about it. They had a lot of time to think. They had a lot of time to consider the fact that they were live streaming to national television on cable news. And they even with all of that, that was the decision.

Those were the decisions that they made. You know, this isn't split. second policing. This is, we have every single minute of footage that went into them making the decisions they made and the decisions still don't really make sense. Yeah, not to mention that behind all that body armor, you can't even see the expressions on anybody's face, right? You're looking like when you're studying that footage, you're like looking for this human face. Like, can I read this person's mind, right? Can I understand what's happening here? And I was watching, I cannot. I cannot see the only people I can see are the reporters being arrested by these heavily armored guys. Justin,

is there anything you're interested in watching for over the next couple of days as we wrap up here? I realize that's a strange question just given what the last couple of days has been. But is there something in particular you are curious about, about where this all goes? I think that the prosecution of the officers involved is going to take time, obviously. So I guess just in the next few days, I'm just looking at. that that political consensus that initially existed about the video and seeing how the polarization regarding the protests and the riots affects, like sort of re-engineers that consensus. Because again, like, I hope that this isn't like every other sort of story of the Trump era

where even if people sort of at an initial phase of a controversy agreed about something, they find a way to work backward to, you know, 47% of Americans think that Derek Shalvin was in the right and 47% of America. You know what I mean? I'm hoping that the next month isn't just America backsliding to its sort of reliable red-blue breakdown in terms of processing basically every political and moral concern of the past four years. but I don't know. I worry that that is what I'm going to be watching play out. Justin Charity, thanks for joining us. We are David Shoemaker and Brian Curtis.

Research by Chris Almata, production magic by Erica Servantes. We're back Thursday to talk more about all this stuff. See you then.