Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello, welcome to Call It Like I See it by Disruption Now, I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to discuss the impact of the murder conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, which stemmed from the 2020 murder of George Floyd, and the still evolving legacy of this Floyd murder and the conviction in our society, as well as the ongoing legislative and reform efforts related to policing in our country.
So take a look at all that and just see where we stand now almost a year later from when this really picked up increased salience in our society.
And later on, we're going to take a look at some ways that, that the operation of our brains and what's going on around us make us as humans more inclined to embrace conspiracy theory type thinking. That this is not something that just happens on the side, but this is almost a feature, you know, not a book.
Joining me today is a man who may look funny, but yo, he's making money. Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde, are you still planning to drink up all the Hennessy we have on the shelf?
[00:01:25] Speaker B: Only if you ask me to introduce myself.
And I appreciate that because I definitely would be happy to keep looking funny and keep making money. I'll take that trade off all day. There we go. There we go.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Now we're recording this on April 26, 2021, and last week we saw Derek Chauvin be convicted on all three charges that he faced. Second degree unintentional murder, third degree murder, and, and second degree manslaughter as a result of him callously taking the life of George Floyd in the spring of 2020.
Now, we could see as early as last summer that this event was shaping up as a seminal one in our culture. And the verdict, if anything, just seems to keep that momentum going and to give some concrete, make a concrete showing that the world may not be the same anymore as it was before that.
So to get us started, Tunde, what are your thoughts on like the actual verdict that, that this is the verdict that we got or you know, in terms of how we. The act that we got it or that the reaction to it and so forth?
[00:02:29] Speaker B: I think anyone watching that video is. Shouldn't be surprised.
I guess it's more of a surprise that we are surprised and if that makes any sense. But I mean, no, like it's, it's. I think in the end this is a tragedy in general.
And, you know, this phase of it has now come to a conclusion. Right. The legal verdict has been handed down And I think we all know in one. In one respect, it's kind of matter of fact, like, all right, that shouldn't be a surprise because we saw a guy get murdered over eight, nine minutes.
But in another way, it is symbolic because this is the first time in a long time and one of the rare times that a police officer has been convicted of murder. And so, you know, it's interesting, it's unique, but I think that I say, you know, I guess that's all I can say what I think about it. But the reactions also.
I mean, I don't watch much cable news anymore and all that, so I can't talk too much about what everybody's talking about. But I would say this.
I think, like we talked about immigration recently and certain other big issues that our society has in our nation and our culture.
This. This. This relationship between law enforcement and the black community is also complex and nuanced. And so I just. What I hope is that no one thinks that this is like, okay, well, now that this happened, everything's going to change, or this or that, you know, like, this is somehow a silver bullet.
I think the problems that existed between certain communities and law enforcement are still there, and the systemic nature of certain things is still there.
But from the idea of a symbolic victory for those who have been looking for justice when things like this have happened, I think that obviously this was a symbolic week, or, you know, this verdict was symbolic, let me put it that way.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that you're correct with that in the sense that the conditions that allowed this to happen more or less, are still in place.
And so while there is a level of relief that, you know, because we buy into certain things as Americans as far as that everyone is subject to the law and that justice under the law should be something that anybody could receive if they. The accountability under the law, not, you know, people with pitchforks or anything like that. But if you do something that is outside the bounds of the law, that you will face the court system and you won't just get off. And so, in a way, I think something like this can restore some faith in that. But it's still. It's only just something that almost needed to happen as a response to show the system can work. And now we have to go get, like, to the hard part and to take apart the things that make the conditions for something like this to happen in the first place, because that still can happen. Like, the goal here, the end goal, so to speak, is to make it so this type of stuff doesn't happen routinely.
The first step of that merely is to establish that there is accountability and consequence for going too far, so to speak. The other thing I would say, and you kind of touched on this, but I wanted to drill on a little bit deeper, was just how.
What struck me the most about this whole thing was this whole thing. What I mean by this whole thing is the verdict being rendered was the moments, the days, the hours right before the verdict were very eerie, intense, I guess, just there was a lot in the air, basically, like people on any perspective, from any perspective, people were preparing for the worst. There was a lot of uncertainty, and there was this level of everything's just hanging in the air, hanging in the balance, waiting to see what happens, what is going to happen here.
And that is just. It's surprising in one sense, from an absolute standpoint. And then it's not surprising in the context of just American history that we can watch something like that on a video.
And then when it comes time to say, hey, is this person going to be held accountable for doing what we saw on the video?
We don't know. It's up in the air when it gets to our legal system. And some of that, you know, admittedly, is because of the legal standard beyond a reasonable doubt. And we saw, you know, paying attention to the trial, the defense counsel saying, oh, it could have been carbon monoxide. It could have been, like, saying all types of stuff, you know, just, again, trying to create reasonable doubt. That's. That's the way the system works. So, I mean, understandably, that high legal standard plays a role into that. But just we've seen this movie, you know, we've seen this movie many times, so to speak. You know, we've seen Rodney King. We saw all those videos, too.
And then we saw acquittals. And so that, you know, just that time frame beforehand was just. So. It was almost like a scary movie when you know there's about to be something crazy happen and everything is just. There's this intensity in the air. And so that. That also stuck out to me. It just something that. And if you. If I dropped you in the middle of this and you had no context of the history, you'd be like, well, you know, of course you would think that this is a foregone conclusion, but we know that it wasn't.
[00:07:48] Speaker B: Yeah. No. And that's why I find this very interesting. That's why I wanted to break down a little bit of when you said the conditions that led to this, because I want to look at this from a lens of someone who's not me and you and may not have the visceral feeling and understanding of what people like you and I, how we have felt under, over time, directly or indirectly, with, with the justice system, law enforcement, and how we're treated as human beings by certain people in that profession. And so I could see somebody looking at this video of Floyd and this whole thing and saying, well, what do you mean? The conditions that, that, that got us here? Because all I see is an hole sitting on a guy's neck, right? Like, I'll, I'll be straight up and say there's nothing in that video that shows me that Derek Chauvin personally is racist. Let's say that he woke up that day and said, I'm gonna go find me a black guy to kill and that he found George Floyd and just killed him.
So I want to be clear that when, when we're talking about the conditions and all that, it's not to point out that Chauvin is necessarily himself racist or that every cop is raised or anything like that.
But what we can see is that Derek Chauvin obviously has issues with his ability to restrain his own aggression. He's had 19 complaints over his career. And so I think those are the things that's why I wanted to stop on that and say, really just parse out when we're talking about the systemic nature of generally I'm going to say this law enforcement and minority communities in the United States.
And that doesn't point to all cops, only because this is. When I say the justice system, it's everything. It's the prosecutors, it's the, it's the court system, it's the for profit prison system. All that kind of stuff plays into it. And so what I saw in that video was the officer Derek Chauvin understanding that because he was on a guy who looked like us Neck, that he probably could get away with being extrajudicial in his treatment of this man because he knew that he could just tell a story that, oh, well, all I got to do is say that I was scared and whatever happens to this guy, you know, I'll be okay. And that's what I think a lot of that point.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: By the way, Tunde, if you saw the original, like now people have gone back and pulled the original press release by the police department after this happened. And if you read that, it looks like, ho hum, just another day, you know, unfortunately, somebody died on their way to the hospital, you know, yada, yada, yada. And so, yeah, it's. I would like. Let me add this to real quick before we get away from this point, but go ahead, finish up.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: Well, that's why I just want to finish because to me, that's where then leads to what you said about accountability.
And that's what I think a lot of people.
That's why when it gets to just the racial component in this discussion about, oh, is this person racist or not, or are cops racist or not, that totally muddies the waters and kills the chance to have any productive conversation, in my opinion. Because then you go from dealing with things like we just talked about, like why, why isn't a bad officer like Derek Chauvin accountable, held accountable, or the many bad apples that we've seen on these videos, and you go to then having to, you know, people trying to say, well, can you prove that he was racist? I mean, that's not the point of the conversation. I, like I just said, we don't know if Derek Chauvin. I don't really care if he's racist or not at this point. He murders somebody. And I remember another thing that happened when you talk about.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Well, let me. Before you move on, I wanted to drill down on that also the. Yeah, like the press release. Just for example, the headline in that press release, man dies after medical incident during, during the police. During police interaction. Like, that's the headline. And I'll put this in the show notes where you can see it. But what it reveals more than anything, more than racism or anything like that, is that there was just a disregard, in a sense like a callous disregard for the life and liberty of George Floyd.
He was handled in a way as if his life didn't matter.
And there's a push, a counter push from that, which is termed. And sometimes this term is derided and saying, oh, it's kind of. It doesn't really convey the whole effort. But the term actually came more of a. From a visceral emotional reaction. And that term is Black Lives Matter. It's to push back on this concept that the life here of this guy didn't really matter to the extent that you could callously sit on his neck or kneel into his neck for almost nine minutes.
And that's what we see. And so, yeah, that doesn't. That's not illustrative of racism, quote unquote. But it does show kind of a systemic nature of disregard for the life of a black man, which you and I may interpret that as. Yeah, that's what we talk about when we Talk about systemic racism. But yeah, to someone who doesn't have our experience, maybe they don't see it as that, but everybody can see that disregard for the life in that video. I mean, and so that's something I think that life is able to bring people together in that sense. Like, whoa, that's not a bang bang situation. That is like slowly, I don't care, you know, like I'm just on here.
[00:13:18] Speaker B: And the fact that he knew he was. People were filming him with their phones and all that. So that's what, that's what I'm saying is that to me was somebody who's saying that I'm protected by the system, I'm not going to get in trouble for this. No one's going to really do anything about this. Well, no, but that's the second thought.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: The first thought is I don't even care what happens here. And then the second thought is, and if something does happen, I, I'll be protected. But you first have to decide that I'm just not concerned about this person's well being.
But go ahead, go ahead.
[00:13:49] Speaker B: Well, and that's what it got. That's why to me, the conditions, I wanted to just go over that because so many people I've talked to and people with even good faith, I mean I'd say most of the people I've talked to, let's say non black people I've talked to since this happened a year or so ago.
Most have been in good faith. And like you said, I think that there is a lack of, just awareness of what goes on in certain communities. And that's okay. It's not like that's what I mean, it's not that people are, you know, I expect everybody to know what it's like to, to, to, to, to what it's like when you're black and the police stop you and you got some aggressiveness in, in their, in their voices or their behavior. And you got to make all these mental calculations in a split second about do I move fast? I mean, think about it. I'm 6 foot 4, I'm black, right there. That's a recipe that some people just are going to be scared of me.
But the interesting thing for me is I've been this tall since I was 15. So I just remember even being a teenager getting in elevators and having the ladies clutch their purses, stuff like that. So it's unfortunate, but you become conditioned to understand that some people are going to look at you with fear and suspicion. And I think that's why the concern about these things won't go away for people like us? Because I think a lot of folks, like, I'll put it this way, a lot of my white friends will say, yeah, but Tunde, no one would ever do that to you because you don't act a certain way or you don't come from this side of town or this and that.
But that's their own bias, because I'm okay to them, because I'm their friend.
But someone else who doesn't know me and who may have a bad inclination to do something to me, again, that's where the systemic, the conditions come in. Because like you said, if someone who looks like us, life doesn't matter. Then when we show up at a morgue, we're that same guy. We don't matter. And then, and to your point about what the. The police report said, immediately after the press release, he died of some medical incident.
We know how many, countless times that's happened in our country.
And it's, you know, it's amazing that just over the last decade or so, with these, with these technology of these cameras, how much we're seeing these things like the lying by the police departments and the police officers on their reports about I was attacked and the video says they weren't. So when I was preparing for this, one thing I kept thinking of and alluding to was the Catholic Church, because I thought, this is very similar, it's systemic. Just like the Catholic Church had systemic issues with child molestation.
That's not a knock against the Christian religion, the Catholic religion, the people that practice in the Catholic faith. None of that, there's that, you know, that's all quality stuff.
The sad part is, is that we had an institution at the time called, you know, the Catholic Church as an institution, the archdiocese system, that instead of doing the right thing when they found out that a guy was molesting kids and saying, you gotta be outta here, this is unacceptable.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: Not just out of this archdiocese.
[00:16:52] Speaker B: Right, that's what I'm gonna get at.
[00:16:53] Speaker A: But like out of this organization. Correct.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: And so instead of that, they hit him. They moved them around to other archdiocese in other cities. And the next thing you know, the guys are allowed and they're basically preying on other kids and ruining another kid's life.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: And I think this will add in good to where you're going. But tell me this, and kind of, I guess let's go to this next step, this next phase, which would be just your thoughts on the overall legacy of the Floyd murder. The Protests and then now this trial and this verdict.
How do you see this or do you see this as a. Something that can be a catalyst to change, for change, you know, for some level of some measure of change?
[00:17:33] Speaker B: I do, I think, like you said, last year was just different, man. It's like I said, even, and I say different in a positive way. Right. Like I said, I, for the first time ever, I had. This is just anecdotal to my life, but I had, you know, white friends of mine actually just checking in on me, saying, hey, man, you know, what's going on over here? Type of thing. Like, tell us about how you feel and how you're doing with all this. That's never happened to me ever with any of these incidences. So I thought this is different, people actually paying attention in a different way then the response by, let's say, just corporate America. Not corporate America, but the states. You know, for the state of Mississippi to take down the Confederate flag off their state flag was huge symbolic. For NASCAR to ban Confederate flags was huge for this, you know, Mitch McConnell, the senator from Kentucky, to openly say, look, if my constituents say that they don't want the Confederate flag in the Kentucky thing anymore, then, you know, I'm with it. Those were things that I never, it's not like I stayed up at night thinking about these things, but I just thought, never thought in my lifetime I'd see the Confederate flag addressed. And all of a sudden it was
[00:18:44] Speaker A: so I think it hadn't been up until this point, like, you had no reason to think that if they, if after they lost, after they seceded from the Union, declared war and lost the war, did the Jim Crow, after all that stuff, if it hadn't happened, then what would make it happen? So, yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense.
[00:19:01] Speaker B: And so that's what I mean, and that's what I felt like last year, is that this is what it must feel like to live through history because we're in our early. I'll say I'm tipping on my mid-40s, but I'll leave you in the early stage. But. But don't take me with you. Yeah, I'm not taking you with me. Just me.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Well, let me say this, actually, let me say this because I don't wanna lose this, but I think actually the biggest legacy here is that this made this issue of whether it be policing, whether it be disregard for the life and liberty of blacks.
It's not a happily ever after type situation, but it gave the issue national salience.
Like, no more was it okay. Oh, that's just something that's being made up, at least amongst reasonable people. It was no longer. This is, you know, this isn't real. This is just made up. This is just over sensitivity. Like the level of, like that it was not a bang bang situation. That it was such a level and such a significant duration of disregard callousness as you. I mean, the thing I'd never forgotten about this was when you. When you first saw it and you were like, look at that, his hand is in his pocket.
Like, And I just. That's always stuck with me. I'm just like, yeah, you're right. Like his hands in his pocket. Like, who murders somebody with their hand in their pocket? And like that level of just disregard. Everybody saw it. And so there's just. There's nowhere really to hide from that. And so there are some people that their worldview is just not offended by that. But those people are not the people who we would seriously engage with in terms of solving these problems anyway. But reasonable people who do want to make the world a better place.
Everybody was like, okay, yeah, this is too much. This is something right here. And so it's not a new issue. You know, many people have been aware of this issue and have studied this issue in terms of the institutions of America and their interaction and their treatment of black folks. People have been aware of that for the whole time. But now it's something that had national salience. It wasn't just people pushing from the edges trying to say, hey, pay attention to this. Look at this. It was like, oh, everybody could see it. And that's with a lot of these things, a lot of times is people definitely see better than they hear. And so this made it be something that people could see and it gave the platform to people. Now you have all these ideas on how to make things better. This gave you the platform to start pushing some of those.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And you know, that's where. I mean, that's why there's not much to say about the case itself, the video and all that. I mean, it's pretty plain in what happened. And that's why I said that's why I wanted to break down kind of the systemic part of it, because it's not about, was Chauvin racist? Did he target George Floyd only because he was black?
It's just that clearly Derek Chauvin is a bad apple police officer. And we're. I'm thankful that most aren't like him. Right. I think most cops are good and they show up to work trying to do the right thing. So that's kind of why I always question this. Why.
Why do we allow. This is one of the few professions, if not the only one I can think of, because I was even thinking about, like, the military. Even the military.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: Don't lose this point. Don't lose this point. The systemic part of this is that the bad apple does not feel any concern, so to speak, that their bad actions will get them in jeopardy. Like, that's.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: Well, that's why I equate it to the Catholic Church, because it's just the same thing. You know, certain priests, unfortunately, and not again, most priests in the Catholic Church system are good and don't do that, or else I'm sure, you know, we'd hear a lot more about it.
So the fact that the bad ones are allowed to kind of hide out. That's. That's kind of what I'm saying.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: And defend it or defend it.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: And like, I'm in. I was thinking about it, just, I'm in financial services. You know, I'm glad Bernie Madoff went to jail. You know, I don't want guys like that hanging around making it harder for the rest of us to earn the trust of the public and the people that don't do what I do for a living. And that's what I.
[00:22:48] Speaker A: No, that's kind of the point. If Bernie Madoff was attacked and then your whole profession got behind him and said, no, no, no, no, you. You guys are just attacking him unfairly. How can any of us do our jobs if you guys prosecute him?
[00:23:01] Speaker B: You can't allow us to print our own statements, run Ponzi schemes.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Your whole profession loses credibility.
Of course, to maintain the credibility of your profession, when you see the bad apples, you have to get them out. And so that's the institutional nature of this, is that the bad apples, the system is set up to protect them.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: But that's my point. Why. So you think about the why. That, again, goes back to the systemic nature of the historic relationship between the role of law enforcement and.
And how it sees, you know, let me say this, Black communities that gets into the who.
[00:23:37] Speaker A: That.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: That's my point, is it goes back to the Patty Rollers, you know, just the history and culture of our country, that blacks were to be tamed and to be basically kept in their place a lot of times in the history of America and weren't, you know, whether it was back to. Again, the Patty Roller days of the slavery was just, you know, to make sure that no one was out when they shouldn't have been to Jim Crow laws, that blacks weren't supposed to be on the other side of the tracks when it was segregation and all that. Sundown counties and sundown counties, yeah, all that stuff.
And so.
[00:24:13] Speaker A: But the point, I just want to make the point that if the police behaved like this to society at large, then we would imagine that the accountability systems would have been put in place. Because if it was just anybody, if the lives were believed to matter, that the police was doing that to, then people would have done something about it, so to speak. And again, that's what gets to the whole. And again, getting away from whether the phrasing is optimal from a marketing standpoint. It came from an emotional reaction and it's just like, look, stop treating us like our, our lives don't matter. And that's the, the kind of. The full circle, so to speak.
[00:24:52] Speaker B: But James, the same as. Remember, I mean, the most people listening if, I mean, you can go Google it actually, if you haven't seen it, but there's a lot of people that have watched any footage of the civil rights movement of the 60s can remember the guys were in the posters of I Am a Man.
[00:25:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:06] Speaker B: And it's the same thing like, you know, 55 years later, here we are, black Americans still saying, you know what?
We're equal to you.
And I think that's why this is just. It's an interesting moment because it's another kind of notch in the belt of, I would say progress in the long arc of history of the United States. And that's where I was going earlier too, was I always used to wonder when I was younger, what is it like to live through these historic moments when you'd see the 60s, or you'd see the Great Depression on TV or you'd see whatever the moment is. And I think that's what happened last year. Right? We, we, we just lived. I would say, obviously we've been through 9, 11, we've been through other historic things. But I think for you and I specifically, that's why I mentioned our ages earlier. This is our first time living through kind of a historic civil rights moment where the country seems to have made a cultural shift.
You know, that, that George Floyd was a straw that broke the camel's back from the last decade of all this footage stuff. And I wanna say this too.
[00:26:11] Speaker A: I think you gotta tie it back to Rodney King, actually, because that.
[00:26:14] Speaker B: Well, I could go that far.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you have to, because that one was on Film as well. And.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: But there was a lull for a while. I mean, that was 92. And then it started up again in like 2011, kind of with Michael Brown. 2012, whenever that. That was the first one again, that kind of brought it back.
[00:26:29] Speaker A: Well, that's in terms of the national conversation.
[00:26:31] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: But there is a bookend nature to it because it's only kind of a seminal moment because it does seem to have created some type of change. Like these types of things happen. Even if you look at the civil rights movement, it was the fact that you get a civil rights of several civil rights acts out of that that did change how the country worked in meaningful ways that we remember the civil rights movement in that way. It's not like before that blacks weren't pushing for equality under the law.
They had been pushing the whole time, but they had some breakthroughs that creates the civil rights movement's lore. And the scale of it increased because of those breakthroughs and so forth. So in this instance, I'm with you. I see the Floyd, the occurrence, the demonstrations after it, and now this trial and the verdict as something in that mold. But it is the reaction. So it's still being written, is my point. Like how this plays out will matter how it's remembered in 30 years or 40 years.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's what I was saying at the beginning. And this is no like silver bullet, like, oh, this just happened. You know, they found Chauvin guilty and now it's all going to change. I mean,
[00:27:41] Speaker A: to that point. It also doesn't make the overall issue, issues that are in play, easier to solve. It just makes them something that people are thinking about now. So the people who have solutions or want to put forth solutions can have a platform to put those in.
But it's still going to be hard to solve overall because so much of this is ingrained in our culture.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: Yeah. No, and that's why it's. It goes back to even, I think when we did the Dr. King book about, you know, you can't legislate what's in people's heads. So, yeah, that's why I don't think we need laws and we don't need all this, this, this, this, all these huge changes. I think all we need is accountability. I mean, it's like you said, like, somebody kills someone else and it's on tape and it's obvious. And that's what I would say, like.
And I think everybody's got to recognize too, not every cop that kills somebody is, is not, is unjustified I mean if you obviously cops do need to protect themselves and if their life's in danger, they have a right to protect themselves. I also think, or I mean if
[00:28:40] Speaker A: somebody else's life is in danger, I mean there are situations with bang bang decisions that we're not gonna necessarily be happy with the outcome, but it's not necessarily a situation where accountability, so to speak, is murder. You know, like that may not be the situation. So each situation is different.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: And that's very true. And that's my point is saying is. And also like every situation doesn't mean that a cop was racist. Right. Like if cop kills somebody and all that, like you said, some of these have been split second things that I don't, I'm not going to sit here and call a cop racist.
[00:29:16] Speaker A: You know, they just, it can be a tragedy, basically.
[00:29:18] Speaker B: It's a tragedy.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: That doesn't necessarily mean it's murder.
[00:29:21] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:29:22] Speaker A: You know, we'll have to see. I mean, but I do think though like there are systemic things that we need to do to change how these situations play out to change the calculus. Sometimes you change the calculus in a bang bang situation. Definitely you want to change the calculus in the slow drawn out situation. So. And I know you mentioned just that. Well, you had mentioned in our personal conversations just that, you know, right now working its way through Congress is the, is legislation dealing with police reform and it bears George Floyd's name. So is there anything that stands out to you in that? I understand that you just said, you know, this isn't necessarily something that's going to be completely solved with rules and laws beyond enforcing what's already there. But there do seem to be some things in here that go after particular types of actions or conduct that seems to be more biased towards negative outcomes. So you know what are your. Anything stand out to you in that?
[00:30:17] Speaker B: No, I mean I see the couple of the main things, you know, limiting qualified immunity as a defense to their light to the liability of an officer.
You know, I think one that's just makes sense authorizing the Justice Department to issue subpoenas to police departments if you know there's something questionable going on. So I think there's some of that that's just top down. But you know, I think, I think it all has to be dealt with carefully because like we said, police officers is not an easy job and a lot of them do make split second decisions. I don't think, I think it is true. We don't want them second guessing everything they're doing. But in on another way we do need to have accountability. So that's why I don't again, I don't think it's too huge of an issue. I just think, you know, bad apples got to be accounted held, accounted for and that's it. And have some sort of risk of loss like you know, you're going to lose your pension or something like that if you kill somebody unwarrantly or you're causing harm to the community of which you're policing. I think the other thing, let me
[00:31:21] Speaker A: say this, I disagree in the sense that I think it is a big deal as long as bad apples are shielded from accountability by the systems that are in place. And also I wanted to mention qualified immunity. That's something that's court generated doctrine from the Supreme Court of the US and it protects police officers amongst other officials but from personal liability unless they've violated what the court has defined as an individual's clearly established statutory and constitutional rights. So it basically raises the standard very, very high when someone can be held personally accountable for going after someone in their official capacity. So and then police officers deal with people in their official capacity a lot. So by the qualified immunity principle that's been in place for over 40 years or well over 40 years, I think over 50 years at this point it makes, it reduces the concern of accountability from a personal standpoint of doing wrong. And so there are proposals that go after attacking that and something that overall it does need to be looked at. The effect of that has been, I think something we could see that's had a negative effect on how people believe their actions are tied to their potential repercussions which we don't want to in general separate that we want people to know that their actions are going to be tied to their outcomes as much as possible. And to that point I think the lowering of the legal standard that's been proposed in this federal legislation, lowering of the legal standard for misconduct from willful to knowing and reckless I think is a huge deal.
And I'm a lawyer, so obviously I'm looking at that like oh, you know, getting in my lawyer brain. But the reason being willful doing something willful. It means that you intend to actually do the bad thing and have the bad outcome. You know, like you're, as you said, Chauvin would have to wake up in the morning and just to use this as an example and say hey or wake, you know, go to work that day, say hey, I'm going to find a black guy to kill, you know, for something to be willful in that sense. Like Chauvin was not convicted of first degree murder, you know, and so, and he wasn't charged with that. Like it wasn't that he had this in his mind, hey, I'm gonna go find somebody, I'm gonna kill him. And so that's not even an issue here. So. But having the, the legal standard for misconduct so high at that willful means it's almost, it's almost never going to be held accountable. Lowering that to knowing and reckless, I think is a more fair way to look at it. And I'll give the example just because I know, you know, this may be a lawyer brain thing, but there's real world implications that are easy to understand. If you look at it like hitting a pedestrian with a car, to be guilty of that from a willful standard, if you had to be willful to do it, then you had to like actually try, like, hey, I'm driving a car, look, there's a pedestrian, I'm going to go hit that person. That's the willful standard. And so nobody would ever be prosecuted for it if they hit somebody with a pedestrian because nobody's driving around looking for pedestrians to hit. It's just, it creates almost an impossibility. Whereas knowing and reckless is a much lower standard. Meaning if you just are looking at your phone or if you just decide to drive the car with your feet and you hit somebody, then you can be liable for that. And so because you put yourself in a situation where that kind of thing, it's reckless behavior. So I think that's huge. And I think that that's one of those things that non lawyers might not look at that as a big deal, but that's a big deal as far as being able to hold people accountable. And I think ultimately that's what we need to do more than anything, like I was saying, is make it so that people understand that their actions and their consequences are tightly linked together.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I know, and that's what I was saying that I just don't understand why unless you look at it from the, just the historic culture of our country, why this profession is allowed this level of leniency above every other profession. That's my point. Like no other industry can I think of where people can, especially people that have the ability to influence communities so heavily are allowed to behave this way.
[00:35:18] Speaker A: The question of why is there the quote unquote pro law enforcement argument that there should not be accountability also is something that confuses me as well, because what we've Seen. And then now what hopefully all of society is seeing is that there's a disproportionate approach. The approach to dealing with certain people is different than the approach to dealing with other people. And in that situation, what we need to do is tighten up the regulation. Tighten up the rules a little bit, because the discretion, so to speak, on how aggressively you're gonna target certain people is being abused. And a good example of that also has happened in the last few months, which was the Capitol riot.
[00:36:03] Speaker B: Right. I was just gonna say the insurrection. Yeah, yeah.
[00:36:05] Speaker A: People attack a government, the seat of power in the government, and the police used kid gloves, by and large. And that is. I'm not saying that to be saying that they should have been using crazy force with that, but I'm saying that actually shows that there is a mindset amongst police of, hey, let's treat these people with dignity. Let's treat these people with respect. Even in that case went too far. They went way too far. They. But there was a level of humanity in the way that they looked at them and said, oh, well, let's try to give these people the benefit of the doubt and so forth. And we see, though, that that doesn't extend to all of America's citizens, though. And so. Right.
Well. But so as a result of that, they're given too much discretion, basically, and we need to tighten up how much discretion you have.
If you're gonna treat people so differently, when you have a wide range of discretion, then you just can't. You're. You're abusing that discretion, and we got to treat you differently. We have to say, okay, we have to tighten this up, because ultimately, we want you to treat everybody with a level of humanity that you clearly can do, you know, but that you are not doing in something that when. When given. You know, when given a completely blank canvas as far as how you're going to. To administer these laws.
[00:37:22] Speaker B: Well, that was confirmed. And that's what I wanted to just, I guess, end on this point for me, is the systemic. Going back to the systemic. Systemic nature of it, which is, you know, there's a senator from Minnesota whose name is Ron Johnson, and from my understanding, there's 100 senators in the United States, and that makes them, each one of them, pretty powerful. And I apologize. It's Wisconsin he's from, not Minnesota.
And so Senator Johnson was on a talk radio show, and he said it.
He acknowledged what you just said that he said, I wasn't that scared of. During the Capitol riot because these were our people.
And, you know, and he said, if it was BLM or Antifa, I'd have been worried.
And I think that's what a lot of people, again, don't understand is that. That, that's a. That's basically what you just said being echoed by a US Senator. And that's what I'm saying is that certain Americans, that's when I say the systemic nature of it.
That's to me, is a guy, he, he's telling me and you and everyone else that I'm looking out for certain people. As a senator, I feel comfortable if certain people come in here breaking glass and busting down the doors and looking to hang the vice president, I'm not, I'm not going to go against that.
But if they, if they look like somebody else, then I'd have had a problem.
[00:38:51] Speaker A: Even if they're doing something that's much less, if they're just marching down the street, I got a problem with it.
[00:38:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And so that's.
[00:38:56] Speaker A: They're trying to hang the vice president, and it's like, that's not that big of a deal. And that's depending on who they are.
[00:39:01] Speaker B: And that's what I try and explain to some people sometimes when I have these conversations that don't understand. I say that's where it becomes systemic. There's no equivalence of that with a BLM person. And I don't even want to get into Antifa because I don't even know what the hell that is. But let's just stick with blm.
There's no senator, nobody in the halls of power in the US Government or anywhere else that's going to be like, yeah, I'm going to stick up for that, the BLM stuff. But there's a lot of people that are sticking up for, you know, bad cops, bad behavior among certain groups of people against others, you know, from a systemic nature, from a, from a seat of power.
[00:39:41] Speaker A: No, I mean, just to say it a little more nuanced, so to speak. Like, there's no one in the seat of power saying that I would support BLM overrunning the Capitol or taking over some government building in the interest of what they believe in. But there are people who are willing to condone other people taking over the U.S. capitol or government building if they either agree with what they're arguing for or whatever. And so, yeah, we need equal administration of the laws. I mean, equal protection under the laws, equal administration of the law. That's justice. And so that's ultimately what we're fighting for. Here. And in this case, I do think that this is something that has given us a glimmer, that that's something that we can still aspire for and push towards and get close to. And so that's encouraging. Ultimately, I mean, and I think that's. You could take that as the final takeaway here is that it's encouraging that the system in this situation worked in a way that we talk about that it should and that we, you know, you and I and many people like us believe that it should. People who believe in equality, injustice and so forth. This was a victory, so to speak.
[00:40:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:46] Speaker A: And so that. And that's good. I mean, it's. So there's no.
[00:40:48] Speaker B: And also, I just want to say this before you wrap this part up. Is it all just coming back into. Circling back to your initial question is what it also shows me this last year is that protests are effective. You know, the. And all the detractors. And look, I'm not a hero being. We've talked about this on other shows. Right. We're not fans of people destroying property, burning down cars and blocking traffic and all this kind of stuff.
[00:41:13] Speaker A: Stuff that was effective, though. The stuff that was effective was the masses of people.
[00:41:16] Speaker B: Correct. That's what I was going to say is what I think happened last summer, too, is I saw anyway, there's a lot more people that embrace equality and want to get past the systemic nature of some of these imbalances than there are people who want it to stay the status quo. And that was shown by the numbers because, you know, like you said, tens of thousands of people marching in various cities over time. Not just once or twice after an incident, but we were talking for months.
[00:41:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:47] Speaker B: And so. So that's. That was a good lesson, that activism at any point is key.
So that was. That was it, man. That's all I got.
[00:41:57] Speaker A: Well, no, and I know we wanted to also discuss. And there's no easy way to transition, but the magazine Popular Mechanics did just a fascinating piece on conspiracy theory thinking and just our embrace of it. And we wanted to discuss. Because there was a couple things that stood out. You know, we always like talking about how our brains work and, you know, just the complexity behind that. And so much that's going on, so to speak, under the hood of our own brains that we're not even aware of or at least consciously aware of. So what stood out to you in this analysis that was laid out, and I'll course cite to this in the show notes, but in terms of the working of our Workings of our brain and what's going on around us as being something that feeds so directly into our tendency as humans to embrace conspiracy theory type thinking.
[00:42:46] Speaker B: This is really interesting.
What, what the one thing that got me thinking because I know sometimes we've joked on the show about I wonder what the benefit of this was from an evolutionary standpoint. Because you know, when we joke about maybe people being or whatever we've joked about, you know, like why, why is this part of humanity still state.
And I'll quote a bit from the article here I highlighted. It just says quote. We descended from primates that tended to notice dangerous hidden things like a predator in the grass.
Our ancestors were the paranoid ones who assumed the worst and survived.
And that's what I was like, wow. So really this is probably is rooted in some evolutionary thing that our minds will.
Will create patterns and solutions. Right. To things that may or may not happen.
[00:43:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:43:39] Speaker B: And if you could get real basic with it. Right. That's kind of a conspiracy. And that's what they go into in the article is like having just enough information to kind of. And I thought about it too is from a psychological standpoint a conspiracy is the ultimate confirmation bias.
Because it's like you have just enough information to be biased to believe a
[00:44:01] Speaker A: certain thing to fill in the rest of the blanks.
[00:44:03] Speaker B: Correct. So you're looking for all these things that confirm that and then the things that go against it usually you'll reject. Correct.
[00:44:10] Speaker A: And just like the piece defined conspiracy theory as two or more people plotting in secret to gain an immoral or illegal advantage on someone else. And so like two of the things that they pointed out in particular in terms of just operation of our brain and our environment, one being the proportionality bias which when big events happen our brains are biased to try to find a cause that is equally significant. Like we just don't like there's a dissonance that's created in our minds when something big and crazy happens. And, and the explanation for it is something very random or small, simple. And there was examples given of that. And then also which this was the piece that jumped off the page to me that stressful ambivalent situations so situations that cause stress and that there are a lot of potential explanations for makes our brain more inclined towards finding simplicity in that which conspiracy theories generally do provide easily understandable villains and easily point you can easy to point to, you know, like it's not complete. Conspiracy theories don't give you a bunch of open ended type of responses. They tell you oh this is happening because this person's evil, you know, and this person just has evil. It's Thanos, you know, so to speak. Or not even Thanos. Thanos is much more creative than your average conspiracy theory villain. So just that inclination towards simplicity in complex situations and more complex it gets, it inclines us more towards simplicity was just a mind blower to me, particularly when. And thrown in at the end was that kind of the observation that there's so much going on in the world that there's always going to be more going on than we could possibly understand.
So it's like, well, we're going to be biased towards that almost no matter what.
[00:45:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's funny because part of what I thought when I was reading it was like, yeah, it's definitely. I can tell I'm getting older because I want everything simple now.
Life's too complicated. I just want to chill out. I was thinking about it. That's probably why I enjoy just doing nothing a lot more than when I was younger, when everything was all new and exciting. Now everything is just, you know, frustrating. So I just want to chill.
But I would say this, Looking at the past year, you had a pandemic. You had like, we just got done talking about all this social unrest and this. And, and I, I would say this.
Me having not watched cable news and been off social media now for a long time, and then watching the news for 24 hours last week in one day, and my heart, my blood pressure was up through the roof after watching just one day. I'm glad that I don't watch anymore. I can totally appreciate how probably conspiracy theories have taken on more after reading this in the last year or so. Because think about it, you've got. People have been more stressed than ever, right? I mean, the amount of people that got family members that might be sick or hurt and lost their jobs, then you had all the stress, just like we talked about from the summer and all that.
So it's not a surprise.
[00:47:20] Speaker A: Also, don't add into that that even no matter what you believe about COVID more or less, there's still no explanation that really can account for proportionality as far as how big of an effect it's had. Whether this is some random thing, some animal crossover, or whether you believe that China was experimenting on stuff and it got loose, or if you think that even that China meant there is to happen, which was kind of the most far fetched. It's still something that shut down the world for months and the world is still reeling from so there's still nothing that would account for that level of effect that would give us that big of a cause. And so that plus one of the things that was also pointed out is the domino effect. And once you believe one conspiracy theory, you're inclined to believe others.
So. Yeah, I mean, your point is very well taken that, yeah, this 2020 kind of created the perfect cocktail for explosion of conspiracy theory thinking because it just created the stress. It created this disproportional effect of pro Covid. And then once you're in with one, you're in with 30.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: Yeah, no, and, and that's why, you know, things like QAnon, for example, as much as, you know they can be laughed off, they shouldn't be because it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's an understanding that those things can really get to people and be received in a much different way when they're under heightened levels of stress.
So I think it, you know, that just kind of helps explain that it shouldn't surprise us that this many people have latched on to various conspiracy theories. Then you have the ripening of kind of the topics at hand. Right. You've already got a healthy anti vaccine conspiracy groups out there. You've got, so now we got a global pandemic that needs a vaccine. You have conspiracies against countries like China already that people think that China is big and bad or that people like Bill Gates were already under his world control stuff.
[00:49:15] Speaker A: And in all of those things existed.
[00:49:18] Speaker B: All of those things existed. And now we have a reason, a lot of people have a reason to believe them, to put them all together.
Like you said, though. But to explain the simplicity, or let me put it this way, to help explain the complexities in a more simpler way. Because you know, I don't, I can't tell you whether Covid came from a lab in China or a bat that some lady ate. I don't even know if we'll ever know. Right. Really.
But I guess if I wanted to believe one of those, it helps to make it simpler for me because then at least I can say, boom. Well, I believe that it came from a lab and that's it.
[00:49:51] Speaker A: And without, and you can start assigning blame, you start saying villains and heroes.
[00:49:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Without any more evidence than any other. And you know what I started thinking too was so a couple things. One was, remember that book and we talked about this, I think on disruption now with Rob was the book why by Simon Sinek and how he made the point that There's a reason why politicians with 12 point plans never win.
[00:50:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:19] Speaker B: And it's this idea that, you know, this kind of the heart and the gut make is where we make our decisions as humans. The emotions.
And so I kind of thought that this, this conspiracy stuff is like the ultimate why. You know, it's just, it's just really the gut feeling of I, I feel like this is the way it should be or that this is why something happened. So I'm going to assign. Find all these things to pull from and assign as to why that is. Like you said, if. If I want to believe that it was the Chinese fault, or if it was Bill Gates and George Soros, or if it was this or that, then I'm going to believe it. And the other one, it got me thinking was birtherism, because again, going back to maybe some of the stuff we talked about in the first part of this show, the culture of America, right. Historically has been that one group has been dominant and one group has been, you know, inferior and, well, harder.
[00:51:16] Speaker A: Not just one, but, you know, like
[00:51:17] Speaker B: there's been many inferiors, blacks and whites. Right. And so. And let's just call it what it is. And so part of the.
[00:51:24] Speaker A: I think that's what we do. Right?
[00:51:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:51:26] Speaker A: As we see.
[00:51:27] Speaker B: We see it.
There you go. So, so supposed to say like, jinx, you know, like we were kids. But no, but the thing is, is that. And on a serious note, though, remember part of. And we've talked about this on other shows, in order to have slaves, in order to treat people a certain way, you have to dehumanize them. Part of the dehumanization that came apart in our culture over hundreds of years is that blacks were stupid. Blacks weren't as smart, blacks were lazy. Remember, part of the.
[00:51:54] Speaker A: They were more tolerant to pain.
Yeah.
[00:51:57] Speaker B: Or even think about things like during the Second World War, you know, that's why the Tuskegee Airmen were such a big deal, because they thought blacks were too stupid to fly planes.
And so when you get a guy,
[00:52:08] Speaker A: also remember that some of the powers that be may not have believed that, but they didn't want other people to see that it wasn't the case as well. Because again, you see, I don't want to. We don't have to get into that, though. Yeah.
[00:52:21] Speaker B: But the reason I just bring it up is because.
So for many who were raised to believe that. Right. There's a lot of people that, you know, when they were taught their parents had dinner at the kitchen table or at the dining room table every night they would say things like that, right? Like these ends are stupid or whatever. So imagine then if you're one of these people in our country who's been conditioned to believe that, and then all of a sudden Barack Obama becomes president.
Think. Because I started thinking about all the conspiracy theories back then. Remember he was a Muslim, he was born in Kenya.
It was all the liberals that plotted to get him to. And his didn't get good grades in Harvard. All this stuff because people needed to have some sort of way to justify this existence because it was too, I guess, against the grain to believe that the guy was just a regular Joe that made it to be president.
[00:53:12] Speaker A: So not an exceptional Joe, but. Yeah. Your point being?
[00:53:15] Speaker B: Yeah, but that's what I mean. He's, he's a normal guy in that way that he's American and he studied harder, hard, and then he was smart and he became a senator and then ran for president and got it. So, and so that's my point. And so it's just, it's just fascinating.
[00:53:27] Speaker A: Conspiracy theory gives comfort in that situation. If what is in front of you is something that creates so much dissonance or so much, you know, it makes you so uncomfortable, particularly in a time, remember this is financial crisis, particularly in a time of great stress. And so I think that, and I
[00:53:44] Speaker B: don't want to get a lot though is fight or flight. That's another thing that I think if you go back to what we said earlier about the, you know, the ancestors being on the plane worrying about, you know, or in the, in the, in the jungle worrying about the, the predator.
I think conspiracy theories at the very, very 30, 000 foot level are a bit of that fight or flight part. Like you're saying that if things are too scary and complex, we, our brains immediately have that kind of fight, fight or flight response. But if this isn't a physical fight, it's maybe a mental fight where it's like, okay, we're just going to make things cut to the chase and get as simple as we can so that we can, we can alleviate this stress of complexity. And so instead of running from the tiger, you're just saying, okay, my brain just needs to make this as simple as possible.
[00:54:31] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, but I do want to try to get us to an end here. But your point is, well taken as far as, you know, like, I think this is one of the things that made this, or gave a lot of, you know, just made this make sense. In a sense for me was you see this with populism. Oftentimes, populism, populist politicians in democratic systems, a lot of times they rely on this type of conspiracy type thinking to galvanize a portion of society, generally a majority against a minority, to justify. I mean, and this is across the board, you know, like you'll see minorities, immigrants or racial minorities or religious minorities be targeted with this type of conspiratorial thinking a lot of times as a mental off ramp for society to explain certain imbalances or certain things that they don't like. And it gives it simplicity. It's just these people that we don't like are doing things that we don't like and therefore we can do things to them that are inhumane. And so, yeah, I mean, I couldn't second your thought on that, you know, at all. And I, but I just want to put some names to it, you know, like, we see that with populism a lot of times, you know, that the way that weaponizes that. So I think we can call it from there, though. But we definitely appreciate everybody for joining us on this and, you know, until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:55:51] Speaker B: I'm tuned to everyone.
[00:55:52] Speaker A: All right, subscribe Rate Review Tell us what you think and we'll talk to you next time.
