This is a HeadGum Podcast.

Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover and it's been a bad week in America.

First of all, I hope you're doing all right wherever you are.

And secondly, I want to say right up top, so there's no quivocation about it.

Justice for George Floyd, Ahmad Arbury, Brianna Taylor, and every black American

who's been murdered by police or by vigilantes.

Black Lives Matter.

And I want to say thank you to all of you who are raising your voice

in support of those causes right now,

and I join you in that because it's beyond clear that we need to

radically change the way we police this country. I mean when you have

hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets protesting

from their hearts saying the police that are supposed to be protecting us are instead violently abusing us not just in Minneapolis but in every

city around the country and when those protesters are met by those very same police, but this time armed with military equipment that they use to violently abuse those same protesters,

I mean, I don't know what to say. It doesn't seem like a great way to de-escalate a situation and

it's also very bad PR if you're trying to make cops look good because well now we are faced by every time we open social media hundreds and hundreds of clips of the exact same abuses that are being protested in the first place.

And those images are very hard to watch.

We've seen the police target black Americans with arrests and violence. We've seen them target

journalists who are covering the scene. At least one journalist was blinded by a rubber bullet this

last weekend. We've seen platoons of armored police and National Guard march down residential streets,

firing tear gas canisters at anyone so bold as to poke their head out of their door.

And we've seen all those actions permitted or even directed by the officials we elected

...