I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome to the To the Contrary podcast. Look, before we get started, I wouldn't want to say this, that this has been an incredibly difficult weekend. It's been an incredibly difficult period of time. And if you are feeling that there's something broken, if you're feeling that things are harder than usual, or that you're seeing things that are more difficult to process. You're not alone seriously.

I think that this is one of these periods in American life or in our personal life where we're looking around or we're going, okay, I'm living in a country that I don't necessarily recognize.

I never thought that I would see many of these things.

And, of course, I'm referring to the latest shooting in Minneapolis.

Look, let's make this very clear. You've all seen the video of what happened. And I think it is absolutely crucial to realize what it is that we are seeing that despite the Trump

administration lies and smears about this, what you are seeing here is the murder of an unarmed American citizen on a

city street in this country. And what's irrefutable from these videos, all of the different

videos that you are seeing is that Alex Prattie, who is an ICU nurse, is holding a phone,

not a gun. He has never seen brandishing or reaching for a gun. That's number one. Number two,

a federal agent actually pulls a gun from his waistband, apparently during the struggle. He is

disarmed. The gun is no longer a threat

to any of the officers the shooting occurs after the weapons been removed and mr prety was disarmed

and then they fire 10 shots 10 shots five of them Prattie is lying motionless on the street.

Now, despite all of this, we know what the Trump administration has said.

Stephen Miller said that he was a domestic terrorist, a would-be assassin.

Christy Noem has put out a version of the facts that bear no relationship to what the whole world is seeing

in these videos. Now, look, part of this is, you know, how can we be surprised at this is the

administration that lies? Donald Trump has been lying, like most people, breathe for more

than a decade, actually many, many decades. And he has created this infrastructure

of people who will lie for him. So we should be surprised that they're putting out this

alternative variation of the truth? Well, this is different, perhaps, because we know what we saw

with our own eyes. And what the Trump administration is asking us to do is ignore the evidence of our eyes.

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