Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast. My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of the

spectator and the editor of its US edition. We thought that 2020 was going to be all about the

presidential election, but now it will forever be the year of the pandemic.

So instead, Americano is going to look at how COVID-19 is transforming the United States and its politics.

There's a lot to talk about, perhaps even more so than before. So please keep tuning in.

I'm joined today by Andy No, who is editor-at-large for the post-millennial,

and we're going to be talking about the riots that have broken out in Minneapolis

and now in Los Angeles.

Andy, take us through what's happened with these riots.

We know that they are in response, or they were triggered, perhaps,

by the mass circulation of a video of a 46-year-old black man

being sort of kneel, his neck was being kneeled on to the point that he appears to have suffocated and died from that.

And this has caused a huge backlash on social media, and now it has erupted into violence on the streets. What's going on?

It's not just a backlash. I would describe it as a national crisis for this country. So you're

describing the death of Mr. George Floyd, who died on the 21st of May, and part of his encounter final moments with Minneapolis police

were caught on camera in very disturbing footage. Four policemen who were involved in that

arrest have been sacked, and there's an ongoing investigation by federal authorities into

civil rights violations.

But I want to sort of step back a little bit because everybody's focus on Mr. Floyd.

We've had sort of incident-to-incident this month in the United States that have really

primed the American public for a backlash, anger, and now violent rioting.

I would call it race riots, actually.

...