Mark Blyth, political economist at Brown's Watson Institute, and Carrie Nordlund, political scientist and associate director of Brown's Master of Public Affairs program, share their take on the news.

On this episode: What this podcast can add to the conversation (and what it can't); the economic ramifications of systemic racism; America's uniquely violent, militarized police system; Trump's escalating rhetoric and actions in response to the week's unrest; making sense of the growing corporate support of Black Lives Matter; catching up on Tuesday's primaries; how police violence, civil unrest, and coronavirus intersect.

[Recorded June 5, 2020]

[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: Hey there. Before we get started with Mark and Carrie, we felt it was important to lead with saying the following names out loud: Tyrell Thomas, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tanisha Anderson, Natasha McKenna, Walter Scott, Laquan McDonald, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Betty James, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd.

CARRIE NORDLUND: We started doing this podcast to have a lighthearted take on events political, economic, everything in between. It's of course not lighthearted times right now. And so we want to talk about what's going on, and we're going to do it within the context of the areas that we know best. And so that's certainly the topics that our listeners know very well, in the political and the economic realm. But we certainly want to talk about what's happening outside our homes and in the world and to understand that we all have different experiences. And just to be part of the larger discussion, I think, is what's important to me. Mark, what are your what are your thoughts at this moment?

MARK BLYTH: Well, being part of the conversation is part of it. Being a useful part of it is more important. I mean, I think the reason that people tune in to us and like to listen to us is yes, it's lighthearted, but we do get into stuff, and we do try and explain things in an accessible manner. And the politics of race in the United States is a peculiarly and intensely fraught landscape. And one of the things that is a very peculiar locution of the moment-- and I think it's badly misunderstood, and I think it's important to say this loud and clear-- and perhaps the person who said this the best, if anybody wants to check this out, is the pop star Billy Eilish. Go look up Billy Eilish's tweet on why the claim that "all lives matter" is not the claim you should be concerned with. Right?

So when I first heard the term white privilege, a couple of years ago, I thought, well, what does that actually refer to? Because being somebody who is a political economist, I think to myself, well, most poor people are white. In fact, poverty extends across all races. That's the one thing that's common. And therefore, to call those people privileged when they themselves are some of the poorest in society struck me as wrong. But what I didn't really realize at that point and what I genuinely didn't appreciate, in part because of my privilege, and I accept that, is the following: those people who are like me even if they're poor do not have an existential fear for their very lives when they walk down the street.

When I see a cop, I'm totally able to smile at them and get a smile back. The chances of me being stopped while driving are zero. And driving in the United States for 25 years, I have been stopped twice, and I was genuinely speeding both times. My interactions with the police are completely different from those from African-Americans. And that privilege of not having that fear-- if you don't have that, if you don't actually understand what that's like, then you don't understand the core of the politics of the moment. Because it's about the right to live without fear. And that's the privilege that people like me actually have. And white people just need to accept that.

CARRIE NORDLUND: So we haven't actually talked about this on air. So I grew up in rural Michigan, as many of the listeners know. I'm adopted. I grew up in a white family. I am very much socialized in understanding the privileges that come along with that. But also, because I grew up as very much an other amongst a sea of very white people in rural Michigan, I can understand the feeling of Other. But I cannot, to your point, Mark, understand the feeling and insecurity of fear for one's life. And I see the protesters and the signs that they say, that the color of my skin is what's predicting where I'm going to live, my education, my job, whether or not I'm going to be stopped by the cops. And you just think that is-- there isn't anything that we can read about and learn it and feel it, is just part of who you are. And I think you're right that we, those that don't experience this, just have to listen and have to be on the side of empathy.

MARK BLYTH: But let me put my political economy hat back on for a moment and say all of that is true, but to me it's still embedded in a bigger set of issues. So I looked up some numbers. They've been all over the press this week. Everyone can find these numbers. But let's actually just think about what this means, right? So here's the first one.

In Minneapolis, where the final spark for this was lit-- so 76% of whites own their home. 24% of Blacks own their home. That housing stock has been redlined. That housing stock has been residualized. The wealth of that stock, their ability to borrow against it, all of the things that make an American life possible, is something that has been excluded even from those who actually own property.

We see this nationally in the fact that the family net worth of white families-- and of course these are averages and thus hide the skewness in the inequality figures that are there that we've spoken about before, but just take the average-- your average white family's net worth is 10 times that of Black families. 10 times. Now if every white family was a millionaire, then you'd say, well, those folks have $100,000. You're talking about average family net worth of black families of $17,000. And that's the ones who own property, right? This is about progress in its most basic sense.

The economy may be growing. And I've written a lot about how this is not going down to the bottom 80%, but it's absolutely not going anywhere near African-American communities. Forget all the stuff about the closure of the racial wage gap. You can look back 30 years in the data and you'll see occasional upticks. But the overall trend has been down against a rising one for whites. And what I would imagine from these lockdowns-- and think about the asymmetry of that one as well. There's a Federal Reserve study that just came out that showed that 39% of workers in households with annual incomes are below $40,000 have been laid off or furloughed. And about 55% of the jobs lost were women, with guess what-- African-American and Hispanic women being particularly hurt. And we can just go on on this.

One of the ones that I think is incredibly important that people never really talk about is the lifetime effect on family incomes and on individual incomes of mass incarceration. So the United States has 4% of the world's population and has nearly a quarter of the world's prisoners. The skewness to that towards African-Americans is astonishing. It's five times the incarceration rate per 100,000 as whites. Now, if you're basically taking people who are about to enter their prime earning years in already depressed neighborhoods, and you bang them up for years for pretty much nothing, and then bring them out with no skills no way to change that, with felon laws that means that they're effectively disenfranchised from employment, as well as from voting. And then guess what happens to lifetimes' earnings? They plummet. So what happens to those communities as a whole? So far from punishment fitting the crime and rehabilitation or any of that nonsense, these are just more instruments which are driving the economies and these neighborhoods and amongst this section of society farther and farther away from anything that the rest of society pretends to get to.

CARRIE NORDLUND: What's so curious to me is that I'm hearing this word systemic over and over and over again. And I feel like in my short-term memory, that I haven't heard "systemic" like I have heard this time around, that we've often heard-- and this is the classic, just to go lean on my academic roots, of that individual frame of, "It's just a few bad apples. It's just a few bad cops or a few bad fill-in-the-blanks that are doing these bad things." And that policy frame to move to the systemic and all of the things that you just outlined really then shows what systemic defines and shows us what systemic actually means.

I just saw an editorial that showed the tip of the iceberg police brutality and then underneath this huge bubble of racism, that we cannot think about these as individualized events, that it has to be thought of, like you said, a state system that has put Black people and Latinx people into these perilous, no-win, no-outlet places, where there is no bootstraps here. There's no American dream here. And we end that as policymakers have to acknowledge that and begin to change those policy frames, again, from the individual to the systemic, to say, "We have to think about the economic policy. We have to think about the policing policy"-- all of this basket of things in order to actually change it. It can't just be, "Well, we're not going to fire people," or, "Someone's going to be thrown in jail," or something like that.

MARK BLYTH: So on the bad apples philosophy, it's a very interesting one. And there's a great irony in this. So if I say to you, "I am a typical conservative. I'm about to give a critique of public schools in the United States." What institution do you think I'm about to draw to the line of fire? It'd be the teacher unions, right? So what's the thing about teacher unions, right? The bad teachers get promoted. They always protect their own. There's no way of getting rid of the bad ones. It turns out it's absolutely true for police unions. But we never, ever hear the critique that's done all the time to public school unions and public school teachers about police unions when in fact, that's exactly what they do, and it's part of the problem.

You're absolutely right that this is a much bigger lift than just the issue of policing. But if you don't start with the basic safety of a community, you can't do anything else. And that's why the focus is absolutely right on this. Now you mentioned to me earlier there's a proposal out there about, basically, change eight protocols, and you change policing. What's going on with that? I haven't heard about that.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well, and I've seen this on social media, and I'm sure listeners have as well. But for example, the putting the knee on the neck is one of those-- and according to police unions, and I read this very quickly online, is that that knee on the back of the neck is not supposed to be one of the protocols that police should be using. But I dove just a tiny bit deeper. And in fact, actually, in Minneapolis, the neck restraints protocol hasn't been updated for eight years. And the police manual's online, so you can check this out. And so just the fact that it hasn't been updated in eight years, Mark, suggests to me that there has been heavy resistance by, potentially, the unions on this. 60% of those in Minneapolis over the last five years who have been subjected to neck restraints and rendered unconscious were African-American. They were all male, and they were under 40 years old.

So just thinking about, that's one of the eight police protocols people are suggesting should be changed out of police manuals and police training in order to de-escalate some of these very intense situations when it's in the heat of the moment. That's just an example of the types of protocols that people are calling for shouldn't be part of the training. And part of this makes sense too, because you're trained in a specific way. Does that training come to bear? I have no training in police enforcement whatsoever. I'm just imagining this. But those are the types of things that have to change in order for us to change, in order for the outcomes to be different. Training has to change protocols, et cetera.

MARK BLYTH: So thinking more concretely about that in a specific instance, of my friend Jeffrey Sommers had a piece in Project Syndicate about this. And one of the things he points out is the dual nature of the militarization of the US police. And if you read the foreign news, if you're a foreigner, and you come here, the one thing you notice, particularly if you come from another wealthy country, is the fact that the US police force looks like the US military. Right? If you go to Glasgow, you can find Glasgow cops. They're dead easy. They'll find they're all about 6'2. Right? And they're armed with a stick. That's it. And believe me, they can do law and order pretty well, because they're damn well-trained. Right? Most European police forces actually carry firearms, yet the rates of shootings are far lower. They're like 10x lower in some countries, right?

So why is this? Well part of this is, as Jeff points, post-9/11 a huge amount of money for Homeland Security had to go somewhere. And cops started buying tanks. Why in God's name, when you're policing your own people, do you need a tank? Right? Unless you see them as a threat, which says tons about your policing culture. The second one is-- again, as Jeff pointed out-- if you go into the statistics, look at the complaints against police, the ones that have the highest rate, or the subgroup with the higher rates, are ex-military vets.

Now, if you did three tours of Afghanistan and leaned policing in downtown Kabul, where basically, society was against you, and anyone could be a threat, you're going to have to get seriously retrained in order to not recognize people doing a protest in the United States as a threat in the same way. So by militarizing the police over the past 15 years, 20 years, we've managed to create something that's very different from the other police forces around the world. And we just haven't grappled with that.

CARRIE NORDLUND: I so agree with this point. I was just seeing pictures of the police in London or in any of the other big sites around the world where there have been big protests. And they show up in what looks to be their uniform and maybe some protective gear and a helmet. They have masks now, but they do not have all the stuff that we see Americans. And there are no tanks. And there are none of these really heavily armored vehicles that show up--

MARK BLYTH: Or helicopters, basically at treetop height. You can go on Twitter and find these pictures. This isn't some kind of rumor. You saw this clearly in Minneapolis, in [INAUDIBLE], in Houston, a bunch of other places. Cops came out of a van, like an APC, an armored personnel carrier, armed to the teeth and immediately started firing rubber bullets which, by the way are seldom made of rubber. They're low-velocity metal, non-piercing shells. They're designed to punch you. And then just start firing them at the media. If I showed you that and said, "This is the media, and this is the cops," you'd be like, "Oh my god, that must be Russia." No, it's not. But it's exactly what you'd expect in an authoritarian country.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Of course this has been in the press all week too, that this is I think the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square put-down and the pictures of the side-by-side between what's happening in the US and Tiananmen Square. But it is this thought of this police state that has just been pumped up on steroids with all of the military equipment. We had talked about how there is a bill, I think, to stop sending military equipment to American police forces.

MARK BLYTH: Which is probably a good idea, because they're not actually trying to fight a war against their own people. And the vast majority of cops I've spoken to here and in other places that I've lived, they're not soldiers and they don't see their own people as an enemy. But if you create an environment whereby your job is to basically jump out with a submachine gun that's filled up with supposedly non-lethal arms and unload on a crowd, then that's not policing work. That's military.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. I want to say something about the politics of the moment. Of course, there's a lot to say about the politics of the moment and, of course, what happened this week in DC with the president clearing out the peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square to make the walk to the church on the corner. And they were using the quote-unquote "rubber bullets" and then the tear gas. And that was supposedly, according to the Washington Post, a personal call from the attorney-general to clear that area.

And to take this to President Trump, the force of the military seems to be how he plans to deal with the protesters. You guys familiar with DC, there's now fencing and barriers around Lafayette Park. You can't get close closer to the White House at all. It's completely fenced-in, to carry on the authoritarian theme as well. I think he, again, was very upset when he saw the trending hashtag of #BunkerBoy. So we have a very, very thin-skinned president of United States then lashing out against peaceful protesters. We know the storyline. And it's so interesting that the place where he can do that is DC, is the place where he does do this, and that other states have said-- we, in fact, have said, publicly, "We don't want this. Send the military home." But in DC he can use them. But they're unidentified as well. They don't wear nameplates. They won't tell you where they're from.

MARK BLYTH: Well, yeah. There's also some somewhat credible evidence that there's even Blackwater people wandering around amidst-- amongst us. And there's a whole mix of people from different federal departments all deployed together and this kind of ragtag Praetorian guard to basically protect the president and do what he wants and the one place that isn't a state, exactly as you say. Interesting to note that you do see real public pushback from the military themselves, not just from quote-unquote "Mad Dog" Mattis but even from his own defense secretary, which basically is the fast ticket to getting fired. So we can expect him to be out and the [INAUDIBLE] defense secretary to be in.

But the way that this was handled-- and let's not even talk about the whole Bible-holding stunt and all the rest of it, right? This has serious constitutional problems. And you're the expert on this stuff. Correct me if I'm wrong. But basically, there's been a kind of a quid pro quo for over 250 years, that the military does not do domestic politics. It doesn't pick sides, and it doesn't get deployed in partisan fights, which is exactly what this is. And then you can try and weaponize this, and you weaponize this by turning it into a terrorist thing. So that then leads us to this thing called Antifa. So what do you know about Antifa? We got into trouble last time for not taking Obamagate seriously. I guess we're going to get pilloried for not taking Antifa as well. So what's the story with Antifa as far as you understand it?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well as far as I understand it, it stands for anti-fascists. And it has been I think this week deemed a domestic terrorist group?

MARK BLYTH: But there's a problem with that. You see, they don't actually have an address, a brass plate, a membership list. It's about like declaring birdwatching a terrorist group. If you declared the Society of Providence Birdwatchers a terrorist group, fine. They're a group, right? But you can't just say birdwatchers are terrorists. And yet basically people who don't like fascists are now terrorists, which is a bit weird given that giant war that we fought against fascism.

CARRIE NORDLUND: That's what was always confusing to me about Antifa. Because in my head those words separately together make sense, and then you put it together, and then I think, "Aren't a lot of people anti-fascist?" And I'm not being sarcastic. I'm being serious.

MARK BLYTH: We would certainly hope so.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. So I'm always confused about why they're seen as a terrorist group, only unless it's because they're seen as being far-left by the president.

MARK BLYTH: So basically, it's an attempt to politicize the left in an election year and mobilize the base. We've seen this before. "Move on, move on." What else can we usefully talk about?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well I was curious. I think I got an email from the Gap and other corporate entities stating "Black Lives Matter," that it's the time for solidarity. And it's interesting because as a consumer, I don't know that I've ever received any emails like that. I've seen stuff like that from corporate America. I'm not sure what to think about it. What's your take?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

MARK BLYTH: I'll give you two options, and you tell me what you think is true-- that large multinational corporations who have become increasingly aware that affluent consumers are the people that they need to basically please, and those offline consumers tend to be on average a bit more liberal, and they might care about this stuff. And if you do this, then you'll basically look good, and it's equivalent to greenwashing. So in a sense it's empty virtue signaling. On the other hand, when you see the video of what happened to George Floyd, when you read the case details on what happened in other cases, you begin to say to yourself, at just a very basic human level, "Oh, come on. Really, enough. Stop." And that allows corporates to then actually do something that they've been talking a lot about but haven't actually done a lot about, which is to say something about their social responsibility to the wider society. Now which one do you think is true, or are both true?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Well I'm going to, for today, hold both thoughts in my head, that they can both be true.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Right. And that's exactly what I would think as well. But at the same time it is interesting that you do see across a large swathe of corporations a move to do this. Now there will be a cost to this. We have had episodes in the past whereby corporations have taken a stance on Colin Kaepernick and such things, and that has actually resulted in a backlash against by certain consumers, et cetera. But basically, given that we live in a world of absolute polarization where even masks in the middle of a pandemic-- remember that? That's all we were talking about, because it's still there, right? --that masks become political weapons. I think it's very hard for corporations or anyone to take a stance that isn't going to be seen in a jaundiced manner by certain groups Yeah and raised It is just in this movie and then they're banned in all of this.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Right, the cynicism abandoned all of this. I like your point, empty virtue signaling. They invented it very, very quickly. On your point about Covid, because we're actually still in a pandemic--

MARK BLYTH: Yeah, I know. Remember that.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Geez. Do you think that this moment, in terms of the pandemic-- I think there's a Washington Post headline that said "Diseased, Unemployed, something: the Country Roils Into Crisis," something like that. Do you think that one of the reasons why we're seeing such a large-scale protests is because of Covid?

MARK BLYTH: So in one sense, I want to see yes. Because everyone was dying to get out. It's now the summer. Something really egregious has happened, and now it has mobilized communities in a way that it normally wouldn't. Right? It's not the people are using this as an excuse-- they are genuinely and justifiably outraged. But the fact that everyone was packed together under lockdown for so long has in a sense pushed us out and propelled in such a way. I have no idea if that's true. Sounds plausible, right? But the most serious way that Covid is implicated into this is it hasn't gone away. Now there's two really interesting things going on, because I'm still watching this. States that opened up, such as Georgia, right? They're not really seeing a massive increase in cases. Same with Florida. Now, they may be cooking the books, all the rest of it but you'd know that, because their hospitals would be crashing. And the figure I saw for Georgia was somewhere around 11% of ICU beds are taken up by Covid. That's serious, but it's not crisis. So what this could suggest is that that thing we've been talking about, before the underlying rate of infection, the number of passives, et cetera, could actually be bigger than we think, and that the opening up isn't going to necessarily result in a second wave, that it is manageable, that this thing is less lethal than we think. There may be some good news buried within this. The bad news is the protests.

So what do we know about the epidemiology and the demography of disease? We know that it's minorities, particularly Hispanics and African-Americans, who are most hit by this. We know this because of the density of their neighborhoods. We know this because of poverty in their neighborhoods, et cetera. The spread is much faster. So what's the fastest way to spread if you're carrying? How do you spread as much as possible? Shout loudly and sing.

So basically, take a whole bunch of people from the most vulnerable community and put them in an environment where you're got to dump viral loads all over the place. It's terrible. And it tells you something. These people aren't stupid. They understand risks. And they are so fed up and so angry about what's happening to them, they are perfectly willing to take that risk even though they're the most vulnerable population because they see no other alternative. Now, there's a huge amount of information in that.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. Right. The anger and the seething is, in their own cost-benefit analysis, motivating them to go out and protest versus staying at home and being silent. Yeah. It's such a powerful point to think about how sad, angry-- but just angry people are. The system, as we've said a million times, is just rotten to the core.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah, which is why I have a book coming out called Angrynomics. But I can't actually advertise it just now, because it's singularly not a book about racial anger. It's about how the economy generates anger. And this is absolutely implicated in what we're seeing, but this precise version of what we're seeing in the United States is deeply, deeply inscribed with that historical wound. And it is now coming into the open. And what we said at the end of the book was that when the lockdown ends, the anger will be back. But the precise modalities of are going to vary from country to country. Well, that's exactly what we're seeing.

CARRIE NORDLUND: One thing that I might say, just for a little bit of nuance about the protesters, is that you see everybody out there. I mean, you see lots of young people for sure, but there are tons of white young-20 protesters there, all the rainbow, the diversity of rainbow. And that is something that, for me, gives me a glimmer of hope, that because it's not just the old hippies out there, for example, that are protesting, but this is all ages. Everybody is out there. You see people walking up and down the streets with their signs, and it really is tons and tons of different people. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that everybody's angry. It's not just a certain segment that's angry. We're all angry right now. And I think that is different than what it may have been in the past.

MARK BLYTH: And while we've been justifiably very critical of the role of social media in driving polarization, I have to say, one of the things that's been most interesting about this is the role in that it can clarify, not through words but through videos. And although they can be doctored and all the rest of it, just the raw footage coming from these protests-- if you just go on Twitter and just look at what's trending now-- Providence was one the other day because of what happened at the mall, which really seemed to be a bunch of white kids from Cranston at 2:00 in the morning just basically smashing things up. But regardless, what you see there is exactly that cross-section of humanity. The people who have been pepper-sprayed are all different types.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah.

I know that there will be a big protest in Providence. There's a big one planned Saturday in DC. And we were talking about this beforehand. You wonder where across the country, in the world, where there's puts President Trump over the weekend, whether or not you see him go to the bunker and continue to be Bunker Boy or whether he is able to get it together and provide any sort of moral leadership to this country.

MARK BLYTH: Well, I think the answer to that is no. I think that it plays out in a slightly different way. What's unique about these protests is that the segregation of the nineteen-sixties, which confined them to areas such as Watts, which can find them to areas such as the south side of Chicago, has largely been erased by gentrification. And now it's Buckhead in Atlanta, and it's Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica, and places like this, which are now adjacent to the areas where minorities live. And of course, that spillover plays two ways. On the one hand, the visual spillover of brutality and violence encourages, I think, rich white populations to feel a kind of solidarity and moral outrage. But the $64,000 question is, how long does that last if the property damage extends into their affluent neighborhoods? And how Trump plays that is going to be highly determinant of what happens in the election. Speaking of which, though, there are still elections going on. In fact, weren't there elections in DC, when basically we thought Trump was threatening to rain fire from the heavens?

CARRIE NORDLUND: And in Rhode Island, primary day was last Tuesday. Yet another thing that we would be talking a lot about.

MARK BLYTH: Last time it was corona and elections. And this time it's basically, the world's ending. But apart from that, so, what's going on with the elections? I mean, has there been any big changes? How is this impacting it? What's going on?

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah. I don't want to be Pollyanna about this, but I believe this at every part, that elections matter and that voting matters. There was a huge turnout in DC. There was a curfew at 7 o'clock on Tuesday, but if you were in line waiting to vote, you could stay out. So I think people on Twitter, at least, said that they were waiting in line until midnight. So there was a huge increase in voting in the primary. Biden of course wins the Rhode Island primary. But across the states that had primaries, you saw women of color winning a number of state leg races, primaries again. But still, these are really strong signals heading into the general election.

And then just today, in Tennessee-- I don't think it was the Tennessee State Supreme Court, but it was some judicial body in Tennessee-- I'll follow up with everybody on this next time-- that everyone can vote by mail in the Twenty-Twenty general election. So I think the vote-by-mail stuff-- we've talked a little bit about this-- that is certainly moving forward in a number of states. I mean, it's moving forward in Tennessee. You've got to think that's a strong signal. And there was just an overall increase for, again, a primary. And you know this: no one shows up at a primary election. So can we hang on to this for participation rates for the general? Geez, I hope so.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah. Well that might be something positive unless, of course we manage to defund the post office completely, so you can't have mail-in votes. Then you would have to mail in through FedEx or UPS. So it would cost you $20 to send in your vote, which would basically be bringing back an 18th-century poll tax.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes. Look at that.

MARK BLYTH: The circle would be complete.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes. I just want to end on that there were, and I notice to your point about social media-- I saw on Twitter the chief of police in Flint, Michigan marched with protesters. There were a number of enforcement individuals across the country that you saw. Police chiefs-- the police chief of Atlanta, she was outside talking to protesters. So I mean, again, there are always those bad apples, but you also see some people that are really trying hard, people in positions of power they are trying really, really hard to make change. And you hope that that is a wave and not just a couple blips on the screen.

MARK BLYTH: Yeah. I genuinely believe, just to close us out as well, and one of the reasons I live in this country is that I believe the vast majority of Americans are decent people. And that certainly includes those that are actually brave enough to go in and become cops, because it is a goddamn tough job. And they've been handed a very, very tough thing to do. The way that it's been handled by elements of their end and the governments that they're responsible to-- militarizing the hell out of them and training them in such a way that you end up with this historic racial divide still being the color line in politics, still being the live wire in politics, and they have to basically deal with it-- it's a tough one. But you know what, it's one they have to deal with. We can't put this back in the box. We can't go back to normal. Right? Just as we were saying about coronavirus allows us to see things as they really are and we need to change, this is exactly the same. Can't go back in the box. Can only go forward.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yeah, and I really like that point. Even talking about what happened last summer or a few months ago seems-- I mean, we can't think that this is just a moment and never just move forward and then we start doing what we did before. It really feels like a pivot in some particular way, or whatever analogy you want to use for it. But you can put it back in the box. I so agree with that.

MARK BLYTH: I think we've said all we can usefully say.

CARRIE NORDLUND: Yes. All right, thank you everyone for listening. We will be back. Please stay safe and healthy. Talk to you later. Thank you.

MARK BLYTH: Bye-bye.

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