07 Jul News Brief: Cops Push “Outside Agitator” Line, Exploit Real Fears of Far-Right Violence to…
Citations Needed | June 4, 2020 | Transcript
[Music]
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow the show on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson. We do these News Briefs in between our full-length episodes when there is oftentimes terrible news in the news constantly or terrible takes in the news and usually it’s both. Unsurprisingly, this time around, it is both. We on our last News Brief covered some of the terrible reporting and punditry that we have been seeing since the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprising.
Adam: Right. So obviously, as a media criticism show, we want to approach what’s going on from a media criticism perspective. So today we’re going to talk about a trope which has been all over the place this past week that we do think needs a kind of nuanced dissection, which is the concept of the outside agitator, which is a script that literally every single mass protest or mass uprising follows since about as far back as newspaper search engines go which is roughly the mid 19th century. The trope of the outside agitator exists in every single major uprising, major strike, racial strife, race riots, quote-unquote “race riots,” racial insurrections, there are thousands upon thousands of examples of outside agitator that literally every single time there’s some unrest, no matter what it is, those in charge, typically the police or city officials, will point to the fact that this is in fact the work of an outside agitator. So before we begin, we want to talk about some of those examples.
Nima: So for instance, on May 30, you have the Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, tweeting this, quote, “In the last few days, both our city and state law enforcement capacities have been overwhelmed by simple math — an overwhelming ratio of rioters that even our unified effort has been unable to push back.” He followed up with a subsequent tweet with this, quote, “We are now confronting white supremacists, members of organized crime, out of state instigators, and possibly even foreign actors to destroy and destabilize our city and our region.”
Adam: Minnesota Governor Tom Walz followed by saying, quote, “We have reason to believe that bad actors continue to infiltrate the rightful protests of George Floyd’s murder, which is why we are extending the curfew by one day.” A tweet by Josh Campbell on May 30, so the Minnesota police precinct was burned down late on the night of the 28th, early morning on the 29th and then we had a day of like, ‘Oh, what’s going on?’ And then right early in the morning on the 30th we saw 1,000 different stories and claims made about outside agitators actually being responsible for the violence. Josh Campbell dropped the sort of first one at 9:30 that really kind of set this off. He’s a reporter for NBC News, this is during their press conference, he said, quote, “Minnesota officials say many of the violent protestors who have caused widespread damage are from out of state. Authorities have been monitoring alleged criminals online, including postings by suspected white supremacist trying to incite violence.” And then both the governor and mayor said that 80 percent and 100 percent respectfully of those that were arrested were outside of the city of Minneapolis or St. Paul and a few hours later, we’ll explain later this always happens, reporters found the jail records, turns out that less than 16 percent were from out of town, the vast majority roughly 84 percent, 85 percent were from the Twin Cities.
Nima: And also being from out of town means having identification from not that place necessarily. It doesn’t mean you don’t live there.
Adam: So this is something people ran with uncritically WLNY, “De Blasio Says He Saw ‘A Lot Of Restraint’ By NYPD’’ and then the article would say, “The X Factor here of a different kind. A small set of men, we’ll call them not just protesters, but people who came to do violence in a systematic organized fashion.” MPR News, Minnesota Public Radio News, “Outsiders, extremists are among those fomenting violence in Twin Cities.”
Nima: Then we saw on the 31st, CNN with the headline, “What we do and don’t know about the extremists taking part in riots across the US,” and the article said this, quote, “Law enforcement and federal officials say outside elements from both far-right and far-left groups are helping fuel the violent and damaging confrontations that have marred protests across the country in recent days, despite President Donald Trump’s focus just on Antifa and the far left.” And then you have Marco Rubio, handwringing Marco Rubio, down in Florida who commented on arrests that were made during a protest in Miami and he tweeted this out also that same day, May 31st, this quote, “Only 13 of the 57 people arrested in #MIAMIPROTEST live in the City. Some of the others came from as far away as New York & Minnesota.”
Adam: So a couple things here I want to establish, which is that we are not saying that there aren’t instances where people from quote-unquote “the outside” come in to do things that are maybe different than local protests will do. This wasn’t really true the first night of the Minneapolis protests, there wasn’t enough time for outside agitators to show up so that’s obviously just a lie. Anyone who’s been in a protest can tell you that there are instances where white, generally white hotheads, maybe have a different agenda than those who are the mass of the protest. That is, without condemning either way, that is definitely a thing that happens and we do have isolated reports of white supremacists sort of going just to troll or white supremacists attacking protesters. This is true for every protest of the past 20 years to some extent, either way, you have right-wing violence, and we have left-wing sects that have their own sort of flavor that may not be congruent with what local activists want and then that can come sometimes in the context of Black Lives Matter, or even other activities, take on a racial dynamic. Now, statistically speaking, Antifa, for example, it’s not overwhelmingly white, we’ll table that conversation for another day, but what’s important to understand is that the police chiefs, the mayors and the governors who are concern trolling these suppose it outside instigators don’t fucking care about any of this. They don’t care about the nuances of white activists in black spaces, they don’t really care about white supremacists, indeed the police work with white supremacists quite openly.
Nima: It is literally a way to discredit what the movement is trying to do.
Adam: But also, and I think probably more importantly, so here’s the deal, right? Let’s say that I’m in charge of X plot of land. I’m an official and I govern X plot of land, right? And I have a massive riot in my plot of land. That is a pretty clear indication that I’m not doing my job as the leader of X plot of land very well, right? Now, if X pot of land has unrest of some kind, burns down buildings, etcetera, the first thing I’m going to do is say wait, wait, wait, wait —
Nima: ‘Hey, it’s not my people.’
Adam: ‘The people who did this were not from X plot of land, they’re from Y plot of land and Z plot of land. Trust me, I got the information here.’ Now, again, we’ll show you several examples of this but every single time the police claims that the majority of people arrested were from out of state or out of city, every single time it turns out not to be true. I wrote an article in 2016 about the Charlotte protests, so this is a response to the killing of Keith Lamont Scott in September of 2016, okay? And Erin Burnett of CNN made a very provocative claim echoing the police in the police union saying 70 percent of those arrested in the protest of Keith Lamont Scott were from outside of the Charlotte area. This was repeated by right-wing websites like Zero Hedge, Breitbart, IJR. It was also mindlessly repeated by Free Thought Project and by Fox News. Now, this was during the Obama administration so they didn’t go for the whole white supremacist twist on that, which we’ll get into, but this was just repeated by everybody. Everyone sort of accepted that this was the case and literally the next day, the Charlotte Observer, a local paper, decided to engage in actual journalism and review this and found out that it was actually the inverse, that 20 percent of people had been arrested were from outside of Charlotte, most of whom were from nearby areas because Charlotte of course is right on the border of South Carolina. And so they found out that most of the ones who were quote-unquote “outside instigators” were from Gastonia, Greensboro, Albemarle, which are towns within a 20–30 minute drive of Charlotte. So that was just not true at all and if anyone has followed this from Ferguson to Baltimore, they always say this, but it does in fact go back even further.
Nima: So For instance, we can go back to say October 5, 1865, when the Baton Rouge Tri-Weekly Gazette and Comet published a column entitled, “Reflections Political and Otherwise.” And they started like this, quote:
That the white population of the South mean well toward the colored race, and earnestly desire to see them advanced to that grade of intelligence necessary to a full and rational appreciation of their new condition as freedmen, cannot be honestly denied. This, we believe, every intelligent member of the colored race, will concede, nor can they in reality be made to feel otherwise, notwithstanding all the undue interference to the contrary, on the part of outside political agitators, who from selfish and unworthy motives would fain delude the colored race into the belief that they are their best and truest friends.
Adam: Right. So this is a very common thing you see from up to the Civil War, up to the Civil Rights Movement, even after, that African Americans are otherwise content in their lot if it wasn’t for outside agitators. Now, for the most part, they’re talking about what they view as leftists, communists, unionists, anarchists.
Nima: So you have this dispatch from Boston, Massachusetts in 1902, published in the Fall River Globe, which is a Massachusetts publication, and the headline is, “Dr. Rowley Talks. Says ‘Unionism Is Tyranny’ and Outside Agitators to Blame.”
Adam: Yeah, and basically the article goes on to talk about how the strike is based on outside agitators. This was an extremely common thing. The Industrial Workers of the World were constantly being accused of being outside agitators, which is to say that people were generally happy with their lot in life until the anarchist or communist agitators came into town. May 14, 1963, this is during civil rights protests in Jackson, Mississippi, a New York Times headline read, “Jackson Says No to Negroes; Mayor Hits ‘Outside Agitators.’” The article would go on to say:
Mayor Allen Thompson rejected today request by the N.A.A.C.P. to open negotiations for an end to racial discrimination in public and business facilities.
Mayor Thompson, backed by 75 business leaders he had called in for a conference, said he would not appoint a biracial committee to negotiate with Negroes over race barriers.
‘No biracial committee will be appointed in Jackson,’ Mayor Thompson said. ‘The only thing that can come of such an arrangement is compliance with the demands of the racial agitators from outside.’
‘The agitators decide who will represent them on such committees, not the local Negroes.’
The implication being that they’re otherwise fine, it’s these blacks from the north that come down and promote violence. Then, of course in Selma in 1965, where Sheriff Jim Clark, who was the one who was behind the beating on the bridge in Selma, let’s play the clip.
[Begin Clip]
Reporter: Breath a sigh of relief today that this is moving out of your county now?
Jim Clark: I hope it’s over but I doubt it. I think when Martin Luther King has used us as much as he wants to then they’ll move out.
Reporter: What about the people who are left behind? Are they gonna settle down again?
Jim Clark: I’m sure that the local people will.
Reporter: You think it’s all been due to outsiders.
Jim Clark I think it has definitely been due to outsiders. I noticed yesterday in the march, a group of my friends and I stood there and we were able to count five local niggers in the whole march.
Reporter: Do you think there are many communists in this business?
Jim Clark: I think it’s possibly made up of ¼ communists and ½ procommunists.
[End Clip]
Adam: So there Sheriff Jim Clark during the Selma March in 1965 claims that it’s 75 percent communists, which I guess is 75–80 percent sort of seems reasonable, that’s the number people use when they make up how many people are outside agitators.
Nima: Well, that’s right. You don’t want to say, you don’t say 99 percent, right? You need to give it a little —
Adam: Right.
Nima: You need a little local flavor in there. We saw this also in the wake of the Kent State shootings in 1970 that happened in May 1970, but then there were grand jury trials basically working out what really happened when the National Guard came to Kent State and shot and killed four students, that there’s an article from UPI that says this, “25 students, Outside ‘Agitators’ Sought in Kent State Disorders,” and it goes on to say that:
The 25 persons tagged as law breakers in indictments handed down by a state grand jury investigating the May disorders at Kent State University were sought for arrest today.
The names of the accused — described as both students and ‘agitators’ from outside the campus — were to be released upon their arrest.
Adam: Yeah, so here just not being a student makes you an outside agitator. So even if you’re from the local area or from Ohio it doesn’t matter. So you’ll notice with the outside agitator claim the goalpost consistently moves of what can constitute an outside agitator. Now we heard this all the time in Ferguson. Ferguson was a very popular, again the police in Ferguson and St. Louis, Missouri, CNN Headline from August of 2014, quote, “‘Agitators’ in Ferguson come from around U.S.,” where they basically uncritically Repeated police claims about people coming from outside the U.S. KUTV, this is from April of 2015, “Police say Baltimore violence from outside agitators.” Another article from News Break, “Baltimore Mayor Says Outsiders Turned Peaceful Protesters Violent.” So when they call the press conference and the Minnesota governor and the Minneapolis Mayor say, ‘Oh, this is just outside agitators,’ anyone who’s followed these things like your bullshit meter goes off because again, every single time they call outside agitator. Now this had a twist a little bit where they really tried to focus on the white supremacist aspect of it, which is really cynical because what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to use the real threat of right-wing violence against African Americans during times of unrest, which is very realistic, this happened a lot in Ferguson, you could have Three Percenters and other right-wing militias go there as a sort of cover to kind of mix them all together. You notice they say, left-wing extremists or Antifa and then right-wing extremists and then outside agitators. So now they’ve effectively in a very slick rhetorical way they’ve lumped this real fear of right-wing militias in with this old anticommunist trope of outside agitators hoping this sort of peels off a certain liberal who doesn’t really know this is a trope. This is again, this goes back at least 150 years. I’m sure it goes back hundreds of years. And this is pretty cynical because there is a real fear of white supremacist trolls and white supremacist militias being violent and for the most part these work with and are part of the police but mysteriously the police are never considered outside agitators and again, the people in power have every incentive to always tell you it’s it’s an outside movement.
Nima: But there’s also a dog whistle in there, which is about the protesters being bused in and paid, right? Like, Soros is paying protesters to come in and you know, you see this, I mean, look, we’ve seen this both here when there are antiracist protests, that there are accusations that they are paid protesters, etcetera. Whereas the astroturf, the real astroturf movements, like, you know, Tea Party shit is not similarly scrutinized but it also dovetails with what we see when accusations are made against people in other countries, when they have rallies or marches against, say something like American imperialism, that we always hear ‘Well, you know, the government bused in protesters,’ right? ‘Those people aren’t really from Tehran. They’re from the rural surrounding areas, and they have been bused in.’ This is all of a piece, right? These are all similar tropes to ensure that as that article from 1956 said, people are not actually thinking for themselves and that they are being stirred up by others who have ulterior motives. It’s not about what you think it’s about.
Adam: Yeah.
Nima: But this also, you know, the Soros thing also connects current antisemitic tropes, which are rampant on the right for sure, with the historical antisemitism that is implicated in the outside agitator accusation. So Zoe Samudzi on the 30th of May tweeted this out, really reminding us all that, quote, “Outside agitator” is also historically antisemitic,” she continued, “it suggested naïve, pliable blacks were being led astray into disruptive communistic thought and behaviors under the influence of anti-capitalist Jewish Bolshevism.” So, you know the historical precedent of immigration from Eastern Europe often, and then accusations that Jewish immigrants here in the United States were bringing their Bolshevism over, their communism over, their Soviet brainwashing propaganda over here, and using that to stir up resentment and resistance in the African American population in the United States and using that, the Jews and the blacks, to discredit movements for justice, and to peg those to communism so that you get a whole mixture of antisemitism, anticommunism and anti-black racism to just, you know, ‘Hey, we get to discredit it all, it’s all outside agitators and therefore don’t take any of it seriously or if you do, strike it down, strike it down hard’ with what say Donald Trump said the other day “dominating force.”
Adam: What’s really kind of brazen to watch and I think pretty depressing is the ways in which this gets sort of rebranded for the 21st century. So there was a pretty depressing series of tweets by the Mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkan, who, by the way, as a former federal prosecutor, so this is someone who has made a career of putting black people and Muslims in jail, said, quote, “I want to acknowledge that much of the violence and destruction, both here in Seattle and across the country, has been instigated and perpetuated by white men. These individuals experience the height of privilege and are co-opting peaceful demonstrations that were organized by and meant to center people of color, particularly Black Americans.”
Okay. So, here’s what I’m gonna say about that: that’s pretty craven stuff. First off, look again, are there white hotheads at protests? Yes, of course there are and those conversations happen within the left and within African American protest communities. Those are good conversations to have. But I want to be extremely clear that former federal prosecutors and mayors who run the police, they’re the man, they work for the state, don’t give a shit about white fucking privilege. This is a liberal Trump era, resistance era update to an old trope about outside agitators with antiracist branding. This is designed in a lab to delegitimize the protests by acting like they actually support the protests, because here’s the deal, right? The implication behind all this stuff that ‘Oh, it’s only white men causing violence’ is extremely patronizing that African Americans cannot legitimately express their anger towards the system by burning buildings, which they of course are both right and correct and justified to do and so liberals sort of run around and by the way, they begin to agree with Trump, right? Trump says it’s outside agitators, they agree.
And then there’s this weird thing where they want every African American protestor to be Bagger Vance, and then they sort of twist themselves for saying it’s rich, white trust-fund kids and it’s incredibly condescending because it removes African American agency from the equation and says, ‘Oh, black people can’t be legitimately angered at Minneapolis police who just executed a man on camera.’ Now again, that’s not to say that there isn’t white people instigating violence, we have evidence of this, this definitely happens, but what they’re saying is that that accounts for all the violence because if that accounts for all the violence, then they’re not doing their job incorrectly, then everything is actually fine, then the liberal order is working, right? If this is all just an expression of trustafarians, and the occasional right-wing troll, and that this is not a manifestation of actual grievance by the African American community that is so bad, that is so desperate, that has had a foot on its neck for so long they are actually going to engage in forms of property destruction, then if that’s not the case, then actually everything is more or less fine.
Nima: Everything’s fine here, please move along.
Adam: Yeah and of course, that’s the implication behind it. So there’s something very craven about exploiting people’s real fears about racism, real fears about white supremacy in a way that basically just keeps federal prosecutors, agents of the state, and the police, again the police are parroting these too, and many police departments have also parroted this ‘white males are committing violence’ talking point because they know it works. They know it traffics, they know it wins over a certain demographic of people who don’t want to wrestle with the messy fact of political violence as a form of legitimate resistance because that’s not a conversation people want to have. So instead of acknowledging that, we basically condescend and reduce to sort of infantile state, African American political agency and the whole thing is so tedious and so scripted, and again, it’s just a new version of outside agitators, something that goes back hundreds of years. And now if Jenny Durkan was legitimately concerned about white male privilege and protests, then she should probably defund the budget of the cops in Seattle who are overwhelmingly white by 50 percent or support the decarceration by 50 percent, or support reparations, you’ll be surprised to know that she doesn’t support any of these things and this is just obviously bullshit.
Nima: So before we go, I just want to read a quote from James Baldwin who, as usual, has already covered every topic that we cover here on Citations Needed, and far more articulately. So Baldwin wrote this:
When the South has trouble with its Negroes — when the Negroes refuse to remain in their ‘place’ — it blames ‘outside agitators and ‘Northern interference.’ When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
Adam: Yeah. So you know, it’s one of those things where it’s like, again, anyone who’s been in a protest or protest movement knows that there are issues of people who are coming in to sort of push their own agenda that is sometimes incongruent with the majority of people as part of a movement, right? Like, when I was at Black Lives Matter in 2014, there was this guy who showed up with an Anonymous mask who was all about ending the Fed, he was a libertarian crank, like, is this guy part of the movement? No. But if I was to point to him and then paint him as representing the entire movement —
Nima: Or like a vast majority of what is driving action and outrage, right? Like that’s what it is. The numbers are always these massive majorities until real numbers come out and then it’s like, oh, no, right? Like a couple people with out of state driver’s licenses.
Adam: Yeah, they’re always a lie. There’s always a lie and it’s like, look, let’s just be adults here and let’s grapple with the political reality of what’s going on. Let’s not try to, even the whole peaceful/non peaceful protest stuff is such a bullshit dichotomy too, because it’s marketed and nothing’s ever been specifically peaceful or non peaceful.
Nima: ‘If the thugs from Chicago hadn’t come to our sleepy little town to start breaking windows then everything would have been fine,’ right? ‘The black population here was living in peace and security totally fine with the occasional person would just be either shot or lynched, right? Whatever. But then it was those damn urban Chicagoans who came in.’
Adam: But even the peaceful protestor dichotomy completely erases the fact that at least in my experience, and I don’t have scientific data that proves that the vast majority of time protests quote-unquote “turn violent” is instigated by the police themselves. The police are the one that make things violent and so people oftentimes in protest will then react with violence in defense.
Nima: Cops are the number one outside agitators in every single community.
Adam: And again, it’s rational to react that way. It’s rational to fight violence with violence. It’s rational to fight a violent system with forms of property destruction. I mean, these things are ambiguous for a reason, you know, protests are like the weather. It’s not a perfect fucking science and you can’t divide these things and the instinct to want to create all these dichotomies of violent/non violent, inside local versus outside edge, these are just ways that you divide movements because you muddy the waters and again, internally, these debates happen and they should happen and they will happen, but when the police chief, when the racist white police chief gets up, and starts opining on the dangers of white male violence, I’m like, give me a fucking break. You don’t believe any of this shit. Clearly this is just a way of dividing the protest, a way of effectively smearing the protests, as I don’t know, holiday for some rich kid and it’s like people eat the shit up because it gets everyone off the hook, right? Trump likes it because it’s Antifa, carceral liberals like it because it’s not an indictment on the system such that it is so we can just have these half ass pseudo reforms like body cams or better training, you know —
Nima: And it gets those same people to support the arrests at the protest.
Adam: Yes, of course, because they do and that’s the thing, Trump announced Martial Law and basically, Democratic leadership, Pelosi and Schumer, supported it.
Nima: And people are like, ‘Well, good, because you know, I mean, a lot of people have been breaking windows here, so…’
Adam: Yeah, exactly. It gets de Blasio off the hook, it gets these liberal big town cities off the hook, because if they can neatly divide violent and nonviolent and then have a sort of faux liberal veneer on top of it, where they can say, ‘I actually support the arrest of the violent protesters, but don’t worry, the people I’m arresting are actually from out of town and they’re rich white kids,’ then it’s like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s fine,’ but of course, that’s not the case and that’s not who they’re actually arresting, and that’s why they always lie about it. So it gets everybody off the hook and it’s extremely neat and anytime something is extremely neat and gets everyone in power off the hook we should question why that is.
Nima: Absolutely so before we go we are going to urge you, our amazing listeners — grovel, grovel, grovel — to support not us, not the show through Patreon, but rather three excellent organizations that absolutely need your help and support right now. So the first is Black Mamas Bailout from the initiative National Bailout and you can support them at secure.actblue.com/donate/freeblackmamas2020, I will say that again, it’s the direct donation link providing bail funds for mothers, for women who are being held in jail, again, the direct link is secure.actblue.com/donate/freeblackmamas2020.
Adam: Also, one of the groups we urge you to donate to is Assata’s Daughters, their URL is assatasdaughters.org/donate-1. You can just go to their website assatasdaughters.org or go to their Twitter @AssataDaughters. The final one is the Chicago Freedom School, which is at the chicagofreedomschool.org/support-us/donate, or you can just go to chicagofreedomschool.org and click on their donate button. These are groups that have been vetted and verified by local activists here in Chicago and New York. They are organizations that we give to in any event, and will continue to give to. They are organizations we strongly urge you to give to in this moment, the bond funds, which I know we did a fundraiser for the bond fund in 2018, for the New York Bond Fund, the bond funds are actually, from what I’m understanding, a little bit flush with money, a lot of people are donating to them and that’s definitely great, it’s wonderful, but what I’m hearing from the word on the street is that you want to give to some of the other groups and so one little gimmick we’re doing is that if you donate $50 or more to any of these groups, and you tweet at us about it, we will read your name on the show in the next episode.
Nima: Just like a critic level supporter!
Adam: Just like a critical supporter. Hopefully that’s okay with you all but like I said, if you donate to any three of these groups, it can’t be some bullshit, you can’t be like I donated to, you know, myself, that doesn’t count, it’s gotta be one of these three groups that have been officially sanctioned.
Nima: We actually want you to give these groups money. So we’re serious about that.
Adam: If you tweet out a receipt we will read your name and we will grovel again and thank you for that in our next episode, so please, if you can, if you’re wealthy or you’re like a white guilty liberal, pull out your wallet, give back money.
Nima: Now’s the time.
Adam: Don’t be cheap. Don’t be cheap. Don’t be fucking cheap. Don’t go read your book about how not to be an antiracist while you fucking put your credit card away. Take your credit card out. We don’t need your self flagellation. We don’t need your guilt. We need your fucking money. Donate to these groups, try to help out.
Nima: But we do need your proof on Twitter that you did it and then we’ll read your name.
Adam: I do need to prove on Twitter. I don’t believe you. I don’t believe people. I’m very skeptical. So if you can donate please, I know you, if you’re sitting there do it.
Nima: Adam needs the receipts.
Adam: I need the receipts. Citations fucking needed.
Nima: That will do it for this News Brief from Citations Needed. We cannot thank you enough for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter @CitationsPod, Facebook Citations Needed, if you are so inclined, you can go to Patreon and do that but really give to Free Black Mamas, Assata’s Daughters and Chicago Freedom School after listening to this. Really hope you do that. Thank you, of course, always to our supporters, to our listeners, to those who rate, rank, review, share the show. We cannot do it without you. We will keep coming to you with these News Briefs and of course our full length episodes will resume very, very soon. Thanks again. Citations Needed is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. Associate producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The music is by Grandaddy. Thank you, everyone. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: We’ll catch you next time.
[Music]
This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Thursday, June 4, 2020.
Transcription by Morgan McAslan.