The Most Important Insight Behind the George Floyd Case & Tou Thao Conversation | EP. 025

The 2006 police killing of Fong Lee, a 19-year-old Hmong teen, set against the George Floyd cases — and what really decides how they end: political cost. Schee, Kong, and Seng follow their episode featuring Tou Thao with a case almost no one outside Minneapolis remembers: the 2006 police killing of Fong Lee, a 19-year-old Hmong teenager, and the civil trial that came three years later. Set against the George Floyd prosecutions — and the very different settlements paid to the families of Jamar Clark, Justine Damond, and Floyd himself — they build one uncomfortable argument: that what decides how these cases resolve is rarely the evidence or the moral weight, and far more often the political cost. The heart of the episode is the Fong Lee case itself. In 2006, Minneapolis police officer Jason Andersen shot and killed Fong Lee, a 19-year-old Hmong teenager, near a North Minneapolis school; three years later, Lee's family brought a federal civil wrongful-death suit and lost. Schee and Kong walk through the parts of that trial that still trouble them — the contested handgun said to have been recovered with Lee, the gang label that shadowed the case, and a family that learned of the verdict only after coming back from a lunch break to locked courtroom doors. Weeks after the shooting, the Metro Gang Strike Force that Andersen belonged to was exposed for corruption; a year later, Andersen received a Medal of Valor.From there the conversation widens into how Twin Cities police-killing cases actually resolve. Fong Lee's family received nothing. By contrast, the city paid $200,000 to the family of Jamar Clark, $20 million to the family of Justine Damond, and $27 million to the family of George Floyd — and Clark's family had publicly asked for the same $20 million Damond's received. The hosts' throughline isn't that any single outcome was undeserved. It's that the deciding variable is rarely the underlying evidence or moral weight, and far more often the political cost of the moment: who is watching, what election is near, and whose death the public has been primed to care about. Because this is a direct follow-up to their long-form conversation with Tou Thao, the episode doubles as a study in precedent and due process. Schee and Kong are explicit that it is neither a defense of anyone nor a re-litigation of Tou Thao's guilt; the question they press is narrower and, they argue, more durable — who actually gets afforded due process, and who doesn't. "Deserve" and "due process," they insist, are not the same thing. The final stretch turns to the summer of 2020 and its aftermath in Minneapolis: the protests and out-of-town agitators, the push to defund the police, and the homicides that climbed on a North Side that couldn't reliably get a 911 response. Kong frames the Fong Lee outcome as a miscarriage of justice driven by tribalism; Schee closes on the thesis — that Fong Lee's mother once stood beside the Black community demanding justice, and that the real culprit was never one race against another, but a political power that decides whose life carries weight, and when.   🎙️ Yada Yada Gold is a culture commentary and deep-dive podcast exploring modern life, society, entertainment, and the human experience. New episodes weekly on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and all major platforms.