Brooke Gladstone (0:00)

Brooke. I'm Brooke Gladstone. On this week's on the Media, a look back at the news and views of 2022. January and February of 2022 were the fourth and fifth deadliest months of the pandemic to date. The message was this is not just Ukraine's fight. Ukraine is fighting for the values of freedom and democracy. Somebody has to lose an election. It's been that way all through history. She had people parked outside of her house with guns. Guns threatening her life, threatening the life of the people who worked in the library. Musk first suspended the account that tweeted the whereabouts of his jet and then the accounts of nine journalists who reported on it. Anti Semitism has been a defining feature of Western culture for at least 2,000 years. And if this feels like a moment that's new or shocking, it shouldn't. Democrats will say guns, Republicans will say mental health. And nothing will change. It's all coming up after this. On the Media is supported by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. This Supreme Court term isn't business as usual. It's a full blown battle over democracy. Justices are shattering precedent, grabbing power and even turning on their own. It's messy, it's high stakes, and it's already reshaping how this country works. And our podcast, strict Scrutiny breaks it all down legally, clearly, and with just the right amount of side eye. New episodes drop every Monday. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube from WNYC in New York, this is on the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Listeners to our radio show know that we present it each week in three segments. And as we reach the year's end, we sometimes look back on the big stories by arranging them by theme. Obviously, three themes. Reviewing 2022, we're calling the first one Everything is War. We've often commented on the overuse of the word. This administration declares unconditional war on poverty. Our new attorney general will be directed to launch a war against organized crime in this country. There is a religious war going on in this country. The war on drugs will be hard won neighborhood by neighborhood. Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. Today we reached a historic milestone in our war against the coronavirus. But in the last couple of years, we've seen a notable shift in the use of the word. The New York Times and the New Yorker are now running headlines saying, is a Civil War ahead? Our political literature is experiencing a sudden surge of consideration of the possibility of, of the next civil war. We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe. Last January, as the first anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol erupted and receded, we asked David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, was the invoking of war, that war just another overreach? We conjure visions of probably the worst moment in American history, or at least on American soil in the 1860s. Pitched battles and 25,000 people dying in an afternoon. But that's not the kind of civil war anybody should be thinking about. The phrase is meant to evoke a sense of sporadic, unpredictable, but highly destabilizing moments of violence that we've already seen examples of in the modern sense in Oklahoma City, at the US Capitol, plots to kidnap the governor of Michigan. So I think that there are many kinds of journalism, and one kind of journalism is the journalism of warning that if we ignore it, it's far worse. But have you ever jumped on board a bandwagon of horror only to find out it was overhyped? I mean, with so much misery and fear in the world, sometimes I fear that pulling that leverage is just too easy. I feel the need to do a lot of self interrogation before proceeding. Well, I'd remind you of the late 80s. A scientist named James Hansen came before Congress and he said, we are witnessing the perilous condition that we now call climate change or climate emergency. And if we had listened more carefully in the late 80s when it was easier to fix this problem, we would not be here in 2022 completely consumed with very legitimate anxiety about the very state of our world. When I'm too sanguine or calm as a journalist, that can lead to a kind of complacency. I mean, look at, look at the Country's experience in 2003. The journalism as a whole. I'm not saying all of it, but as a whole, was not aggressive enough in the run up to the war. Absolutely, I plead guilty to that. To this day. It's a torture not to have been able to punch an adequate hole through the Bush administration's case for war. And the consequences were horrific. So let's say there's nothing to be lost by sounding the alarm of civil war. What do we gain? A former President of the United States who is going to run for President again and who shows nothing but love and support for the most violent and or deluded political actors in the country. If the metaphor, if that's what it is, of civil war makes us pay attention, I think it's legitimate because the facts bear it out to make us pay attention. That, to me, is not only a legitimate activity, it's a necessary one. Not to succumb to a lack of imagination or not to succumb to the very human desire to look away. That was David Remnick in January. In December, Atlantic writer Adam Serwer said that the phrase suggests this era we're in is particularly violent. And actually it's not. In fact, he argues, nowadays political violence is very much out of favor. You can sort of see this in the characterization of the Capitol riot. Right after it happened, Fox News was saying, well, it wasn't conservatives who did this, it was antifa. And obviously they switched messaging. When Donald Trump tried to say the Capitol riot was a good thing, the fact that they wanted to attribute it to the other side is a testament to the idea that political violence is much more unpopular than it was back in the day. Now, I think there is certainly a tremendous amount of verbal advocacy for political violence. After the FBI searched Mar? A Lago and repossessed those classified documents, you, you saw Donald Trump warning of civil war and sort of people on social media talking like a lower level functionary on the Death Star about what they were going to do. We've heard Tucker Carlson talking about Biden taking actions that have effectively declared war on half of America's citizens. This is a strategy for engagement and branding. These people are trying to find an audience by catastrophizing, and it's mostly hot air. There's a small number of people who are willing to engage in violence on behalf of these causes, and those people are dangerous. But when you think about civil war, I mean, that is a level of violence that is on, you know, it's another order of magnitude. But the year was filled with literal war, too, one that grabbed the focus of the government and the media for reasons both geopolitical and perhaps romantic in the dictionary sense of being marked by, quote, the appeal of what is idealized, heroic or adventurous. Russia's invasion of Ukraine last March was by no means a metaphor. It was and is a war of devastation. But it was preceded by a war of information. We tracked the ever changing array of Kremlin narratives. It was a war against Nazis, a war of liberation, a war against NATO, against Western aggression, against moral corruption, a war to preserve and protect The Russian way of life. Russia's information war also entailed the dispersal and decimation of Russia's free press. When Alexei Kavalev's news outlet Meduza was classified as a foreign agent, increasing the chance of his arrest, he was forced to flee Moscow, joining countless journalists from across the globe. I wanted to just grasp this full severity of this. The New York Times kept reporting from Moscow throughout the entire 20th century, throughout two revolutions, two wars, in the untold number of social and political upheaval. Now they're leaving because they cannot guarantee the safety of their staff anymore. So Medusa would be one of the few, if not the only one, who delivers the unfiltered, uncensored news. We've been anticipating this for many years, founded this publication outside of Russia to protect ourselves from physical harassment, from getting our office raided. But we will continue working because, well, the whole responsibility falls on us now. Ten months later, Ukraine still staves off Russia's attacks and has even recovered some territory in the east and the south. I think the messaging has been pretty consistent and that messages we will not let the aggressor take our land without a fight. Olga Tokhariok is a Ukrainian journalist. Six months after the invasion, she told me about how those invaded have used the media to enrapture the world. There the message was, this is not just Ukraine's fight. Ukraine is fighting for the values of freedom and democracy. I was thinking about those selfie videos that President Zelensky posted early in the invasion. Those videos were engaged to great effect, not only with his own people, but with the world. How about now? Do they still work? Yeah. You know, I remember in the very first days after the Russian full scale invasion began, me and other people whom we were sheltering in our house, internally displaced people from different parts of Ukraine were sitting in the basement during an air raid alert and watching to these videos of President Zelensky. And they were giving us a really strong morale boost to see that the president of the country is here, he's in Kyiv. Me personally, I'm not watching them as often as I used to, but somehow it feels comforting, you know, to receive notifications that a new video from President Zelenskyy has dropped. Still, war fatigue is inevitable if it's not your war. And when competing wars, especially domestic metaphorical ones, flare up. This year, free speech was a major battlefield and Joe Rogan was a phoenix rising unscathed from the flames after being hailed as a martyr for spreading Covid misinformation on his hugely popular podcast on Spotify, prompting some big artists to quit the platform. Also, Rogan was pretty insensitive, used the N word a lot. And anyway, Spotify gave him a public slap on the wrist and he agreed to remove about 70 episodes. A lot of this is a question of scale. Who is spreading the misinformation? How many people are they reaching? Because he's not just a random podcaster. Right. We spoke to CNN columnist Jill Filipovic back in February. Whether Joe Rogan wants to admit it or not, he is considered by a tremendous number of people in the US and abroad, somebody who they can trust. And when Spotify makes a financial agreement with him to, on Spotify's part, financially benefit from that broad social trust and these claims of expertise among the guests, then Spotify assumes a set of obligations that they're not meeting here. Rogan himself has said he shouldn't be taken seriously about COVID information. I'm not a doctor. I'm a. And I'm a cage fighting commentator who's a dirty stand up comedian who just told you I'm drunk most of the time and I do testosterone and I smoke a lot of weed, but I'm not a respected source of information. Even for me, if I say things, I'm always going, check on that, Jamie. I don't know if that's true. Right. I do that all the time. Right. But I at least try to be honest about what I'm saying. I mean, how can you not forgive a guy who's that authentic? You know, what I hear in that clip is kind of wanting it both ways, wanting to be taken seriously by his audience as someone who tells the truth. Right. Which he's emphasizing. I ask Jamie to Google that for me after he said it. Right, exactly. But also if I get it wrong, I'm an idiot, so you can't rely on me for anything. And it's like, well, you kind of don't get to have both of those things. Audiences understand that artists and creatives play with the facts, which is par for the course for, you know, rock stars, for musicians, since forever. I think that we do expect something different from people who play this kind of quasi journalistic host role, which I think is a fair way to characterize what Rogan does. Rogan's show is still huge and he's still rich, his free speech intact. As usually happens, it was a good year for hearing rich guys grouse about the danger to our First Amendment rights. Like Elon Musk. Twitter has become kind of the de facto town Square. It's just really important that people have the. Both the reality and the perception that they're able to speak, speak freely within the bounds of the law. Last week, Elon Musk banned high profile journalists from Twitter. Musk first suspended the account that tweeted the whereabouts of his jet and then the accounts of nine journalists who reported on it. Musk reversed the suspensions after tweeting out a poll. 58% of more than 3.6 million voters said the accounts should be unsuspended. Now, it's worth noting this was the second poll Musk posted on this topic. He said that the first had too many options, so he narrowed it down. Musk then tweeted a poll asking if he should step down as CEO. Of the more than 17.5 million people who responded, 57.5% said yes. He said he'd stepped down when he found a replacement. It seems most people don't like when Godzilla rampages through what they regard as their own communities. Right. And we've seen that as part of his rush to get costs down, Musk has fired half of the company. I spoke with Thomson Reuters foundation reporter Avi Asher Shapiro in November who told me that those cuts were having an even greater impact outside the US so we've seen reports that 90% of the staff in India were fired. The entire Africa hub in Ghana was fired overnight. Twitter doesn't need someone there to run its servers and allow people to use the platform. But if they don't have local staff, if they don't have local content moderators who speak the language, if they don't have people who specialize in managing these relationships with tough governments, if they don't have people whose job it is to be in touch with civil society groups who have their ear to the ground, you know, they're going to be operating blind, and that can be a big problem. We've seen a lot of people worrying whether Twitter will even continue to exist. What happens if it doesn't? What happens to the activists and activism that relies on it? Look, it's really hard to know, but the ability for the world's richest man to buy the rails and wires of such a massive communications apparatus and then unilaterally make changes to it, I think is an important reminder of what it means for our communications infrastructure to be, you know, up for sale to the highest bidder, which it is. You know, these are private institutions, but they function often like public utilities. Yeah. And the Musk thing is a great inflection point for people to Think about that. I mean, Elon Musk can shut it down tomorrow. He could take everyone's direct messages. He could publish them on the Internet. He could give a list of all the users in Saudi Arabia. He could give them directly to the state. He can do whatever he wants. The battle over what content we should moderate, what platforms should permit, like many of the other wars in 2022, rages on with no sign of slowing. But the war over free speech was just one prong in the culture wars. 2021 was the deadliest year for trans people in the United States, and 2022 was the worst year on record for anti trans legislation. Among the vocally prominent proponents of those is Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, who has said that merely allowing children to identify as transgender is grooming them. Last month, in the wake of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, she said it was disgusting to blame her for what happened or to say she had, quote, bad rhetoric about the LGBT community. I think that some people, especially living in larger cities, think that trans people would be safer because we have so much more visibility. In November, I discussed the growing threats to trans and LGBTQ people with Joe Yerkaba, a reporter for NBC out actors like Laverne Cox, Elliot Page. Openly trans people who have a lot of visibility. But in response to that, there's been a significant pushback from the far right after marriage equality, who think that LGBTQ rights has kind of gone too far. Yacperba said that the most extreme narratives, the ones that warn of threats to the children and to the culture, are no longer confined to extremist news outlets. A report cited that Lauren Boebert, along with nine other politicians, are driving rhetoric that labels LGBTQ people as grooming children. So it's coming from these people who have national platforms, and then the media is reporting on that, and so their messages are getting spread that way. One defense of any culture war is that it's inevitably, invariably all about the children, protecting the children. Last spring, we spoke to New Republic staff writer Melissa Jira Grant. Such a pernicious and kind of old fashioned, in a way claim to make about gender and sexuality, right? This evil that we're facing is grooming young children for sexual abuse. When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals. Sounds really scary to be told that if you stand up for LGBTQ rights, if you stand up for your trans students, your trans kids, you essentially are saying child abuse is okay. In none of this do I mean to imply that there's nothing to discuss about our rapidly changing America or the pace of that change. It's just that there is so little real discussion, so little empathy, just fear and rage and combat in a metaphorical war that claims flesh and blood casualties. Thus ends the segment we call everything is War. Up next, Everything is fiction. This is on the media. On the Media is supported by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Packages by Expedia. You were made to be rechargeable. We were made to package flights, hotels and hammocks for less. Expedia made to travel. This Supreme Court term isn't business as usual. It's a full blown battle over democracy. Justices are shattering precedent, grabbing power and even turning on their own. It's messy, it's high stakes and it's already reshaping how this country works. And our podcast, strict scrutiny breaks it all down legally, clearly and with just the right amount of side eye. New episodes drop every Monday. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. A lot of the fighting this year, both real and metaphorical, was targeted on truth. And who gets to define it. We spend a lot of time looking at narratives and this year most fell into the genre of fiction. Hence this segment is called with a touch of ironic verisimilitude. Everything is fiction. The reality is 60% of Americans will have an election denying candidate on their ballots this election cycle. There's a lot of stuff going around about what happened in this election. Quite frankly, I don't know. But I'm looking at the beginning of the year. We marked the anniversary of the current mother of all fiction, the Big Lie, by speaking with New York Times political reporter Astid W. Herndon. He said that believers of Trump's fable employ a particular vocabulary. You are in that interaction and you don't know what they're talking about. If you don't speak the language, they're not gonna really wanna talk to you. I remember asking a woman at that Virginia rally what is it about Trump supporters that she doesn't think the rest of the country knows. And what she said was, I really think the election was stolen. When you are there, that is the topic of discussion. There's been a lot of pearl Clutching about giving a platform to the Big Lie. Do you think it's important to interview people who espouse those views? Absolutely. I think it's the core of really understanding how politics is working right now. But it doesn't tell you how it works, just that it did work. I'm making a smaller distinction in that people thinking that politics is a debate class that only deals with what is true has actually stopped people from seeing the spread of certain political movements in the country over the last five to 10 years. And so I think if we had a media ecosystem that understood how birtherism was more widespread than we ever admitted, then we would have understood the 2016 election and the 2016 Republican primary a lot more. I really think that in the current tech environment, in the media environment, and how politics is working, you can't run from this. That does not make it true. And you need to know in your stories that it's not true. You need to find ways to do it responsibly. But I don't think that ignoring it's an option. When November rolled around, the Big Lie remained a big factor in the 2022 midterms, though not in the way many predicted. Embracing the Big Lie proved to be a disadvantage. But the fervor of believers burned hot, as OTM correspondent Michael Lowinger found when he traveled south to meet with Ann Dover, the director of elections in Georgia's deeply conservative Cherokee County. When somebody says, I'm going to pray for you, that you'll have a change of heart, and I'm like, my heart's fine because I'm following the law. I mean, we're all Christians in this office. We pray together. What bothers me is that they do it in the name of Christ. But then you exit the meeting and you get to the parking lot and people start yelling at you. What have they yelled? We have a combat war veteran here that works for us. And he was yelled at, you should be hung for treason. He's a big fella, big heart, great guy, and it was very hurtful to all of us because he fought for our country. I'm sorry for what you've gone through. I mean, it sounds very painful. It's very upsetting. I have been at my grandson's ball game, and somebody recognized me. What did they do? They whisper. I could hear them saying, she's the director at the elections office. I don't think that you're the only election worker in this state who has experienced abuse. No, absolutely not. It's definitely not a Cherokee county problem. It's a Georgia problem. It really is. Why Georgia? Because I don't believe the results of 2020. We joke and say 2020 is never going to go away. It's got to be put behind us. A lot of Republicans won't agree with me on that, but we got to move forward. We move now from political fictions to the literal and literary kind that rests on our library shelves. We're used to. At any rate, this year, libraries felt the pressure. As movements to ban certain books sweat the country. Efforts to ban specific books or even whole categories of books are on the rise. The reality is it's happening everywhere. Kelly Jensen is a Chicago based editor at Book Riot. We spoke last February. It's happening in the Chicago suburbs. It's happening in New York state. I recently reported outside of Seattle, Tacoma. In one of the suburbs, a middle school librarian was trying to add more LGBTQ positive books into the collection. Doing what a librarian does, researching these titles, making sure they have great reviews and that they would be appropriate for their community. The principal bypassed all their policies and procedures, just quietly pulling these titles from shelves. People in that area were shocked it was happening in their backyard. Moms for Liberty. You've drawn attention to this nonprofit group. You say it has more than 70,000 members in 33 states. They operate county by county, meaning that the action can be very quick and targeted. Last week, Moms for Liberty created a campaign that they are calling Moms for Libraries. They have collaborated with a publisher called Brave Books. They're doing two things. They're pulling books out of the library, which is giving them negative press. But if they create a campaign called Moms for Libraries and donate books back to libraries, that certainly gives them a different look in the public eye. But when you start to dig in a little bit, you realize that this particular publisher they're working with is propaganda. So they're pushing their agenda in two directions. But the debate wasn't just about what was on the shelves. It was also who gets to decide. And sometimes it boiled down to the expertise of trained librarians versus parents and others rallying under the banner of parents Rights. I sat down with scholar Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire, authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, the Dismantling of Public Education, and the future of school. They've been roundly accused of suggesting that parents don't have rights. Parents do have rights, but children themselves have a right to an education, and they are future citizens who we all have a stake in. The system is not designed to alienate young People from whatever values and beliefs they're exposed to at home, for the most part, that isn't really what happens. But in cases where parents, let's say, don't want young people exposed to even basic things like the ability to read and write, the compelling state interest in preparing somebody to participate as an equal member in a democratic republic trumps those parental desires to, let's say, shield a young person from the world. Jennifer, you wrote that this actually isn't the first time we've seen a push for parents rights, that we saw this happening back in the 90s, for instance. What's amazing is if you start poking around in the 90s, you'll find, you know, an unbelievable amount of media coverage of the parent rights issue, including by columnists who are still writing today. A lot of it started as the culture changed to include, you know, more recognition of gay and lesbians. And so there was a big backlash in New York City against what was known as a rainbow curriculum and the idea that kids were gonna be reading books like Heather has two Mommies. Parents felt like they were losing control over the ideas that their kids were being exposed to. There was a deep pocketed, well organized push to get parents rights, language on the books in every state. And then it ran out of steam for reasons that I think are really instructive for us today. One of them I learned about reading a George Will column. He was very concerned that putting language like this in constitutions would set off an explosion of litigation. And he asked, you know, do we really want to turn every parent's cultural grievance into a lawsuit? And so the movement ran up against another pet GOP cause at the time, which was tort reform. Right. Fast forward to today. You know, we've already seen this just explosion of these education gag orders across the country. It's very much a wedding of what law professor John Michaels describes as the industrial grievance complex with the school wars. There was one that was rolled out in Oklahoma that if a teacher teaches something that goes against a child's religious beliefs, that the teacher will have to pay $5,000 out of his or her own money. And if the teacher is found to have been the beneficiary of something like a GoFundMe or, you know, an organization stepped in, the teacher will lose their license in Oklahoma for five years. These education gag orders now affect a third of the students in the country. According to the American Library association, as of this fall, 2022 is on track to have the most banned books on record. The ALA's incoming President Emily Drabinski told me about the former director of the Boundary County Library in Idaho who resigned because of attacks she was facing for books that weren't even on her library's shelves. You know, she had people parked outside of her house with guns, threatening her life and threatening the life of the people who worked in the library. And so it's not about the book. It is about wanting the library itself to disappear. We see that happening in Vinton Public Library in Iowa. The attacks were so severe that the people in the library refused to work there anymore and the library was effectively closed. Librarians out in Utah were telling me that a bill would require books added to school library collections be reviewed by a set of parents. Boxes of books just sitting in school buildings unable to get on the shelves because of these kinds of restrictive policies. It's always framed as parents rights. But most of these book bans are on books that families and children can elect to read. They're not required to read them, they just exist. One of the things I loved about libraries when I first started is that they are non coercive learning spaces. You can choose from anything on the shelf and if your kid checks out something you don't want them to read, that's between you and your child and the way that you're parenting. And it just isn't something that the state needs to be involved in. Another case of trying to find out what is true in a sea of too much dubious information concerned the economy. Throughout the year, it's been an especially confounding topic. The problem's actually less about partisan politics and protecting the children and more about the dubious accuracy of our economic measures and yardsticks. But according to Mark Blythe, political economist and professor at Brown University, maybe it ought to be about the children, or rather about young adults and a crisis in confidence. Think about it from the point of view. If you're a 25 year old coming out of college, do you really have great faith in your ability to put together a retirement portfolio that's going to last the course, let alone buy a house? To go back to this idea of what are the things that we're measuring when we're measuring the economy? Let's think about the confidence index. Consumer confidence is down at its terrible low. Well, if you go on Bloomberg, you can sort it out by partisanship. You can look at the Michigan Confidence Index in terms of Republicans and Democrats, and what it shows is the majority of Democrats think things are okay but not great. Practically all Republicans think things are terrible because they must be under a Democrat. So on average, we all think they're bad, right? But I wonder how much these other subjective factors are featuring into this. I mean, are we confident about the future in the way that we used to be? Do we really think that, like, 20 years from now things are going to be totally fine and kids coming out of college are going to have more life chances than they do now? Or is there this kind of feeling that we've all got that we don't really express it? Is that kind of. And what's that doing to us on a macro level? I mean, it would be wonderful if this moment of rising temperatures, et cetera, really gives us pause and makes us recognize that we face an existential set of problems. I mean, this should be a moment for transformation, a moment for incredible investment in our culture, collective futures. But we seem to be paralyzed by a lack of imagination. So do we feel that, ugh, because everything is war, or is it because everything is fiction? Or could it be because it feels like we've done all this before and everything's just reverberating? That's up next. This is on the media. Foreign is supported by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states. This Supreme Court term isn't business as usual. It's a full blown battle over democracy. Justices are shattering precedent, grabbing power, and even turning on their own. It's messy, it's high stakes and it's already reshaping how this country works. And our podcast strict scrutiny breaks it all down legally, clearly, and with just the right amount of side eye. New episodes drop every Monday. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. This is on the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone with the third part of our Year in review, the coverage that focused on unresolved systemic challenges to the American project. How everything is reverberating. In April, I spoke with Ed Young, science writer at the Atlantic about our current, not figurative, plague, the third leading cause of death in the U.S. january and February of 2022 were the fourth and fifth deadliest months of the pandemic to date. For about six months straight, the U.S. lost over 1,000 citizens every day. Where was the reaction that that level of death should have provoked? It feels like Covid has become similar to a lot of other causes of mass mortality in the U.S. gun violence is a classic example that people just accept as part of the background of our lives. Some of this has to do with fatalism. But you write that in the case of COVID fatalism has been stoked by failure. Yes, the US Went into this pandemic rated as the most prepared country for a pandemic in the world, yet across two plus years and two separate administrations in it really did fail to control the pandemic. You know, before vaccinations, after vaccinations, that creates this sense of almost nihilistic abandonment, this feeling that you're going to get infected. We're just going to have to learn to live with it. CDC data suggests that about 70% of the adult population in the US are estimated to have had Covid, and around 68% are fully vaccinated. But far fewer Americans have gotten their boosters, in part, some say because of fatigue over the question, are we immune yet? In May, we asked Catherine J. Woo, staff writer of the Atlantic and microbiology expert, that very question. Clearly, the virus is slinging variants and subvariants at us at an incredibly fast pace. We get flu shots once a year, and that is the most frequent regular booster type of vaccine that we get. The pace at which we have been giving out Covid vaccines has been a couple times a year, at least, depending on who you are. That's not a pace we can sustain. But if we know that they're not doing an extraordinary job at preventing infection, that they're not perfect, that's not an indictment of them, it's an invitation to think, what else can we do? That's another question that reverberates along with its corollary. Why didn't we do more? As of 2020, for the very first time, gun violence overtook car accidents. It also became the leading cause of death in children. Recent data show an uptick of 30% between 2019 and 2020, including death by suicide, by accident and by homicide, with homicides outpacing the other two categories. And it was a horrific year for mass shootings. A supermarket in Buffalo, New York. An elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. A medical building in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois. A nightclub in Colorado Springs. A Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia. A string of tragedies that reverberate CNN's Victor Black. Well, listen, I. I was counting in the car, talking with my producer. I've done 15 of these, and we keep having the Conversation about Democrats will say guns, Republicans will say mental health, and nothing will change. And I'll probably do another one this year. Family after family, after having nowhere to go with their grief. We'll get into a political conversation later. But is this the way we're supposed to live? Are we destined to just keep doing this city after city? Have we just resigned that this is what we are going to be? After the uvalde shooter killed 19 children, we took up the issue of using visual documentation to report on violent death with journalism professor Susie Linfield. You can say torture, you can say concentration camps, you can say gun violence, but these words are somewhat anodyne, at least at a certain point. And one of the things that I think that photographs can do is make realer to us what the actual experience of violence, of degradation, of suffering is. You suggest that the whole world had that experience when they saw pictures of the Holocaust or of the liberation of those camps. Well, yes and no. That's actually an interesting example. You should never assume that everyone has the same reaction to a photograph. Photographs are very, very slippery, Thin. Most of the photographs of the Holocaust, certainly most of the iconic ones we know, were taken by Nazis celebrating their atrocities. But at the end of the war, German civilians were forced to see photographs of the camps and to actually view the piles of corpses that were still in the camps. Their reaction was not what the Allies had hoped. Their reaction more often was a kind of resentment. Why were they being forced? You know, they didn't have anything to do with this. The Allies were hoping that this would inspire a kind of moral reckoning among German civilians. But we know that that reckoning really didn't happen until the 60s. It was the children of the perpetrators who began that reckoning. That is fascinating, the generational difference, this kind of reckoning, which you describe as an Emmett Till moment. He was a teenaged victim of lynching in the 50s. His mother insisted that photos of his body be shared and the image was used in a lot of protests. It didn't launch the protest, but the picture enabled his story to be told, which educated many ignorant people about the horror of lynchings in the us but you also note there's a big danger in overstating the political power of any photograph. Yeah, and I think lynching is another very interesting example. Right. They took pictures on the day, souvenirs. They were actually postcards that white people in the south would apparently send to relatives, friends, whomever. So that's actually a very good example, sort of like the Holocaust photographs that what might fill one person with absolute horror is not interpreted by other people in the same way. This year, we also discussed some of the nuances of modern prejudices that don't gain headlines. In July, we asked Sabrina Strings, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, about her work examining the deep connection between race and our culture's abhorrence of fat, an attitude that dates back to the Renaissance, bound up with Christianity and moral purity. When I first started doing the research into this, putting your little simple search terms coming back, were a lot of references to Irish women. And I thought, I don't know what's going on here, because I'm looking for representations of race and blackness and whiteness and body size. And I keep getting Irish women. What is happening? It took me a while to understand that the category of whiteness is always shifting. This is still true, and that's important, because what it means is that whiteness is always aspirational. If it were settled, then we would know who belongs where at all times, and we might also have the ability to protest such standards. But if there's always the possibility of another group entering the coveted space of whiteness, people are less likely to protest it. And so this is one of the things that was happening with Irish people in the United States when they arrived. There was this fear that they were overly fat, which is interesting given the context of their arrival right here. They're fleeing famine, but the moment they arrive in the US they're too fat, Right? So this makes no sense at all. Why do you think we're always preaching fat or thin? I mean, even with the blatant racism, aside from why is weight something we love to proscribe, prescribe? Why? If we look at earlier moments or even different regions of the world, you can find that people have different body size preferences. But what made the contemporary shift to the slender ideal different was that it was placed within a hierarchy of humanity. Were it not for that, perhaps other individuals would have been able to say, you know what? I find different body sizes more attractive. And so I don't agree with this rendering. There could have been a greater conversation that could have shifted the aesthetic ideal or moved the needle. But there was this economic imperative, there was a racial imperative, there was a religious imperative, and then later there was a medical imperative for people to be slender. And even that last imperative, which appears the most empirical of the bunch, has plenty of problems. Nevertheless, we persist in trying to create hierarchies of humanity, even amongst groups fighting to be seen as equal. In November, in The midst of stories about black celebrities posing anti Semitic content, I spoke with Leo Ferguson, director of Strategic projects of the Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. And to summarize, he suggested that black people who are anti Semitic and the Jewish people who obscure, especially on black people's antisemitism have each absorbed the prejudices established as norms by white supremacist Christians long, long ago. But I press the issue. Wasn't there something particular about the tension between blacks and Jews? Yeah, great question. So crib notes for the particularity would be James Baldwin's writing about antisemitism and about the conflict between non Jewish black people and white Jews. I think that's probably a great place to, to start. The piece I'm referring to is Negroes are anti Semitic because they're anti white. I have it. Yeah, he wrote in the New York Times in 1967, yeah, the grocer was a Jew and being in debt to him was very much like being in debt to the company store. The butcher was a Jew. And yeah, we certainly paid more for bad cuts of meat than other New York citizens. You know, he goes on to say the army may or may not have been controlled by Jews. I don't know and I don't care. I know that when I worked for the Army, I hated all of my bosses because of the way they treated me. I don't know if Nabisco's Jewish, but I didn't like clearing their basement. I don't know if Rikers is Jewish. I didn't like scrubbing their floors. The root of anti Semitism among Negroes is, ironically, the relationship of colored people all over the globe to the Christian world. He's talking about white supremacy. He's doing a really interesting trick, which is that he is, I think maybe to get under the skin of Jews. Certainly to be thought provoking, he is essentially describing Jewish assimilation into Christendom rather than Jewish assimilation into whiteness. I don't know if it's because he was aware of Jewish people of color or the global Jewish diaspora, or if it's because he was thinking very specifically of, as he calls it, the vices of white Christianity in the United States. The enabling of anti black racism, of enslavement, of Jim Crow, of lynching, of every terrible thing that's been done to black people on this land. So much of that has been enabled by Christianity and excused by Christianity. And when Jews emigrated to this country in large numbers for the first time at the turn of the 20th century, they began a process that I think we often think about in racial terms, in terms of assimilating into whiteness. What Baldwin is naming here is that it also looks like in many ways assimilation into a pre existing religious and cultural hierarchy which Jews have benefited from enormously. Right. The white parts of my family are part of that story of upward mobility. Coming from deeply and unsettled and unsafe homeland in the old country and coming here and eventually finding a kind of stability in the United States. But in part that was by virtue of whiteness. I'm just wondering, since Jews are considered both a religious group or an ethnic one, or both. When we talk about antisemitism right now, is that steeped in the religion or in race? I think that what we're seeing is much more about culture and a general sense of the other. The Jew is the other, the outsider, the interloper. This has a long history and anti Semitic ideology going back to both fears around immigration and cultural change. The kinds of things that people have said about Jews for hundreds of years, certainly in the 20th century. The idea of Jews as communists, as people who were going to come in and undermine society, but also the flip side of that, the idea of Jews as the masterminds controlling everything. You said that the difference in this moment is that the thoughts and arguments of right wing chat rooms have made it to the mainstream. There's always an argument centered around normalization. Whether or not seeing this ugly side reflected everywhere publicly is ultimately a good thing or a terrible thing. Well, it's always better to be out in the sunlight than in the darkness. You sure about that? It's better to be real with who we are as a country so that we can find real solutions. The alternative seems to be perpetual reverberation. That's the message I got at the start of 2022 from David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriel, authors of the Bright A New History of Medieval Europe, who emphasized the importance of understanding that the Dark Ages had sunshine of their own. Matt usually says, but I'm gonna steal it from him, they lived in color. They did not live in a black and white world. And in some cases the colors on the stones have faded. And in other cases we just somehow don't look at the colors that are left. I'm curious though, if we really did understand the period as you do, what do we stand to gain? Although there's a limited number of things we can do sometimes in our society, we still do have choice. You know, political budget is a certain number of dollars. We can put it on X or we can put it on Y. We've made a choice that's not a foreordained conclusion. So if we're talking about this idea of the clash of civilizations, if we focus on the reason that people chose violence in certain cases, but chose understanding or respect in other cases, those can be models for how we relate to inter religious tradition relationships for the future. When people are telling you that the past is very simple, that you can draw a straight line from X until Y in the modern day, they're selling something and we have to ask what are they selling and why are they selling it? And what if we look at it from a different perspective? Does that upend the entire story that they're trying to tell and the entire product that they're trying to peddle? So 2022 was a year we could spend more time less scared outdoors. Some of us set plans hatched during the lockdown in motion. But I was great. I will say in a year that felt breathless. We did learn a great deal about where we are and where we're from more than usual. And for those of us who need them and who doesn't, there were hints that were not altogether powerless. It's just really hard. But what's the alternative? Perpetual reverberation. That's a phrase I hope to interpret with these sacred bones of 2022. Happy New Year. Dear Listeners on the Media is produced by Michael Olinger, Eloise Blondio, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark Callender, Candice Wong, Suzanne Gaber with help from Tammy George. Our Technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nirviana and Sam Baer. Katya Rogers is our Executive producer. 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