The Fantasy of America at 250

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Fantasy of America at 250"

On the Media (WNYC Studios) | June 26, 2026 Hosts: Brooke Gladstone & Michael Loewinger
Guests/Featured Voices: Lex McMenamin (Guardian), Eddie Glaude (Princeton)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores America's difficult reckoning with its own narrative as it turns 250 years old. Using recent events—the harsh sentencing of Texas protesters—and the nation’s long historical anniversaries as a lens, hosts Brooke Gladstone and Michael Loewinger, with guests Lex McMenamin and Eddie Glaude, examine the tension between national myth-making and the realities of race, dissent, and the meaning of freedom in America. The episode traverses abolition, Reconstruction, racial violence, the rise of the Klan, and national celebrations, showing how each anniversary is shadowed by unresolved contradictions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Criminalization of Dissent: Texas Protest Sentencing

• Case Overview
  • Recent court cases in Texas saw severe sentences (30–100 years) for anti-ICE protesters.
  • Notably, some defendants (e.g., Daniel Sanchez Estrada) were not at the protest but were charged for activities like possessing political zines and participating in book clubs. ([02:41]–[04:24])
  • Authorities framed First Amendment activities (zines, book clubs, Signal chat) as evidence of criminal conspiracy.
    • “What most people would describe as protected First Amendment activity is the bulk of the basis for these charges.” – Lex McMenamin [03:43]
• Criminal Conspiracy Tactics
  • Prosecutors used strategies typically reserved for drug cases, applying them to protest activity.
  • Evidence cited included participation in encrypted chats, owning zine printing equipment, and literature with anarchist/feminist themes ([04:14]–[07:42]).
  • “There's political posters, stickers, photos of some of the defendants tabling at book fairs as evidence of their antifa cell, quote unquote.” – Lex McMenamin [03:52]
• Targeting of Marginalized Groups
  • Many defendants were trans individuals, now held in men’s prisons and denied treatments.
  • The government’s approach indicated both anti-intellectual and transphobic biases.
    • “A lot of the folks who are involved in this case do believe ...the government essentially tried to otherize these defendants, cast them as being scary on the basis of having tattoos, being trans.” – Lex McMenamin [08:52]
• Legal & Symbolic Implications
  • The use of literature as evidence raises profound First Amendment concerns, likened to treating revolutionary pamphlets as criminal.
  • National zine networks responded by distributing the same zines, raising bail and awareness.

2. America’s Anniversaries: The Double Consciousness of Celebration

• Task Force 250 & National Narrative
  • New government body aims to inspire unity for the semiquincentennial, using patriotic themes and religion ([16:26]).
  • “Kind of sounds like a pep talk in the mirror for a country that doesn't much like what it sees.” – Brooke Gladstone [16:23]
• Eddie Glaude's Historical Perspective
  • Each milestone anniversary—100th, 150th, 200th—forces the nation to reckon with its founding myths and their dissonance with lived reality, especially racial injustice ([17:38]).
• The "Double Consciousness"
  • W.E.B. Du Bois's concept is applied to the whole nation, not just Black Americans:
    • America is torn between being an egalitarian nation of laws and an exclusionary "white republic." ([18:19])
    • “When the tension between them becomes unbearable, white America risks everything, including the well-being of the country, to resolve it.” – Brooke Gladstone [18:19]

3. Historical Reflections: July 4th—and July 5th

• The Meaning of National Holidays
  • July 4th originally had little unified meaning; unity and a national identity were constructed post-Civil War ([19:48]).
  • July 5th—New York Abolition Day—became a separate freedom celebration for Black Americans excluded from July 4th ([21:14]).
    • Frederick Douglass's July 5th speech: “The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” – Douglass (quoted by Eddie Glaude) [22:27]

4. Violent Backlash After the Civil War & The End of Reconstruction

• Suppression of Black Citizenship
  • Vicksburg (1876): Black celebration of freedom met with massacre; the federal government failed to intervene ([23:19]–[25:08]).
  • The "Mississippi Plan" modelled the use of terror and disenfranchisement, spreading Jim Crow across the South ([25:08]).
• Supreme Court’s Complicity
  • The Court reduced Reconstruction’s ambitious aims, handed enforcement to states, and nullified protections against racial violence ([26:13]).
  • “How does the court justify murder?” – “By saying, this falls within the purview of the states.” [27:09]
• Collapse of Political Will
  • Economic downturn and “race fatigue” enabled a Democratic, white-supremacist resurgence (“the red wave of 1874”) ([27:20], [28:32]).

5. 20th Century: The Klan, Immigration, and White Identity

• 1915 Klan Revival
  • The Klan reemerged as the self-appointed defender of “America First,” now with anti-immigrant and anti-Black focus ([31:03]–[32:07]).
• 1926’s Unmoored Sesquicentennial
  • The 150th-anniversary celebration was marred by corruption, technological irrelevance, Klan power, and explicit exclusions of Black veterans ([32:23]–[34:31]).
  • The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 established restrictive immigration quotas, codifying whiteness as the standard of citizenship ([32:58]).
  • “The Klan ... claimed about 6% of the American population as its membership... but the Klan in so many ways represented the common sense of white America in this moment.” – Eddie Glaude [34:31]

6. Modern Mythologies and the Civil Religion

• Bicentennial (1976): Unity or Erasure?
  • Despite civil rights progress, the bicentennial became another occasion to reassert a sanitized, white-centric patriotism ([41:26]).
  • The concept of "America's civil religion"—shared sacred myths, symbols, and rituals—often masks violent chaos beneath claims of unity ([43:13]–[44:12]).
    • “Wherever you hear talk of cohesion, wherever you see this burning desire for consensus, usually it's hiding the roiling chaos underneath.” – Eddie Glaude [43:13]
• The Limits of Sentimental Solidarity
  • Historical white “allyship” proved consistently fragile and often motivated by sentimentality rather than sacrifice or responsibility ([46:03], [39:19]).
    • “Those feelings are really about you and your moral character. It has very little to do with the actual object of the sentimentality... it doesn’t come with responsibility.” – Eddie Glaude [39:25]

7. Contemporary Reckoning: The Present at 250

• Patriotism and Its Discontents
  • Today, the idea of patriotism and even the flag itself have been “hijacked” by reactionary forces, yet Glaude suggests the only way forward is to assert a diverse, pluralist vision that can withstand reactionary narratives ([49:41]).
• The Persistence of White Nationalism
  • Explicitly white nationalist language (“blood and soil,” “America First”) has re-emerged in mainstream politics ([48:43]–[48:55]).
• What Remains: Truth Carried by Love and Lit by Rage
  • Glaude reflects on his own motivation to document this history: not hope, but an insistence on truth, “carried by love and lit by rage” ([53:08]).
    • “My faith is in us. It always has been... I wrote the book because I was angry all the time... I had to write some sense of my own sanity into being.” – Eddie Glaude [52:10]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Criminalization of Reading:
  • “They're anti-intellectual. ‘Oh, these defendants read. That's so scary...’” – Lex McMenamin [08:52]
• On Institutional Betrayal:
  • “Reconstruction didn't just end. It was murder.” – Eddie Glaude [25:08]
• Frederick Douglass on the 4th:
  • “This fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” – Frederick Douglass, quoted by Eddie Glaude [22:27]
• On American Sentimentality:
  • “Sentimentality is always a mask for cruelty.” – James Baldwin, cited by Eddie Glaude [39:19]
  • “The sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” – Oscar Wilde, quoted by Eddie Glaude [39:40]
• On Contemporary America:
  • “Patriotism, to my ear, sounds like a rebel yell. It makes me worry who's saying it.” – Eddie Glaude [49:43]
  • “We need to get rid of this talk that we're somehow this exceptional nation chosen by God. We need a more blue soaked sensibility. We need to grow up. We can't grow up if you don't admit who and what you are.” – Eddie Glaude [50:44]
• On Faith and Bearing Witness:
  • “My faith is in us. It always has been... I had to write some sense of my own sanity into being.” – Eddie Glaude [52:10]
  • “What remains is not hope, but something just as lasting. The insistence on truth carried by love and lit by rage.” – Eddie Glaude, quoting his student [53:08]

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Segment Timestamps

• 00:00–14:12 – Texas protest sentencing, criminalization of dissent, radical use of conspiracy laws (Lex McMenamin)
• 16:23–40:00 – Eddie Glaude on America’s historical anniversaries, race, and the national narrative
• 41:00–53:55 – America’s bicentennial, civil religion, cycles of reaction, decline of progress, faith in truth and “bearing witness”

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Tone & Style

• Thoughtful, nuanced, and analytical—eschewing “hot takes” for deep historical context and reflective conversation
• Language is both critical and elegiac: direct about failures and violence, but equally invested in the possibility (if not certainty) of justice and witness

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For Those Who Haven’t Listened

This episode offers a powerful meditation on how national mythmaking collides with uncomfortable truths—from courts treating reading as a crime, to repeated historical cycles of violence and exclusion, to the present where even symbols like the flag are contested. Featuring expert voices and uncompromising honesty, it’s a necessary listen for those trying to make sense of America’s 250th birthday and its ongoing struggle to reconcile myth with reality.

Transcript

[Lex McMenamin]

Among those sentenced was Daniel Sanchez Estrada,

[Eddie Glaude]

who wasn't even at the protest.

[Brooke Gladstone]

This week, a judge handed down what amounts to life sentences for activists in Texas for, among other things, making zines and joining a book club.

[Lex McMenamin]

What most people would describe as protected First Amendment activity is the bulk of the basis for these charges.

[Brooke Gladstone]

From WNYC in New York, this is ON THE media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

[Michael Olinger]

And I'm Michael Oinger. Also on this week's show, America is turning 250. With all the fanfare, you this is

[Eddie Glaude]

the destiny of America, to be the greatest country ever to grace the earth. We are one people, one nation marching into one magnificent future.

[Brooke Gladstone]

But are we? Come on.

[Eddie Glaude]

Wherever you hear talk of cohesion, wherever you see this burning desire for consensus, usually it's hiding the roiling chaos underneath.

[Michael Olinger]

It's all coming up after this. OnTheMedia is supported by Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort, offering destination focused small ship experiences on all seven continents with a shore excursion included in every port and programs designed for cultural enrichment. And every Viking voyage is all inclusive with no children and no casinos. Learn [e-mail] hey, it's Micah. I've been working at OnTheMedia for over a decade and I believe that we're doing our best work ever right now as we face another wave of media consolidation and attacks on the press. What we're doing every day to cut through the noise and hold power to account has never been more resonant or important. You're listening, so I know you feel the same way, too. That's why I'm asking you to make a donation to support on the Media today. We need to raise just $10,000 by June 30th to meet our goal for the year. And with your donation, I think we're going to get there. Please [e-mail] donate right now. And when you give now, you get our brand new OnTheMedia Jumbo tote, an oversized canvas tote bag with an extra large OnTheMedia logo on the side. I use it to carry my groceries. You can get [e-mail] donate thank you and enjoy the show.

[Brooke Gladstone]

From WNYC in New York. This is ON THE media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

[Michael Olinger]

And I'm Michael Oinger. This week a Texas judge handed down a major win for the Trump administration's crackdown on protesters and anti fascist organizing.

[Brooke Gladstone]

This all happened July 4th last year.

[Lex McMenamin]

The group of protesters set off fireworks that damaged buildings and vehicles at the ICE detention center in Prairieland.

[Michael Olinger]

22 people have been charged and nine were given sentences this week ranging from 30 to 100 years.

[Eddie Glaude]

During the protest, a police officer was shot in the neck. He survived.

[Michael Olinger]

Benjamin Song, identified as the group's leader,

[Eddie Glaude]

was sentenced to 100 years in prison

[Michael Olinger]

after being convicted of attempted murder for

[Eddie Glaude]

shooting and injuring an officer.

[Lex McMenamin]

Among those sentenced was Daniel Sanchez Estrada,

[Eddie Glaude]

who wasn't even at the protest.

[Brooke Gladstone]

He received a 30 year prison term

[Lex McMenamin]

for conspiracy to conceal documents after he

[Michael Olinger]

moved a box containing anti fascist magazines and pamphlets.

[Yasmin Vesugian]

Acting U.S. attorney General Todd Blanche welcomed the unusually harsh sentences, writing that, quote, antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice.

[Lex McMenamin]

What most people would describe as protected First Amendment activity is the bulk of the basis for these charges.

[Michael Olinger]

Lex McMenamin followed the trials for the Guardian.

[Lex McMenamin]

There's a lot of books in the exhibit files. There's political posters, stickers, photos of some of the defendants tabling at book fairs as evidence of their antifa cell, quote, unquote.

[Michael Olinger]

Some of these people may not have known one another and yet they're being charged with participating in some kind of antifa cell.

[Lex McMenamin]

Definitely. Some of the 22 defendants have never met, never knew each other. Part of the strategy here was that this case was undertaken as a conspiracy case. And what I was told by someone at the center for Constitutional Rights is that this is usually a strategy used against drug dealers, for example. So in that case it's not abnormal for someone who wasn't there, wasn't technically involved in the incident at hand to get roped into these broader charges. What is novel is this strategy being successfully used against protesters. The things that they pull to make that case were in addition to the zines. The books are that some of them were participants in signal chats. The government cast their usage of signal chat for organizing purposes as proof that they had nefarious intentions and that it was a conspiracy in that folks were using pseudonyms or discussing whether or not they intended to carry at this protest via signal.

[Michael Olinger]

And not all of them were in the Signal chat.

[Brooke Gladstone]

No.

[Michael Olinger]

Which they may very well have been using to organize the protests. But that isn't in and of itself proof that there was a conspiracy to kill a cop.

[Lex McMenamin]

Yeah, absolutely. The whole reason that they were discussing self defense, quote, unquote, is because they were afraid of physical violence from law enforcement for just protesting, not because they thought they were planning an ambush, which is how the government described it.

[Michael Olinger]

Let's talk about another one of your sources, Elizabeth Soto, who was sentenced to 50 years for, quote, providing material support report to terrorists 50 years. What evidence did they use for this claim?

[Lex McMenamin]

Elizabeth Soto and her husband Inez are among the defendants. Inez is getting sentenced next week. But Inez, Liz and Savannah Batten, another one of the defendants who was also sentenced to 50 years on Tuesday, are among those who were walking away when the shooting happened. Blizz is a stay at home mom. The reason that the government felt that they were a part of this quote unquote antifa cell is because they were very active participants in the Emma Goldman Book Club, which is named for the 20th century anarchist. They are the people who are photographed in the exhibit files tabling at book fairs. They would table as the Emma Goldman Book Club and sell zines, give away seeds for people's gardens, sell books and host book club. As part of that, they had a quote unquote printing press in their home gar, which was two big Xerox office Standard printers. And then like a book binder. The only thing that they ended up making with that is a poetry collection about the writer's sister dying of cancer. And so when the FBI raided their house, they saw the printing press and then they actually conducted a second raid to come back for the printers and the book binder.

[Michael Olinger]

How did the prosecution draw a line between these political books and zines to some kind of conspiracy to kill a police officer?

[Lex McMenamin]

Among the zines and books that are collected are a zine version of a movie review from 2019 of the ARI Aster films Midsommar and Hereditary that is titled the Satanic Death Cult is Real. That's an article by feminist theorist Sophie Lewis, who told me for this story, like, it feels like they didn't even look past the first page. They just saw, oh, Satanism signed Antifa.

[Michael Olinger]

Those are two films in which, spoiler warning, it turns out that the villains of the film are in fact parts of satanic death cults.

[Lex McMenamin]

Yeah. And also Sophie Lewis is a theorist of family abolition. And in the government's counterterror messaging, they've included anti family and pro transgender as being anti American. So it is kind of interesting because it feels like they are saying anything that depicts a possible negative family, which if you've seen Hereditary or Midsommar, they're definitely about having bad experiences with your family. I think is a very light way to put what happens. It's casting that is inherently like nefarious and anti American. Another example of what's in the exhibit files is the book Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown. This book came out a Decade ago. It's an extremely common book. It's certainly sold in a Barnes and Noble.

[Michael Olinger]

So not exactly a terrorism manifesto?

[Lex McMenamin]

I would certainly not say.

[Michael Olinger]

So why do you think the government chose these books and these zines to present as evidence if they fall short of showing some kind of violent conspiracy against the government?

[Lex McMenamin]

I spoke to the wife of one of the defendants, Autumn Hill. She was sentenced to 50 years on Tuesday. Her wife's name is Lydia Koza. And Lydia said they're anti intellectual. Oh, these defendants read. That's so scary. You shouldn't trust people that read. They might be writing things that'll be dangerous to you. A lot of the folks who are involved in this case do believe that the reason the case went the way that it did is because the government essentially tried to otherize these defendants, cast them as being scary on the basis of having tattoos, being trans.

[Michael Olinger]

Let's talk about a couple of the defendants, Autumn Hill and Megan Morris, both trans women who are being held in men's facilities. Morris was denied access to hormone treatments while in a Johnson county jail nearby the Prairieland ICE detention center. They each received 50 year sentences for conspiracy to riot and ambush an officer. But they weren't even present when the shots were fired. What's the court's justification here?

[Lex McMenamin]

Autumn Hill and Megan Morris were in these affiliated groups or in signal chats. The FBI rate on their house similarly collected zines, literature, posters. I wouldn't say that these folks are being targeted because they're trans, but I would say that it is noticeable how the government's attacks on trans people are impacting the duration of their incarceration or even how this like case is being conducted. Roughly, a little less than a third of the 22 defendants in this case are trans. But Autumn and Megan are the folks who had socially transitioned, they had legally changed their names, they had begun medically transitioning. They've been held in men's facilities this entire time. Criminal justice and civil rights experts are extremely opposed to trans women being held in men's prisons for their own safety.

[Michael Olinger]

Just to be clear, the targeting of left wing activists is not itself.

[Yasmin Vesugian]

Newt.

[Michael Olinger]

There's a long history of the US Government conflating anarchists, communists, leftists with criminal conspiracies. Can you talk a little bit about that history and how you think this incident fits in?

[Lex McMenamin]

Kind of ironically, 99 years ago, Emma Goldman was charged with a conspiracy for organizing against the draft in World War I. And that charge was brought by a young Joseph McCarthy who would then go on to start the Red Scare of characterizing left wing ideologies, particularly communism, as threats to national security. You see the same tactics be intensified in the wake of the civil rights movement and the rise of the Black Panthers. The 80s and 90s were a time where a lot of those movements were crushed on the basis of these conspiracy cases. This follows all the way through into Trump's first term where there was this case called J20, where over 200 people were charged as part of a conspiracy over protests that occurred on an inauguration day in 2017. And then that brings us to now where the Department of Justice is pursuing several conspiracy case style prosecutions of anti ICE protesters across the country.

[Michael Olinger]

But as a ProPublica investigation earlier this year found, over a third of cases built against some 300 plus anti ICE protesters have crumbled. What do you think sets Prairieland apart from some of those less successful prosecutions? Was it simply the shooting of an officer?

[Lex McMenamin]

I think that the shooting of an officer is absolutely the main thing that ended up shaping this case. A lot of the folks who might usually come to their defense, like the A.C.L.U. for example, that they did not make a lot of ruckus about this case because there was a gun involved. And I think a lot of liberal groups just did not want to touch this. Compound that with the fact that this happened in the Northern District of Texas court, which is a pretty conservative district. It ended up being like a very ideal setup of a case for the Trump administration to go after.

[Michael Olinger]

The fact that political literature is being used as evidence, is that not just a clear First Amendment violation?

[Lex McMenamin]

This is extremely concerning to legal experts. It goes all the way back to the basis for some of the Constitution. The Federalist Papers were effectively a zine. They were anonymous pamphlets that articulate something that is anti authority, that is not so different from the anti capitalist, anarchist, et cetera literature that these folks had in their homes. When I met Elizabeth Soto in jail for our interview, I asked her, do you think there's anything to this? Her response was, they didn't like my book club. It's very clear to the defendants that this is about the literature. This is about the ideology that they share in support of that, the folks who are organizing around this case on the outside have responded by making their own anonymous literature. They have issued so many zines to inform people about this case, about the defendants, and about the possible consequences and risks. A lot of national zine networks have responded by even like selling collections of the zines that were included in the exhibit files to fundraise to help get some of the defendants who have not yet been tried out on bail. The First Amendment is not dead, but this case is absolutely an assault on it.

[Michael Olinger]

Lex, thanks for keeping on top of this case and thanks for speaking with us about it.

[Lex McMenamin]

Thank you for letting me come on to talk about it. It's really important.

[Michael Olinger]

Lex McMenamin writes about protest movements for the Guardian.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Coming up, remembrance of Independence Day's past through a mirror darkly.

[Michael Olinger]

This is on the Media. On the Media is supported by Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort, offering destination focused small ship experiences on all seven continents with a shore excursion included in every port and programs designed for cultural enrichment. And every Viking voyage is all inclusive with no children and no casinos. Learn [e-mail] on the media is supported

[Brooke Gladstone]

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[Yasmin Vesugian]

As the day wraps up, get the scoop on what's been happening with here's the Scoop, a new podcast from NBC News, with me, your host, Yasmin Vesugian. We'll take a deep dive into the day's top stories with NBC News's trusted journalist. It's a fresh take that's sharp, thoughtful and it's informative, bringing you closer to the headlines and conversations that are shaping our world on the front page to the Zeitgeist. Here's the scoop from NBC News. Listen daily wherever you get your podcasts.

[Michael Olinger]

This is ON the media. I'm Michael Loewinger.

[Brooke Gladstone]

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. In the first month of Donald Trump's second administration, the government created Task Force 250, dedicated to planning a year's worth of events surrounding the nation's semiquincentennial. Its brief mission statement said that it aimed to, quote, inspire a renewed love of American history, encourage citizens to experience the beauty of our country, ignite a spirit of adventure and innovation to help our nation succeed, and invite Americans to pray for our country, our people, and rededicate ourselves as one nation under God. Kind of sounds Like a pep talk in the mirror for a country that doesn't much like the what it sees. Eddie Glaud is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of the new book America How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. He set out to explore not just the present, but all our past big birthday bashes and the question why, a quarter of a millennium into the American project, we still can't reconcile our own reflection.

[Eddie Glaude]

Every present demands a past to account for itself. And I kept thinking, here we are in the 250th year of the country and we're grappling with so many contradictions, so many ghosts. And I'm not Jill Lepore, so I couldn't write that big tome over 250 years.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Yeah, but you have.

[Eddie Glaude]

But I thought, though, that these anniversaries are these telescoped moments where the country has to tell a story about itself. And it just so happens that with each one of these, particularly the milestone anniversaries, the hundredth, the 150th and the 200th, the issue of race is at the forefront.

[Brooke Gladstone]

W.E.B. du Bois wrote about what he dubbed the double consciousness in his classic the Souls of Black Folk. It was, you say, the way he depicted the veil that separated the worlds of black and white folk and the impact that duality had on the way black people saw themselves. But you also note that condition is truly the inheritance of all Americans. The idea that America is at once a nation of laws that reflect ideally the equal standing of every individual and that it is a white republic. You wrote that these two values are irreconcilable, and when the tension between them becomes unbearable, white America risks everything, including the well being of the country, to resolve it.

[Eddie Glaude]

We see it with the Civil War and we see it now. There were those who were willing to throw away the entire experiment before they gave up not only the economic institution of slavery, but the idea that the racial hierarchy which justified the peculiar institution that that was kind of baked into the order of things.

[Brooke Gladstone]

So let's start with America's birthday, so called the 4th of July in the first 50 years of the country. You wrote that the 4th didn't look anything like the present, mostly because it didn't have a cohesive purpose.

[Eddie Glaude]

People from Virginia were loyal to Virginia, folk from Massachusetts were loyal to Massachusetts. There was this kind of broad confederacy, but there wasn't a kind of strong national sense of identity that would emerge later.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Right? The identity that causes the schizophrenic reaction because there wasn't actually much ambiguity about white supremacy. Slave auctions were often held on the 4th. You noted it was made a holiday in 1870. That was five years after the Civil War, and free black people weren't allowed to participate. In fact, you noted that it was the most menacing day of the year for free blacks in the North.

[Eddie Glaude]

Yeah, you get the horrors of the July days. In 1834, for example, you know, a church was accused of administering a marriage ceremony to an interracial couple. The church was attacked, pews destroyed. Black folk were slaughtered in the streets. I think it's important for us to understand that our very bodies kind of signaled the contradiction of what was being celebrated. It is said that John Adams said to King George, we will not be your Negroes. So in the very moment in which he's giving voice to a notion of freedom, it's based on this very intimate understanding of unfreedom. And you can see this distilled on these early July 4th days.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Tell me about the significance of July 5th.

[Lex McMenamin]

Yeah.

[Eddie Glaude]

There's this alternative commemorative calendar. In African American traditions, there is this celebration of these freedom days. We initially celebrated January 1st. Why? Because January 1st, 1808, was the end of the transatlantic slave trade. We used to celebrate August 1, 1834. Why? Because it was the end of slavery in the West Indies. And July 5 was important, perhaps the most celebrated of all the freedom celebrations. Until Juneteenth, it was New York Abolition Day, the end of slavery in the state of New York. And so during these days, you would have picnics, prayers, sermons. Families would come out and celebrate in our idea of freedom. Over and against a country that claimed itself to be a defender of freedom

[Brooke Gladstone]

and wouldn't let them participate on July 4th.

[Eddie Glaude]

Exactly. So the most famous of July 5th celebrations, of course, is Douglass. July 5th, 1852. Oration was initially supposed to be delivered on July 4th, but July 4th landed on a Sunday.

[Brooke Gladstone]

I was going to ask you to quote from what to the slave is the fourth of July.

[Eddie Glaude]

The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Douglass went on to say that America is false to the past, falls to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. So let's jump ahead to the Centennial, 1876. A decade after the Civil War ended and already the twilight of Reconstruction. Tell me what happened on July 4th in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

[Eddie Glaude]

You have African Americans celebrating, not just simply the 4th of July, it's the fall of Vicksburg. And you have those persons who suffered the defeat take offense at this celebration of freedom by these former slaves. And so this gathering of women, children and men, they are attacked, you say

[Brooke Gladstone]

by the end of the summer, nearly 350 were murdered. Why did did President Grant, who was asked to send support, decline?

[Eddie Glaude]

He was worried about the response to his efforts in Colfax, Louisiana. Colfax, Louisiana. There was some questions around the elections.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Questions about the elections. How?

[Eddie Glaude]

Well, they didn't trust the Republicans who were elected.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Were they black?

[Eddie Glaude]

Some of them were black. Black people voted Republicans in. You see, this is the key. The idea that these former slaves could exercise the franchise, actually played a role in governance was an affront. And then the idea that these people would dare to defend themselves in the face of violence just simply intensified the bloodlust. And so Grant sent in troops in Colfax, Louisiana, and he took a serious political hit, because across the country, there was this kind of fatigue around the issue of race. People thought with the ratification of the 15th Amendment, everything was settled. These black men now had the right to vote. And as Du Bois wrote several Years later in 1903, in the Souls of Black Folk, that didn't resolve anything. In fact, it just simply nationalized the race question. So with the hesitancy around Colfax and his intervention, he refused to send troops to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the slaughter continued.

[Brooke Gladstone]

You say Reconstruction didn't just end.

[Eddie Glaude]

It was murder. Robert Smalls, who was a Civil War hero from South Carolina who was elected to Congress during the Reconstruction era. Robert Smalls said, between the collapse of Reconstruction and the turn of the century, over 53,000 black people were murdered. And these weren't just random folks. These were people who were participating in the electoral system. They were poll watchers. They were actually in the Republican Party. Coming up, when you think about what happened in Mississippi, what happened in South Carolina, what happened in Wilmington, North Carolina, there's actually a physical couple. You have the Mississippi plan, this blueprint in the state of Mississippi for seizing the power of the state. The idea was, through coercion and violence to scare black people away from the polls and through law disenfranchisement, stripped them of their ability to exercise the vote and seize power. That plan was then duplicated across the South.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Tell me about the participation of the Supreme Court in all of this, you

[Eddie Glaude]

know, we tend to read the court through the Warren Court.

[Brooke Gladstone]

I know it's just an accident of

[Eddie Glaude]

our birth, but, you know, the court is rendering decisions that fundamentally narrow the aims and ends of Reconstruction. During radical Reconstruction, there's legislation passed to curtail the violence of the Klan. The Supreme Court overrules it. During radical Reconstruction, you get the 13th amendment, which ends slavery, the 14th amendment, which gives us due process, the 15th amendment, which gives black folk the right to vote. You see, the court systematically narrows and constraining what the 14th Amendment covers. So much so that you get the violence of the Klan. You see those laws implemented in order to hold them to account, particularly in Colfax. Those very people who committed the horrors in Colfax were then absolved of any guilt by virtue of the court.

[Brooke Gladstone]

How did they do that? How does the court justify murder?

[Eddie Glaude]

By saying, this falls within the purview of the states.

[Brooke Gladstone]

So if the state isn't going to prosecute, then there's no murder.

[Eddie Glaude]

It's not a federal issue.

[Brooke Gladstone]

What was the red wave of 1874?

[Eddie Glaude]

This kind of takes us to the cycle that I'm talking about in the book. This red wave reflects the exhaustion of the nation. They've had to bury their dead lost in this extraordinary violent conflict. That was the Civil War that almost destroyed the nation. And so you have not only those in the south, but even those in the north. And of course, those folks who didn't believe that black folk had the capacity for citizenship, but they didn't believe in disunion. These are the copperheads. They are tired. And then you get the economic downturn. Folks are losing property, losing wages, losing their way of life. So between the economic downturn and the fatigue around race, Republicans who had been governing the country lost enormous number of seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate not even a full decade after the Civil War. Democrats now control all of the major committees in the House of Representatives. And you see the effects of this as we're barreling towards the centennial of the country.

[Brooke Gladstone]

The red wave represents the Democrats. Yes, they were red back then. So we get to 1875 as you write, the Gilded Age that Mark Twain skewered, the bounty of the frontier and the genius of our technological advance. Native people were savages to be tamed or eradicated. The past mattered little here. And Frederick Douglass spitting against the wind again, the Negro was not the problem.

[Eddie Glaude]

I mean, this is, you know, that 1875 speech is so powerful. July 5th again.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Will you pull a little bit of that up.

[Eddie Glaude]

Yeah. When this mighty quarrel had ceased, he told the crowd, the war, when all the asperities and resentments have gone as they are sure to go, when all the clouds that a few years ago lowered about our national house shall be in the deep bosom of the ocean buried, when this great white race has renewed its patriotism and flowed back into its accustomed channels, the question for us is, in what position will this stupendous reconciliation leave the colored people? What tendencies will spring out of it? And how will they affect us? If war among whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring? So here Douglass is understanding very clearly, right, the dangers on the horizon. He's already described these people as the apostles of forgetfulness. They think they've resolved the question because slavery is no more. But he knows about Colfax. He has heard about Vicksburg and Hamburg, South Carolina. The violence that has taken across the South. And his friends, the people who were once anti slavery, have turned their backs. And that's when he declares, I don't want alms, I want justice.

[Brooke Gladstone]

And that part of the book truly shocked me. The failure of those allies, the statements they made. I mean, Whitman, Yeah.

[Eddie Glaude]

When we read Whitman's Leaves of Grass and you read the first edition, it's an anti slavery page. But by the time you get to the last edition, he's redacted it all because he didn't believe that these people actually could bear the burdens of citizenship. He likened us to baboons.

[Brooke Gladstone]

And the disaster that was the collapse of Reconstruction led most prominently to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915.

[Eddie Glaude]

I mean, there was a decision by government to address the extralegal violence of the Klan. Those laws in 1870 were designed to prohibit the violence that Congressional hearings around the Klan aimed to snuff them out. And the courts made it possible for them to return. In 1915, they were reborn in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Now, mind you, it's happening against the backdrop of the anniversaries of the Battle of Gettysburg and the like, the Klan emerges, and they're emerging as a defender of America first. It's interesting though, Brooke, they're not just simply identifying black folk because by the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th century, the pressures of European immigration, Jews and Irish Catholics whose loyalty was to the papacy, those swarthy Italians, those Europeans coming from those s hole countries, threatened the cohesion of the nation. And the Klan took it as its role and responsibility to defend America first.

[Brooke Gladstone]

And they use the phrase, that is their phrase, America first. So jump to 1926. What was top of mind for America at the 150th year mark? What did the sesquintennial celebration look like?

[Eddie Glaude]

Well, it was a disaster. Unlike the 1876 centennial celebration, which was by every measure a stunning success, the sesquicentennial was mired in corruption. This is how South Philly, for example, got built. You know, you have the corrupt politicians making sure that the exposition would be held in South Philly, which was basically a swamp. There was this attempt at a fair, but by this time, technology had outpaced the exhibits.

[Brooke Gladstone]

This was sort of like a failed World's Fair.

[Eddie Glaude]

Exactly.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Whereas all the technology in the one

[Eddie Glaude]

50 years earlier had everybody gasping, oh, my God, look at America's technological prowess in 1926. This is the roaring twenties. Only the United States can have the roaring twenties after the Spanish flu, after all of that death. We're going to describe the 20s as the age of the Charleston and the Jazz Age, but it's also the decade of the Klan. It's at the height of its power in the 1920s. And its seminal achievement is the Johnson Reed Immigration and Nationality act of 1924 that put in place national quotas. It, in effect, codified the idea that whiteness defined the substance of American citizenship. And so this is really important in the way in which I'm telling the story in the book, because the 1920s represent this vexed and complicated expansion of who was considered to be the white America. You hear it in Teddy Roosevelt, you hear it in Woodrow Wilson. You're going to hear it in Calvin Coolidge. They're trying to beat back the nativism of the Klan in an interesting sort of way. Congressman Johnson, who co authored that piece of legislation in 1924, was actually a member of the KL. And Senator Reid from Pennsylvania represented a state that had over 250,000 members of the Klan. At some point, the Klan claimed about 6% of the American population as its membership. Not that everybody had to wear a sheet or a hood, but the Klan in so many ways represented the common sense of white America in this moment.

[Brooke Gladstone]

And how was that reflected in the celebration?

[Eddie Glaude]

Initially, the Klan was approved to hold its annual convention on the grounds of the celebration of the 150th annivers of the nation. They were going to celebrate the flag and burn a cross at the same time. And if it wasn't for a coalition. Listen at this coalition. A coalition of Irish Catholics, Jews and Black folk in Philadelphia, it would have happened. AJ Sutton, who was one of the key organizers of the 1926 sesquicentennial, was purportedly a member of the Klan, and he punished people for blocking this. They called it a clonvocation.

[Brooke Gladstone]

One notable exclusion was that among the thousands of veterans celebrated for their service In World War I, who led the opening day for the 1926 celebration, there wasn't a single African American among them, despite 350,000 of them having served during that war.

[Eddie Glaude]

Do you think about 1876 in the Centennial? Right. There's a disappearance of the reason for the war. Frederick Douglass was invited to sit on the dais in 1876. A Philadelphia police officer, as he was trying to enter the exposition, says very clearly this is possible that an N word could ever be invited to sit on the dais with the President of the United States.

[Brooke Gladstone]

It seems so hard to believe because at one point Frederick Douglass was the most photographed man in the world.

[Eddie Glaude]

It didn't matter. He was still an N word. And then here we are. All of these black soldiers who risked everything in World War I disappeared.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Of all the anniversaries, you wrote that 1926 seemed to be the most unmoored. It was caught between the old dying world of monarchs and empire and a new modern one struggling to come into existence.

[Eddie Glaude]

What I'm interested in is the way in which the idea of the white American is taking shape during this period. It is the basis of reunion to see themselves beyond being in the south and in the North. To overcome these regional differences, an idea of the white American is articulated. And in the 1920s that idea is expanded to include European immigrants, those people who would become white ethnics. Because the very people in the 1920s who are seen as infestations, a threat to Nordic America, are now quintessentially American. And so the Klans view of the world became much more binary. Is black and white and white included now ethnic diversity? We have to always remember the United States. At least in our popular rhetoric, we tend to locate the monster outside of us. We talk about Hitler's Germany and we ignore the fact that Hitler found in us the example. He looked to us for resources, including

[Brooke Gladstone]

the science of eugenics.

[Eddie Glaude]

Exactly. Listen at this quotation from Lothrop Stoddard. The rising tide of color against white supremacy was published in 1920. And he says, finally, perish. White civilization is today coterminous with the white race. If white civilization goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption. That's great replacement theory. That's what's animating a lot of our politics today. That was 1920, though.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Let's talk just for a moment about the madness. I referred to it when we began the interview. The reason why churches could buy and sell slaves to support its charitable operations, the lunacy of trying to reconcile those

[Eddie Glaude]

things, the way the country has historically financed. That's divided soul, Brooke, is that it argues that white people are the possessors of freedom, to give and to take away. So if the country is divided between the idea of the country as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic, the way you finesse that division is just simply make freedom the possession of white people. What can we do for the Negro? What can we do for the slave? As if racial justice is a philanthropic enterprise, a charitable Jasper. And then the moment in which, you know, you admit of the horrors, you admit of the racism. That admission is supposed to bring forth absolution. And instead of bringing forth absolution, it brings forth another demand for a more just world. Then that sentimentality morphs into white rage. Because as Baldwin said, sentimentality is always a mask for cruelty.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Define sentimentality. This pain that you feel for someone else, that has a limit.

[Eddie Glaude]

Those feelings are really about you and your moral character. It has very little to do with the actual object of the sentimentality. Right. You know, it doesn't come with responsibility. This is what Oscar Wilde is saying.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Can you recall that quote, Oscar Wilde

[Eddie Glaude]

in De Profundis thought of the sentimentalist as, quote, one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.

[Michael Olinger]

Coming up, the second half of Brooks conversation with Eddie Glaud.

[Brooke Gladstone]

This is on the Media.

[Michael Olinger]

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[Yasmin Vesugian]

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[Michael Olinger]

this is on the Media. I'm Michael Lowinger.

[Brooke Gladstone]

And I'm Brooke Gladstone, joined again by author and educator Eddie Glaud to conclude his guided tour of the, let's say, mixed history of our nation's biggest birthday bashes. Picking up in 1976, real progress had been made. We saw the Civil Rights act, the Voting Rights Act, a slew of critical decisions at the Supreme Court. We had things to celebrate.

[Eddie Glaude]

Right, one would think. But the country was splitting apart at the seams. You had Watergate, the fall of Saigon. You had black power. You had the radicalization of the student movement. You had the women's movement. So the bicentennial had to give voice to some sense of unity. In the midst of rampant and profound skepticism about the country, I interviewed Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian, the first African American secretary. And he said, in many ways, the bicentennial celebration was also a celebration of white ethnic America. The children and grandchildren of the people in the 1920s who were considered infestations are now claiming the revolution as their own.

[Brooke Gladstone]

How did they do that?

[Eddie Glaude]

Give you an example. The anti bussing movement. This is happening in Boston. So judge issues a ruling trying to desegregate Boston schools. Many of the communities in South Boston and the like feel that judge's decision is an affront to their liberty. Shipping these black kids into their schools and shipping their kids away from their neighborhood into these other schools. There's this really serious Protest and this 1975 wonderful piece in the New York Times. You know who owns 1776? You read these men and women who are anti busing, claiming the revolution. They are suffering the tyranny of King George. The judge, of course, is King George. These are the children of the children who were considered a pollution of the Nordic stock. The irony of history, My God.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Sociologist Robert Bella believed that America reflected commonly shared religious beliefs which informed and shaped political debate. He referred to this as America's civil religion.

[Eddie Glaude]

Yeah. John Winthrop, as they were making their way from the old world to the new, declared the North American continent as the city on the hill, saying that this was the bounty that God had given. Reagan would add an adjective and call us the shining city on the hill. But this is also about the sacrality of the Declaration of Independence of the Constitution. The founding fathers kind of being mapped onto the apostles with our own version of Judas, Benedict Arnold. The American project gets read as divinely sanctioned because animating our sacred documents are enduring metaphysical principles. Bella says that these enduring principles provide an underlying cohesion to the country. And what I'm suggesting in the book is that wherever you hear talk of cohesion, wherever you see this burning desire for consensus, usually it's hiding the roiling chaos underneath.

[Brooke Gladstone]

But those conflicts roiling beneath television was now firmly established in people's homes in 1976. They couldn't hide quite as well as they had before.

[Eddie Glaude]

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I was seven years old. My mother had me in red, white and blue pants. You know, it was such a kitschy kind of celebration because corporate America was everywhere. You know, you even had red, white and blue puppy cushions. I remember trying to figure out what kind of music was the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing. You know, I'm from the coast of Mississippi. Right. So this was piping in.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Is that where you grew up?

[Eddie Glaude]

I grew up on the coast of Mississippi. Right. So television meant that you didn't have to have the celebration in one place. So this is the first time in the milestone anniversaries that the celebration isn't in Philadelphia. But it also generates a kind of decentered story. You still had the flotilla coming into New York City, the freedom wagons and all of this other stuff. But, you know, the conflicts, the tension was there. So even as people are talking about union unity and cohesion, you get the image in Boston outside of City hall of a young teenager attacking Ted Landsmark, a Yale trained black with the American flag.

[Brooke Gladstone]

I remember Martin Luther King observing, and this is by no means an exact quote, that white people could be moved by the cruelty of fire hoses and vicious dogs wielded by southern sheriffs to make changes. But they were never really eager to change the system to allow genuine equality. What I'm reflecting on is the white tears, the sentimentality referred to in the earlier segment.

[Eddie Glaude]

You got it.

[Brooke Gladstone]

That's the argument with no willingness to sacrifice behind it. Because you have to change a system rigged to deprive a chunk of Americans equal rights, equal access to generational wealth.

[Eddie Glaude]

Yeah, that's it. You know, because the book is not just simply directed to loud racists. That's too easy. It's really addressed to those people who think that they are, at the heart, decent. You know, five years, six years ago, we were all in the midst of a racial reckoning.

[Brooke Gladstone]

After George Floyd, we were in our homes.

[Eddie Glaude]

We all, we watched it over and over again. People risked their lives. I was on television crying.

[Brooke Gladstone]

It was a moment, a horrible moment of unity.

[Eddie Glaude]

And then in a blink of an eye, we find ourselves here, and the only thing I can conclude is that folk were lying. They weren't telling the truth, or maybe they didn't have any place to land and they just went back to their regular lives and let the status quo return. But here we are in a moment of the great capitulation. Universities have bent the knee. The Voting Rights act is gone. They're redistricting right now. They have gutted the infrastructure of the mid 20th century. And what that moment produced, they have ripped it out.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Which brings us to the present day.

[Eddie Glaude]

Yeah.

[Brooke Gladstone]

So in 1826, we were still a baby nation. By 1876, we were tapping into a deep wellspring of violence to kill off Reconstruction after the Civil War. In 26, we'd won a war but lost the narrative. As the Klan surged progressive politics embraced immigrants and the white working class while ignoring the systemic practices arrayed against America's Black citizens. By 1976, we had shed some innocence, but not enough to kill off the powerful idea of white supremacy. And I'm reminded of that opening line from Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy. The sun shone, having no alternative on the nothing new. So where are we now?

[Eddie Glaude]

It's just pitch perfect. Here we are doubling down on the ugliness that has haunted us since the beginning. J.D. vance, on July 5, 2025, at the Claremont Institute, delivered a speech where he said, America, you know, it can't just simply be an idea. That's not enough. He put forward an argument that the country was based on blood and soil.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Blood and soil, another phrase taken up by the cloud along with America first. They're not that ahistorical. The people who come up with these terms must know where they came from.

[Eddie Glaude]

The echo, in some instances, is purposeful. I think it's really important for us to understand that in this moment, white nationalists have seized control over the government, and they're going to tell a story of the country's beginnings that will reflect those commitments. What's so fascinating about the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th century century was you had the Gilded Age, the rich oligarchs who seized control of government. You had the consolidation of Jim Crow, and you had American empire. All of that was happening at once. And here we are in a moment where hatred, greed and selfishness is eating the lining of our bellies. And we will see what we will do on this 250th in response.

[Brooke Gladstone]

So how's our celebration looking to you?

[Eddie Glaude]

Oh, my God. It was actually interviewed not too long ago by a younger reporter who was asking me this question, is it the case that if we celebrate the flag, we are going to be read as maga? And the question revealed, at least to me, and I think it was certainly what motivated her, that the celebration of the nation has been hijacked by maga. I never claimed possession of the flag. Usually. Patriotism, to my ear, sounds like a rebel yell. It makes me worry who's saying it. But in this moment, I think it's our task to render the vast and vibrant diversity of this country as a rich counter to the nonsense we're going to hear come July 4th.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Towards the end of the book you write, I cannot help but think that Donald Trump and his supporters believe in something, that his election amounts to the end of American history.

[Eddie Glaude]

Yeah.

[Brooke Gladstone]

What do you mean?

[Eddie Glaude]

Because America's salvation was secured in its beginnings, assured by God. They hate more perfect union talk. They can't stand it. Because more perfect union talk requires, even in its own kind of Pollyannish way, a confrontation with our failure years. Now, Barack Obama, you got a contrast with the opening of the Presidential center and the UFC fight, right? You got the contrast between these two stories. To me, both of them trade in fantasy. We need to get rid of this talk that we're somehow this exceptional nation chosen by God. We need a more blue soaked sensibility. We need to grow up. We can't grow up if you don't admit who and what you are. I think the power of the country resides in the phrase we. It's just we've never been clear on who the people are.

[Brooke Gladstone]

This book was hard to read, not just because of the horrors of the contents in many cases, but also because of the feeling of being caught in a time warp. Even allies, as I mentioned, the people throughout the book who opposed slavery, tried to make things better, would back off eventually. And I wonder, did you write the book with at least a faint hope that there is still hope to be had? Or these days you can actually count on allies?

[Eddie Glaude]

My faith is in us. It always has been.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Why do you have faith?

[Eddie Glaude]

Because I have to. You know, human beings, they're capable of being monstrous, but they're also capable of extraordinary miracles. It doesn't require all of us, just a few. I wrote the book because I was angry all the time. Brooke. I'm walking around saying, I bet you you voted for her, right? I have to interpret the country to itself every single day, every single day. And the madness was overwhelming me. I couldn't find my feet. And so I had to get to the page, I had to write some sense of my own sanity into being. But I was teaching my Baldwin Semin. And I had this wonderful student. She's just bubbling joy. She's from Texas. She has neuroscience major. She's since graduated. And Baldwin had her on the ropes. She would come into my office crying, I don't know if I want a white boyfriend anymore. I just don't know.

[Brooke Gladstone]

She's black.

[Eddie Glaude]

Yes, she was black. And her final paper was to chart Baldwin's notion of love across his life, given all that he saw. And she wrote this sentence, what remains is not hope, but something just as lasting. The insistence on truth carried by love and lit by rage. She was telling me in that moment that my task is to simply bear witness. My student instructed me as to what I'm supposed to do. That's what the book is all about. I'm just trying to bear witness to how we've arrived to now.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Thank you so much, Eddie.

[Eddie Glaude]

Thank you.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Eddie Glaude is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University and author of the new book America How Race Shattered the Nation's Anniversaries.

[Michael Olinger]

That's it for this week's show on the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender and Candace Wong, with help from Ella Walsh. Travis Manon is our video producer.

[Brooke Gladstone]

Our technical director is Jennifer Munson with engineering from Jared Paul. On the Media is produced by wnyc. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

[Michael Olinger]

And I'm Michael Olinger.