Red Scare: "Podcast of Our Discontent w/ Thomas Chatterton Williams"

Date: October 4, 2025
Guest: Thomas Chatterton Williams
Topic: Williams' new book, the Summer of Floyd and Covid, the collapse of liberal discourse, race and power in America, the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the state of the left and right.

Episode Overview

The Red Scare hosts, Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, welcome writer and public intellectual Thomas Chatterton Williams for a wide-ranging discussion anchored by his new book Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse. The conversation examines the transformation of American race discourse since Obama, the "meme-ification" of public tragedy, the unraveling of institutional credibility, the emergence of a “woke right,” issues of free speech and cancel culture, and the difficulties of finding moral and cultural clarity in a polarized era.

Main Discussion Topics & Insights

1. The Genesis and Timing of Williams' Book

• Williams describes his motivation to chronicle the events and aftershocks of the George Floyd summer and Covid, focusing on race, discourse, and shifting cultural paradigms.
• On the timing:
  • Dasha: “I was kind of worried it was too late... but it turns out that it’s back in a big way, or it never really left us.” (02:45)
  • Williams: “I started in 2021... I delivered the book late, so I was able to see Trump come back to power, and thought that was good for perspective.” (02:24)

2. Dissecting Contemporary Discourse: Klein vs. Coates

• Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent conversation served as a lightning rod, exposing deep fractures even within the left.
  • Williams: “Everybody was mad about something... this conversation was really a Rorschach test.” (03:32)
  • Dasha: “These guys are both invested in maintaining the illusion of progress, even as all of the progressive institutions have been exposed as corrupt or inadequate.” (05:13)

3. The Kirk Assassination and Comparative Martyrdom

• Comparison between the deaths of George Floyd and Charlie Kirk:
  • Dasha: “The left thinks your speech is violence, and their violence is speech.” (28:22)
  • Anna: “With Kirk… you have a coherent worldview reflected back... George Floyd was a metaphor, no one knew who he was until he was killed.” (34:11)
  • Williams: “It is interesting that there has not been violence in the streets at all [for Kirk]... what triggers a kind of license to do violence that’s not even connected to addressing the initial harm?” (29:49)
• The role of meme and myth:
  • Williams: “There’s the man, and then after death, posthumously, there’s the meme that is used for purposes and is sanctified.” (42:34)
  • Anna: “The narrative that the meme of George Floyd was used to prop up this narrative that the original sin of America is racism… whereas the narrative around Kirk is about the violence of the left against civil discourse.” (43:10)

4. Institutional Credibility and the Media Landscape

• Williams discusses being reviewed in major outlets and the ideological straightjacketing that comes with it.
  • Williams: “Who you choose to review a book is already making the judgment by who you give the book to…” (13:30)
• The general loss of trust in institutions, accelerated by the pandemic and media polarization, frames the broader malaise.

5. Race, Culture, and the Myth of Stasis

• The group debates the stickiness of racial victim narratives, why the improvement in black American conditions is ignored, and why activism intensifies as conditions improve.
  • Williams: “People really struggle with incremental progress... microaggressions are only possible when things are much more equal.” (45:34)
  • Dasha: “As soon as people start to live on more egalitarian terms, the slightest kind of inequality becomes unbearable.” (46:53)

6. Class vs. Race, and What Explains Crime

• Williams and the hosts push back on left/literalist narratives:
  • Williams on George Floyd: “Much more so than being black, he was killed because he was poor.” (64:52)
  • Dasha: “Most poor people aren’t criminals.” (65:55)
  • Anna: “Poverty and crime are related, but Floyd was a criminal—poverty was a factor, but the criminality put him in contact with the police.” (65:39)

7. Policing, Reform, and Narrative

• Noting the media’s race-centric focus, Williams argues for a more holistic approach:
  • “In sheer numbers, white people by far get killed by police more than anybody, but that’s my frustration with how these things get done when filtered through the lens of race.” (53:23)
  • “Black citizens... insisted that white liberals who were pushing [defund the police] on them get a grip and refund the police.” (50:31)

8. Assimilation, Immigration, and Cultural Change

• Debating America versus Europe, the hosts and Williams talk about assimilation, the “Great Replacement,” and why demographic and cultural change breeds anxiety:
  • Williams: “America always was fundamentally Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, African, Native American... the challenge is assimilative capacity and the rate of change.” (119:56)
  • Dasha: "If you have too many immigrants, the ideal of America ceases to be." (148:47)
  • Williams: “No society can have completely porous borders and allow a new population—change itself is what’s at stake.” (156:59)

9. The "Woke Right" and Cancel Culture

• Williams warns of the right imitating the authoritarian excesses of the woke left.
  • Williams: “J.D. Vance guest-hosted Kirk’s podcast and encouraged people to inform on each other to their employers... that’s cancel culture, that’s consequence culture—it’s the worst possible politics.” (91:44, 103:04, 160:53)
  • Anna: “It is bad on the left, and it’s bad for the right.” (103:24)
• The persistent dilemma: How to defend liberal values, especially free speech, when the playing field is not level, or when institutional power is unbalanced?

10. Liberalism and Its Discontents

• Williams advocates for reclaiming the “abandoned moral high ground,” but the hosts challenge whether liberalism is enough—and whether its inherent tolerance undermines itself.
  • Williams: “Genuine liberals don’t believe everything is zero-sum... We must identify and disown the means of extremism, even in pursuit of ends we agree with.” (160:53)
  • Anna: “Liberalism is incoherent. It claims that reclaiming a moral high ground that’s not based on anything except for liberalism is going to... [fail].” (185:11)

Notable Moments & Quotes

• On Moral Clarity:
  • Williams: “Everybody feels they’re operating from a position of moral clarity. The only way you can impose that is through authoritarian imposition, which only works as long as you’re in power.” (169:29)
• On the Dangers of Pendulum Swings:
  • Williams: “Chris Rufo’s saying, ‘cancel culture makes sense now that we’re in power’—that’s the worst possible politics… He’s going to see it swing back in a way he doesn’t like.” (161:00)
• On Institutional Capture:
  • Dasha: “They literally hate husbands and fathers... they think abortion is rad.” (100:46)
• On Progress and Victimhood:
  • Williams: “There’s a kind of comfort in fetishizing the wound—but it takes some courage to acknowledge progress and accept it.” (61:23)
• On the Narrowness of 'Race':
  • Williams: “Different cultures value different things... there’s nothing about genome or blood. It’s what’s valued in your community.” (70:29)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:40] Williams discusses the miracle of public engagement around books
• [02:16] The genesis of Summer of Our Discontent
• [05:13] Ezra Klein vs. Ta-Nehisi Coates debate as a cultural indicator
• [11:29] Charlie Kirk’s effectiveness and the reaction to his death
• [27:39] The implications of “structural violence” and post-October 7th victimhood narratives
• [41:13] Memeification of public deaths and the transformation of individuals into symbols
• [45:34] Why does racial grievance persist despite evidence of progress?
• [53:00] Data: who dies at the hands of police and why
• [63:42] Black-white wealth gap and how it’s mostly at the top tiers
• [78:00] Is race a lie, a construct, or a genetic reality?
• [91:44] The right’s embrace of cancel tactics and consequences
• [120:09] America’s original ethnic/cultural constitution
• [156:59] The Great Replacement: demographic anxiety beyond race
• [160:53] What must liberals reclaim, and what are the means of extremism?
• [169:04] The journalistic turn to "moral clarity" and the danger in it

Episode Tone & Style

Consistent with Red Scare, the conversation is frank, irreverent, and discursively wide-ranging—willing to probe taboo territory, poke at contradictions, and traffic in dark or sardonic humor. Williams is thoughtful, measured, and somewhat wistful about both liberal possibility and its ongoing erosion.

Conclusion: Takeaways

Red Scare and Williams offer a sobering reflection on polarization, performative moral clarity, the failures and dangers of both sides, and the apparent exhaustion of the liberal project—while acknowledging that its alternatives are, if anything, scarier. While no easy answers are provided, the episode stages a nuanced, and at times uncomfortable, reckoning with the limits of discourse in an age of certainty and spectacle.

If you missed the episode, this summary should give you a clear sense of the major arguments, the freewheeling discussion, and the way contemporary American pathologies are being re-examined through the lens of books, memes, and (sometimes morbid) public spectacle.