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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree. Zoe. This thing weighs a ton. Drew Ski, live with your legs, man.
- [00:27]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Santa. Santa, did you get my letter?
- [00:29]
Mike Pesca
He's talking to you, Bridges. I'm not. Of course he did. Right Santa, you know my elf Drew Ski here.
- [00:35]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
He handles the nice list.
- [00:36]
Mike Pesca
And elf. I'm six' three. What everyone wants is iPhone 17 and at T Mobile you can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. Right, Mrs. Claus? I'm Mrs. Claus much younger sister and AT T Mobile there's no trade in needed when you switch. So you can keep your old phone or give it as a gift. And the best part, you can make the switch to T mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes.
- [00:58]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Nice.
- [00:58]
Mike Pesca
My side of the tree is slipping.
- [01:00]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Kimber.
- [01:01]
Mike Pesca
The holidays are better. AT T Mobile switch in just 15 minutes minutes and get iPhone 17 on us with no trade in needed. And now T Mobile is available in US cellular stores. 24 monthly bill credits for work qualified customers plus tax and 35 device connection charge credit and balance do. If you pay off earlier, cancel financing agreement 256 gates 830 eligible port in a new line 100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes fees required. Check out 15 minutes or less for line visit t mobile.com. It's Tuesday, December 23, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. These are guys I love. Weekend I just so do adore Thomas Chatterton Williams. Not everyone does, right. He cuts against the grain. He's a wonderful writer. In fact, the quality of his writing was a big issue with a very mean spirited I thought New York Times review. I'll get to that in a second. It causes probably causes tcw as he's sometimes called a little bit of undue angst. But all week yesterday I talked to Kiko Toro. Today this new interview with Thomas Chatterton Williams drops. Then I'll play a few of the comedians who I've had on over the years for funny you should mention, especially this week, three guys who I adore who see the world in an odd or askew way or not the way that maybe you're supposed to see the world. It works for a comedian. It works well if you're a thinker like Thomas Chatterton Williams. And my problem self assessment with me and tcw, as he's called is I agreed with him too much. I read his book the Summer of Our Discontent and it was filling in gaps I had. It was confirming intuitions I had, but then I was surfacing or remembering research I've done segments I've done on the just segments that I never had the space to air. And I think you might hear in this interview me getting a little too excited. Oh, wait, wait, wait. TCW as he is called. Listen to this. Do you remember the fact checking that USA Today did around the Jacob Blake interview? So it's a very excited on my part, self assessment, self critique, maybe overly excited interview. By the way, in that New York Times review, which didn't like his book and his book is great and it really takes you back to 20, 20, 20 21. And he correctly analyzes what I think is so easy to forget. Not just that, oh yeah, we went through these paroxysms of angst and rage and fear and not knowing where we're coming from and not knowing who our enemies are. And as I think I say in the intro, a little bit of resistance, a little bit of reckoning. The reckoning crashed into the resistance and no one knew who they were. Reckoning what? It's important for a thinker who is thinking at the time and jotting down notes to write this down so that future generations can maybe begin to understand what was going on. Because it really was a sea change. So it's a wonderful book. And in this New York Times review, they pluck a sentence from it, which admittedly was a long sentence and had too many dashes. You know, there are 3,000, 4,000 sentences in a book like this. Let's say this was among the bottom third. You know, a third of the sentences have to be among the bottom third. So not a great sentence. A lot of space in the Times review was given to it. But what they wanted to do was prove that tcw, as he is called, is not a good writer, which is not true. Very good writer. And they wanted to prove that he wrote in confusing ways. But what they did to add to the confusion was they added extra parentheticals in the brackets on top of the parentheticals in the sentence. So now a sentence that went from having dashes in parenthes now has dashes and two types of parentheses. One the curvy parentheses, the other block parentheses to give first names to individuals who I don't think you needed to make the point anyway. Not fair, not a fair game. I give the book a great review. I give me interviewing tcw, as he is called, a good review. I think you'll like the interview. Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Some of Our Discontent, the Age of Certainty, and the Demise of Discourse. Up next. I'm very pleased to be sponsored by GiveWell because when you choose a nonprofit and maybe Giving Tuesday, which happened or around the end of the year, and you perhaps want to get some tax savings or you're just a good person but you want it to go the furthest, how do you know that you're engaged in efficient fundraising? Low overhead costs? Enter GiveWell, which is sponsoring the episode they focus on impact. And it's really important because as we've covered on the show, cuts to USAID and especially PEPFAR programs have made headlines. And this has of course raised real legit concerns. GiveWell does not claim to have all the answers, but what they do is they make sure their fundraising goes the furthest. They identify highly cost effective ways to improve lives. I've been hearing about them for years and now that they're a sponsor, I am asking you to take advantage of their 18 years they have spent researching global health and poverty alleviation. They have over 150,000 donors already. You can find all of their research and recommendations on their site for free. If this is your first gift through GiveWell, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year or as long as matching funds last. To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the Gist at checkout. Please make sure you do this. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from the gist and make sure you get your donation matched. Again, that's givewell.org code the gist to donate or find out more. To make a tax deduction Today, go to givewell.org and pick podcast and enter the Gist. To check out. Make sure they know that you heard about GiveWell from the gist. Again, that's givewell.org to donate or to find out more. According to the National Institutes of Health, as many as 30 million men in the US experience something called ED. Imagine the number of men in that category who are also named Ed. It must be horrifyingly compounding for them, but it's really not great for everyone because confidence can be shot and your confidence is important. It shouldn't be this complicated. Through hims, you could skip the guesswork and get access to care that actually fits your lifestyle. Through Hims, you get personalized prescription treatment options for ED, like hard mints or SexRx plus climax control if prescribed. You shouldn't have to go out of your way to feel like yourself. HIMS brings expert care straight to you 100% online. Couldn't be easier. It's not one size fits all. No, you're not cooling your heels in the waiting room. It's your health and your goals put first with real medical providers. Think of HIMS as the digital front door that gets you back to your old self. Ed, I'm talking to you, but also everyone else. To get simple online access to personalized, affordable care for ED, hair loss, weight loss and more, visit hims.com thegist that's himss.com thegist for your free online visit himss.com thegist Actual price will depend on point, product and subscription plan. Featured products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality. Prescription required. See website for details, restrictions and important safety information. As we whipsawed from the resistance to the reckoning of the summer of 2020, I said to myself, the center cannot and does not want to hold. And if you listen to the show, you know, I talked about the events then. I reflect on them now. But no one, to my mind, has done this in a more interesting way than Thomas Chatterton Williams. His book Summer of Our Discontent, the Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse analyzes the events from the election of obama through the October 7th attacks by Hamas. I'm going to talk about that endpoint. We're going to talk about the critiques. We're going to talk about the ideas. Tcw welcome back to the gist.
- [09:27]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
It's so good to be with you, Mike. Thanks for having me.
- [09:31]
Mike Pesca
So love the book. I It's going to seem like it's mostly critique or mostly challenge, but you know how I work. I was wondering at one point in the book you write that it was not inevitable, the supposed inevitability of the outrage over the death of George Floyd during a time of lockdown. What happened was not inevitable. It seems inevitable in a way. Or how human cognition works is we can cast our minds back, tell ourselves a very rational story, oh, this is why it happened. And that probably is right. But then we convince ourselves that it couldn't have really happened any other way. Can you take us to a hinge point in the summer of 2020 where you think things could have gone far differently.
- [10:24]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Oh, that's interesting. I think one of the points I was trying to say it was not inevitable that we would have gotten into such a kind of moment of disillusionment after the kind of post racial promise that Obama had first revealed to us in terms of the summer of 2020. There were multiple ways in which I think that. That we could have had an alternate reality were things. Some. Certainly it wasn't inevitable that we would have reacted as a country and as a kind of Western world, because there were protests and manifestations throughout Western Europe and even in Asia. It was a global phenomenon. But I don't think that would have happened were it not for the pandemic conditioning, the way that we were all kind of receiving news through our smartphones and social media while being quarantined and sidelined from regular life, being very afraid of being so vulnerable to a pandemic we didn't yet understand. And I don't think it was inevitable that Donald Trump would have been kind of polarizing and exciting the population to the extent that he was. So I think that there were many ways in which we could have all been outraged collectively, as it seemed that we were at the moment by the death of a man slowly over almost 10 minutes in broad daylight, when bystanders were asking the police to ease up off. I think that that could have been something that united us rather than divided us. One of the points in the book that I try to spend some time on is that I don't think that things really completely went off the rails just in Minneapolis. It was some of the other theaters of protest and rioting that really, I think, sent the country into a tizzy. Kenosha, Wisconsin, for me, two months later, when a much more justifiable shooting happened, non lethal shooting of Jacob Blake happened, and then the subsequent rioting and mayhem that led to Kyle Rittenhouse shooting several white men in the streets on August 25, 2020. That, I think was actually much more incendiary than even what happened in Minneapolis with Floyd. So it was this kind of strange confluence of. Of provocative elements, from the killing of George Floyd to the pandemic, to the election campaign of Donald Trump that went all through the summer of 2020 and kind of led to a general mood of mayhem that was not inevitable, but it was this kind of strange mix that made things the way they were. That's a very long answer to a short question, and I apologize for that.
- [13:11]
Mike Pesca
It's cool you brought us to Kenosha and that example is the number one example I point to of it not being inevitable because the Rittenhouse shooting, which I think, I think this is true to this day, most news consumers, most reasonable, plugged in the election, wasn't stolen type Americans probably think of Rittenhouse as a monster who killed. Yeah, I can't assert that they think he killed black people, BLM protesters, but maybe they do think that. And they.
- [13:49]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
BLM activists. Yeah.
- [13:50]
Mike Pesca
Yes, they were in real life. In point of fact, they were white and as you point out, radical. Very radical. In one case, just released from mental hospital or psych ward. Blm.
- [14:02]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Not even political.
- [14:03]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yes, yes. Very dangerous guys. He shouldn't have had, because he's an 18 year old and shouldn't have had that kind of armament that he didn't know how to deal with. And. But I won't even go back. I want to go back to the Jacob Blake shooting. And this was a key hinge point of non inevitability when, and this is mentioned in your book, but I've done some deep dives on this. Do you remember that the call was that Jacob Blake was oftentimes said shot dead. He wasn't dead. Shot in the back while unarmed. That was very much a part of the outrage that led to the riots that led to Rittenhouse killing these protesters. So that was totally armed. So this is very important. He was armed the whole time and the details. He wasn't just armed and walking around with a knife by his side. You could tell us what was he trying to do.
- [14:54]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
So the thing that's so terrifying about the situation with Jacob Blake is that he was actually in the process of abducting three of his children from the home of their mother, whom he had on previous occasions assaulted. And she had a restraining order. And so he was wrong all kinds of ways for even being there. But he was trying to leave in a vehicle with young children in the back in an agitated state, and he had a knife on him and he did not stop when officers demanded that he get out of the vehicle and submit. So I don't know in what world we can have a society in which officers simply allow an armed, agitated man who has already assaulted the mother of defenseless young children to flee a scene with those children in the back of his car. I just don't know how exactly, I'll quote you, how that can be allowed to happen.
- [15:55]
Mike Pesca
There is no conceivable world in which it would have been responsible or merely even fair for police officers to Allow a man of any complexion or ethnic background or mitigating circumstances worked into such a state of agitation to escape with a weapon and small children from an arrest warrant. To suggest otherwise is either disingenuous. That's too kind. Or emotionally blinded. Even if we simultaneously pause to acknowledge that that number of bullets is a lot. Absolutely.
- [16:23]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Seven is a lot.
- [16:24]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah. Layer wasn't killed. Layer onto that. Then we have the Democratic candidate for president visiting a man who tried to while arm abduct his children and get away from a sexual assault warrant. Visiting him at bedside. I don't know how many people remember that.
- [16:44]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
I remember that. I don't. Mike. Writing this book was challenging because there are so many like details like that that can't make into the main text. It's already a book full of footnotes. There are so many footnotes like that. By the way, Kamala Harris visited this convicted criminal who had raped his credible rape allegation against the mother of three of his children and who had assaulted her and stolen her vehicle. She visited him bedside. And this is just a kind of one more aspect of this oversimplified narrative that for a few years Ibram X Kendi and Robin d' Angelo and people like this force in the country that everything is either racist or anti racist. And so the anti racist response is to stand bedside by this criminal. Anything else would be to give into a system of white supremacy. And obviously reality is much more complex than that. But there are so many details like that that you can't even work into the book. But yes, that was ludicrous. That was one of the many ludicrous. This was a crazy, crazy moment.
- [17:47]
Mike Pesca
And then as an example of media coverage, first of all, you have the governor, Tony Evers not asserting as every other governor in that circumstance in US history would have, he was armed at the time, or the police say he was armed at the time. Evers, a Democrat, certainly whipsawed. I think I use that word already by what was going on in the national mood. Didn't want to assert the fact. The truth. And we talk about the fact. USA Today, I don't know if you know this to this day has the following fact check up on their website. Fact check. Jacob Blake did not brandish a knife. Their ruling false. Wait, how can you say it was false? And the answer is in a. In an updated note after it came out definitively that he had a knife the whole time. That does not affect the rating for this item. Ratings are based on what is known at the time when the statement was made.
- [18:46]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Yes.
- [18:46]
Mike Pesca
When the statement was made in August 2020, it was not clear what Blake was holding or when given the grainy cell phone video. So we began to accept cell phone video over the word of the police. That's fine. But also to retroactively redefine facts. And two months before that fact was checked, as he was not holding a knife, USA Today did a column where they said, we are a part of the international fact checking network, and part of being a part of that network is where credible evidence is provided that the applicant has made a mistake worthy of correction, the applicant makes corrections openly and transparently. You go to USA Today, that fact check is.
- [19:28]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
I guess I'm just glad no one's. I don't think anyone reads USA Today, but that is really.
- [19:33]
Mike Pesca
Well, if it's slipped under your door in the morning when you're catching up in the hotel. Yeah, yeah. So this is why. This is why I say that. Is this unfair? If Tony Evers had acted like just a de Gore governor and said, right now the police say he was armed the whole time. Time. Which is what you should say, because it was true. And if all of the media did not just question but reject the fact that this wasn't an unarmed man, we wouldn't have had Kenosha burning down, and we wouldn't have had Kyle Rittenhouse going in there with the equivalent of an AR15, and we wouldn't have two people dead. I mean, we can't rewind history, but I think that's fair to assert.
- [20:15]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
I mean, it certainly. It seems to me that there were many chances to bring down the temperature around Kenosha that were not taken. But, you know, one of the things that this book really tries to recreate is this. This mood that was pervasive at the time. It was a genuine moral panic. People were not acting rationally. People were responding, you know, in ways in which it seems that certain ideas possessed them. And there was a way that you had to signal that you were against the only true issue at stake in this country, which was. Which was anti black racism or white supremacy more broadly. That was the only thing that mattered. And to counteract that was the only thing that you really were ever responsible for having to do. It was. It was really a moment. You know, I want to stress that the. The reactionary moment that we're in right now with Donald Trump returning to power and kind of, I think, actually destroying not just American society, but the entire, like, liberal order, that is worse. But there was a mom that made that return to power for Donald Trump plausible. That was really rooted in a kind of mass insanity. It is not too much to say that for a year and a half to two years to even maybe two and a half years, the country collectively lost its mind pursuing this kind of bogeyman of white supremacy.
- [21:42]
Mike Pesca
Was it more that the sane voices couldn't get through, couldn't, didn't act as a countervailing argument to the insane voices? Or was it that the sane voices began to doubt themselves?
- [21:57]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
I think both. I think there were always sane voices that were trying to get through and were drowned out. I think it was a real failure of institutional authority. You know, I was at the time working for the New York Times. That's an institution that I revere. And I think that, you know, as the most important media organization, I would say, in the world, it failed so spectacularly. It's hard to describe. They just went fully in on this kind of idea that the narrative that mattered was an anti racist narrative, in fact could be kind of molded to fit that they were high off this kind of 1619 supply of the country is only a kind of racist idea. And, and the only like thing that the only task at hand for any of us in any industry, whether we're reporting on climate or whether we're reporting on biology, everything comes back to this idea that we have to counteract the fundamental sin of America, which is anti black racism. This was crazy. But it wasn't just the New York Times, it was Harvard. It was everywhere. It was everywhere. So I think the institutions really failed us. Also the kind of, the political spinelessness of, of mainstream Democrats who knew better is part of this story as well. You know, a kind of one party just completely captivated by the most fringe activists in its midst, allowing itself to be bullied and dominated by, by radical activists. This is, this is a moment that we're going to look back. I think future historians will say that this is what paved the way for a kind of authoritarianism that damaged the country for a generation or more, damaged the whole western order for a generation or more.
- [23:53]
Mike Pesca
Journalistically, as a timesman and also affiliations with the Atlantic and other great publications. How important to all of this was the conscious jettisoning of objectivity as an ideal.
- [24:08]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Can't overstate that you had people like the journalist Wesley Lowery, who had been at the Washington Post reporting on Ferguson. That was the kind of prelude to Minneapolis. And that was a kind of test run of how an oversimplified and in some cases like fabricated and false narrative of racism. White supremacy was able to radicalize a media class. This hands up, don't shoot idea that Michael Brown was just killed in the street for being black. Wesley Lowery, one of a Pulitzer Prize. Through his career of writing about Ferguson.
- [24:49]
Mike Pesca
He'S won two Pulitzer Prizes.
- [24:51]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Did he really? I didn't. Okay.
- [24:52]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. He won one originally for starting the Washington Post, counting police violence project.
- [24:59]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
And then that's the one I knew about.
- [25:00]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, then he's won. In fact, if you read his against objectivity or for moral clarity, New York Times dead. It'll say winner of two Pulitzer Prizes.
- [25:09]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
That's interesting. Now, I mean, he's most known more recently for being. Being highly, very credibly accused of multiple kind of Bill Cosby, like, sexual assaults in which he slipped date rape drugs to other journalists, female journalists. But at the time, in 2020, he was able to spearhead a kind of argument that the way that we do journalism in this country is fundamentally skewed against. Against blacks specifically, but against marginalized people more generally. It's a kind of white supremacist and I guess male supremacist way of looking at reality and that we have to do journalism in a new way that foregrounds moral clarity and that people like himself and Nicole Hannah Jones and people like this, they would be the kind of bearers of a kind of moral truth that the rest of the industry is blind to. And they need to assert that moral truth and that we can't let the kind of petty facts get in the way of this, like, greater truth, which is that America is a fundamentally racist society that damaged. It's hard to overstate what damage that kind of oversimplified narrative did for the kind of, you know, let's say 2020 through 2023, where I'd put a hard stop on this. It started before 2020. 2020 was the climax. I think 2023 is really. Everybody can kind of agree that that is when whatever this was, this decade of. Of excess was, it ended.
- [26:44]
Mike Pesca
I'm will be back with more of. I'm gonna call him tcw. Up next, Guys. Thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree, Zoe. This thing weighs a ton. Kriski, lift with your legs, man.
- [27:06]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Santa. Santa. Santa.
- [27:07]
Mike Pesca
Did you get my letter? He's talking to you, Bridges. I'm not. Of course he did. Right, Santa. You know my elf Drew Ski here. He handles the nice list and elf. I'm six' three. What everyone wants is iPhone 17 and at T mobile. You can get it on them that center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies, right Mrs. Claus? I'm Mrs. Claus much younger sister and at T Mobile there's no trade in needed when you switch, so you can keep your old phone or give it as a gift. And the best part, you can make the switch to T Mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes.
- [27:37]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Nice.
- [27:37]
Mike Pesca
My side of the tree is slipping. Kimber. The holidays are better. AT T Mobile switch in just 15 minutes and get iPhone 17 on us with no trade in needed. And now T Mobile is available in US cellular stores with 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers plus tax and $35 vice connection charge credit and balance due. If you pay off earlier, cancel financing agreement. 256 gigs $830 eligible for it in a new line $100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes fees required. Check out 15 minutes or less per line. Visit t mobile.com AI agents are everywhere, automating tasks and making decisions at machine speed. But agents make mistakes. Just one rogue agent can do big damage before you even notice. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that helps you monitor agents, set guardrails and rewind mistakes so you can unleash agents, not risk. Accelerate your AI transformation@rubrik.com that's R U B R I K.com we're back with Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Summer of Our Discontent, the Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse. I heard you on Ben Smith's and Mac Tanny's podcast Mixed Signals. And they Ben Smith used to be a columnist, media columnist for the Times. And I think he would see that, that some of his columns landed and had an effect. But also he, from this great perch would spend a lot of time and write something and no one cared. So he kind of questioned you. Come on, do these abstract words like objectivity, this conceptualization is 30,000 foot conceptualization really that much affect the journalism on the ground and how they do things? And I think in that conversation you got to the point where you said, well, it certainly motivates the haters of liberalism and, and the Times. But you're also saying now, and I have some backing evidence that yeah, it does. It really does. It's not maybe as if everyone in the newsroom debated the word objectivity every day. But once you inject, it's sort of like the doj. Now, once you inject the idea, well, maybe we shouldn't be separate from the president and that gets a foothold, a strong foothold. It's really degrading to the institution.
- [29:43]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
It really is. Mike, you had the name is escaping me, but you had an Asian American reporter on the science desk at the Times inject into one of these, like, company wide meetings with Dean Baquet, who was the executive editor at the time. You had him say that every single facet of the paper, all reporting, should be filtered through an anti racism lens because no subject area is not touched by white supremacy. Of course it had a huge impact. Even if it didn't have an impact on my aunt in Georgia, it had an impact on the people that make the decisions within these institutions. It had an editorial impact. People were debating whether it was still valid to hold on to a kind of antiquated idea of a view from nowhere. Neutrality. That had been the kind of way of doing things for decades. People were now debating whether that was something that was morally defensible to hold on to. And many of them were saying that it was not. Many of them were editing through this kind of new mood. So of course it had a huge impact. And the people even who knew better were fundamentally operating in a climate of fear. So people who knew better, it wasn't that they necessarily agreed, but they knew that there were going to be repercussions. If you too vocally disagreed, could you.
- [31:18]
Mike Pesca
Fire that were disagreeing with that massive sentiment at the time?
- [31:22]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
I mean, I know that you know what I'm talking about. It's sad. You know, it's really sad. And it kind of shows that, you know, humans are herd animals. You know, there is a kind of a reluctance to ever be the person that sticks your head up to say, wait a minute, what are we doing throwing away objectivity? Is that something we really want to throw away? What happens when Trump also says that he has moral clarity?
- [31:52]
Mike Pesca
Or the people throw away objectivity and a commitment to the ideals? It's an impossible ideal, maybe like love or peace or justice, but to jettison it as an ideal at a time when the president then was making all these outrageous claims and within a couple months would start denying the election was a horrible mistake. I'll add a couple more data points so in case people are listening and say, oh, the Times and oh, the Columbia Journalism School, which, by the way, many panel discussions and objectivity was taught as a thing not to be taught. So I do think the Times has corrected a lot. Do you, by the way, in the last couple?
- [32:34]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
I do. I think Joe Khan is doing a really good job.
- [32:37]
Mike Pesca
And I think A.G. sulzberger, the editor, was behind this and he wrote the Publisher.
- [32:43]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Yeah, the publisher.
- [32:43]
Mike Pesca
The publisher. He wrote an owner. He wrote at the time in the Columbia Journalism Review a defense of objectivity. But it was so toxic a word to the reporters at the Times that he couldn't even defend it as such. I'll read some of what he wrote today. However, the word objectivity is so. Is so contested inside the journalistic community that it is viewed by many as self discrediting in the debate over the role of journalism. I continue to believe in objectivity or if the word is simply too much of a distraction, open minded inquiry. And then he rebrands. What he's saying is independence because you can't possibly say objectivity because it gets too many people within, inside the Times upset.
- [33:30]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
That.
- [33:32]
Mike Pesca
And then if you're saying, if someone is listening, all right, that's the Times. Of course, the Times is important and spreads out to other institutions. So do you remember I read seven newspapers and the two ones who were most affected by these trends were the L A Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Whereas I'll say now, the New York Times doing a lot better. Bloomberg kind of weathered it pretty well. A lot of the financial press did. But the Philadelphia Inquirer did a whole reckoning, a whole commissioning of what they did wrong. And they had this huge project where they paid a lot of money and they're a nonprofit, they don't make money. Black City, White paper was the big title of chapter one. The summer of 2020 forced a reckoning for the country, Philadelphia and its newspaper. But after perpetuating inequality for generations, can the Inquirer really become an anti racist institution? Who was paid to put together that report? Thomas. Oh, you know the name.
- [34:35]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
I mean, the same person who must have been paid to, to counsel the president of Princeton University to say that Princeton is a systemically racist institution. That was one of that was included in the book, in a footnote because I think it's very important to admit that you're systemically racist as an institution while taking a lot of federal funding is so clearly a violation of civil rights law. That actually one of the things even.
- [35:05]
Mike Pesca
The Trump administration noticed.
- [35:07]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Yeah, Betsy DeVos, I think this was brilliant. She actually just took them at their word and said, oh, that's very serious. If in fact you're a structurally racist institution, we're going to look into that. And immediately the university, not the president trying to score points, but the actual, the lawyers for the university immediately established that they were not in fact a structurally racist institution and denied that.
- [35:35]
Mike Pesca
Well, when it's not just empty words.
- [35:37]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Yeah, but the Inquirer was doing this thing that one had to do, an institution had to do at the time was to say that it was a white supremacist institution. Being punctual was a white supremacist practice, according to.
- [35:51]
Mike Pesca
And that's why they fired the editor. Said, yeah, buildings matter too. And by the way, buildings do matter.
- [35:56]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Though, if you think about that for a second, I don't know a single black person in my life, certainly not the ones I grew up with, who didn't go to college, who think buildings don't matter. Of course your home matters. Of course your place of business matters. If you are so lucky in this country to have worked hard and to opened a place of business, to hung your shingle somewhere, that building does matter. And you'd be a fool to say it doesn't matter. That's such an offensive idea that there's a kind of choice to be made between. Between buildings and. And black people's lives. Black people also need buildings and need to prosper in a capitalist society. It's ridiculous on its face. The. I believe the editor in chief of the inquiry had to step down over that. No.
- [36:40]
Mike Pesca
Oh, it was an editor. A bad editor, but not the editor in chief. Yeah. By the way, the 75 interviews with current and former staff members who are uninvolved with the production of the piece that I quoted, was written, commissioned. Wesley Lowery was the writer of that.
- [36:56]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
I mean, I just think that it's very.
- [36:59]
Mike Pesca
He was the guy. He was the guy who was rewriting.
- [37:01]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
The rules, pushing the agenda. And the Columbia Journalism Review did good work on this. It needs to be stressed. And this was not something that many of the social justice justice activists I'm aware of who were prominent in 2020 have taken upon themselves to. To talk about or to discuss or to share on social media. But Wesley Lowry has multiple credible accusations of having been a kind of Pill Cosby of the journalism world, slipping date rape drugs to multiple mostly black colleagues who came to him and thought that they were networking with him or thought that he was a kind of mentor figure to them. He drugged and assaulted them, according to very serious, incredible allegations as reported in the Columbia Journalism Review and elsewhere. I mean, it's just kind of interesting to me that. That some of the most outspoken kind of leaders of this movement for moral clarity themselves have, let's say, a moral ambiguity clinging to their person. Ibram X. Kendi, the guy who was kind of lecturing the anti racist guru who went around the country, enriching himself, simplifying, reducing reality into a black white binary of racist or anti racist. The man took in something like $53 million in a very short amount of time to his anti rac racist center and somehow blew it all without producing any scholarship. No one even knows where all the money went at Boston University. I mean, the Black Lives Matter founders, Patrice Cullors, one of the three women who coined the phrase Black Lives Matter, has something like 4 multi million dollar mansions that she's used victims of violence like Tamir Rice and other and other, you know, poor unarmed victims of violence. She's used their names to enrich herself and her family with no money going to the, the mothers of these victims with no money being accounted for. I mean, it's strange that these are the people lecturing the country on moral clarity. It's not to say that there's nothing wrong in this society. I go to great lengths in both my personal life and in my writing to acknowledge that there are enormous problems, there's enormous kind of racism that's quite explicit now that has become even more bold and confident in the second Trump era. But who was advising us and counseling us on moral clarity and telling us to abandon objectivity and standards? These are very compromised people. And it was a moment of great incaution for us to entrust the kind of organization of our institutions to these stewards.
- [39:46]
Mike Pesca
So the biggest critique of your book is the phrase the right is worse. What do you say to that?
- [39:55]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
It depends which right you're talking about. I mean, I'm certainly somebody who defines themselves as a liberal. I, I've always voted Democrat, but I'm also, you know, I'm, I've been a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for six years now. And I find there are many extremely sensible conservatives in this country. They just don't have any influence over the Republican Party right now. Or not enough. When I say that the right is worst, I mean the faction of the right that's in control, that is enthralled to a cult of personality around a reality television real estate developer, Donald Trump maga. That right, which I don't even know, is actually conservative. That is worse than whatever insanity preceded it from the left when, when the left was culturally ascendant. That's what I mean when I say the right is worse. I'm almost pining for the days of George W. Bush and when Mitt Romney was going to put us all back in chains as Joe Biden. I wish that was the case.
- [41:04]
Mike Pesca
So stipulated and Also agreed, not just for rhetorical purposes. The maga right is worse, far worse. What do you do with that when your project, what you're trying to do over many years is to write this book. How many, to be sures, how much? Pausing the forward thrust of the narrative to talk about how the right is worse? Or do you just say at some point, I'm never going to satisfy those who bludgeon me with the critique. The right is worse. These will come forward in dismissive reviews in my book. I know it. I just have to write the book. Book I need to write.
- [41:38]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Appreciate that question. I think I, I basically think it's how you, how you, how you just phrased it. I'm never going to satisfy these people. There's an entire chapter devoted to how appalling January 6th was and how much worse January 6th, 2021 was than anything else that had happened. It's one of the most shameful episodes in our nation's history. I mean, that is not something that I try to both sides or beat around the bush on. And I've noticed that that is something that's either dismissed in these kind of criticisms or it's. It's mentioned in passing. But it's, it's kind of. Yeah, he had to say January 6th was bad, but in fact, he only cares about the left. So I realized I'm never going to satisfy that kind of critique. And so it's kind of pointless. I do think that, you know, the kind of people that believe that January 6th was justified, that's not the kind of. I'd be happy if that was the type of person that would pick up this book and engage it in good fai. But I don't, I don't imagine that as my readership. I don't think that I'm going to convince those people. What I, what I was hoping to do with this book and what I am hoping to do in my career more, more broadly is to engage good faith people from center left to center right, and even on the progressive left, people who care about how liberal politics is pursued. I would like to talk to those people and try to get them to see that. I think that you can't really present a more attractive vision that will, that will be successful and will win elections and will enact the kind of values that you care about. You're not going to be able to make that vision attractive to enough people if you can't really assess what went wrong when you were in power. What made Donald Trump's vision of America and of revenge more attractive to 51% of the population. You really have to be able to be introspective. And so the kind of reader that I care about is somebody who probably already agrees that Donald Trump and January 6th and all that is worse. So we need to now look at our own side and we need to take stock of what went wrong there and we need to make sure that we don't continue to kind of double down on these mistakes. I think that there's a kind of very strange response to this book that I was getting even before it came out, which was that something like essentially.
- [44:08]
Mike Pesca
Like that'll be an informed response. It's a pre sponsor, by the way.
- [44:12]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Yeah, real wokeness, real Trump derangement syndrome has never really been tried. We need to like, we need to actually like really pursue Trump derangement syndrome and a woke agenda. We need to even make the case that we have to take a stronger, more antagonistic stance on trans rights or the trans agenda than we did in the past. We lost because we didn't go hard enough on that issue issue. I think that's exactly the opposite lesson to take from the past several years. And this book is trying to engage with people that would be open to introspection. I think I've lost people on both extreme for sure.
- [44:51]
Mike Pesca
Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Summer of Our Discontent, the Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse. Little Shakespeare in the title, little Dickens and a lot of tcw. Thank you so much.
- [45:05]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
It's always a pleasure to talk to you, Mike. Thank you.
- [45:13]
Mike Pesca
And that's it for today's show. The Gist is produced by Cory Wara. Kathleen Sykes helps me with the Gist list. Text Mike to 33777 for a discount on the Gist list. Lia Yane is the production coordinator. Writer Jeff Craig does all things visual. He's a visual guy. I've seen him move in 22 or 24 frames per second. And Michelle Pesca is COO of Peach Fish Productions. Improve G Peru Duper and thanks for listening. Everyone deserves to be connected. That's why T Mobile and US Cellular are joining forces. Switch to T Mobile and save up to 20% versus Verizon by getting built in benefits they leave out. Check the math@t mobile.com switch and now T mobile is in US cellular stores. Savings versus Comparable Verizon plans plus the cost of optional benefits plan features in Texas and fees vary. Savings with three plus lines include third line free via monthly bill credits, credit stop if you cancel any lines. Qualifying credit required.
- [46:28]
Thomas Chatterton Williams
Beautiful Anonymous changes each week. It defies genres and expectations. For example, our most recent episode, I talked to a woman who survived a murder attempt by her own son. But just the week before that, we just talked the whole time about Star Trek. We've had other recent episodes about sexting in languages that are not your first language, or what it's like to get weight loss surgery. It's unpredictable. It's real, it's honest. It's raw. Get Beautiful Anonymous Wherever you listen to podcasts.