BROOKE GLADSTONE Hi, it's Brooke, and you know what that means, it's holiday time. At this time last year, I mentioned that only about one percent of listeners, it's one point two percent precisely, actually contribute to this podcast. Now, none of us could have possibly imagined what sort of year this would turn out to be. The station has been hit pretty hard, and so I now have many of you. Believe me, I know. But some of you are doing not so bad. And so I'm talking to you guys. You've listened to us this year. I think the show has helped us all get through it. And you can count on us being here next year too. In fact, you know, 2021 is actually going to be our 20th year. Sure. It seems weird to shell out for something you can get for free, but that's not a sustainable model. A quick look at the news biz will tell you that. Sustain us and we'll sustain you. Just go to onthemedia.org and hit the donate button, or text OTM to 70101. That's OTM to 70101. Thank you. Really, thank you so very much, and have a great New Year.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE On this week's On the Media, even though we're still in it, just it's time to consider the lessons of the Year of our Lord or a random chance 2020.

 

LAURIE GARRETT We've not had a serious epidemic in the United States except HIV in well over 100 years. We witness the pain, the agony of the struggles from afar.

 

KAREN ATTIAH As the country marks 100000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic. The former British colony finds itself in a downward spiral of ethnic violence.

 

BRANDY ZADROZNY QAnon at its core, is this belief in good versus evil. Right versus wrong of biblical proportions.

 

[CLIP] 

 

PAUL WEYRICH I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country - and they are not now. [END CLIP]

 

MATTHEW SITMAN One person, one vote. That is what they're rejecting. They're saying that actually they know better.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE It's all coming up after this.

 

BOB GARFIELD From WNYC in New York, this is on the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE And I'm Brooke Gladstone. How to sum up the terrible, horrible, no good year of 2020? It was a train wreck, a dumpster fire, a metal muffin sandwich soaked in hogwash.

 

BOB GARFIELD We were, most of us, only dimly aware of a far-off virus that was slowly perhaps making its way to the United States. Our first COVID story was back in January with Alexis Madrigal, one of the journalists behind the COVID tracking project. We discussed the relentless spread of confusing, conflicting information online, including the viral primal scream from a tweeting Harvard affiliated public health researcher.

 

ALEXIS MADRIGAL So, you know, he's sitting at home, is reading a paper that has not been peer reviewed, but that researchers had put up on the Internet so that they could kind of share it with each other. And he tweets, Holy Mother of God, the new coronavirus is a three point eight. How bad is that reproductive r-naught value: it is thermonuclear pandemic level bad. Multiple exclamation points. In this thread took off and of course, attributed to Harvard epidemiologist.

 

BOB GARFIELD Madrigal called it a socially constructed number describing both the initial contagion and what the government does in response. He said that the tweeting public health researcher, though ultimately justified in his panic, had gotten a little ahead of his skis. It was one of the first bits of COVID arkana we would encounter: the r-naught.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE But as the virus burned through us, so did the associated lexicon. Words and phrases like case fatality rate flattening the curve, social distancing, droplet transmission, viral shedding, super spreader, cytokine storm and COVID-19. In February, we heard this from Dr. Nancy Mesnier, director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

 

[CLIP] 

 

NANCY MESNIER It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness. I had a conversation with my family over breakfast this morning, and I told my children that while I didn't think that they were at risk, right now we as a family need to be preparing for a significant disruption of our lives. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Also in February, we spoke with Pulitzer Prize winning science writer Laurie Garrett, an interview that frankly electrified our staff for what it revealed about what we then knew and didn't. I told Laurie we had advised listeners that if the CDC says to worry, then we should but if it says don't worry, then don't. I asked, is that still true?

 

LAURIE GARRETT Well, let's see how that played out this week at the White House.

 

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NEWS REPORT Here's the president's tweet from a short time ago, blaming the media. He says, low ratings and fake news. Comcast and CNN are doing everything possible to make the coronavirus look as bad as possible. [END CLIP]

 

LAURIE GARRETT Rush Limbaugh had fueled this.

 

[CLIP] 

 

RUSH LIMBAUGH The coronavirus being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. [END CLIP]

 

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RUSH LIMBAUGH I clarified this. Dr. Nancy Misophonia of the Centers for Disease Control today warned it could be bad. It might be bad, is the sister of the former deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. [END CLIP]

 

LAURIE GARRETT The president will make some assertion or one of his economic advisers will make an assertion all intended clearly to calm the stock markets.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Like the director of his National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow.

 

[CLIP] 

 

LARRY KUDLOW I don't want to negative that. I'm just saying all I can do is look at the numbers. Yeah. And Larry are saying the U.S. is holding up nicely. [END CLIP]

 

LAURIE GARRETT All of it meant to undermine this notion that America is facing a grave risk. So the question is who are we believing. We've not had a serious epidemic in the United States except HIV in well over 100 years. We witness the pain, the agony, the struggles from afar, you know, Zika in Brazil or Ebola in Democratic Republic of Congo. Now, we're really facing the probability that we will not just be witnessing, will be experiencing, and then we'll find out what is the mettle of Americans.

 

BOB GARFIELD And as she predicted 10 months ago, we saw reflections of ourselves in its terrible wake, suspicious and resentful, just as we had been in kindred disasters centuries ago.

 

FRANK SNOWDEN The bubonic plague in the 14th century shows what are our relationships to our whole human beings.

 

BOB GARFIELD In March, we spoke to Frank Snowden, professor emeritus of the History of Medicine at Yale University and author of Epidemics and Society From the Black Death to the Present. An epidemic, he writes, holds a mirror to the civilization.

 

FRANK SNOWDEN You read and vocal about the terror from the plague. Husband left wife and vice versa. Parents fled their children. One can see the scapegoating, the search for a demonic influence. This is not something that we ourselves did. Of course, it's always some other group of person that we want to blame. The hunt for witches, pogroms against Jews, xenophobia unleashed societies coming to a halt. It's something that seems, alas, to be with us since the very beginning. We can see it in homophobia in the American epidemic of HIV/AIDS and the assault on Asian people today.

 

BOB GARFIELD I want to move on to an infection bedeviling Napoléon. Let's start with his invasion of Russia in 1812, where his superior armies were overrun not by the czar's troops so much as what?

 

FRANK SNOWDEN Oh, dysentery and typhus. His military tactics were predicated on lightning strikes and sudden rapid movement. He wanted his army not to be laden down with supplies and with food, but to live off the land. And so he marched an army that was half a million men. Imagine the whole city of Paris going into Russia. And Napoleon, having decided not to take medical supplies, bandages or sanitary precautions of any kind of at the time. And so they went into Russia marching for this vast distance in what was the immediate creation of what we might call a terrible urban slum living in the dung of the animals and that they themselves made drinking water that was polluted in the rivers. And very soon they were immersed in a tremendous outbreak of dysentery that was killing something like three thousand men a day. Then after Moscow, Napoleon finally decides that they can't survive a winter in Moscow. He has to return to France. Napoleon himself took off in a sled with a bodyguard and abandoned his troops. Only about ten to fifteen thousand returned to France, and almost all of those 480000 or so died of first the dysentery and then the typhus. And there was regime change in France and disease had a major role in that.

 

BOB GARFIELD In the midst of coronavirus, you're thinking of Napoleon and feeling a bit of deja vu.

 

FRANK SNOWDEN I think about Napoleon a lot because it seems that he's a model of how not to react to the threat of disease that was about to overwhelm the 500000 men he was commanding and the larger society and empire for which he was responsible. He reacted by doing something that sounds very similar to the present day by saying it was false facts. We don't need to think about these diseases we're going to march on ever forward. So Napoleon seems to be someone who had contempt for the impact of the environment, nature, disease and the threat that it posed. Not willing to think of this in terms of planning and mobilizing resources and deploying them and the way that people with knowledge and science and the lessons of history all urge should be done.

 

BOB GARFIELD And to your earlier point, he seems to take as a personal political assault the behavior of microbes.

 

FRANK SNOWDEN Napoleon took great umbrage that a disease could harm the the almighty emperor of the French.

 

BOB GARFIELD Month after month, the virus taught us more about how our nation works and how it doesn't. The disproportionate impact on communities of color and on warehoused elderly alone in their final hours. But for the health care workers, so-called essential workers, who put themselves so much at risk. Essential worker, that's another term with which we've grown familiar, usually low wage workers who can't afford to stay home, they keep the wheels from falling off the jalopy that is our national life. So they are celebrated as essential, but too often treated as disposable. Taken for granted.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE So much taken for granted. Human beings most of all, but also classroom chatter, weddings, movies, concerts, theaters and bars and especially well, let's just say we had to learn a lot more about the supply chain. Another phrase now in vogue just to comprehend where all the TP went.

 

[CLIP] 

 

NEWS REPORT As everywhere, there's been an inexplicable run on toilet paper. [END CLIP]

 

[CLIP] 

 

NEWS REPORT Fights over toilet paper, breaking out in grocery store shelves run empty. [END CLIP]

 

[CLIP] 

 

NEWS REPORT The shelves are empty, no toilet paper. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Turns out we weren't hoarding, at least not that much, at least not at first. It's just that the toilet paper didn't follow us home when our offices closed. The reason tech writer Will Oremus explained, is that it's not the same paper. 

 

WILL OREMUS It's two totally different products. One of them is thin, flimsy. It comes in huge rolls, whereas the kind you buy in the store is often embossed and layered and cushy, and it's actually often different companies producing these two different kinds of toilet paper. If you were making toilet paper for the commercial market and now you want to send it to drugstores and grocery stores, you've got to make new contracts. You've got to figure out new shipping routes. Who's going to be driving that toilet paper? Who's going to be dropping it off and when, how it'll be priced, how it'll be packaged. That will take time. It's not the only product that works like this. Grocery stores have been selling out of bananas. The bananas that you get at your workplace, you know, at the cafeteria, they are small and they come loose, whereas the ones you buy in the store are big and bright and they come in bunches. And again, we have two different supply chains there. And then there's the beer industry where a company like Anheuser-Busch, usually a lot of its beer is put into kegs and sent to restaurants and bars. Well, that is kind of out the window.

 

BOB GARFIELD Another big lesson we learned is that in our overheated, enraged nation, everything but everything is politics. Even when hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake, people are still moved like pawns by evasions and lies. And now it has finally come to pass that trusted media outlets know they are obliged to call out the lives.  Other influential outlets, merely amplify them.

 

[CLIP] 

 

NEWS REPORT An Arizona man died after taking chemicals that he thought would protect him from a coronavirus. And his wife is in the hospital this morning. The couple took chloroquine phosphate. Now, that is similar, but not exactly the same as the prescription drug chloroquine, something that the president had talked about. [END CLIP]

 

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REPORTER What would be your message to the American public?.

 

MAN Don't believe anything the president says [END CLIP]

 

[CLIP] 

 

REPORTER Now, why would you send a lie like that to your followers?

 

TRUMP I know nothing about it

 

REPORTER You retweeted it.

 

TRUMP That was a retweet, that was a opinion of somebody.

 

REPORTER but -.

 

TRUMP And that was a retweet. I'll put it out there. People can decide for themselves I don't take a position.

 

REPORTER I don't get that. You're the president, you're not like someone's crazy uncle. [END CLIP]

 

BOB GARFIELD According to a Cornell University study, the president was the largest driver of the coronavirus misinformation infodemic. But he found able amplifiers in Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram and Rush Limbaugh and countless politicians. Also making a striking cameo vaccine science denier Judy Mikovits, who sold a heap of books after starring in the 30 minute video Plandemic.

 

[CLIP] 

 

NARRATOR The man who is heading the pandemic task force, was involved in a cover up.

 

JUDY MIKOVITS He directed the cover up and in fact, everybody else was paid off and paid off big time. [END CLIP]

 

BOB GARFIELD Plandemic fueled the paranoid notion that the COVID-19 virus was concocted in American and Chinese labs. That flu vaccines actually increase your chance of getting COVID-19 as did wearing a mask.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE In time of plague, lies may kill you, but the truth won't set you free. We've also learned this year about the perils of pandemic media overconsumption and the limits of our battered psyches of even the luckiest of us to stay focused on the devastation. Even those whose job it is to sound the alarm.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER You know, there was a statistic this week, and I'm sure by the time this goes to air, the statistic will be worse. But it was that more people had died on a day this week than on 9/11.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE This earlier this month from our own producer / reporter Micah Lowinger.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER And on 9/11, when I was a little boy, I cried a lot and I was very disturbed. And it shook up the way that I saw the world and. I haven't. Felt that intensely about this pandemic in a really long time, maybe at the very beginning, but the days just keep going and the world is telling me like, hey, there's as much tragedy as the biggest tragedy in recent American history. And so I should feel. An equivalent amount of sadness, and I really don't and I want to and I understand it. And it's our job on the show and as citizens to understand it and to care, but if I'm being utterly honest, I just don't feel that sadness every day.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE I asked what good it did, the dead and the dying to feel their pain.

 

MICAH LOEWINGER You know, it's something like a bell curve. If you feel nothing, you do nothing. If you feel too much, you do nothing. But in the middle, there's some kind of sweet spot of action and of productivity and inspiration and motivation. And I fear I'm too far to the inactive side of the bell curve. That doing nothing, feeling nothing. You know, I'm going to survive. I'm going to be fine. The people around me, for the most part, are going to be fine and do OK. This is not an existential moment for me, but that doesn't mean I don't have a responsibility.

 

BOB GARFIELD Coming up, 2020's lethal lies and terrible truths about the uprising.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE This is On the Media.

 

Copyright © 2020 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.   

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record. 

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE This is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone.

 

BOB GARFIELD And I'm Bob Garfield. This was a year of revelation and reckoning. Giving bumper-sticker status to a pair of phrases already known to the bone by some and shrugged off by others. Systemic racism, black lives matter.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE We don't know precisely why. The death of George Floyd on May 25th in Minneapolis was so galvanizing amidst so many other sickening videos of police murder. It may have been the prolonged cruelty of it. Eight minutes and 46 seconds of slow suffocation under an officer's knee, or the icy disregard of the cop for the man he was killing. Or how George Floyd said, I can't breathe, please, and called for his mother until he spoke no more.

 

BOB GARFIELD Maybe it was the shared threat of death by virus or the pressure of quarantine or all of those things. But the death of George Floyd drove a great diversity of people into the streets night after night in city after city, here and around the world.

 

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NEWS REPORT we see actually every day we're listening and we're coming out with you. [END CLIP]

 

[CLIP] 

 

NEWS REPORT We saw protesters tear gas yesterday to make way for a presidential photo op. I'd like to ask you what you think about that. And if you don't want to comment, what message do you think you're sending here? [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Here, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau paused for a very long 20 seconds or so, but I'm not supposed to air all that on the radio. Silence sounds like a mistake.

 

[CLIP] 

 

JUSTIN TRUDEAU We all watched in horror and consternation what's going on in the United States.  [END CLIP]

 

KAREN ATTIAH As the country marks 100000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic, the former British colony finds itself in a downward spiral of ethnic violence.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE That's Washington Post Global Opinions editor Karen Attiah. Not long after Floyds death reading from her column titled How Western Media Would Cover Minneapolis' if it Happened in Another Country.

 

KAREN ATTIAH And I was just up at like three am kind of in shock and despair and just grief honestly.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE It seemed to be a satire of how Americans and American journalists set themselves and their nation apart from the rest of the world.

 

KAREN ATTIAH Yeah, I spend a decent amount of time in the Caribbean working with the Associated Press. I also reported in Nigeria and in Ghana. And so I'm coming at this understanding the foreign correspondees. My parents are immigrants from West Africa. And so I also come at this with the experience of having us considered in the periphery and being flattened, frankly, by media narratives that say, oh, well, Africans are diseased and poor.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE You were inspired a little bit, right, by the famous Trevor Noah bit comparing Trump to an African dictator.

 

[CLIP] 

 

TREVOR NOAH Yeah, what I'm trying to say is Donald Trump is presidential. He just happens to be running on the wrong continent. In fact, once you once you realize that Trump is basically the perfect African president. You start to notice the similarities everywhere. [END CLIP]

 

KAREN ATTIAH There is a history of some of these leaders proposing bogus health remedies.

 

[CLIP] 

 

TREVOR NOAH The president of Gambia says he can cure AIDS with bananas and I can also cure cancer using AIDS. [END CLIP]

 

KAREN ATTIAH So I just kept thinking of Trump suggesting that maybe bleach could be a cure or sunlight's. To me, it's just ironic, right? Because this is the president who called the Africa asshole countries, but he's cut from the same cloth.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Obviously, what happened in 2020 was set in motion long before the forty fifth president. America was already a pressure cooker ready to blow its top. It just needed the nudge of a lockdown and the brazen showmanship and prejudice of Donald J Trump for the response to lethal police brutality and structural racism generally to burst into the streets.

 

[CLIP] 

 

SPEAKER So you think a lot of this is borne out of frustration?

 

PROTESTOR Yes, they're sick and tired of being sick and tired. And this is what the inside looks like. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE For many white Americans, 2020 was a time of revelation. For many black Americans, the time of reckoning, as in - enough. No justice, No peace. Abolish the police. Another phrase that burst into the mainstream this past year.

 

BOB GARFIELD The idea of defunding the police seemed so radical that some politicians quickly sought to redefine it as just another call for reform. Proponents, though, said that they meant exactly what they said. Amna Akbar, law professor at the Ohio State University, told us that the call to take money from police departments and redistributed to improve the social conditions that drive criminality is not new, but...

 

AMNA AKBAR When George Floyd is killed and the police respond in the way that they do to the organic uprisings all around the country, countless numbers of police outfitted in all sorts of expensive vehicles and vests and wood pellets and sound devices, I think it creates another kind of visible moment of the contradictions of life in the United States. We are repeatedly telling the public that we don't have enough money for books in the schools. Our health care workers don't have access to masks, PPE, and at the same time, you have the police forces mobilized like that to crush an organic uprising. Responding to the scale and depth of police violence around the country.

 

BOB GARFIELD That organic uprising was mostly peaceful, but sometimes it wasn't. Rage can bubble over, and those outside the movement can hijack the coverage of righteous marches with acts of blazing destruction.

 

[CLIP] 

 

PROTESTOR So what I see happening on the streets of Atlanta, this is chaos. A protest has purpose. When Dr. King was assassinated, we didn't do this to our city. [END CLIP]

 

BOB GARFIELD A Monmouth poll earlier this year asked respondents about the actions of protesters, including the burning of a police precinct in Minneapolis. 57 percent said the protesters anger was fully justified. But as to whether the actions themselves were justified, only 17 percent said yes. White support for the Black Lives Matter movement started to slide. There's a belief that human rights movements falter if they engender violence, a belief bolstered by what New York Times political reporter Maggie Astor calls a cycle of public opinion about these movements. First anger and derision, then sanitization and nostalgia, she told us. This soft focus revisionism reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of protest and of American history itself.

 

MAGGIE ASTOR It sort of perpetuates this myth that if people just stand up politely and state what is right, then society will change. But if the idea is that a movement was promoting were universally accepted and not controversial, then there wouldn't be any need for the movement to begin with. You know, the protest movements that have been successful are very complicated. They are accumulations of many different people using many different tactics. And it is really impossible to separate out one person and one tactic and say this is the one that caused the movement to succeed. So this mythology really inhibits our understanding of how movements do achieve their goals and what they actually look like when they're happening.

 

BOB GARFIELD A majority of Americans. I still believe that polite protest is great, kicking up a ruckus bad and even more than that, counterproductive. You spoke with at least two scholars who have studied that very question. One researched the relationship between so-called intense protest and voter turnout, which is the most fundamental tool of orderly democracy.

 

MAGGIE ASTOR The study was by Daniel Gillion, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. He ranks the intensity of protests on a scale. So, for example, a protest will get one point. If it involves more than 100 hundred people, it'll get another point if there are arrests made, another point of three injuries to measure how intense the protest is. What he found was that more intense protests were associated with increased voter turnout among people who were ideologically aligned with the protest. And he also found that intense protests in any given congressional district tended to influence the voting record of that district's congressional representative.

 

BOB GARFIELD And yet there's that myth that shares the violence from the story. Why?

 

MAGGIE ASTOR Well, I think that certainly there is a tendency for people to believe that if they had been alive during a particular period of history, that they would have stood on the right side. Obviously, that is something that is impossible to know. During the civil rights movement, a very large subset of the population did not support Dr. King. Either his tactics or his message violently resisted him. That fact is uncomfortable to a society that wants to believe that it would have stood with him.

 

BOB GARFIELD I am about to share with you an extremely troubling episode of my personal history. This was in 1970, let's say, four summertime. And I was visiting my freshman year college roommate in central Pennsylvania. It was in his family's family room and above the mantelpiece was a rifle. His father was there. I said, what's that? And he says, oh, that's a replica of the rifle that killed Martin Luther King.

 

MAGGIE ASTOR Wow. I spoke with two of his children for my article, and both of them emphasized that at the time that he was assassinated, he was one of the most disliked people in America according to polls. He was not the lionized hero that he is today.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE We spent a lot of 20-20 going toe to toe with our myths. During our live three hours zoom on election night, we spoke to Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Stakes as High After the American Dream. In it he wrote that there's no immunity to the American myth, the, quote, promise of a free equal and just America in which your own destiny is completely under your control. Sounds wonderful. And because it hurts too much to think that your future is controlled by anything other than your own actions. It's easy to fall under the spell.

 

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH What I was trying to get at with what you read there is that I'm not immune, I'm not immune to it. And I think so many of us, especially right now, are looking toward an election of Joe Biden. There's a lot of people hoping that it's a return to normal, that it ends the aberration of Donald Trump's four years as president, where the country lost its way. That's the myth. The myth is believing that Donald Trump is losing the American way instead of seeing him as an outcome of the very ideologies that we have so far not uprooted. The problem with that thinking is that we can't afford to then elect Joe Biden as president and to act as if that was sufficient. To act as if all of these things that we've come to fear during the Trump presidency have been solved. No, Joe Biden has to face the kind of pressure that makes the presidents that we remember for their virtues and that we exalt. You know, there's no Abraham Lincoln if it isn't for the abolitionists who push him. There's no FDR, if it isn't for the labor movements that push him, there's no Lyndon Johnson, if it isn't for the civil rights movement that pushes him. And so if we're not willing to engage again with the myth, with our own unlearning, with all of the things that we've seen and been. Horrified by during the Trump presidency and ensure not only that Biden doesn't repeat those things, but is undoing a lot of what has been erected during this time and before him. Then we fall into the trap in which we could see another Donald Trump in some incarnation down the road.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE So in stakes as high, you call B.S. on the American dream and observe that what liberal white folks call a crisis is actually the everyday condition that people like me have simply learned not to see. Now you are able to manage depression all through your life, but you finally gave way to sadness in the last few years. And you wrote that the book at its core was, quote, a desperate plea for community. I want to shake loose the dread and I know I cannot do it alone, but I also cannot do it with the American myth hanging overhead. Empires fall. Nations end. What does not have to end is our commitment to one another. But first, it has to begin, right?

 

MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH Yeah, and I think you ask, so how do we move past that in the immediate? Maybe we don't. Maybe we just use that to get people engaged and maybe that's just the way that it has to be. I'm thinking strategically here, like maybe that's just their entry point. I mean, you know, everyone has a different one. So it's just, you know, this past summer protests that erupted in response to the killing of George Floyd, I mean, so many good white liberals were buying their anti-racist book kits. And, you know, for me, I'm sitting there saying, like, how is it that you still need these? Right? Like, how is it that you haven't gotten to that point, but, you know, it maybe Trumps just going to be there entryway. That's going to be the thing.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Earlier this hour, science writer Laurie Garrett said our response to the pandemic would reveal the mettle of the nation. But I think it's what happens when those working at home no longer have the time to marinate in righteous anger via video. When they go back to, quote, a real life that is not the everyday calamity lived by so many others. Revelation and reckoning, as we experience to this year, is not the same as redemption. That begins if it begins in 2021.

 

BOB GARFIELD Coming up, how democracy almost broke and another new word for much of us this year, anti-majoritarian.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE This is On the Media.

 

Copyright © 2020 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.   

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record. 

 

BOB GARFIELD This is On the Media, I'm Bob Garfield.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Now we talk about nightmares. The rhetoric of the far right depicts the world as bleak and bitter night, dark and full of terrors. And one of those terrors is ANTIFA.

 

[CLIP] 

 

TRUMP We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend and in the plane, it was almost completely loaded with with thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that they're on a plane.

 

REPORTER Where is this?

 

TRUMP I'll tell you sometime. But it's under investigation right now. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE That investigation, if indeed there ever was one, never surfaced. But in the landscape of that cold, dark night ANTIFA terror took hold, terror misplaced.

 

BRANDY ZADROZNY So Antifa is a loose collection of hundreds, maybe a couple of thousand radical groups and people, generally the far left who share an ideology and tactics.

 

BOB GARFIELD NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny has traced the twisted path of conspiracy theories through the Web, including the one surrounding ANTIFA.

 

BRANDY ZADROZNY The way that I best describe it is if you see a Nazi punch, a Nazi, you don't go call the cops and say there's a Nazi. And it's rooted in the idea that, you know, the Nazi party would have never come to power in Germany if people had literally fought them in the streets. I think the idea behind the anti fascist ideology is that fascism and the far right is inherently violent. It violates and it hurts marginalized people, people of color. They believe that it is inherently right to fight, sometimes violently, a movement and the far right that is violent itself.

 

BOB GARFIELD Antifa stalwarts are by definition looking for a fight and there has been violence, but they offer far less of a threat in terms of numbers, firepower, actual bloodshed and mission than the heavily armed self-styled guardians of the American way who believe they must take arms to defend it and themselves.

 

[CLIP] 

 

MILTIA We are literally standing at the cusp of a post American world. Are you all  f*ck in. Over.

 

RECRUIT I ain't got nothing holding me back, so if it kills me, it kills me. [END CLIP]

 

BOB GARFIELD But the country's unleashed by the current president are full of mixed motivations. Some are big caliber bullies who just want to shoot something. Some are proud boys who burn Black Lives Matter banners and defaced black churches, enraged and threatened by a nation that's changing. That's what they see. Then there's that vast array of people horrified by what they don't see. But here on the Internet, those enlisted in the conspiracy theory called QAnon believe that Donald Trump is working tirelessly to rid the world of left leaning politicians and celebrities who prey on children and eat human flesh.

 

[CLIP]

 

INFLUENCER I have been digesting information from my guides about what this light worker in human form looking like the name Donald Trump has been doing for the entire human collective.[END CLIP]

 

BRANDY ZADROZNY QAnon on at its core, is this belief in good versus evil, right versus wrong of biblical proportions. And so almost like evangelical Christianity, they are winning souls.

 

BOB GARFIELD Brandy Zadrozny kept us updated throughout 2020.

 

BRANDY ZADROZNY They call it red pilling. How can I red pill my husband? How can I read my neighbor? Often the answer is a YouTube video or have them join this Facebook group. In the most recent groups that formed around Save the Children. The people who have organized these groups are major QAnon believers. They post videos. They say, here is what you need to know. And there are people saying, oh my God, I never knew.

 

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INFLUENCER Nothing as we know it is true. Yes, there is good in the world, but our world is being run by evil. [END CLIP]

 

BRANDY ZADROZNY QAnon has a hashtag that's really popular and it's #we are the media now and they're not wrong. They've been very good for years at highjacking hashtags, highjacking trending topics, getting things into the national conversation. Through the president's Twitter account, a QAnon proponent is headed for the halls of Congress. [END CLIP]

 

[CLIP] 

 

INFLUENCER If you are aware at this point that we are at the precipice of like the dawning of the ages, like, then I don't know. I don't know what you're doing. You're still asleep. [END CLIP]

 

BRANDY ZADROZNY If I'm being really honest, I feel scared a lot. They claim in the open to be there to save the children or they're patriots or they're just evangelicals who love Donald Trump. But when you get into their private groups, it's just post after post wishing mass murder on, you know, their political enemies or members of the media to which I belong. I talked with this guy, Scotty, the kid. At the end of our conversation, I said tomorrow after I report this, you're going to call me a pedophile and all the people on your page are going to call me a pedophile and I can't have a public Instagram page because you guys send me pictures of my own kids. It's very upsetting. So could you not do that tomorrow? And he said: yeah, I won't do that. And he said, and I don't think you're a pedophile, but your boss is. You want to think that you can make a human connection, and I think it's beyond that.

 

BOB GARFIELD Jeff Sharlet, an author, scholar and journalist with a focus on religion, recognizes a certain Christian adjacent idea in such certainty and suspicion, one that can be traced back nearly 2000 years to the heretical movement known as Gnosticism.

 

JEFF SHARLET One of the things that makes Gnosticism a nice metaphorical frame for Trumpism is that it presents the Divine as this sort of series of contradictions. Probably the most famous Gnostic texts, The Thunder, Perfect Mind. It's quite lovely poem. And it sort of set up as a divine voice that is speaking. I am the scorned and the revered and so on.

 

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NARRATOR I am the one whom they call law and you have called lawlessness. [END CLIP]

 

JEFF SHARLET The deep state is what the Gnostics would have viewed as the church, the bishops, the authorities, the so-called experts. They call them waterless canals, and beyond that is what they called the depth. The depth that you experience, not through fake news, not through experts, not through even elections. You just know you don't have to trust expertize. You don't have to trust those who have put in the work of developing bodies of knowledge. Because here's the Americanized aspect of this gnosticism is it has a small D democratic veneer. Which is to say that you make this gospel through your research. You two can become an expert in the technology of voting machines. With just a few hours on Parler and a few YouTube instructional videos. They said, I am finding out for myself, I personally am helping President Trump make America great again because I am making the real knowledge that is beyond the fake knowledge, the fake news.

 

BOB GARFIELD And in this kind of world, experts and journalists, they're not just misguided, their enemies.

 

JEFF SHARLET The press is functioning for Trump, the way the Jews function for the czar that communist functioned in the Cold War, they could be anywhere. Within this kind of Trumpian gnosticism. It is very much people like you and I, Bob, who are laboring in the veil of delusion, both promulgating the conspiracy. But we're also sort of trapped in the conspiracy. We can't actually see the truth because we haven't done the hard work of research. How can so many Americans embrace what to many of us looks like authoritarianism or even full fascism and the true ideological sense and and yet insist that they're not? It's because you're helping make it happen. It feels democratic, even as it does away with even the need for democracy.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE So the mind of the ascending right that enabled Trump's march to political dominance, causing much celebration and some consternation within the GOP, has no use for democracy. It never has had use for it.

 

RICK PERLSTEIN One of the things that Jimmy Carter realized when he became president was that a lot of people who wanted to vote had a hard time voting for the same kind of stuff we see now.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Rick Perlstein is a historian of American conservatism and author most recently of Reagan Land America's Right Turn, 1976 to 1980.

 

RICK PERLSTEIN So one of the first major initiatives he undertook as president in the spring of 1977 was to come up with a comprehensive voting reform plan proposing to have a constitutional amendment to end the Electoral College and to have same day registration. When he announced this, there was overwhelming support from both parties. But lo and behold, the right wing of the party cried foul. The right wing magazine Human Events called it euthanasia for the GOP. Another figure enters the story. Reagan, the former governor of California who is making a tidy living, writing newspaper columns and giving radio addresses every day. He calls this a horrifying prospect, and he revives that story of civil servants voting because their bosses tell them to of dead people voting. One of Reagan's arguments. Was that Jimmy Carter won in Minnesota because of same day registration and that he wanted to use this kind of same day registration scheme to assure Democrats won every election. And once again, the argument is Republicans are harmed when more people vote. In 1980, the Christian right held a massive rally for ministers in Dallas. One of the speakers, Christian Right Pioneer, a new right organizer named Paul Weyrich, who gave a very famous speech.

 

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PAUL WEYRICH They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not. Now, as a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Matthew Sitman, once a conservative Catholic, now a progressive one, is associate editor of the liberal Catholic Journal Commonweal. He also co-hosts a podcast, Know Your Enemy, tracking the Intellectual Drift of the Extreme Right, which is why I suspect he named his podcast with some irony, because as he's observed over and over again, religious conservatism has migrated to Trumpism, which views what was once the opposition as the enemy, which must be vanquished now and forever. That enemy being political liberalism.

 

MATTHEW SITMAN Liberalism is not the partisan contemporary political meaning, but liberalism is a political philosophy grounded in individual rights, human equality, the rule of law, due process. Constitutional governments are what they're rejecting, especially the individualism and the equality of it. When you take aim at human equality, that's also the foundation of democracy. One person, one vote. That is what they're rejecting. They're saying that actually they know better. They are no longer speaking the language of a Democratic majority of the people being with them. They are saying we must crush our enemies because we know what the highest good is. That move from democracy to simply saying we're right is the essential thing. And my concern is that these conservative intellectuals are creating the conditions, are giving themselves permission to go along with what amounts to authoritarian rule by a political party that doesn't have anywhere close to the support of a majority of Americans.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE You said that within 20 to 30 years it's possible that 70 percent of senators will be representing 30 percent of the country?

 

MATTHEW SITMAN By 2040, It's predicted that 70 percent of the country will live in 15 states. That means that 70 percent will be represented by only 30 senators. That number is actually not radically different than what has existed at other periods in our history. But what makes it so deeply troubling is that never before has our country been polarized the way it is. The difference between rural voters and urban and suburban voters is so great that the system's structural problems are running into the buzzsaw of polarization that it'll be balanced kind of radically against the Democratic Party.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE On his podcast, Sitman quoted conservative turned moderate Damon Linker, who wrote When social conservatives thought that they were the Moral Majority, it made sense for them to dream of exercising real political power. When they recognized they were a minority, it made sense for them to resign themselves, to adopt a defensive posture and prepared to live out their days in the country as dissenters from the reigning liberal consensus. What makes no sense is for social conservatives to think that they can be both weak and strong at the same time. A minority that wields the power of a majority. Unless, of course, social conservatives no longer care about democracy.

 

MATTHEW SITMAN He put it very well. The key is to implement the highest good, to implement the order they think is true and just and good, and the ways you get there matter less.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE So that brings us to the end of our review of 20/20 lethal lies and terrible truths. But listen between the lines and you'll hear the wind blowing over the virgin territory before us. The chance to replace America's founding myths of justice and equality with something real and durable.

 

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JAMES BALDWIN The bill has come in. It is not coming in. It is in. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE That's James Baldwin in 1964, speaking about housing racism in San Francisco.

 

[CLIP] 

 

JAMES BALDWIN And the very question now, is precisely what we've got in the bank. This, of course, is everything we think we have. Everything. [END CLIP]

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE I think Trump's most shattering legacy is that the lies he told, but the truth he exposed. Well we always have next year, am I right?

 

BOB GARFIELD That's it for this year's shows. On the Media is produced by Alana Cassanova-Burgess, Micah Loewinger, Leah Feder, Jon Hanrahan and Eloise Blondiau. Xandra Ellin writes our newsletter and our show was edited...By Brooke. Our technical director is Jennifer Monsen.

 

BROOKE GLADSTONE Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

 

BOB GARFIELD And I'm Bob Garfield. Merry Christmas, everybody.

 

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