How media drove America crazy, with Thomas Chatterton Williams

0:07Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from Semaphore, where we are talking to the people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tawney. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore. And with me as always from Semaphore HQ in New York is our editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. Ben, How's it going over there today? It's great. It's beautiful. The weather is great outside in New York. It's amazing. But this week on the show, we're talking with the author Thomas Chatterton Williams. He's the writer of a new book called The Summer of Our Discontent, which looks back at the summer of 2020 and how the events of that year shaped what we are still experiencing today.

0:48We'll talk to him about the salience of his critique of liberalism on the left at a moment when the federal government is attempting to shape speech in universities. We'll ask him about how Elon turned the Twitter experience on its head and whether we can really blame The New York Times or Donald Trump.

1:06Max:Can always blame The New York Times if there's one lesson from this podcast. Well, anybody who doesn't like this podcast should blame The New York Times because, of course, Ben learned everything he knows from his experience there. But we'll be right back after this break.

1:31So, Ben, while this is a media podcast, what I've realized is that the show has kind of really drifted back towards 2020 and kind of the reexamination of that year and the way in which the things that happened then really are shaping what the media kind of looks like and the ways in which it's still rippling into our lives. Of course, we had on Dr. Mike, the YouTube doctor, who was talking a lot about the ways in which people's views of our health system have changed following the pandemic. We had on Dr. Fauci last season. Recently, we had on Ari Aster, the director of Eddington, who made a movie set right in the middle of COVID.

2:10And of course, today we have the author and writer Thomas Chatterton Williams on, who has a new book out that is a reexamination of 2020 called The Summer of Our Discontent. Ben, what's your feeling about us living in 2020 on this show?

2:26Max:Yeah, maybe we all live permanently in 2020. I don't know. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things about media is we're great at correcting minor errors, but there's no real mechanism for revisiting, like, big questions, like, what did we get right? What did we get wrong? What do we misremember about everything from the Iraq war to COVID and the sort of racial reckoning of 2020? And Thomas Chatterton Williams, I mean, I'm eager to talk to him because he, in that summer, was a real outlier. He's a black American writer who lives in France and had written a couple of books about how he was uncomfortable with American racial categories, basically.

3:02Max:And when American political discourse moved in one direction, he just opted out, became a figure of real kind of like ridicule, I think, on media Twitter, among other things. And then was a key writer, author of The Harper's Letter, which was this letter sort of in favor of free speech against a kind of censorious social media culture. And now he has decided to walk right back into the firestorm with this book. From my perspective, I'm really curious to hear this thinking about this moment. And one big focus of the book is kind of the illiberal tendencies on the left. He gets into some on the right.

3:37But I guess my personal view on this, and I'm curious to hear from him, is that the most interesting things happening in the illiberal space at the moment are very much those forces on the right, not necessarily the kind of angry people yelling on social media from the left who seem to have been kind of pretty thoroughly defeated by Donald Trump in 2024. So I'm curious to see how he's thinking about that and how he thought about publishing a book into that environment.

4:02Max:Yeah, I think the book is in a way about how he uses the phrase crazy making. The summer of 2020 was, in some sense, the question is like, did the media lose its mind in 2020? Have we gotten it back? Whose fault was it? And who's the craziest now? I mean, I think those are basically the questions he's asking. Well, Thomas is here, so let's bring him on. Thank you so much for joining us, Thomas. It's a pleasure. A lot of the book focuses on you know, illiberalism in America and particularly on the left. Can you talk a little bit about what you think the central idea or kind of critique is here?

4:37Oh, 100%. You know, I think that 2020 was, and part of the reason I'm able to say this more clearly now is because the book was, you know, was delivered later than it had initially been intended to be. It was originally called Nothing Was the Same, and it was supposed to be about how 2020 was a hinge year than the kind of social justice movement won. And with more time to reflect on it, the book, as I was finishing writing it, really became a meditation on this kind of movement from the hope and optimism and I think very inspiring but short-lived belief in a kind of post-racial American future heralded by the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

5:20It moved from that kind of hope into the disillusionment of the Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Black Lives Matter activism of his second term, and then the Trump years, and the social justice movement. It traces the ideas and events that led to the social justice movement peaking in 2020. And then it comes to realize that that is not, in fact, the end of the story, but that is just the climax. And now there's another movement after that, which is that this 12 to 15 or so year period actually set the scene, set the table for this era of extraordinary backlash, illiberal right-wing backlash, populist backlash that we're living through now with Trump.

6:01So the book is essentially the movement from the hope and promise of the Obama era to this kind of opposite dystopian reactionary two-steps backward moment of Trumpism, the redemption and re-election of Donald Trump in 2024. forth.

6:18Max:You know, just reading this book, it's inevitably, it's a lot about Twitter, as it was then known, and also like a lot about the experience of you being in this all-consuming Twitter conversation, but also it begins while hanging out in the west of France. And I guess I'm curious if you could just begin by telling us a little, like, how did you come to this story in the first place? Like, what's going on for you in the summer of 2020 when suddenly this wave of social media hits you? Well, like everybody else, you know, I was sheltering in place around May 25th, 2020. Life was in this kind of strange and in some ways, really nice lull.

6:56I was cooking dinner for my kids. We were at my friend's house in the west of France in a kind of makeshift homeschooling situation where everybody was cooking together, cleaning together, rearing each other's children. And the days had a slow pace. And I remember I I was borrowing my friend's office and I walked upstairs on May 26th, I guess it was, and just logged into Twitter, as was the habit at that time where news was always breaking. And I saw this video that just like knocked me out of my tracks. It just astonished me to see the video of George Floyd. And, you know, I was up six hours earlier than the East Coast, so I just didn't really have many people to communicate with about it.

7:38But I retweeted it. And when I came back to Twitter later in the day and New York was awake and America was tweeting, I began to really understand how big of an event this actually was shaping up to be. So that's the beginning of the kind of the story.

7:54Max:And you had more or less, I think, the same reaction as a lot of people in that moment. I then remember you emerging as kind of a punching bag by June for other writers on Twitter who write about race. I think it's by July, really, right? Yeah. Was there a moment when you were like, oh, man, like I'm really, really outside the mainstream here? Well, that's interesting. The mainstream is such a strange term. I mean, the Twitter. Yeah. Mainstream of that particular stream, right? Yeah. The Twitter was dominated in a way it is not today by a kind of progressive identitarian viewpoint, kind of the opposite of what it's dominated by today.

8:29But yeah, July 7th, 2020 is when I really became aware of the kind of backlash and, you know, the kind of abuse that like the views that I was putting out there on Twitter were going to receive. That was when the Harper's Letter was published, and myself and four other friends, we wrote and organized just an anodyne statement, you know, telling people that, you know, censoriousness and a climate of punishment and stigmatization really doesn't help anybody, and we should really think about it before we go and, you know, whip up mobs of outrage to go after people's livelihoods.

9:03Max:Was there something in particular that had made you want to write such an anodyne letter? I think everybody had their own specific examples, but the one that I think that really kind of bothered everybody and felt very unfair was the firing of James Bennett at the New York Times, the editorial editor, for the crime of having published a sitting senator's op-ed, Tom Cotton's op-ed, asking for, you know, restoration of order in cities where rioting was taking place and where law enforcement wasn't able to stop buildings from being burned and people from being attacked. You know, that was a view that was controversial, but it was certainly shared by more than 50 % of the population across ethnic lines.

9:42So it wasn't really something beyond the pale. But just for the publication of that op-ed, I don't know how many people remember, but there was a campaign on Twitter from many New York Times employees. I don't know if you were at the Times at the time. Yeah, I was. A lot of reporters there started spreading a kind of copy and pasted statement saying that that op-ed put their black and brown colleagues in physical danger. And within a few days, Bennett was gone just for having overseen the op-ed page. That struck everybody as a moment where we had to actually say something, that this kind of culture of censoriousness and punitiveness was really out of line.

10:22So for those who do not remember, we're going to read a little bit of the Harper's letter. We have it here. The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces, books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity, journalists are barred from writing on certain topics, and professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class. What was the reaction to you, and how did that shape what you wrote about in that period afterwards?

11:04Well, I want to emphasize there was an enormous amount of support for that letter. It was viewed within a few days millions of times. It was shared widely, and many, many, many people reached out to us to express solidarity and agreement, whether they said so publicly or not. A lot of them did say so publicly. The letter was signed by over 150 public intellectuals, academics, people ranging from Noam Chomsky to Cornell West. It was not some kind of wild and niche point of view that we were spreading. On Twitter, there was a kind of very hyperbolic reaction to it. And it really was interesting because it really depended on how you were looking at the signatories more than the content of the letter that conditioned what type of objection you might have to the text.

11:51So if you were looking at names like Jesse Single or J.K. Rowling, who signed it, then there was a kind of reaction that was being parsed saying that the letter was in fact a transphobic document. So that was one angle that there was criticism. If you looked at and focused on names like Barry Weiss and some other people that are associated with a Zionist position, then the letter was being called an anti-Palestinian or a Zionist document. If you focused on me or John McWhorter or people like that, then it was supposed to be a kind of racial dog whistle. And the blacks that signed the letter were used as a kind of cover for that.

12:27So there were many different ways in which people parsed the signatures and then decided what it was actually about.

12:33Max:The book's a lot about media. And I think the core question that we sort of want to talk to you about is to what extent did the media cause us all to lose our minds? And to me, the best section of the book about the media that I really thought was interesting was the passage about Kyle Rittenhouse. And you just basically kind of retell the story of this boy in Kenosha who goes out to, in his view, try to prevent, you know, maybe a little misguidedly, but in his view, to go out to prevent riots. And winds up shooting these two really quite crazy white guys who are there to participate in riots.

13:03Max:And the Guardian headline that you quote is, Kenosha teen charged with murder after two Black Lives Matter protesters killed. I'm curious to just talk a little how the media handled that story. Yeah, I mean, everything from roughly the death of Trayvon Martin, I would say through 2022, 2023, during this great awokening or social justice era was really filtered through a kind of lens of anti-racism, where no matter what you were talking about, whether it was climate change or epidemiology, whatever the issue was, there was an angle in which we could perceive structures of power and white supremacy at play.

13:43And then there was an angle in which, you know, social justice, there was a message of social justice that should be injected into any kind of narrative. This peaked in 2020. So you had a situation that really intrigued me, especially as somebody that thinks about the way that race is illusory and concocted in American life and has always been. You had a situation where an event that was certainly related to issues of race in America, but involved solely white actors and broke into violence was redefined and retold as a story of, you know, white supremacy and white on black violence. And so, you know, the other, one of the victims, the main victim, Joseph Rosenbaum, this guy who had a long rap sheet and had a history of very severe mental illness and was released into these chaotic streets on the fateful day that he encountered Kyle Rittenhouse and that he actually provoked the interaction with Kyle Rittenhouse.

14:38You know, he was recast posthumously as a BLM activist because that was the way that the media narrative had to see things. It couldn't be this far stranger and I think much more interesting and much more American dynamic where this guy, Joseph Rosenbaum, who was white, very likely, you know, a product of American culture that was able to speak in ways that when you watch the videos and read the quotes, it's just incredible. He's, you know, he's dropping N-bombs. He's using the N-word left and right with a bunch of black people around him, but he's calling other white people the N-word. And it's not being used pejoratively in any racial sense.

15:15It's this kind of weird American way of being that the media, through their oversimplified way of relying on racist, anti-racist binaries, had no way of describing accurately. And it spiraled out, you know, the whole story became this kind of, I think, you know, it was emblematic of all the ways that we get race and social justice and violence and law and order and chaos wrong in American life today.

15:39Max:You write in the book at one point that the posturing from elites, which is in a way what you're talking about, was crazy making for millions of Americans. To what degree do you think that backlash moment you're describing is really kind of the media's fault? I mean, I wonder if I could ask you the degree to which you think media, especially from elite institutions like the New York Times, really shapes the national culture. I know that there's a tendency for people who work in media to feel that it's very consequential. And I wonder if you just come to this conversation with a deep skepticism of that.

16:15I wonder if Max does too. My personal view is that people vastly overrate in 2025 the importance of what's covered on NBC News. I think that the New York Times shapes elite opinion on the left. And I think that it's a great punching bag for Fox News and for Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk. And I think some of this trickles out to the mainstream and it comes to them ambiently. But I think that most mainstream media institutions, at least now, have a lot less influence on the broad public. Like if they had more influence, Trump wouldn't have won the second time.

16:48Max:Yeah, I mean, I was at the Times during that summer of 2020 that you write about. I think I, Dino, did a story about James is firing. I mean, my experience of it at the time was really that like the Times newsroom was just part of a culture of like kind of every institution and every company sort of pivoting around these values. It probably wasn't that different from being inside like PepsiCo, you know, or like Kraft. Like any big company was like having meetings about, you know, sort of racial reckonings. It's just that the Times and media, it plays out in this very public way and becomes a symbol of the changes.

17:20Max:And I was, I mean, I was in the newsroom, but of course it was COVID. So, of course, and all of the craziness with that. So, the newsroom was really slack and was these excruciating Google Hangouts calls. You know, somebody's trying to give some emotional speech to a bunch of people who are multitasking or slacking each other about how terrible they are. I mean, it was a pretty challenging moment. Yeah, I mean, I guess I tend to underestimate the reaction to media. It's like media's influence is understated, but its symbolic role in politics, I think, is not understated. I mean, it's huge right now.

17:52Max:But now, anyway, it's your turn to answer the question. You made us let you stall. No, I just really wanted to know because I think you might be more skeptical than me, but I tend to come down closer to what you just said, Ben. I think that elite institutions really matter even when people don't necessarily pay attention to them day in and day out. I think they shape the atmosphere. And I think that a lot of people have really been impressed, this is called impressed, by the degree to which people hate universities and hate journalism, hate the New York Times, and what Elon Musk was able to tap into when he took Twitter away from the elites and gave it to the people and turned verification on its head and just made an absolute joke out of what it meant to have a blue check.

18:38You know, how many people really liked that, how well that played in large swaths of the country. Even if the times can't influence you to vote for Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton, I think it was extraordinarily powerful in motivating people to vote for Donald Trump and move into that camp.

18:57Max:Yeah, it's remarkable, right? Like it has no power, like the media has like no power over the people who like it, but enormous resonance with those who hate it. I think that's really true. Yeah, I think that is really true. And so that's why I spend quite a lot of time talking about people who operate, not just at the Times. This is not a book that's against the New York Times, but the Times is an important institution. But universities are too. Museums are too. I spent some time talking about what happened at, you know, the SF MoMA or the Guggenheim. You know, these places where culture is shaped, it really does affect the entire national culture and it affects the kind of culture wars that people are able to tap into and exploit sometimes when people don't even understand who the particular players are.

19:42So, yes, Fox News is extraordinarily powerful and influential. And they're responding day in and day out to the kind of mistakes and missteps that are happening at elite institutions. And so that's why I take seriously these institutions. I think that they should actually be held to much higher standards than they were able to get away with for the past, let's say, 12 years. So speaking of The Times, I want to kind of get at the fundamental critique that's been made of your book. The Times writes, he does not seem to grasp that the left's illiberalism occupies a marginal position in mainstream democratic politics and the right's illiberalism possesses a stranglehold on the Republican Party.

20:18Today, many Americans justifiably fear rising authoritarianism and worry that the nation might not withstand sustained attacks on our core democratic institutions. But Williams manages to contort himself into asserting that the American left somehow poses significant threats along both those dimensions. I mean, hearing that kind of critique and seeing kind of what's going on now with, you know, Trump's attacks on higher education, on trying to politicize the Fed, trying to use the Justice Department in extreme ways to exact kind of vengeance. I mean, what do you think of these things and kind of what's your response to that?

20:56Well, yeah, I mean, I think that it's very clear to state up front that I think that the liberalism that Trump represents and mobilizes is uniquely threatening to this country. I can't think of a precedent really for it, not within our lifetime, certainly. But that doesn't make the Times' critique or Justin Driver, the author of that review's critique, so compelling to me because, you know, what happened was actually that, you know, the culture and our institutions that matter were dominated for years, even under Trump's first term, by the kind of social justice movement that had captured the Democratic Party or that was able to be associated with the Democratic Party.

21:41And a plurality of American voters, including the most multiracial and diverse coalition of voters for Republican candidates since Richard Nixon, since 1972, came together to say definitively that this illiberalism from Donald Trump, this populism, this kind of madness that he represents is more attractive to us than what you showed us for the decade and change, or the two decades almost, that you really have been in control of the country. going back to Bush. So if you can't have a degree of humility and self-reflection on the left, I think you're just not going to figure out how to present a better vision and to win back some of these voters who rebuffed you.

22:24You know, Trump probably would have won in 2020 were it not for the pandemic. You know, Americans don't find the vision that Democrats who had been so captivated by this activist wing were presented. They don't find that vision compelling or attractive.