This week, we reflect on 2019, a year of disorder that exposed some of the nation's illusions,

delusions, and unacknowledged truths.

You know, whether something is actually factually true is not at all a concern.

The question is, is it useful for him?

One of their goals is to make the information ecosystem so chaotic and so unstable

and so unreliable that people start believing that the actual objective truth is not knowable

and that they should stop looking for it. You're not quite sure if they're real or if they're fake

and it can be incredibly corrosive to any sense of solidarity with other people.

People in the white power movement see a whole number of social issues as fundamentally being about a threat to white reproduction.

Those constant shouts of go back to your country

causes some people to ask the question, well, is this my country?

Coming up after this.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

This week, we want to do something we seldom have the bandwidth for,

which is to sit down in the studio together,

to take a moment to reflect on 2019.

What its impact has been on our country, our press, and, yeah, the show.

We won't revisit all the major stories this year. Not every mass shooting, every political snafu, every weather disaster, or even every sign pointing to the Republic imploding. I mean, it would take a couple of years to chronicle all of that. And anyway, that's not really our job.

So instead, we're going to return to a couple of the year's biggest themes for us anyway.

And let's start with one of the first episodes of 2019, which we called Everything is Fake.

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