Thomas Chatterton Williams: Why the Summer of 2020 Wasn't Inevitable
The Gist
Mike Pesca
4.4 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thomas Chatterton Williams joins to discuss his new book, The Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse. He argues that the racial reckoning of 2020 was not an inevitable tide of history but a perfect storm of pandemic isolation, polarizing politics, and institutional failure. TCW dissects how mainstream institutions—from the New York Times to the Philadelphia Inquirer—abandoned objectivity for "moral clarity," and how misinformation about cases like Jacob Blake fueled a cycle of violence in Kenosha. Mike and Thomas debate whether the Left's introspection is necessary to defeat the "worse" impulses of the MAGA Right, or if it just alienates the base.
Produced by Corey Wara
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Tuesday, December 23rd, 2025 from Peachfish Productions. |
| 0:08.7 | It's The Gist. |
| 0:09.8 | I'm Mike Peska. |
| 0:11.4 | He's a guys I love week, and I just so do adore Thomas Chatterton Williams. |
| 0:15.6 | Not everyone does, right? |
| 0:17.0 | He cuts against the grain. |
| 0:18.3 | He's a wonderful writer. |
| 0:20.6 | In fact, the quality of his writing was a big issue with a very mean-spirited. |
| 0:25.6 | I thought, New York Times Review, I'll get to that in a second. |
| 0:27.7 | It probably causes T-CW, as he sometimes called, a little bit of undue angst. |
| 0:33.2 | But all week, yesterday I talked to Kiko Toro. |
| 0:36.1 | 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 |
| 0:54.8 | well if you're a thinker like Thomas Chatterton Williams. And my problem, self-assessment with me |
| 0:59.9 | and TCW, as he's called, is I agreed with him too much. I read his book, The Summer of Our Discontent, |
| 1:07.4 | and it was filling in gaps I had. It was confirming intuitions I had. But then I was |
| 1:13.5 | surfacing or remembering research I've done, segments I've done on the gist, segments that I never |
| 1:18.2 | had the space to air. I think you might hear in this interview. Me getting a little too excited. |
| 1:22.9 | 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? |
| 1:30.7 | So it's a very excited on my part, self-assessment, self-critique, maybe overly excited |
| 1:36.5 | interview. |
| 1:36.9 | By the way, in that New York Times review, which didn't like his book, and his book is great, |
| 1:42.6 | and it really takes you back 2020 2021 and he correctly |
... |
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