I just finished the second season of Things Fell Apart, a BBC podcast series where Jon Ronson dives into the culture wars. The first season was excellent and the second matched it.

It focuses on the changes in the culture wars brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic but moves through the deaths of sex workers in Miami in the 1980s to Plandemic to a family being terrorized while on holiday in Oregon to George Floyd's murder and the BLM protests to the Great Reset. It's just a fascinating listen.

I've always appreciated Ronson's empathy when interviewing people, especially when he disagrees with them. His curiosity helps me to try to understand why they think what they think. He lets them speak but also puts their claims against actual evidence and experts to see if they have any merit.

I liked how he signed off the series.

This has been a series about the culture wars that snowballed during lockdown told by some of the main players. There have also been stories about untruths and their consequences.

Excited delerium is not real and George Floyd wasn't suffering from it.

Judy Mikovits was not jailed by a medical establishment for exposing Big Pharma's deadly secrets and vaccines aren't killing millions.

I don't believe that Brandon, put on trial for plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan, was a white supremacist. Nor that Covid and lockdown were engineered to enslave the people.

The family in the Big Bertha school bus weren't Antifa and the media shouldn't scare people that way nor forego evidence for ideology.

Children are not using cat litter boxes as toilets in American schools and being confronted with uncomfortable ideas is not the same as suffering from PTSD.

Finally, tempting as it always is, documentarians should try not to see the world in terms of heroes and dragons.

We all get things wrong sometimes. No one is perfect. But as this series has shown, when untruths spread, the ripples can be devastating. And so it feels more important than ever to try and hold onto the truth, like driftwood in the ocean, because, if not, we might drown.

Things Fell Apart (Season 2, Episode 8: Mikki's Hero's Journey)

I listened to a podcast episode from the Things Fell Apart podcast. It's an interview with Jon Ronson and Dolly Alderton on his career and the podcast series covering the culture wars.

The whole interview is worth listening to but I loved this quote in particular.

“No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”
― Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel