Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Much of our day-to-day lives is spent protecting ourselves and loved ones from the negative influence or impacts of others. And another portion of our lives is spent trying to make a positive difference in our own life and the lives of others. If we are fortunate, we may be able to extend our positive influence to our community, nation and the world.
To be human is to live in the exchange of influence and impact.
Vehemently disagree with someone? They have influenced you. The impact may be to further entrench you in your own ideas. Or it may be to open your heart and mind to new ideas. Either way, influence has happened.
As Russia’s war in Ukraine dominates the headlines, many of my friends have turned away from the news, feeling an array of emotions that include anxiety, rage, anger, guilt and helplessness. Other friends watching intently via news channels and social media are witnessing the horrors of war. Some are experiencing trauma remotely, or reliving their own similar events.
Recently, I was listening to a woman who is “incandescently angered” by the gaslighting happening in Russia. She experienced a similar tragedy as a Serbian refugee from the former Yugoslavia. At 15, she made it to the U.S. with her family. Her grandmother stayed behind, believing in the propaganda of the regime that Serbia was fighting Nazis, dying with this belief. We know there were atrocities being committed by the Serbs because of these lies. But her grandmother’s beliefs were captured by the influence and impact of propaganda.
This is the source of her rage: how reasonable people can be fooled by propaganda delivered through the media as “news.” We are witnessing the same propaganda being used to motivate Russians to be brutal to their Ukrainian neighbors. The woman journalist who held up a sign behind a news anchor/reader in Russia used her position of influence to break through the delusion of Russian propaganda that the military is fighting Nazis in Ukraine.
Closer to home, many personal friends in the U.S. believe that our mainstream media is corporate propaganda, since six corporations own 90 percent of our media outlets. This has led to the proliferation of citizen journalists and propagandists who can have equal time on the internet. And once an audience is developed, it has influence in ways that impact us all. We only need to remember our feelings of shock and horror (or support) on Jan. 6, 2021, when people influenced by disinformation stormed the Capitol to disrupt our election.
Stories, real or fictional, influence our thinking and impact our lives. Propaganda (fictional stories) is a tool of dictators, manipulators and con artists. It works because we (all of us) want to believe it. We need a better way to verify facts rather than believing our friends or random people on the internet.
Our recent question on “Your Take” asked about journalistic objectivity as a standard. The majority of responses noted that objectivity for humans is impossible. A little bias will always slip in, you told us. I agree. Our bias is always at play. Perhaps we need to closely examine our bias when watching any news to more clearly understand our willingness to believe one story and disbelieve another. This would help our critical thinking to discern fact from fiction.
“We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).” -Jonathan Haidt
For example, many people are turning away from corporate-owned news; they are more willing to believe a person on the ground, reporting from the scene, regardless of journalistic ethics being followed or not. This bias is based in a belief that good reporting cannot come from a corporation without a pro-corporate bias. So they dismiss corporate media outlets, en masse, as untrustworthy. I would ask people with anti-corporate bias to identify the biases of the citizen journalists and livestreamers. Are the biases declared transparently? Or covered in broad statements like, “I’m just telling you the facts, you decide what they mean.” This is a linguistic tool used by many propagandists when they take something out of context to make a point, which would demonstrate their bias.
For my friends who dismiss every citizen journalist, I would ask them to consider the stories not being covered by mainstream (and corporate-owned) media. While there is financial support and a code of ethics mainstream journalists follow, I’ve also witnessed that each day, the cable news channels seem to pick a theme, which they cover relentlessly. Why would they not cover other stories? Repetition is another tool of propagandists; it crowds out other worthy news stories, trivializing them by non-attention. This is why so many Americans have been surprised by the Black Lives Matter movement.
We cannot help but influence and impact one another. It is my hope that we start to examine our own biases and so we may be better informed of exactly what that means in our day-to-day lives.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.