By: Michele Weldon: Weldon is an author, journalist, emerita faculty in journalism at Northwestern University and senior leader with The OpEd Project. Her latest book is “ The Time We Have: Essays on Pandemic Living.”
Diamonds are forever, or at least that was the title of the 1971 James Bond movie and an even earlier 1947 advertising campaign for DeBeers jewelry. Tattoos, belief systems, truth and relationships are also supposed to last forever — that is, until they are removed, disproven, ended or disintegrate.
Lately we have questioned whether Covid really will last forever and, with it, the parallel pandemic of misinformation it spawned. The new rash of conspiracy theories and unproven proclamations about the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump signals that the plague of lies may last forever, too.
Summer ushers in a Covid surge of the new variant that is unfolding in the U.S. and abroad with emergency room visits up 23 percent, and a 13 percent increase in hospitalizations in this country, the Centers for Disease Control reports. Infections are increasing in 39 states or territories and declining in none. The World Health Organization reports more than 1,000 deaths from Covid in this country in June.
Even though the WHO declared in May 2023 that Covid was no longer a public health concern, the notion that this disease will forever pose a threat lingers. There have been more than 7 million deaths worldwide from Covid to date, and more deaths every day.
The lies surrounding Covid, vaccinations and treatments also still persist, calling into question most every source of news and timely announcements. Covid for many marked the end of innocence for those who believed in the reliability and credibility of news sources.
Reality is freshly challenged as a new Washington Post poll shows that nearly 30 Republican congressional members blame President Joe Biden, the Secret Service, Democrats or the media for Trump's shooting. None of these projections are substantiated.
The infinite future for the Covid pandemic signals a tale of two countries divided into those who are careful with masking and vaxxing due to correct health information and safe practices, and those who defy prevention and treatment because they are part of a political scheme of control and encroachment on their civil rights. The division is once again prominent with the way the Trump rally shooting is interpreted and explained — without factual backup.
Fortunately, last month the Supreme Court denied the lawsuit challenging the government’s right to restrict social media platforms from disseminating Covid-19 misinformation. The lawsuit was in reaction to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy seeking to stem the tide of inaccurate vaccine information that could cost thousands of lives.
The prevailing falsehoods about Covid are not just bothersome or inconvenient, they change behaviors that result in the spread of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. Playing what one expert calls “Covid roulette” with risky behaviors based on false information can result in more cases. Untruths are a matter of life and death.
Politifact has fact-checked more than 2,300 claims about Covid vaccines, including the Instagram post in January that claimed 17 million people died from vaccines. Not true.
A recent Brown University study of “50 papers published between Jan. 1, 2020, and Feb. 24, 2023, that investigated the efficacy of 119 misinformation interventions,” found that actions to counter inaccuracies around Covid and publications are urgently needed.
“Public health practitioners, journalists, community organizations and other trusted messengers are tasked with responding to health misinformation every day,” said co-author Stefanie Friedhoff, an associate professor at Brown’s School of Public Health and co-director of the Information Futures Lab.
Whether or not people believe Covid infections will last another year, decade or century, it is critical to guarantee that reliable, factual information about Covid is available and that misformation is debunked as swiftly as possible.
A March 2024 Gallup News poll shows “ 59% of Americans believe the pandemic is over.” More than half, or “57%, report that their lives have not returned to normal, and 43% expect they never will.”
Yes, Covid is on the rise and hopefully new vaccine variants can keep the spread under control and prevent deaths. The vaccine for disinformation of any and all sorts is a commitment to what is real and a vigorous rejection of false narratives. Debunking the latest untrue assertions can also prevent deaths from possible political violence.
As a nation, we can and must handle the truth.
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.