Challenging history 

When reporters Brian Palmer and Seth Freed Wessler toured the historic Mississippi home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, they heard a lot of disturbing takes on history: 

Slavery was good and bad.

He was a benevolent slave holder.

He took care of his slaves and treated them like family. He loved them.

These came straight from a tour guide and the executive director of the site, which received $21 million in public dollars between 2007 and 2016. 

On this week’s episode, we partnered with Type Investigations to uncover the continued costs of the Confederacy. In the last decade alone, Palmer and Freed Wessler found that American taxpayers have spent at least $40 million on Confederate monuments and groups that perpetuate racist ideology.

“Investing a single dollar in Confederate monuments is essentially investing dollars in racism and slavery and White supremacy,” scholar and author Ibram X. Kendi says in the episode. 

Since the murder of George Floyd last year, roughly 160 Confederate monuments and symbols have come down. Palmer and Freed Wessler explore how sites and statues honoring the Confederacy were created to influence Americans’ understanding of our country. 

“These places are set up to feed on people’s ignorance and make them feel comfortable about America’s violent and racist past, comfortable with a false history of America, one that honors the Confederacy and everything it stood for,” says Palmer, who has spent years photographing Confederate monuments around the country.  

Listen to the podcast: Monumental lies

(This show is an update from a 2020 episode that was based on reporting originally broadcast Dec. 8, 2018.)

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Debunking vaccine conspiracies … one family group chat at a time 

In order to achieve herd immunity against COVID-19, President Joe Biden set the goal of getting 70% of American adults vaccinated before the Fourth of July. That date is now less than two weeks away, and the vaccination rate is inching upward – 62% of people over age 12 in the United States have gotten at least one dose. One of the big factors that’s holding people back: misinformation. A May poll showed that half of people who said they would not get the vaccine believed the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 vaccines contain a tiny microchip. 

Reporter Ike Sriskandarajah ran into this myth in his own family. He spent months digging into the origins of the vaccine microchip conspiracy theory, tracking its convoluted path from a Reddit forum with Bill Gates to a poorly titled article on a Swedish biohacking website to the rest of the world. 

Last week, Ike saw a surprising message in his family’s group chat: An uncle in Sri Lanka shared a conspiracy theory meme about Gates building an army of “vaccinated robots.” Luckily, Ike’s mom jumped in on the thread and shared his reporting tracing the origin of this myth. His uncle’s reply? “Thanks for keeping us informed.”

We’ll count that as a win. 

This newsletter is written by Sarah Mirk. Have any feedback or ideas? Send them my way.