It Was the Summer of Being Wrong

Plus, our journey through Apple Music's Top 100 Albums of All Time Continues

A late entry for Coolest Guy of the Summer of 2024 is Terry Richmond, the much put-upon protagonist of Jeremy Saulnier’s meaty procedural/thriller Rebel Ridge. Played with fiery resolve by a fantastic Aaron Pierre, Terry is an unassuming cyclist who has what should have been a simple misunderstanding with a couple small town cops that turns into a nightmare when he finds himself racially profiled and then subjected to an infuriating civil asset forfeiture that puts him up against the wall. But more pertinently, it puts the small town police force against the wall, because Terry is a lot more than he seems, and these cops quickly find out that they messed with the wrong guy. 

In Rebel Ridge’s most electrifying scene, Terry confronts police chief Sandy Burns (Don Johnson, who’s found his post-heartthrob groove playing loathsome racists (Django Unchained, The Watchmen, Knives Out). You can watch it here if you want, though I highly recommend you just watch this whole awesome movie. It is just delicious to watch Terry walk Burns through all the reasons he’s decided to take drastic measures, and Saulnier wisely chooses this moment to finally let his pot start boiling over a little. Johnson’s acting is terrific here too, his smug bastard mask starting to slip as it dawns on him that he may have stepped in it bigtime. He made a mistake. 

It was the Summer of Being Wrong, the summer where pretty much everyone had a Chief Terry Burns moment at one point or another. The liberal Biden deadenders who swore up and down that Biden would never step down or chaos would ensue were wrong. The Black Keys who thought they could sell out full stadiums were wrong. The people who thought there was some sort of Satanist activity in the opening Olympics ceremony in Paris were wrong, as were the people who thought a biological male had knocked out a biological female in women’s boxing. Ben Affleck thought he’d found the love of his life, but it looks like he was wrong (for now, at least. Seems like these two will be in each other’s orbit for the rest of their lives). Katy Perry thought she had the song of the summer in the bag, but she was wrong. Meg Basham thought she had the biggest names in evangelicalism dead to rights on selling their ministries to the nefarious left, but she was wrong. Drake thought he could go toe-to-toe with Kendrick Lamar, but he was wrong.

Many of these people know they were wrong. Maybe all of them. However, a key part of the Summer of Being Wrong is never admitting that you were wrong. We’ve already discussed this. In the Summer of Wrong, you were never actually wrong. You may have been wrong on the facts, but you were still basically right. Existentially right. Spiritually right. “Nevertheless!” “My point stands.” 

This all happened in rapid fire last week with a pastor named Michael Clary, who posted that he had a friend whose pastor “put his kids in the most progressive school in his big city,” and was horrified to find that this school had litter boxes in the bathrooms for kids who identify as cats. This pastor was quickly fact checked by hundreds of people who pointed out that this pernicious rumor has been going around for at least five years, with no evidence behind it. Welcome to the Summer of Being Wrong, Pastor Clary. And true to the Summer of Being Wrong, he followed his post up with another post where he admitted that “I don’t know if it’s true or not” but “it wouldn’t make a difference to the overall point” so “grow up with all the childish fact checking.” 

And now JD Vance has marshaled every single rhetorical trick in the bag to rally America around hating Haitian immigrants because they steal our cats and dogs to kill and eat. This line, ripped directly from the Nazi playbook, is not true. Vance himself has admitted it now, though now he’s attempting to simultaneously backpedal and double down. He now says that he “created stories” to get people talking about these very important issues. Vance also provided journalists with one single police report of a Springfield, Ohio resident who called the police to report her missing cat. The woman said she suspected her Haitian immigrant neighbors of catnapping, though she had no proof. 

It was all a misunderstanding. Wall Street Journal reporter Kris Maher drove to Springfield and knocked on the door of this woman, Anna Kilgore, who had filed the report. As it turned out, Kilgore had later found Miss Sassie hiding in the basement. She had been wrong. Welcome to the Summer of Being Wrong, Anna. 

But then Kilgore violated the terms of the Summer of Being Wrong. She owned up to it. According to Kilgore, she and her daughter went next door and, with a little help from an iPhone translation app, apologized to her neighbors for the error. I understand something like this might be the bare minimum and it hardly makes up for the avalanche of racist ill will currently being foisted upon the Haitian people of Springfield, but it also strikes me as one of those simple acts of moral rightness that, were we all doing them regularly, would spare a lot of people a lot of harm. 

Because in a better world, the Summer of Being Wrong would lead to the Fall of Admitting You Were Wrong or, at least, the Fall of Being a Little More Humble. But I’m writing this the day after three major evangelical sex scandals broke. By journalist Robert Downen’s count, eight Dallas pastors have had to step down following a sex scandal since May. The Summer of Being Wrong is over. Love live the Fall of Continuing to Be Wrong.

Applecore: A Journey Through Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time

Liz and I are listening to Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time. One album a day-ish, counting down to number one. We did this with Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 500 Albums of All Time, and it took more than a year. This should only take a hundred days or so. I’ll be posting a few thoughts here as I listen. We’ll be dropping standout tracks from the listen on this Spotify playlist here.

Here’s parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen and fifteen.

48. Beastie Boys: Paul’s Boutique

One of the more surprising things I learned while reading up on Paul’s Boutique is that it was actually critically very well received. Rolling Stone called it “clever and hilarious.” Melody Maker called it an “outrageously funky triumph.” LA Weekly predicted that Paul’s Boutique would "probably change the face of all hip-hop for a long time to come" and “will surely put an end to any notion that the Beastie Boys were a one-shot or a producer's creation." LA Weekly was right. But, as you might know, it wasn’t a straightforward journey. When Paul’s Boutique dropped in 1989, it was a commercial disaster and, for a time, stopped the Beastie Boys’ hip-hop ascent dead in its tracks. The album’s subsequent reappraisal is one of the great redemption stories in rap music. But give credit to the critics here — they were ahead of the curve.

In some ways, people wanted the Beastie Boys to fail, and the wild swing of Paul’s Boutique was the excuse they were looking for.