From NWA to CNN: When Justice, Fear, and Identity Went Live

I’m Gen X. Which means I didn’t grow up reading about history. I watched it happen live.

On CNN. On Channel One. In classrooms where world events interrupted algebra, and cable news ran nonstop in the background of our lives.

At the same time, I was learning journalism. The difference between fact and opinion. Why sources matter. Why a free press, trusted expertise, and respect for evidence are essential to a healthy democracy.

Growing up in suburban Texas while listening to NWA and watching CNN, I learned early that power doesn’t treat everyone the same, that justice is often negotiable, and that identity and fear can override facts if you know how to activate them.

This episode traces a Gen X media memory arc through Rodney King, Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Oklahoma City bombing, the OJ trial, 9 11, and the collapse of information gatekeepers that once separated reporting from rumor.

It’s a radio essay about watching history unfold in real time, the fine line between healthy skepticism and conspiracy thinking, and what happens when shared truth disappears.

This is not a hot take.
 It’s a witness statement.

Transcript

George TenEyck: 0:00

Before I start, I want to be clear about where I'm coming from. I listen to NPR. I listen to the BBC. Not because they're perfect, but because they try. They correct the record, they distinguish fact from opinion, they slow things down instead of turning everything into a fight. I also trust doctors. I trust scientists. I trust people who have dedicated their lives to understanding complicated systems most of us don't have the time or training to fully grasp. That does not mean blind faith. It means respect for expertise. There's a difference between healthy skepticism and conspiracy thinking. Healthy skepticism asks questions and follows evidence. Conspiracy thinking decides the answer first and works backward. I learned that distinction early, because before I ever worked in radio or production or streaming or webinars, before microphones and control rooms, I started out studying journalism. As a teenager, I was learning the difference between fact and opinion, why attribution matters, why sources matter, why verification matters, and why a free press is not a luxury but a requirement for a functioning democracy. I learned that gatekeepers of information are not sensors, they're filters. They exist to separate evidence from rumor, reporting from speculation, truth from noise. And I learned something else early on. When those guardrails disappear, the public becomes vulnerable, not just to mistakes, but to misinformation, and eventually to deliberate disinformation. So when I talk about media, power, history, or identity, I'm not doing it as a pundit. I'm doing it as someone who was taught that words matter, that truth matters, and that once we lose a shared agreement on what's real, everything else gets harder. This episode is not about telling you what I think. It's about telling you what I saw. I'm Gen X, which means I did not grow up reading about history. I watched it happen live on television, on CNN, on Channel 1, on the TV bolted to the wall in our high school classrooms. Cable news was always on. The Gulf War looked like a video game. Green night vision footage, bombs falling over Baghdad while anchors tried to explain things in real time that no one fully understood yet. There was no pause button, no rewind, no hindsight, just images, repetition, and the feeling that the world was moving fast, and we were supposed to keep up. When you grow up like that, you don't just trust tidy explanations. You trust patterns. At the same time, I wasn't just watching the news. I was learning how it worked. Before I ever switched to radio, TV, and filmed as a major, I started out as a journalism major. I was on the Pioneer Press, our high school paper, learning the basics while history unfolded on the screens around us. How to write a lead, how to verify a quote, how to separate what happened from what someone said about what happened. We were taught that framing matters, that what you leave out can be just as important as what you include. So while Channel 1 piped in world events to our classrooms between algebra and English, I was also learning how stories were shaped before they ever reached the audience. That combination never leaves you. At the same time, something else was shaping me. I was a suburban white kid in Texas, listening to NWA, Ice T and Public Enemy. Not because it was edgy, but because it sounded like reporting. Those records were not theory. They were first hand accounts. They talked about racial profiling, over policing, living under constant suspicion, being treated like a threat just for existing. That wasn't my life, but it was definitely somebody's. And that mattered. Then Rodney King happened. We watched the footage, we watched the verdict, and then we watched Los Angeles burn. And we watched it safely from our high school classrooms on Channel 1. That contrast stuck with me. I understood early that the system didn't experience everyone in the same way. That anger didn't just come out of nowhere, and that a lot of white kids never had that realization, not because they were bad people, but because nothing ever cracked their bubble. For me, culture cracked that bubble. Journalism helped me name it. Then came the events that hardened everything. Waco, right here in Texas. A heavily armed religious cult, steeped in apocalyptic thinking, barricaded inside a compound. Federal agencies decided the way to handle that situation was a raid, then a siege, then armored vehicles and tear gas. And a question that never really went away. Was that ever gonna end well? You had people who believed that the government was the enemy, who believed that martyrdom was inevitable, who were armed to the teeth and waiting for a confrontation, and the response was force. We watched it escalate live on television again, we watched it drag on for weeks and months, and then sitting in our high school classrooms, right there in the journalism department, we watched it all end in flames. People died, kids died, whatever you think of the branch Davidians, and they were dangerous and abusive. There was legitimate question about whether law enforcement made the situation worse instead of better. That question did not stay theoretical, because after Waco, the anti-government movement surged into the open. Ruby Ridge, militias, talk radio rage. Waco became proof for some people that the federal government could not be trusted, that compromise was impossible, that violence was justified. Those ideas did not stay fringe. Then came the Oklahoma City bombing. Domestic terrorism, a white American veteran. Timothy McVeigh was not inspired by Waco in the abstract. He was obsessed with it. The building he chose was not random, the timing was not random, and the attack was retaliation in his mind. Waco was not just a tragedy, it became a recruiting tool. Then there was OJ, the slow speed chase, Domino's Pizza's biggest night of all time, every network cut away at once, a white Ford Bronco rolling down the LA freeway. Justice turned into live television. What stuck with me was not just the spectacle, but it was the outcome. Here was a man with money, fame, and the best lawyers money could buy, the dream team. A man facing a mountain of evidence, just shy of actual video of the killings. And he walked. That was my first real glimpse of something unsettling. Justice was not blind, it was negotiable. But there was another layer. OJ's defense did not just argue evidence, it argued identity. It framed the trial as a referendum on race, policing, and historical abuses. And here's the uncomfortable truth. Those grievances were real. Los Angeles had a long documented history of racist policing. Rodney King was not ancient history, it was recent memory. So when the defense said you couldn't trust the system, a lot of people were ready to believe it. Even if the facts did not line up. That's when it clicked for me. If you can activate shared identity, if you can tap into justified anger and deep distrust, you can convince people to suspend disbelief. Even with overwhelming evidence, especially with overwhelming evidence. Because emotion does not just override facts, it rearranges them. Looking back, it's hard not to see that trial as a rehearsal, a wealthy celebrity, a media spectacle, a narrative that said, if they're coming for me, they're really coming for you. I don't think we get to Trump without the OJ effect. We had already learned the lesson. OJ just taught it first. Then came 9-11. Planes, smoke, replays, collapse, silence. Over and over again. When you grow up watching that much Trum alive, you learn something important. The people explaining events are often less reliable than the events themselves. And that brings us to now. We live in a time where the gatekeepers are gone. Anyone can publish anything. Opinion dresses up like fact. Algorithms reward outrage over accuracy. Authoritative sources are treated like just another option. Journalism gets dismissed as bias. Expertise gets flattened. And when there's no shared agreement on what's real, the public becomes vulnerable. Not accidentally, deliberately. That's why this current panic over history feels so manufactured. When I was younger, I read A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. Not to hate my country, but to understand who had been edited out of the official story. Howard Zinn was not saying America was uniquely evil. He was saying that power tends to write flattering autobiographies. That's not radical. That's journalism. And yet now, acknowledging colonialism, slavery, or the genocide of Native Americans in our past gets framed as being ashamed of who we are, quote unquote. Which is strange. Because knowing your past is not shame, it's adulthood. There's another word doing a lot of dishonest work right now, socialism. Somewhere along the line it became a slur, a shortcut, a way to shut down conversation. But Gen X remembers something from our social studies classes. A lot of things American workers love, weekends, overtime pay, unions, social security, were not gifts from benevolent corporations. No, those things were fought for. They were socialist adjacent ideas. And the thing that pulled the United States out of the Great Depression, the New Deal, was deeply influenced by that same thinking. Not communism, that's a totally different thing. Not state control of everything. But the idea of letting people starve in a rich country is just bad policy. Now, socialism gets used to attack things like feeding school kids or making sure people don't go bankrupt because they get sick. And that demonization usually comes from the same people who benefit most from the system as it exists today. That nationalist project does not oppose capitalism. It protects it selectively. It props up the wealthy, deregulates at the top, and moralizes scarcity at the bottom. If you're poor, that's a character flaw. If you're rich, it's a virtue. That's not economics. That is theology. I'm not anti-capitalist. I like innovation. I like markets. I like things working. But I reject the idea that we have to choose between feeding people and making money, between healthcare and profit. We can have capitalism with guardrails. Because, let's get real, giant corporations left to their own devices without regulations kill people. The only people who benefit from pretending that we can have capitalism without guardrails are the ones already laughing all the way to the bank on the back of the poor. I live in Texas, and I've watched this performance for decades. Personal responsibility. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Small government, traditional values. Well, they're quietly defunding schools, they're demonizing the poor, and they're relying on underpaid and migrant labor to keep the whole machine running. It's not hypocrisy by accident, it's a strategy. Gen X watched institutions fail quietly. We watched history unfold live while learning how stories are told. We don't need everything to be sacred. We just want it to be real. What worries me is not people who are asking hard questions. It's how aggressively some folks are trying to shut those questions down. Because when power tells you not to look back, it's usually afraid of what you might see. This is not about left versus right. It's about whether we're mature enough to tell the truth about our past, clear-eyed enough to fix what's broken, and confident enough to believe that we can do better without burning it all down. When I step back and look at all of this together, the thread becomes clearer. OJ taught us that justice can be negotiated if you have money, power, and the right story. 9-11 taught us how fear can be amplified, simplified, and weaponized when people are desperate for certainty. Waco in Oklahoma City showed us what happens when distrust in institutions turns into absolutism, and our ongoing fights about history, colonialism, labor, and socialism show us how uncomfortable we still are with admitting that this country was built on extraction of land, of labor, of people. Texas didn't invent that. It just perfected the business model, cheap labor, moral language, and an economy that depends on workers being desperate enough not to ask too many questions. Socialism became a slur not because it failed America, but because it threatened that arrangement. Because ideas like worker protection, safety nets, and shared responsibility interrupt the story that suffering is personal failure instead of systemic design. And when you remove trusted journalism, when you erase expertise, when you blur the line between skepticism and conspiracy, people stop arguing about policy and start fighting over identity. That's the through line. Who gets believed, who gets protected, and who is told to be quiet and grateful. I don't think any of this makes America uniquely evil. I think it makes us unfinished. And maybe the work now isn't about tearing everything down or pretending like nothing's wrong. Maybe it's about growing up as a country, about telling the truth, about rebuilding trust, and about remembering that democracy only works if we can agree on what's real and care about who gets left behind when we don't. I'm George Tin Eich. This is Confessions of a Gen X Mind. Tell me what you think. If you like what you've heard so far, check out all of our episodes of Confessions of a Gen X Mind on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. Tell a friend, drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.