My One Single Post-Election Digestion News Link

My approach to political news has been a gradual tuning out. I stopped listening to MAGA ages ago, because I found it 100% performative bad-faith horseshit. And around the 30,000th time I endured an MSNBC panel discussion of whether Trump's racist or not (spoiler: he is), I realized I was getting zero nutritional value from that sort of thing. As a child of the 70s, I was conditioned to accepting non-nutritive TV. I've probably seen every episode of F Troop twelve times. But I've been forcing mysel to learn - late in life! - to resist media stupors.

I do stay up on what's happening, but I've opted out of "Can you believe this????" media-coached digestion. Yes, I believe it. I don't need help processing the obvious, nor do I need to be spun up any angrier. Even the stuff I agree with starts to feel so tediously repetitive that it feels like hypnosis. Hard pass.

I stay on top of headines - which I catch once, without coached digestion (unless I need help understanding implications, which is often available via a brief quote or tweet or soundbite - the Must-Read Twitter list I curate usually does a good job of contextualizing news) - plus I'll pay attention to anything that seems like it might be both smart and surprising.

Virtually nothing fits that description, unfortunately. But this does:



The segment offers a number of fresh facts and framings. The big one: Trump has not only hollowed out and zombified the Republican party, but he's done so with the Democrat party, as well, though the mainstream hasn't noticed yet.

It starts a bit slow (where they indulge the clickbait fury - which I find hypnotic, not fresh - conveyed in the title), but is only a 15 minute commitment, and it's entertaining.