To save my sanity, I try to wait until mid-afternoon before checking the national news.
Sometimes I fail, but this is one of those good habits that I try to keep a tight lid on. It helps keep my mind focused on the steady, if often maddening, marathon of book writing vs. feeling like I’m stepping on a lego-pile of stories I can do nothing about.
I just finished Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy, which I listened to on audiobook and recommend. She opens in memoir form with New Years Eve 1999, describing a party she hosted with a hundred friends and family members to ring in the new century. Then she spends the rest of the book telling us what happened to those friendships over the next two decades of constant political upheaval.
You can’t read Applebaum’s book without thinking of the friends and family you’ve either lost touch with or kept your distance from since the 2016 election.
I still talk to Trump voters (which I wrote about last week) but I no longer seek out the most devout Trump acolytes of the ultra-vocal, conspiracy theory, cult variety. When it can be avoided — and it mostly can be — I no longer even talk to my own father about politics. There is only so much time left together, be it days or weeks or years, and politics is not how either of us want to spend that time.
That said, since the 2024 election, my biggest mind shift is around the deleterious effects of decades of rightwing, hateful, conspiracy-theory heavy, and outright lies spread by media outlets like Rush Limbaugh radio, FOX News, the rightwing podcast bros, etc.
Do they, or did they, purposefully spread lies for the purpose of entertainment, getting famous, and making big money? Yes, and they should be held accountable.
But confirmation bias is real. And there is free will. We seek the outlets and opinions of those we want to hear, of those who confirm our deepest convictions in how we see the world and want to live our lives. If the hateful laughter of Tucker Carlson, the vitriol of Ann Coulter, the immaturity of Greg Outfield, or the smugness of Laura Ingraham are your jam, carry on.
What I have learned this last decade is that you cannot change someone’s mind when they are perfectly happy with the mind they have. Nobody is force-feeding TV programs or websites. We make choices. We do or do not decide to change our minds. And time is passing passing passing.
And we are, you and me and all of us, in the twilight.
My afternoon-specific news habit does not, unfortunately, keep me from feeling completely aghast by the time the afternoon rolls around and I open my internet newspapers.
Often, like yesterday, I read the first few headlines and then quick-plug my phone in so I can run away and avoid it all before reading any deeper.
Trump moves to ban flag burning despite Supreme Court ruling that Constitution allows it
Meeting with South Korea’s leader, Trump praises North Korean Dictator
FEMA employees warn that Trump is gutting disaster response
As tariff shock sets in, small toymakers fear for holiday stockpiles, even survival
A lab made a promising discover in lab research, then its funding was frozen
The [John] Bolton raid feels like a warning
A warning.
The president, wandering like a confused patient around the White House, hijacks the cameras on a daily basis, turning the free press into his personal film crew and marketing department to terrorize his own citizens. When he’s not paving over the Rose Garden or walking on the roof to brag about building a 90,000 square foot ballroom, he’s mostly preaching to the world about the Americans he hates the most and the Americans he plan to punish next.
He is continually daring us.
Like with the executive order he signed yesterday about burning the flag, he was daring someone in DC to burn a flag so there would be B-roll for him to prove he needs troops in the streets. And it only took a few hours for him to get his wish.
But there is always a bottom line, and here is ours. He is just a man. And he can mass produce and wear all the red hats he wants — Make America Great Again, Trump Was Right About Everything, MAGA — but he and his many toadies will be recorded in the history books (if we still get to have history books) as the monsters who held up their funhouse mirrors and asked two simple questions of all of us:
Who are you?
What does it mean to be an American?
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