I know people who listen to "local" radio and watch "local" news and even read "local" (1%-owned) newspapers. I actually can't speak for the radio, but the local news seems to be basically nothing but petty crimes and cops solving them mixed in with one or two feel-good stories about like a local girl selling lemonade to pay for her brain cancer treatment, plus high school sports. I couldn't believe that people actually consume this kind of media in 2021, but I think large numbers of Americans get their news basically from these sources plus extremely cringe Facebook meme pages. That's it.

I used to think that we're surrounded by people who haven't changed their minds about anything since the nineties or even earlier—people who are living as though we are still in the 1990s, but with smartphones and internet—but their opinions now might be even more reactionary than they were back then.

My lib parents listen to NPR in their car. I know that's a step above local news but it still really did feel like nails on a chalkboard to me when I found myself with them in their car (in the before time) listening to that shit. Only a few years earlier than that, I used to love NPR. Radiolab made me feel so good. I even listened to Planet Money, although I remember in one episode, they asked an economist if the stock market was just going to keep going up forever, and that question was kind of too much even for lib me. I even listened to the Freakonomics podcast—a lot. I heard their entire episode when they did a fellatio-style interview of Boris Johnson when he was just the mayor of London. I stopped listening to Hidden Brain (aka soft phrenology) years ago but I remember the guy did one or two episodes about "billionaires bad," which was cool. I maintain that Shankar is better than the average lib unless someone here can produce proof to the contrary. I may have ultimately escaped NPR because their politics podcast either ignored or shat on Bernie in the 2016 primary which was pretty off-putting, although I still listened to every fucking episode of Nate Silver's podcast leading up to the general election. (He isn't NPR but might as well be.) Once they were completely proven wrong I lost interest in them.

What's so odd to me is that I know lots of fellow liberal millennials had pretty similar media consumption habits but just kept consuming liberal media even after it was completely, objectively, stunningly proven wrong in 2016. The process with me was gradual, not instantaneous, but 2016 really did profoundly shake me out of that ideological dumpster (and into this current one instead).

Because of my previous bourgeois listening habits I don't really trust myself to be in charge of any kind of leftist organization.