I've been hoping the dems can wipe the republicans out of existance with social issues so a truly left party can form

What incentive do either of the existing parties have to make that come about?

The dems have no incentive to destroy their opponent and empower the working class. They want to balance the situation and keep it going indefinitely.

What news sources would you consider trustworthy?

With news you have to apply critical thinking and view it through a lens of "who wrote this and for what purpose?" Liberals view their own media as some apolitical moral arbiter of truth and fact when in reality their news has a specific interest and it is in pandering to liberals while advancing american imperialist interests. BBC advances the goals of the british state (and we in the left fucking despise it here in the UK). Al Jazeera is actually ok but it does advance the interests of its arabic owners in Qatar. It finds itself heavily pressure by needing to be popular among the populations across the middle east though which leads it to doing a lot of anti-imperialist reporting.

I use socialist news sources, but these are again going to be biased, they seek to advance the interests of socialism. Ben Norton probably does some of the best investigative journalism in the left these days. I keep an eye on CGTN, Jacobin, Double Down News, Mintpress News, Declassified UK, Telesur, among others I'm probably forgeting right now. CGTN i find too dry and professional though tbh it's boring, I think I like Mintpress and Telesur the best, several of these others I've named are very UK-focused so won't be much good to you on international news. I'm probably forgetting a bunch of things I like tbh it's hard to remember. At the end of the day you get an eye for biases after you learn all the different political ideologies that exist out there, you can understand much more about media when you understand the ideology the writer has, you can practically write any article on any topic if you do "from the perspective of [insert ideology here]".

My business trip had me in florida, and i didn't get a sunburn, but still managed to come back red.

Haha that's neat. There's a loooong way to go though and some of it will feel overwhelming to learn. If I can offer one piece of advice to anyone dipping their feet into the left it's to never go in with the mindset of believing you've ever finished developing politically. There is always more to learn, forever. None of us know everything and all of us are in a constant state of change. Be open minded and learn from all areas. Once you pick up the general concept of how to do marxist analysis and dialectics it becomes very easy to add new information to old information and build a cohesive picture of the way the world actually works instead of just.... Noise. Like the liberals seem to think.