Queen of Swords

15 or so years ago I began hearing more about how people have increasing difficulty talking to their parents or other relatives who listened to faux news and thus inhabited increasingly divergent media universes than they did. I never had that problem – my parents (and now just my mom) are basic centrist liberals who have never watched (and would never) watch faux and enjoy the Daily Show. We didn’t always agree on politics (me being a democratic socialist), but we very much lived in the same media universe, and our facts were mostly the same.

Now I have a similar problem, because my mom watches NBC, ABC news, or CNN and reads the Washington Post, and I don’t and instead get my news from Bluesky, What the Fuck Just Happened Today? (which is awesome), Daily Kos, and similar lefty sources. Recently I discovered my mom hadn’t heart of the costumed protests (starting with frog guy) in Portland, hadn’t heard of any but the largest No Kings protests, and most concerningly had no idea who JB Pritzker (the governor of Illinois, and by far the most credible 2028 presidential candidate on our side) was or how he'd been standing up to 47, and she also hadn’t heard or seen anything about 47’s increasingly obvious mental decline (like the recent video of the Japanese PM leading him around, which reminded me astonishingly much of how my mom used to lead my dad around while he was still mobile (he died of Alzheimer’s). OTOH, she has heard of Gavin Newsom and has also heard news reports that he is (gag) the only possible Democratic candidate in 2028). That’s what you get when billionaires own all large-scale media in the US, because billionaires almost universally support authoritarians.