If you have an older relative who spends way too much time stewing in the conservative media, you may have experienced a moment when you not only disagreed with him, but you realized that you had no earthly clue what he was going on about. Perhaps it was when he started talking about the UN plot to eliminate golf courses and replace paved roads with bicycle paths. Maybe he stopped you in your tracks with a discourse on why flies were attracted to Barack Obama, or complained about the government insisting on referring to Christians as “Easter-worshippers” or expressed outrage over 9/11 hijackers being given leniency by Muslim jurists.
A study of media citations conducted by researchers at Harvard in 2017 found that publications from the far-left to the center-right tended to reference reporting from mainstream news organizations, whereas the right-wing media were more walled off, citing mostly opinion pieces from like-minded sources. As a result, people who tend to consume mostly conservative media often come to the erroneous belief that the rest of us will be familiar with whatever controversies are raging within that bubble when in fact we have no idea what they’re even talking about.
While I don’t have an angry uncle who reads Breitbart every morning, I have had some of these odd interactions with conservatives on social media. And I was reminded of these bewildering exchanges on Friday, when Donald Trump, president* of the United States of America, addressed a pressing national problem…