(I’ve now posted summary notes and comments about all the nonfiction books I’ve read since the beginning of 2024. Before that there are titles I’ve read but not yet posted, and I’ll work those next.)
- A MAGA feed;
- A solution to the Daylight Saving Time debate.
For today, I want to examine this piece closely. The polarization of American society means that each side may simply not understand the other, or even appreciation its point of view. Actually, I think I have a better understanding of the MAGA viewpoint, than MAGA has of mine. But set that aside for the moment.
Slate, Luke Winkie, 8 Mar 2025: I Wanted One Day of Peace on the Internet, subtitled “So I swapped my feeds for a dose of what it’s like to live in the certainty of MAGA land.”
The word “certainty” strikes me immediately. How are they so certain? Because they live in their bubble, I’d guess, and conservatives tend toward black and white thinking. But I’ll begin at the beginning.
Last month, Fox News host Jesse Watters outlined the indomitable 21st-century conservative media apparatus thusly: “What you’re seeing on the right is asymmetrical,” he said, on an episode of The Five. “Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it, and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.”
If you excuse the ostentation of the sentiment, Watters is absolutely correct. It has never been easier for an American voter to elide mainstream airwaves and yet still think they know exactly what is going on. …
This is the bubble effect. Continuing:
Donald Trump has understood this for the entirety of his political career but particularly during his latest campaign. He snubbed conventional press cycles to instead sit for lengthy interviews with Twitch streamers and former reality show stars, both of whom successfully framed the candidate as more of a personality than a politician. That media strategy has persisted through the early days of this presidency: In a nakedly authoritarian turn, Trump has ripped away control of the White House press room from reporters and banished outlets like the Associated Press in favor of more credulous coverage. (The hilariously pro-Trump One America News Network has been granted a work station at the Pentagon. Politico, meanwhile, had its station “rotated out.”)
Thus polarization. There’s a lot of news, and only so much time, so most people read the news that confirms what they already believe. My bold.
The consequence here is that for all of the chaos marking the febrile early days of Trump’s revenge, our countrymen are sealed in two different planes of reality—divaricating media, culture, social contracts, and long-standing consensus on what democracies need to function. And the MAGA reality, it must be said, seems far less stressful than the one I inhabit. It is a place where the president is always right, and nothing is going wrong. When I consider the anxious dread that has infected much of the past decade, to live elsewhere almost sounds like a relief. So many Americans are walking this earth feeling relaxed. Tranquil, even! Imagine that! They are savoring this Republican trifecta, and especially, their self-selected, opposition-free media environment, which continues to promise them a golden age.
I hadn’t quite appreciated this angle: the right-wing media exists to reassure its viewers that *everything is fine*, *everything is all right*, that the noble Trump is *vanquishing those evil liberals* and *don’t believe what they say*. While the oligarchs take over the government, for their own benefits.
I wanted a taste of that blissfully ignorant life. Because honestly, I needed a break from all the apocalyptic vibes. So last week, I created one for myself. I muted Slack, ditched my group chats, and silenced the pervasive push notifications that keep me attuned to the daily slate of outrage. With that liberal enclave banished, I created a brand new Twitter—well, X—feed that followed, exclusively, White House agencies and their associated MAGA partisans. For the next 24 hours, it would be my only source of news.
Reality depends on which feeds you follow, apparently.
My collection of cranks included @WhiteHouse, @StateDept, and @DOGE. I weaved in a few recent Trump appointees, like @KashPatel and @SecRubio, as well as some lower-level bureaucrats like @KariLake. Naturally I followed Elon Musk—a man who has been muted on my primary account for quite some time—and I threw in @Catturd2, someone who, while not associated with the government, remains the internet’s most pervasive Trump regime booster. In order to maintain the purity of the dose, I avoided outwardly branded right-wing media that might still occasionally voice meek dissent. So, no Fox News, no New York Post, and especially no National Review.
Because even those last three sources are honest enough to occasionally call out Trump’s lies and disinformation. Even Fox News!
And I’ll be honest, after logging into my newly MAGA-fied Twitter account, completely purged of a single contrasting viewpoint, I experienced a sensation that has eluded me for quite some time. My typical morning social media banquet of blood-curdling headlines and scream-crying rage—sorted algorithmically and melded into an infinite scroll—was nowhere to be found. Instead, my laptop greeted my bleary eyes with a font of good tidings.
With examples.
The morning simmered into the afternoon, and the news of the day continued to whoosh by. Whatever atrocities that merited my attention were out of reach—tittering away in unclicked Slack rooms. Each headline had been gloriously disfigured by florid spin, lulling a whole nation into docility. I glean, from my highly bifurcated timeline, that a meeting between Keir Starmer and Trump went well, that the Supreme Court blocked a spending mandate filed by an activist judge who must be impeached, and that those America First tariffs the president keeps teasing will, indeed, go into effect the following week.
Some of the more pickled and grievance-fueled elements of MAGA-dom came through, propping up nonsensical controversies that bloom and die within the conservative ecosystem without ever breaking through to our side of the aisle. Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson, is all worked up about a stack of notecards Jen Psaki left behind in the White House during her brief run as Biden’s press secretary. It’s a squabble that literally nobody cares about, and I think that includes Cheung.
More examples. And concluding:
And while existing inside of MAGA land may be a reprieve from the horror of existing outside of it, this is not a sane place to be either. The constant reaffirmations of loyalty must grow tiresome, even for the most committed of Trump accessories. We’ve become desensitized to the ritual by now, but slobbering over an elected official—of any stripe—is, and always will be, unbecoming. With my patience for the groveling wearing thin, I yearned for my ancestral home of belligerent progressives. I do not consider myself a person at risk of being red-pilled, and no surprise, but the propaganda did not work on me.
As night fell, I switched back to my original Twitter account, and sunk deep into that familiar, nauseating exasperation. The next day, Trump had his acrimonious exchange with President Volodymyr Zelensky; I don’t think I’ve ever seen my timeline so freaked out. Pundits forecasted the end of the post–World War II order, Democrats mounted frail ripostes, and my own mother tweeted at the embattled Ukrainian premier, offering him an apology on behalf of our nation. It felt awful—and it felt right.
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Lagniappe
Washington Post, Jon Lovett, 7 Mar 2025: I have settled the endless daylight saving time debate, subtitled “One time doesn’t fit all. Send the sun back to the states.”
After much backstory:
Right now, according to the Uniform Time Act of 1966, states can choose permanent standard time or they can spring forward and fall back. But states can’t choose permanent daylight saving time. All Congress has to do is revise this law to provide for this third option.
That’s it. Twenty or so states would shift to permanent daylight saving time as planned under their laws; others would probably join. Some states would stick with the current system of springing forward and falling back. And, hey, maybe a few states would join Arizona and Hawaii on permanent standard time. Everybody wins! A few states continuing to switch their clocks while most don’t would be no more complicated than our current system, in which a few states don’t switch and most do.
Do we have bigger fish to fry right now? Yes, of course. The administration is gutting federal agencies without going through Congress. Republican politicians care more about pleasing the president than protecting the Constitution. And we might be headed toward a shutdown even though Republicans control the entire government, because it turns out you can’t cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans and cut the deficit without deeply unpopular cuts to health care and social services. Still, I’m going to leave this idea here on a sticky note for when we have a moment.
So to answer the president’s question of “what else do we have to do?” — on daylight saving time, this is what we can do: Give states the right to choose permanent daylight saving time.
Now I just need somebody to show this to Elon Musk. That seems to be how the government works these days.
Why is there a union at all?
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Again: my position is that Daylight Saving Time is a lie; it’s a redefinition of the clock against the actual movement of the sun — or actually, the Earth’s rotation — which defines noon as when the sun is highest in the sky. It people don’t like DST because of their schedules, then adjust your schedules. To want permanent DST is the same as resetting the time zones one ahead, or behind.
Also: the time zones were set up in the 19th century to synchronize local train stations; see Wikipedia Time zone. Because before that, every town kept its own time (presumably based on the sun at noon), and train schedules were difficult.
