Sunday Smiles

David Strom 2:00 PM | July 06, 2025
Stromboli

It is dispiriting to see the extent to which liberals and conservatives now live in two different Americas. 

Of course, some of that has to do with actual geographical facts--we now tend to accumulate in different parts of cities, states, and even regions throughout the country. There are differences between cities, suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas so vast that you might think that you are in a completely different state or country moving from Austin to 50 miles away. 

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Here in Minnesota, it was, ironically, our governor, Tim Walz, who put the divide in our state so artfully when he said that outside the Twin Cities, Minnesota has nothing but rocks and cows, so who cares what people who live there think? 

But the divide goes much deeper than demographic differences between different regions. At least some of that divide is caused by liberals and conservatives living in different information bubbles. You may intuit that the conservative information bubble is more porous than the liberals', and you would be right. Study after study shows that liberals tend to congregate more closely around opinions and beliefs about the world, and that is driven by the fact that their information sources are very limited and what reaches them is highly curated. 

Whether conservatives would want to live in a similar bubble or not, I can't answer--I certainly don't want to--but whether you want to or not, it is extremely difficult for anyone to accomplish that without avoiding everything but Fox News, which itself is not as ideologically monochromatic as liberals think. Liberals dominate the cultural, educational, academic, and governmental bureaucracies, making it nearly impossible to avoid The Narrative™. 

Conservatives know what liberals think before they open their mouths, because we hear The Message™ from everywhere. We can't watch a show on TV without getting it blasted into our brains, and a quick scan of the Pravda Media informs us of what we are supposed to think. 

What distinguishes most conservatives' news consumption from liberals' is that it is almost certainly more diverse. A liberal can figure out what they are supposed to believe and think by reading 3 or 4 newspapers and magazines. Almost everything else is superfluous because the Narrative™ is consistent. And because they trust those sources--would The New York Times or The Atlantic LIE?!--nothing else penetrates into their consciousness--even if they somehow see it, and they often don't. 

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I have a friend who keeps sending me stories about some cruelty or another caused by Trump's immigration policy--some stories are true or partly true, others pure hoaxes that they will never believe are anything but the God's honest truth--and I keep wondering: Where were you when Biden facilitated over 300,000 unaccompanied minors being "lost" after being given to unvetted adults with no real address?

Many of those children were trafficked--for sex, for slavery, for God knows what. 

I have yet to do so because no doubt they wouldn't believe it, no matter how much evidence I provided. It's not that they are cruel or indifferent to the suffering of children--they just think that no Democrat would do such a thing. So I get lectures about Kilmar Abrego-Garcia from a person who supported the trafficking of hundreds of thousands of children. 

We are living in different realities, and I don't know how to bridge the gap. How do you convince somebody they are being manipulated when they shrug at the COVID lies, the Biden lies, the Trump hoaxes, and keep going back to the same sources who told them those lies? 

I can't get over it. 300,000+ children...vanished. The media didn't just basically cover it up--they went on a propaganda campaign to convince people that bringing up child trafficking was a Q-Anon conspiracy theory. When Sound of Freedom came out, the entire cultural elite went on a jihad against the movie--based on a true story--because it might reflect badly on the border crisis. 

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My God.

Many of the liberals in these bubbles are very decent people. They genuinely believe that the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case is exactly as described in the media, and have no idea how many lives are being saved by closing the border. They are obsessed with a single ambiguous case while ignoring hundreds of thousands of missing children because, well, they are told the one is important and the other a myth. 

It's in The Atlantic! 

Whenever I get a story sent to me, I don't have the heart to say, "I read that already--I read almost everything because that is my job--and here is why it is wrong." First, it's pointless and irritating to the person on the other end--it has the whiff of exuding superiority. And second, I don't have the credibility that a writer for The Atlantic or The Washington Post has in their mind. These institutions still have massive prestige with some people--ill-deserved, but there it is. It's like the love of the Ivy League. You can show that the President of Harvard is a plagiarist, but it doesn't penetrate. The armor of prestige is too great. 

My great frustration is not that somebody lives in a bubble--it's pretty common--but the resistance to evidence when the bubble should pop. You would think the COVID lies would do it. Or the descent into alphabet ideology. Or the serial Trump hoaxes. Or the "Sharp as a Tack" hoax. 

Something should pop the bubble. But no. Not for people who are deeply invested in that alternate reality. It's like being taken for all your life savings by Bernie Madoff and still defending him. 

I don't get it. 

























































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CONSERVATISM COVID-19 LIBERAL MEDIA MEDIA BIAS SUNDAY SMILES

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