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Yuri Bezmenov's avatar

I appreciate the way you explained your thoughtful curation of a healthy information diet. Substack is the best place to build your own newspaper. The horseshoe theory is real - Caitlin is also my favorite lefty/socialist writer because she has anti-war principles.

My paywalled posts contain travel guides, recipes, and podcasts that could tell you a few things you don't already know ;)

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eugyppius's avatar

Thanks for the shout-out bro.

I see basically three eras in my own personal media/news consumption. I first developed sincere political interests for the first time in the context of the Iraq war, when I was a student in the US. I read a lot of left-leaning anti-war publications then, and some left-trending blogs. Most of what I read was quasi-mainstream but I found it at least minimally engaging.

Sometime after the financial crisis in 2008, I noticed an increasing uniformity in the content of the mainstream press that caused me to lose almost all interest in it. I also became indifferent to politics for a while. I was writing a dissertation/trying to get a job/trying to get my first book published, so I didn't have much spare time or attention anyway.

I returned to the scene for Brexit and Trump – a movement and a candidate I at first regarded with hostility, simply because everybody around me did, and which I increasingly saw as positive developments the more I read about them. I was appalled to see what a circus the press had become, and also amazed at how the German press merely recycled headlines from the Anglosphere at a few days' delay. When the wokery really hit American universities around the same time, I started reading more English blogosphere material on the phenomenon.

The third era would really be Corona and the aftermath. Late in 2020, after a viral twitter thread, I found myself with a small audience of my own, and I started reading all the legacy media I'd spent years neglecting, because people kept asking me about it and I also realised that understanding 'the narrative' itself is 70% of everything. Now that I do this professionally, I force myself through the same five or six tedious major newspapers everyday, as well as a small collection of other Substackers and blogs.

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