My GF and I rarely discuss news or politics, but she's a frequent NPR listener who gets most of her (ahem) "news" from there and Reddit. So the other night something came up about Israel and she casually said "well, but everyone hates Israel now". In that context, I said what do they think about the masses of unarmed people shot in the streets of Tehran. So imagine my total surprise when she said she had no idea there were any protests in Iran. None at all. Somehow, for a couple years of the war in Gaza, she was attuned to every video - real or fake - that was attributed to that war zone. Yet this completely passed without her noticing.

She said, "well, how would I know about it if it's not on the news?"

I said, "well, it was on the news." And then I went looking for articles about it. And y'know, I realized that unless you actually went looking, you probably wouldn't find those articles, even though they're only a few weeks old.

What is super disappointing about this is that when the US does take action against the Iranian regime again, the reasoning is not going to be legible to most Americans. I don't really understand how this was erased so quickly. That meme about Columbia's campus being totally protest-free was pretty much on point. It's startling to see a large portion of the population being manipulated so thoroughly into being rabid about one thing and totally blind to another at the same time. Is having consistent values no longer a value?

Might have to do with the funding cuts to public broadcasting?