After the Norms Break

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My education in political communication came at a hinge moment when the norms, guardrails, and shared assumptions of the field were already eroding under the pressure of Trump’s rise. I was trained in a discipline whose rules were dissolving in real time. At first, I was disillusioned by the cruelty, the incivility, the sense that political language had become intentionally debased. But disillusionment eventually gave way to something more unsettling: recognition.

There was a stretch where I genuinely felt like I was losing my mind. Every day studying at American University and Media Matters for America meant immersion in Fox News narratives, the conspiratorial paranoia of Alex Jones, and an outrage economy engineered to reward distortion over explanation. What rattled me wasn’t just the extremism itself; it was how quickly its framing began to bleed into the mainstream.

At the same time, I watched centrist pundits and Democratic-aligned media, places like The Bulwark and Pod Save America, translate those manufactured grievances into electoral “realities.” The language softened, the tone became respectable, but the underlying premise remained: reactionary anger had to be accommodated, laundered, and treated as an immovable feature of politics rather than something produced by decades of institutional failure.

That was the breaking point. Studying political communication while watching this unfold felt like being trained to describe a fire while standing inside it. You were told to take civility seriously while cruelty was incentivized. You were told institutions would hold while they quietly bent. You were told silence was prudence, even as it functioned as consent. The dissonance wasn’t just academic, but deeply psychological.

This image symbolizes that reckoning: power protecting itself, incentives hidden in plain sight, silence framed as neutrality.

Stew On This exists because I needed a place to name that fracture honestly and to talk about how historical failures resurface as cultural grievance, how narrative discipline replaces accountability, and how politics becomes theater when material conditions go unaddressed.

The newsletter stays free because I believe this kind of thinking should circulate.

But the paid section exists so I can go deeper, more candid, more personal, less polished for comfort, as well as keep doing this work daily without laundering the truth.

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