By: Daiman Teer for The Simpleton Star
If you pride yourself on navigating the modern world exclusively through the gentle, acoustic-guitar-backed tones of public radio, or if you treat MSNBC or NPR or CNN as your personal sensory deprivation tank, congratulations. You are effectively a functional illiterate in the year 2026. You aren’t “informed”; you are a curated product of a media vacuum, walking around with a brain as smooth as a polished stone, completely oblivious to the reality happening five feet outside your door.
Let’s be entirely honest: tuning into Fox News at least once a week isn’t a political statement anymore. It’s basic intellectual hygiene. It is the ideological equivalent of brushing your teeth. If you don’t do it, your perception of reality begins to rot from the inside out, and everyone around you can smell the decay. You can pretend you’re above it all, but while you’re busy smelling your own progressive rose-water, actual history is passing you by.
We all know the type. The enlightened suburbanite who sniffs, “Oh, I never watch Fox News.” They say it with this nauseating little smirk, as if abstaining from a cable network makes them eligible for sainthood. They genuinely believe that by dynamic-filtering their reality down to a handful of approved legacy outlets, they are keeping their minds pure. In reality, they are keeping their minds completely empty. They are the people who can recite the latest abstract sociology theories from a boutique university, but have absolutely no clue about the immediate, violent realities of the streets they live on. Fox News — even 20 minutes a week – tells you the truth about stuff you would never have known were you to watch the rest of the dead zone news.
Take the horrific case of Karmelo Anthony—the teenage thug who cold-bloodedly murdered another kid. If you are chained to the MSNBC teat, you literally didn’t even know it happened. Why? Because it doesn’t fit the narrative. It doesn’t align with the sanitized, therapeutic world view where structural forces are blamed for everything and individual depravity is swept under the rug. MSNBC viewers are coddled; they are tucked into bed with a warm glass of narrative compliance, left entirely blind to the visceral, breaking tragedies that define actual current events.
And then we have the NPR crowd. God save us from the people who read and listen to National Public Radio. If you rely on NPR to understand the world, you aren’t just misinformed—you are mentally stunted. You have allowed your intellect to be permanently frozen in a state of perpetually offended, middle-management anxiety. These are people who need a twenty-minute trigger warning and an anthropological deep-dive into the “nuance” of a literal execution before they can admit a crime was committed. They are so busy analyzing the systemic intersectionality of a mugging that they’d let the mugger take their watch while they apologize for their privilege.
If you don’t look at what the largest news network in the country is covering, you are effectively choosing to walk through a minefield with a blindfold on, bragging about how much you love the dark. You don’t have to agree with every commentator on the payroll, but you have to know what the conversation actually is. Otherwise, you’re just an NPC in a simulation, parroting talking points from a script that was outdated five years ago.
The arrogance of the “anti-Fox” brigade would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous. They walk around utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority while being the easiest marks in the room. They are the sheep who think they’re the wolves because they read a New York Times op-ed written by a guy who hasn’t left an air-conditioned office in Manhattan since 2012.
So keep skipping the broadcast. Keep turning the dial. Keep pretending that the world is a polite, NPR-approved seminar where everyone just needs a little more empathy. But don’t wonder why you’re constantly blindsided by reality. When the world collapses around your ears, at least you’ll die with perfect plaque-free teeth and a mind completely untouched by a single unapproved fact.
The Scripture
“The simple believeth every word: but the prudent man looketh well to his going.” — Proverbs 14:15
The Rationale
I chose this verse because it is the definitive diagnosis for the modern NPR reader and MSNBC addict. The “simple” in this world are those gullible pseudo-intellectuals who swallow whatever sanitized, pre-chewed narrative their preferred outlets feed them, believing every single syllable just because it’s delivered in a calm, authoritative accent. Meanwhile, the prudent person actually opens their eyes, looks at the ugly terrain around them, and checks the data from all sides so they don’t get blindsided by a reality they chose to ignore.
The Prayer
Dear Lord, deliver us from the terminal smugness of the aggressively uninformed. Grant the NPR listeners the strength to survive a broadcast that doesn’t feature a soft-spoken host sighing over abstract tragedies, and give the MSNBC faithful the courage to realize that bad actors exist in the real world, regardless of whether they fit the evening script. Open their eyes, pull the wool from their faces, and cure the profound mental stunting that comes from living in a media-constructed bubble. Amen.
