Virginia Heffernan is concerned. The seasoned journalist (who was the guest on Ep. 5 of our At a Distance podcast, in 2020) spent the better part of the last four years co-hosting Slate’s Trumpcast, a podcast dedicated to the Sisyphean task of preventing the normalization of the former president’s actions. During this time, Heffernan saw a political left so occupied with responding to the ever-more concerning behavior wriggling out from under the emboldened right that they inadvertently ceded much of the cultural conversation to the droning microphones of the relatively unconcerned center-right, or the “apolitical.” Commentary from the Rogans, Shapiros, and Petersons of the world—with their MMA zeal, not-so-surprisingly restrictive definitions of what constitutes music, and endorsements of all-meat diets—ran through the ears of the curious masses.