Do you feel stuffy in that echo chamber?

“The news media, unlike Senator Mills’ Twitter/X post and Trump’s baseless ‘enemy of the people’ refrain, serves as a voice for people who, unlike our lawmakers, do not hold positions of power,” columnist writes and arms dealer. safety activist Teri Carter. (Getty Images)

Last Friday I ran into the Anderson County Judge Executive at Five Star where we both got gas. I hadn’t seen him in a year. He smiled big and said, “Hello, Miss Carter!”, walked around his truck to give me a hug, and stayed to talk about our families.

On Saturday, a couple I often went to church with shouted hello to me as they walked into the Lawrenceburg Kroger and I was looking for a parking spot. Seeing it was a bright spot in my afternoon.

The next day I texted a former magistrate to tell her I had thought about her in Sunday school. The word “love” was used in our conversation.

I tell you this because I am an outspoken Democrat, the aforementioned people are all lifelong Republicans, and these encounters are both routine and contradictory to what we see from too many GOP supermajority leaders and communications staff in Frankfort who, if you follow their public comments , and Twitter/X-feeds, would have us believe that real life in Kentucky is as sarcastic as they are.

It’s not.

Just this week, Senator Robby Mills – who is running for lieutenant governor alongside Daniel Cameron – posted: “Watching @KyTonightKET and listening to the leadership of the Frankfort media ‘on their own’! They are simply not balanced… that is why our citizens are confused about what the truth is.”

Click to watch: State of the Media on KET’s “Kentucky Tonight”

No, Senator. No one has left anyone out and Kentuckians are not confused. But you have to wonder why people like Senator Mills are so determined to create this illusion. Is he speaking personally, in this tone, to his constituents who disagree with him politically? Is he speaking to anyone this way?

One of the destructive habits that Donald Trump ushered in with his presidency was the constant, off-the-cuff whining on Twitter by elected officials, as if being in a protected, elitist position was an unbearable burden. Poor, poor me, they seem to be screaming.

When I see powerful Kentucky lawmakers on Twitter/X and elsewhere complaining about their reporting, I’m reminded of the wise words of writer Anne Lamott: “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

The reason I haven’t seen our judge-executive in so long is because, after the Old National Bank shooting in April 2023, I decided to spend the entire year out of Anderson, up the road in Frankfort, learning personally how things really work in state government, to spend hours in chambers with Republican lawmakers, and to see if the most basic firearms legislation had a chance.

While I’m sorry to disappoint the recent GOP Twitter/X-hulbaloo, there’s nothing more glamorous to me than a lobbyist. I’m just a citizen, mother, grandmother and volunteer – read ‘unpaid’ – trying to find a way to prevent people from being shot at work, school, church, etc. A timely reminder that one of the fundamental differences between real news and social media are fact checking.

When it comes to potential gun legislation, I’ve learned over the past year that the disconnect between doing what many in our Republican supermajority know (they know!) is right — like that people in the midst of a mental health crisis shouldn’t have access to guns — and the powerful seats they hold in our Republican supermajority are Grand Canyon-esque.

The chair itself must be preserved at all costs, and that cost includes, let’s be blunt, lives.

With the exception of Senator Whitney Westerfield (who, it must be said, has an affable Twitter/X presence but is sadly leaving office at the end of this year), even the most rudimentary discussion of laws to curb gun violence in Kentucky won’t do that. take place in any public setting where it can be video recorded and in turn shared on social media. It simply hasn’t been done.

Call it fear of the Trumpian social media mob; call it fear of the uninformed voter; call it fear of the voter who gets most of his political information from unfact-checked social media (including lawmakers and pundits who regularly post Trump-esque snark); call it fear of being expelled from the Frankfort fraternity.

But call it what it essentially is. Fear.

And the news media, unlike Senator Mills’ Twitter/X post and Trump’s baseless refrain about “enemy of the people,” serves as a voice for people who, unlike our lawmakers, do not hold positions of power.

Earlier this month, Bill Kristol, founder of The Weekly Standard, posted a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that stuck with me: “The line between good and evil runs not across states, nor between classes, nor between political parties – but across every human being to. heart – and by all human hearts.”

I’m a Democrat living in a rural county who voted resoundingly for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020, but I’m also the person who purposefully goes to Kroger on Saturdays because I want to run into people I haven’t lately seen and want to talk to my neighbors, regardless of their political beliefs.

I’ve spent the past year in Frankfort, attending every meeting and mostly talking to Republicans like me wrote in a recent article on Senate Bill 2: “met with the senator because I wanted to understand both him and his bill. Did I miss something?” All it cost me was time.

The line that separates good and evil is not party membership, but fear of the other.

I encourage lawmakers like Senator Mills and anyone else who feels stuck in an echo chamber to remember that social media and professional, fact-checked news are not the same – kind of like a Mustang convertible and grilled ribs are not the same – and speaking to people personally who disagree with you politically is healthy for you, healthy for Kentucky, and free.

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