Thanks, everyone, thank you for listening in.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard the term triple-Trumper. It refers to people who voted for Donald Trump in the three presidential elections he has run in, the two he won in 2016 and 2024, and the one that everyone except him thinks he lost in 2020. They are also probably among the people who say they support him when they are contacted by pollsters. I’m always surprised by this percentage: it’s in the high 30s to the low 40s percent overall. 40 percent! In my calmest moments, I ask myself, or sometimes just stand up in the middle of a restaurant during my meal, and say, Who the fuck are these people?

You could probably divide up the categories of them in many ways, but just think about something simple, like whether they watch the news and pay attention. Some of them must do that, though of course when you say the news these days, it generally doesn’t mean a newspaper that does research and leaves black ink stains on your fingers after you’re finished reading it. It’s online and you can find everything from people who, like Trump himself, compare him to Jesus, and others who think he has more the appeal of one of the sandals of Jesus after he’s walked for nine days and finally plopped down at a falafel place in Damascus. So what I’m trying to say is that there’s bias right across the spectrum, but the ones I worry about are those who pay attention, choose neutral sources of information, and still come to the conclusion that they support him.

The other category goes by one of my favourite euphemisms of all time, the low-information voter. I love this term. It sounds sociological and fancy but it basically means, You don’t follow the news because it’s a downer and full of hard words, and you prefer to watch short videos on TikTok. For hours. The other great thing about this term is that it kind of implies that there may be several other aspects of these people that are low in addition to their acquisition of information. Curiosity, manners, use of deodorant, IQ, ability with numbers that have more than one digit, and so on. Yes, the beloved low-information voter.

I’m kind of on my way to becoming a low-information voter of another kind. One morning last week I sat down for my ritual of catching up on the news while I sipped my coffee, and I just couldn’t deal with it. All bad news, wars, groceries unaffordable, expensive gas, everything, and so I just turned it all off and sipped in silence like a prisoner in solitary confinement.

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You’ve probably heard of the actor Gene Hackman, who died last year but at the great old age of 95. I just checked IMdB: he acted in 101 movies in a career that spanned over forty years. That’s two or three movies on average every year, so the guy definitely kept busy. One of the great movies he was in is called The Conversation, released in 1974, so if you’re of a certain young age and don’t watch a lot of movies, you may have never heard of it. But I’m about to give away the ending, so if you plan to watch it and don’t like spoilers, put your phone on mute for about thirty seconds.

Here goes. The movie is all about people spying on people and especially using bugs to listen in on conversations. At the end, the Hackman character becomes obsessed that his own apartment is bugged, and so he spends a full eight minutes totally dismantling and destroying it, even going so far as to rip up the floorboards. Great scene.

So my point is that that is how I feel as I am preparing to move out of one Canadian province and move into another one. I’ve decided to get rid of almost all my possessions, mostly by giving them away to friends so far, or leaving them on the table in the lobby of my condo building where people leave stuff they don’t want any more. So every week my condo is noticeably becoming more and more devoid of stuff. I gave away a rug in the living room yesterday and one in the bedroom literally about three hours ago. I used to have paintings on most of the walls, but they are slowly going too. Now, more of the walls are bare, like there’s just been another heist at the Louvre. I’m glad my mind is not deteriorating, at least not yet, otherwise every time I got up in the morning I’d be shocked at what I see. I’m sure I had a coffee maker. Did someone from the halfway house next door break in last night?

And that’s my time. Thanks for listening and please join me again next week.