Stephen Fowler

Well, to your point, there has been a notable increase in other politicians and accounts that crop up that have this sort of trolling antagonistic style.

For Democrats, you have the official press accounts of California Governor Gavin Newsom and New York Governor Kathy Hochul that have adopted this sort of mentality and kind of owning the conservatives and pushing back and memefying everything.

So there is evidence that that is where some people are heading.

But this is also something that I asked Larry Shack about.

He's a political strategist.

He recently published an analysis of the 2024 election with the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

He said that his research and polling found that this political environment we're in

has switched from being one driven by policy to one driven by narrative.

And what he means by that is that somebody's perspective on an issue is determined by the party that they voted for, not necessarily what they might be persuaded to believe.

So in the case of the fatal ice shooting in Minnesota, this is what he had to say.

It seems likely that there is this disconnect between Reality and the views of many many videos in the case of Minnesota but the views of people just depending on what political affiliation they have and

Many of the experts we talked to said they don't know what's coming next.

the DOJ has failed to fully meet a deadline set by a law signed by President Trump.

The relatively few documents that have been made public have extensive redactions, and the government also says some of what's released should not be trusted.

While there's no public estimate of how many files remain or when they'll be made public, according to some emails released in the files, the number of documents collected as evidence in the criminal investigation into Epstein alone is well north of a million.

Stephen Fowler, NPR News.

Well, the Justice Department says it's working on it, and there could be well over a million more pages to come.

They say they're taking time to review and redact information to protect victims required by the law.

What we do have is about 40,000 pages, most of them redacted in ways that make them unreadable, and there's very little new information.

Here's one example.