Barbara Hawkins—a grandmother from Arizona who is a registered independent—discovered the MeidasTouch Network eighteen months ago, when she was between books, scrolling idly on YouTube. Until then, her news diet had been the “old reliable mainstream media,” she told me, but she’d been getting fed up. “It’s rare to see mainstream media doing anything except treating this election cycle as business as usual,” she said. “There’s little discussion regarding the various threats we face as a nation.” Then she found MeidasTouch, which describes itself as doing “pro-democracy” journalism, and provides commentary on national politics seemingly calculated to appeal to those for whom Rachel Maddow is too subtle.