I've seen very little evidence that representatives have any special understanding of issues. Have you ever watched congress ask tech people questions? Taibbi and Greenwald do excellent real journalism and dive extremely deep into the topics they cover, whether it be wall street, nsa, etc. I can understand the backlash against Rogan to a degree because he's a comedian talking about things over his head at times, but I'm saddened by the way the woke mobs have turned on good journalism from Taibbi and Greenwald because they won't toe the party line. Ive yet to hear coherent criticism of those two other than an emotional "fuck those guys"

Both Taibbi and Greenwald are not good reporters. The facts they report are not accurate and often intentionally misleading, the predictions they make don't come true, they're terrible at overcoming their own biases, they prefer to say inflammatory things over saying truthful things, and they've been ostracized from the larger journalism community for these reasons, not their refusal to toe any given party line.

There are plenty of other people who do all of the things you seem to like about those two, but who are also good at journalism and haven't otherwise fallen victim to their own greed through moral turpitude.

And you may think representative democracy doesn't work, but I think you need to understand that it's more or less all the West has going for it. If you throw out representation, you throw out more or less every modern democracy in the world, and I'm personally not willing to do that. The alternatives are ghoulish and chilling to think about.

You say this with zero examples or evidence, and yet having read their reporting for many years they always have good evidence and examples. So frankly, I find them a lot more credible than you.

I'm not suggesting removing representative democracy, you're creating a strawman there, I'm saying that starting at the assumption that everyone is a moron that must have their information stream managed is bad for democracy; and that your average representative has more blind spots than we care to admit.

Besides, frankly your average representative doesn't actually do that much research into most topics, they either take the party line or do whatever their biggest donors ask them to do. So in essence you're not generally represented by Jim Bob, you're represented by oil companies or insurance companies or hedge funds etc..

What is 'representative' democracy in the age of weekly/(daily?) polls that break down your constituents' views on every last issue? The blind leading the blind...

For all his massive faults, I think Trump demonstrated that trying to appease people rather than having a strong point of view is a losing game. I live in a red state, so I've talked to quite a few Trump voters, and the one thing I've noticed is that a lot of them really sharply disagreed with a lot of his policies, but they liked that he didn't back down or equivocate. I'm not saying this with any love for Trump of course, but I think he demonstrated how modern campaigns tend to be pretty badly run.