SALENA ZITO: In Pursuit of the Normal. Salena Zito is so good at these stories, but she gets snark from Beltway media folks over covering this beat. But if more journalists covered the normal-American community, well . . . they’d be doing actual journalism instead of regurgitating talking points they got off of Twitter.

Meanwhile, from the story:

If those running these institutions wonder why the public has lost faith in them, those three things are a great place to start. When the pandemic began, anyone who questioned the origin story of the coronavirus was marked as a xenophobe and a conspiracist. Everyone seems to ignore that our open borders are contributing to our opioid epidemic. And unless you haven’t filled your gas tank up since January 2021, you’ve noticed that our gas prices, which make everything else more expensive, too, are not Vladimir Putin’s fault.

America’s present need is for normalcy. Log off Twitter for a few minutes, and you may notice that people are turning to each other, their families, and their communities to achieve it — the one place they know they won’t find spending hours of the day scrolling through Twitter.

And that is why they don’t. Do a quick search on Twitter no one tweeted #MountainFest that day — they were too busy living in the moment.

A story by Axios last week, whose main audience is located in Washington D.C., New York, and Silicon Valley, ran a very self-aware, data-rich story last week showing what I see every day in my reporting: Most people in this country are not on Twitter, and most people are friendly, donate time and money, and would help you shovel your snow.

As Mike Allen and Erica Pandey reported, “They are busy, normal and mostly silent.”

Twitter has its uses, but it’s basically an electronic asylum for the mentally dysfunctional crowd that runs our institutions now. Unlike traditional asylums, though, it doesn’t limit their ability to do harm to the sane.

Meanwhile, the silent normals need to be less silent, and I don’t mean by getting on Twitter.