Science & Tech Quote by Barney Frank

Frank’s jab lands because it’s less a lament about polarization than an indictment of the media machinery that manufactures it. He sketches “parallel universes” with the bluntness of someone who spent decades watching policy disputes get rerouted into identity warfare. Talk radio and “the Internet” aren’t offered as neutral information streams; they’re portrayed as closed-loop ecosystems that reward certainty, outrage, and tribal belonging. The line “they just reinforce one another” is the tell: Frank isn’t accusing people of being wrong so much as being trained to stay wrong, repeatedly, in communities that treat contradiction as betrayal.

The mischievous pivot is “They have no sense of reality.” Coming from a legislator, it’s a pointed reversal. Politicians are usually the ones accused of spin; Frank redirects the charge to the audience and the megaphones they choose. That’s the subtextual flex: governance requires shared premises, but the attention economy turns premises into branded content.

Then he caps it with a curmudgeonly punchline: “to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.” It’s funny because it’s plausible, and it’s cutting because it admits impotence. A veteran of committee rooms and coalition math is conceding that legitimacy is migrating from deliberation to performance, from hearings to feeds. “Essential” is doing heavy work: tweeting isn’t framed as optional outreach but as a job requirement in a politics where visibility substitutes for persuasion. Frank’s real target is the future tense of politics itself - a system in which the loudest narrative wins, and reality becomes just another partisan platform.