"Ben Wikler's rise to Democratic stardom has a very Madison backstory."

A nice article in the local paper, The Cap Times.

I especially liked the part about The Yellow Press, which was sometimes edited right here in the house we now call Meadhouse:

[In high school,] Wikler and his friends had founded a satirical publication called The Yellow Press.... The newspaper... dovetailed with the rise of another Madison-area satirical publication, The Onion, where he later worked part-time as a headline writer. But while The Yellow Press included [silly topics] and occasionally rankled an administrator or two — an article titled “Prom Night Is Such a Romantic Night to Get F-----” landed the kids in hot water — the paper included serious subject matters. ...

The paper came out in support of teachers during contract negotiations with the Madison Metropolitan School District and helped launch student activism on the Coca-Cola issue. The Yellow Press also played a part in a successful effort from Wikler and fellow West student Jim Ploesser to add a student representative to the School Board. The paper’s popularity was clear, said Bill Keys, a former English teacher at Madison West, who Wikler has said was a particularly strong influence on his life. “By the time they started handing it out on any one morning, it was gone within a matter of minutes,” Keys said. “People were grabbing it like crazy and reading and laughing like hell. And it was always to make a point in its own way, a (bigger) political point.” 

Always? That's not what I remember, and I'm the one with a box full of old editions of the Yellow Press in my basement, but you can tell by that prom headline, above, that not everything served "a (bigger) political point." (Insert even bigger political point that everything is political.)

Wikler sees the connection between his high school newspaper and America’s modern media ecosystem quite clearly.

Yeah, me too! 

It is worrying, he said, that Americans “get their news about Democrats from Republicans.” Making serious things slightly more humorous might help with that, he added. “I think at every step, finding ways to make the truth more interesting than the lies is a big part of the political project of people who think that the agenda of far-right media and social media platform owners shouldn't dominate how the country thinks about what its government is doing,” Wikler said.

In case you're wondering about the "Coca-Cola issue".... Is Coke another thing that seems political to political people? There was a question whether to have Coca-Cola vending machines in the school buildings.

What galled Wikler about the deal was that the district was effectively banking on students to become rabid soda consumers to hit the School Board’s revenue goal.

“They'd have to sell a Coke to every student in the district every day during the school year, which seemed like the opposite of what the school district should be focused on,” he said.

That is, it was the very food issue RFK Jr. is pressing today.

AND: I'm rereading and pulling apart the layers of the tellingly long sentence Wikler is quoted as saying: "I think at every step, finding ways to make the truth more interesting than the lies is a big part of the political project of people who think that the agenda of far-right media and social media platform owners shouldn't dominate how the country thinks about what its government is doing."

The main point there is that — especially in the present day media mix — people are going to pay attention to what they find most interesting, so if you want to reach them, you've got to be interesting. The other point — slipped in — is that there's someone in this cacophony of voices who's actually trying to tell the truth. But who are these people? They're not "far-right media and social media platform owners," according to Ben, who is enough of a truth teller not to explicitly assert that they're the Democratic Party.

But he is running for chair of the Democratic National Committee.