RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.: Nashville shooting should’ve opened a dialogue. Clashing ideologies shut it down.

Do you ever feel like you’re consuming too much of something, to the point where it’s doing you harm?

For some people, that something might be alcohol or cigarettes or sugar. For me, it’s news and information. I devour the stuff — especially when there is a tragedy or a crisis. As a journalist, it’s part of my job to stay current. Yet these days, the more information I consume, the less I know, the more confused I get and the more frustrated I become.

After the mass shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, where three children and three adults were killed by an assailant wielding high-powered semiautomatic weapons, including an AR-style rifle, I spent much of the next 36 hours doing two things I probably should not have done. I flipped back and forth between liberal and conservative media sources that seemed to be operating on different planets. And I checked back in with these sources frequently as they refreshed their content.

Warning: If you prefer a world that is clear and unequivocal, without nuance or complexity, I wouldn’t recommend doing either. As they say, ignorance is bliss. Some of the happiest people I know live comfortably siloed in ideological bubbles where they never reach for the remote control to change the channel. All day long, on both the right and the left, these sheeple are spoon-fed information to advance one agenda or another.

Speaking of ignorance, conservative radio host Ben Shapiro will often serve up a good-size helping — especially when commenting on groups that have been marginalized or “othered.” Those are populations that Shapiro, a straight white male, doesn’t understand and cannot relate to.

In the Nashville tragedy, the killer — 28-year-old Audrey Hale — was described by Police Chief John Drake as a female who identified as transgender. Hale sometimes used male pronouns and, according to a LinkedIn profile, preferred the name Aiden.

Meanwhile, what worries Shapiro is that media criticism of Christianity might prompt “vulnerable people” to “do deranged things.”

“When you keep raising the temperature dangerously, this is going to have some predictable side effects,” he told listeners. “The pot is going to bubble over.”

What a stunning lack of self-awareness. Shapiro and other conservative radio hosts have built entire careers by stirring a witch’s brew that tells white people to fear demographic “replacement” by non-whites.

That pot bubbled over in El Paso on Aug. 3, 2019, when a white supremacist killed 23 people and injured 22 others. All but a few of the victims were Mexican or Mexican American. It bubbled over again in Buffalo on May 14, 2022, when another white supremacist killed 10 people and injured three others. Most of the victims were Black.

In covering the shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School, the most difficult part of the story turned out to be how to refer to Hale. And it was not just because the details were slow to come out. It appears to have been because — instead of simply doing journalism and reporting the information — both left-wing media and right-wing media seemed to have other agendas.

It appears that some liberal outlets wanted to come across as politically correct, while some conservative outlets did not want to seem the least bit supportive of transgender individuals. Under normal circumstances, liberals insist that individuals be identified however they choose, while conservatives insist on referring to the gender people were assigned at birth. But in this case, those rules went out the window. The narratives kept shifting back and forth.

I get it. This is relatively new ground, and the subject matter is tricky. The New York Times and CNN both issued corrections after gender activists tore into them for “misgendering” Hale (incorrectly, as a man who identified as a woman) and not using the pronouns Hale used.

Once conservative pundits began to imply that what appears to have been Hale’s transgender status may have been a factor in this horrendous act, the instinct of liberals seems to have been to downplay that aspect of the story to prevent attacks on the transgender community.

What strange times. Before the funeral arrangements were made in Nashville, many Americans were already suited up in their ideological jerseys and making clear what they thought was important to talk about and what was — for everyone else — off limits.

Our country is ailing. What hope do we have of getting better if we can’t even get a decent conversation going?

Ruben Navarrette’s email address is crimscribe@icloud.com. His podcast, “Ruben in the Center,” is available through every podcast app.