Batshit Crazy Progressives

There are several new stories circulating today about Bluesky and all of them describe it as an unpleasant place, including the one written by two Bluesky fans at Slate. We’ll get back to Slate in a moment but first the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle may have kick started this trend at the start of this week when she wrote a column pointing out that Bluesky isn’t doing so well.

New polling data shows what you may already suspect: your experience of losing friends since the 2024 election of Donald Trump is absolutely real – if very divided depending on your political tribe.

When national pollster Cygnal offered me the opportunity to suggest a question or two for their latest national survey, it was a chance to put to the test the experience of many Americans I know: in the past six months, they’ve lost at least one friend over the result of the 2024 election. The direction of lost friends seemed very politically consistent in my experience, but anecdotes aren’t data, and knowing more people on the right than the left, it’s possible this personal experience was skewed.

This Western fixation has produced zany — and harmful — results that would be unthinkable in an ethical system that has stood the test of time.

We need to talk about morality.

One of the most consistent trends in modern “discourse” is activists arguing that Westerners, whites, men, and members of similar large groups have a duty to do objectively insane things — allow the un-vetted mass migration of young men, for example — because “morality requires this.”

Last month, conservative news host Jesse Kelly told Megyn Kelly on her podcast that “the mentally ill single woman is the beating heart of the Democrat Party.”

He proclaimed over 70 percent of single women vote Democrat. Furthermore, he declared that “studies” show approximately 60 percent of those women had been diagnosed with some sort of mental illness.

Kelly (the man) joked that everyone knows a woman with “her eyes half bugged out of her skull. … She ruins Thanksgiving every time bragging about her 15th abortion!” While Kelly’s exaggerations made me laugh, I simultaneously thought to myself, Oh crap. He’s talking about me. Or at least who I used to be. And while I’ve not had 15, or even one abortion — thank the Lord — I have been known to ruin a perfectly fine family event.

The left has tut-tutted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s sending of illegal aliens to sanctuary cities and states to force them to carry the some of the cost burden the border states are carrying.

When I hear the word “books” I think of great literary works like The Last of the Mohicans or the Lord of the Rings trilogy, full of noble heroes who lay down their lives for others, or disturbing exposés like The Real Lincoln or Marx & Satan. I certainly recall haunting dystopian fiction like 1984, and philosophical gems like Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness and Bastiat’s The Law. And, when I think of book bans, I think of the ritualistic bonfires of the far-left Nazi regime, which sought to destroy (in Joseph Goebbels’s own words) the “intellectualism” of men like Ernest Hemingway and women like Helen Keller.

Megan Rapinoe stayed true to form in her final match as a member of the U.S. Women’s National Team.

Rapinoe, the 38-year-old captain of the squad, did not sing the national anthem before Sunday’s match vs. South Africa at Soldier Field in Chicago, Ill.

Naomi Klein is more responsible for Naomi Wolf than she would like to admit.

Naomi Klein, the poster girl of early 2000s anti-capitalism, is pissed off. Not with disaster capitalism this time. Not even with climate change, despite her belief that we’re ‘sleepwalking towards apocalypse’. No, it’s being confused for Naomi Wolf that is getting the goat of the Western world’s best-known critic of globalisation. It’s a little odd that a writer who believes the world is ‘on fire’ should be losing sleep over once hearing two women in a public bathroom in Manhattan mistake her for Ms Wolf, but here we are.

North Carolina progressive activist LaTarndra Strong founded Hate-Free Schools Coalition, “a grassroots alliance of community members and groups working toward racial equity in public schools and communities throughout the nation.”  Strong collaborated with Orange County School Board members to ban Confederate symbols, rename schools, and craft equity policies claiming “to dismantle educational oppression.”  A recent article in The Assembly reports that Strong remains a member of the district equity task force. 

Why is academia so rife with lefties?

College towns are “decimating the GOP,” reported Politico in July, the reason being, in part, that “more college students and more faculty tend to be a recipe for more Democratic votes.”

The college-town blues are a phenomenon with which I’m quite familiar. I live in Philipsburg, an old lumber and coal-mining town about twenty-five miles from State College, home to Pennsylvania State University. Though we’re in the same county, “the mountain” separates us physically, and as for politics… well, at last month’s Rush Township supervisors meeting, an old-timer floated the idea of seceding from Centre County (his main concern being that Centre County requires emissions testing on vehicles, and neighboring red counties don’t). The township solicitor told the man that this concept had been tried some twenty years ago, but it would take an act of the state legislature to change the county boundaries, and “they don’t give a rat’s hindquarter about this part of the world.”

IT’S difficult to believe, but at one time left-wing politics involved serious discussion by serious people about serious topics such as the nationalisation of industry, union rights and working conditions, or the creation of new towns and transport links. Earnest people got into the complexities of big issues. Today woke left-wing politics seems to embody catastrophic reactions to every cause.

The vitriol pouring out of liberal media attacking “Try That in a Small Town” is purer than the purest EverClear and just as toxic.

There’s no cogent argument against the contention “the country is divided.”  Most any subject political, social, even sports-related can ignite a firestorm of four-alarm proportions anywhere, any time, at the drop of an innuendo.