Progressives are fleeing the social media platform Twitter for a progressive-leaning social media platform, Bluesky. They are doing that in response to Twitter becoming more ideologically balanced, and Twitter making it harder to block or avoid users with opposing viewpoints. Many progressives don’t like being exposed to conservative or centrist views. They can’t stand criticism of progressive policies or politicians, even from someone who shares some of their views.
Twitter is fairly balanced politically. The New York Post reports that Twitter’s “userbase is a nearly even split between 48% of Democrat users and 47% of Republican users, according to the data. In 2022, a 65% majority of the platform’s users had identified as Democrats.” These figures come from a survey by the Pew Research Center.
Many Democrats have recently left Twitter for Bluesky. Over at Bluesky, progressives block users who criticize Democratic politicians, even when the user shares their antipathy to Donald Trump. And they block some centrist and conservative users from seeing or responding to their posts.
For example, they block Jonathan Adler, an outspoken anti-Trump law professor who criticizes Joe Biden as well as Donald Trump for unethical behavior. When Professor Adler criticized Joe Biden for pardoning his son Hunter, he was ridiculed by progressives such as Will Wilkinson, and progressives responded by blocking Professor Adler from seeing or responding to their Bluesky posts.
For example, the progressive filmmaker Joe Gannon wrote “blocked…what a tool” after seeing Professor Adler’s criticism of the Hunter Biden pardon and Will Wilkinson’s ridicule of Adler.
Wilkinson used to work at the libertarian Cato Institute, before he evolved leftward into a progressive the way many Beltway laptop libertarians do, during and after working at the Cato Institute (a Cato Institute adjunct scholar, Jacob Levy, backed Joe Biden’s multi-trillion dollar Build Back Better spending plan). From 2004 to 2010, Wilkinson was a research fellow at the Cato Institute, where he was managing editor of Cato Unbound, a monthly web magazine. Today, Wilkinson views both the Democrats and the Republicans as being too right-wing, judging from his social-media posts. In January 2021, Wilkinson was forced to leave his job at a center-left think-tank after tweeting, “If Biden really wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence.”
Wilkinson’s ridicule of Professor Adler was reposted by Julian Sanchez, a progressive-leaning long-time Cato Institute employee and self-described “libertarian,” who thinks that children should not be taught about the evils of communism (he views that as indoctrination, even though communist regimes killed 100 million people), but should be taught about America being racist. Julian Sanchez approvingly reposts the malicious, race-baiting man-basher Amanda Marcotte, who peddled the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax long after it was debunked. On May 15, Sanchez reposted Marcotte’s false claim that “critical race theory” is not “real,” but rather is a right-wing fantasy. On April 17, Sanchez opposed a mandate to teach kids about the evilness of communism, which resulted in one hundred million deaths in the 20th Century, writing that such a “mandate is counterproductive” and it is wrong “to spoonfeed them that conclusion” that communism is bad. Sanchez is a huge fan of the left-wing Amanda Marcotte, who is known as the “David Duke of feminism,” and he has reposted countless intemperate and inaccurate social media posts by Marcotte.
Bluesky users sometimes claim that a person they blocked is a “fascist” or “reactionary,” when the blocked individual is not even conservative. The people they block are often centrists, centrists that leftists on Bluesky disparage as being part of the “center white-wing” or the “reactionary center.” Or they block people like Professor Adler, who is socially liberal in many ways, and founded the anti-Trump group Checks and Balances in 2018.
Before moving from Twitter to Bluesky, Will Wilkinson would troll Greg Lukianoff, a free-speech advocate and head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, on Twitter. Wilkinson depicted Lukianoff as a right-wing grifter for criticizing campus censorship and cancel culture, even though Lukianoff was a registered Democrat who could have made more money working as a lawyer in private practice than as civil libertarian. Wilkinson trolled Lukianoff when Lukianoff was suffering from cancer of the jaw, claiming that cancel culture was not real, and that people fired from their jobs for their speech deserved what they got (even though the First Amendment protects speech that attracts a cancel mob).
Contrary to the suggestions by Sanchez and Marcotte that critical race theory is not “real,” it is a staple of progressive education schools. One of the most frequently read books in education school is Gloria Ladson-Billings’ book “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education, which has been cited thousands of times in published works by education school professors (it has 11,237 citations, according to Google). Critical race theory is also taught in some K-12 school systems. Reason Magazine reported that “Hispanic students” in Salinas, California, “were forced to learn critical race theory. They hated it.”
The Salinas school district is far from alone in teaching critical race theory. Detroit’s school superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, observed that critical race theory is deeply embedded in his school system: “Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially in social studies, but you’ll find it in English language arts and the other disciplines. We were very intentional about…embedding critical race theory within our curriculum.”
Twenty percent of urban school teachers report having discussed or taught critical race theory with K-12 students, as have 8 percent of teachers nationally, according to an Education Week survey.
“Unequivocally, critical race theory is taught in K-12 public schools,” said the Heritage Foundation’s Jonathan Butcher, who wrote a research paper detailing numerous instances of school districts openly using the phrase “critical race theory” in curriculum plans.
Students should be taught about the evil of communism, contrary to what people like Julian Sanchez believe. Communist regimes killed 100 million innocent people. As a U.S. president pointed out, the victims of communism
include innocent Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin’s Great Famine or Russians killed in Stalin’s purges; Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians loaded on cattle cars and deported to Arctic death camps of Soviet communism.
They include Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Cambodians slain in Pol Pot’s Killing Fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest and Ethiopians slaughtered in the “Red Terror”; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua’s Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny.
Up to 50 million people died in the famine and atrocities of communist China’s Great Leap Forward. It
ruined peasant life at its most basic level…Villagers were unable to secure enough food to go on living because they were deprived by the commune system of their traditional means of being able to rent, sell, or use their land as collateral for loans. In one village, once the commune was operational the Party boss and his colleagues “swung into manic action, herding villagers into the fields to sleep and to work intolerable hours, and forcing them to walk, starving, to distant additional projects”…. Failure to participate in the CCP’s political campaigns—though the aims of such campaigns were often conflicting—”could result in detention, torture, death, and the suffering of entire families”. Public criticism sessions were often used to intimidate the peasants into obeying local officials; they increased the death rate of the famine in several ways…“In the first case, blows to the body caused internal injuries that, in combination with physical emaciation and acute hunger, could induce death.”… beatings with sticks was the most common method used by local cadres and roughly half of all cadres regularly pummeled or caned people. Other cadres devised harsher means to humiliate and torture those who failed to keep up. As mass starvation set in, ever greater violence had to be inflicted in order to coerce malnourished people to labor in the fields. Victims were buried alive, thrown bound into ponds, stripped naked and forced to labor in the middle of winter, doused in boiling water, forced to ingest excrement and urine, and subjected to mutilation (hair ripped out, noses and ears lopped off)…Around 6 to 8% of those who died during the Great Leap Forward were tortured to death or summarily killed…communist officials sometimes tortured and killed those accused of failing to meet their grain quota.
