On the progressive website Bluesky, users wished death on Democratic Senator John Fetterman after he voted along with 52 Republicans — and 8 Democrats — to end the government shutdown. In an interview with Katie Couric, Fetterman noted that people on Bluesky often pray for his death or suicide.
Fetterman voted in support of Joe Biden’s agenda 92% of the time, but woke progressives hate him for the 8% of the time he voted against Joe Biden, and for voting with moderates and conservatives to reopen the government. Woke people are so intolerant that if you don’t agree with them 100% of the time, they will try to get rid of you.
Conservatives are much less likely to wish death on Fetterman than progressives are, even though Fetterman’s political stances are mostly progressive, not conservative. Conservatives are better at tolerating disagreement.
As Senator Fetterman explained to Katie Couric:
I asked my digital folks, I said, what’s the harshest [social media website]. And they said, oh, absolutely. It’s Bluesky, Bluesky. It’s been my experience. The right would say mean things and call me names. But…on the other [progressive] side, it’s like, hey, I know I’m rooting for your next stroke or it sucks that depression didn’t win. Or I hope your kids die, you die and all these kinds of things. Is there a difference between just saying mean things versus wishing my death and saying those things?
On Bluesky, many progressives gloated about a CEO’s murder. “The deluge of support I am seeing over there for murdering health insurance executives is depraved and disgusting. Taylor Lorenz is already targeting other CEOs. Lunatics,” noted a prominent economist, Brian Riedl. The New York Post reported that journalist Taylor Lorenz defended “United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s murder” in a “sickening post” on Bluesky.
Bluesky is a social media website that exists largely because progressives fled Twitter — now renamed X — after it became more ideologically balanced.
Last year, the New York Post reported 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.
Being in a place where 47% of the people are Republican is too much for many progressives to tolerate. So many Democrats 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.
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 or moderate Democrats, moderates 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 co-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 often protects speech that attracts a cancel mob).
Even Never Trumpers who consistently endorse Democrats are too moderate for Bluesky users. Tom Nichols is a former Republican who is now a Democrat. Nichols not only endorses Democrats like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in presidential elections, but also supports down-ballot Democrats. Nichols supported progressive Oregon governor Tina Kotek, who defeated a moderate Republican. But Bluesky users blame Nichols for the rise of Donald Trump, even though Nichols has publicly opposed Trump in every election he ran in, merely because Nichols used to be critical of illegal immigration and used to be a moderate Republican. They also falsely accuse him of supporting “Great Replacement Theory,” even though Nichols never imputed a racial motive to open-borders policies:
