Do you Bluesky? If you are a COMMENTARY reader, the odds that you’re also a user of the alternative social-media site are slim. Bluesky began as an experimental side project at Twitter and was then spun off when Elon Musk bought the larger company in 2022. Operating on an invitation-only basis, Bluesky attracted artists, minorities, and (in Wikipedia’s summary) “left-wing, transgender, sex worker, and furry communities.” When Bluesky opened to the wider public in 2023, more left-leaning users flooded in, many of them hoping to escape the increased visibility of conservative views on Musk’s now laissez-faire platform redubbed “X.” Donald Trump’s election in November 2024 sparked another surge in migration as prominent liberals abandoned the site that omnicause activist George Monbiot calls “an incubator for fascism.”
It might seem crazy that so many left-wing thought leaders—and even entire media brands, such as the Guardian—would walk away from huge followings on X in exchange for a relatively tiny audience of like-minded souls on Bluesky. (The site’s total user base is well under a tenth of X’s global following.) But the move made sense as an expression of the left’s growing hypersensitivity to ideas leftists find offensive. Having emerged from the intersectional hothouses of academia, many progressives today view policy disputes through a therapeutic lens: They see themselves—and the marginalized groups they claim to speak for—as victims of trauma. The solution to that trauma is not rigorous debate. Quite the opposite; they need protection. Exposure to dangerous speech could threaten their mental stability. So progressives now treat opposing ideas not as errors that need to be rebutted with facts, but as dangerous contagions that must be quarantined.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Commentary
______________________
James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor.
Photo Illustration by Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images