The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

When the ‘Progressive Bubble’ Bursts

Posted on | November 14, 2021 | Comments Off on When the ‘Progressive Bubble’ Bursts

Sarah Beth Burwick is an excellent example of how disillusionment occurs on the Left. Once you start questioning the narrative on some point — any point — you begin to distrust the narrative generally. In Burwick’s case, the breaking point was the “believe the science” COVID-19 nonsense, the narrative promoting eternal lockdowns, vaccine mandates, etc. Burwick is a concerned mother, and locking her kids out of school was the pin that burst what she calls the “progressive bubble.”

In a sense, Burwick is like David Horowitz, a lifelong leftist (indeed, a “red diaper” baby) who became disillusioned in large part because his proximity to the Black Panthers gave him direct knowledge that contradicted the radical myth. The Panthers literally murdered Horowitz’s friend, and got away with it — and this wasn’t the only such case. When a group is celebrated by the Left as the “vanguard of the revolution,” and you know for a fact that they are murderous criminals, this tends to make you question your commitment to the revolution. Such is the thumbnail summary of Horowitz’s disillusionment.

It astonishes me, but perhaps should not, that anyone interested in the Kyle Rittenhouse case wouldn’t have known the identity of the three rioters he shot. Within days of the Kenosha shootings, the basic biographical information was readily available, and blogged here:

Sex Offender Joseph Rosenbaum Taunted
Armed Civilians: ‘Shoot Me, N–r!’
— Aug. 28, 2020

Kenosha: Anthony Huber Was a Felon,
and Jacob Blake Was Dangerous
— Aug. 30, 2020

OK, so if all my blog readers knew the identity of the rioters Rittenhouse shot, how could anyone not know this? Mainly because the kind of “progressive bubble” that surrounds people like Sarah Beth Burwick is so omnipresent. She is Jewish and lives in Montreal, and it may be that not a single person of her direct acquaintance is conservative. In the United States, 71% of Jewish voters in 2016 voted for Hillary Clinton; we may safely say the Jewish community is two-thirds “progressive,” and in Montreal? Urban Canadian Jews? It’s easy to understand that anyone in such a “bubble” wouldn’t even know the rioters in Kenosha were white.

Horowitz has talked about how, for many Jews, devotion to tikkun olam leads to a nearly religious loyalty to leftism, and thus one becomes an apostate — a renegade, a heretic — by abandoning the Left. This sense of political loyalty as the basis of identity makes the “bubble” almost bulletproof in its impenetrability. And it’s a major reason why the Left so habitually employs accusations of “racism” and “white supremacy” against the Right, because this triggers a particular memory cascade among Jews: If Trump is a would-be Hitler and Republicans are crypto-Nazis, then the GOP is an existential menace which every member of the Jewish community has a moral duty to oppose.

So yes, it’s entirely possible that Sarah Beth Burwick never questioned the claim that Kyle Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist,” who aggressively targeted “racial justice protesters.” In fact, of the three people Rittenhouse shot, only Gaige Grosskreutz, a member of a Marxist group, was politically active. JoJo Rosenbaum was a criminal psychotic and Anthony Huber had a domestic violence record.

And all of them were white. Also, while we’re at it, how does “racial justice” justify arson and looting? Doesn’t the fact that Jacob Blake was terrorizing his domestic abuse victim matter? But asking such questions requires us first to be skeptical of the media narrative about what happened in Kenosha, and about the Black Lives Movement more generally, and skepticism isn’t permitted inside the “progressive bubble.”

Once you start questioning the narrative about anything — COVID-19, in Sarah Beth Burwick’s case — it’s like pulling the thread that quickly unravels the entire garment. A complete worldview can be shattered almost overnight, and I know this, because it happened to me, during the first two years of the Clinton administration, when I went from being a “yellow dog Democrat” to being a right-winger in a matter of months.




 

Category: Progressivism

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