Even Mark Cuban is Sick of Bluesky’s “Everyone Is Hitler But Me” Vibe

Would progressives rather emote or persuade?

“Hello, less hateful world.”

That’s how Mark Cuban announced his arrival on Bluesky back in November. Many others viewed the self-styled anti-Elon, anti-X social media platform the same way. Since the presidential election, millions fled X, and Bluesky has swelled from about 10 million to 30 million users.

Like Cuban, many sought refuge from Musk and MAGA. They sought a nicer version of X. They sought a place free from hatred and intolerance.

Yet now, just seven months later, Cuban sees things differently.

In a recent series of posts, the billionaire ripped Bluesky for its hatred and intolerance. He now regards the platform as a left-wing echo chamber that’s repelling users, and driving them back into the arms of Musk:

“Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist,” Cuban wrote. “We are forcing posts to X.”

The former Shark Tank star and Dallas Mavericks owner also said he thinks Bluesky users have “grown ruder and more hateful.”

“Even if you agree with 95% of what a person is saying on a topic, if there is one point that you might call out as being more of a gray area, they will call you a fascist etc.,” said Cuban [...]

Other famous lefties have reported similar problems. For instance, Bluesky users throttled director Rob Reiner for saying that progressives should accept that Donald Trump won the election.

And how might someone with a more libertarian orientation fare on the “less hateful” platform?

Consider the experience of Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle:

First impression:

1) I am possibly the most conservative person on the site, and I voted for Harris.

2) Group dynamics make it hard to voice dissent. (I got blocked by someone for noting that in 2019, just under 3,000 females were victims of homicide, which means the overwhelming majority of women are, thankfully, at low risk of being killed by a man in their life.)

3) Founder effects mean this dynamic will be hard to change. The libertarians I see there mostly seem to be posting on issues where they agree with progressives, not ones where they disagree. Progressives who point out that, say, it's actually really hard to denaturalize a citizen and this is probably not a big risk, even under Trump, are getting dragged.

4) I'm not sure there's Twitter-level demand for a conversation that is restricted to agreeing with the leftmost 7% of the electorate.

Ah, those Seven Percenters!

Regular readers know that I’m always moaning about the Eight Percenters.

Here I refer to the essential report Hidden Tribes, published by the British research organization More in Common. According to the report, the left-right, Dem-Republican divide obscures what’s really going on in America.

Instead of focusing on two political parties, the report’s authors separate America into seven different political “tribes.” On consequential issues such as free speech and affirmative action, roughly 92 percent of us actually share a lot of common ground. But there is one tribe that breaks with the rest, the Progressive Activists (a.k.a. the Eight Percenters).

This is the leftmost tribe. Its members are very likely to be active online and posting about politics. Although small in number, its members dominate our most powerful institutions including entertainment, academia, and the legacy media. I prefer the term “Eight Percenters” to “Progressive Activists” because my term serves as a reminder of how small this tribe is. The tribe might seem to represent most of the nation, but only eight percent of America agrees with its worldview.

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The Choice

The Eight Percenters who dominate Bluesky and other lefty monocultures face an important choice: emote or win?

If they choose to emote, the upside is clear. They get to enjoy the catharsis of raging against those who fail their purity tests. They must really enjoy screaming “Nazi” at those who don’t agree with them 100% of the time. That rush must be hard to quit.

But if they continue with the “everyone is Hitler but me” approach, they shouldn’t be surprised if their small but powerful tribe shrinks in number and influence.

Since the presidential election, Team Blue has spent countless hours and many millions of dollars trying to figure out how they got shellacked by the Orange Hitler. Maybe the reason is simple: Nazis vote for Nazis!

If they really believe that, Eight Percenters should start to make good on their post-election promise to flee America.

But Eight Percenters didn’t need to hire an army of consultants. They didn’t need to head off to retreats or produce multi-million-dollar reports that focus-group every aspect of the 2024 election in excruciating detail.

All they had to do was listen to the words of a teenager named Lucy.

Lucy Kross Wallace from The Coddling of the American Mind movie

Wisdom from a Teenager

Lucy was once like the Eight Percenters.

She fell into social justice activism. Her top issue was ableism. She’s autistic and remained convinced society was systemically bigoted against disabled people like her. As a Stanford undergrad, her campus environment reinforced her view of herself as a victim of a bigoted society.

Ideological Conformity at Stanford

Like so many Eight Percenters, Lucy grew obsessed with policing the speech of others. She interpreted nearly every interaction, however benign, as more evidence that the world hated her. If you uttered the phrase “person with autism,” she would assume you wanted her dead.

Here’s how she explained it in my film The Coddling of the American Mind:

If someone used the phrase “person with autism,” my brain would immediately go to “they think that autism can be separated from the person. That means that they want autism to be separated from the person which means that they want autism to be cured, which means that they want people with autism not to exist, and that is eugenics which amounts to genocide.”

So just three words—person with autism—and I would immediately be thinking about genocide. That is not healthy.

Lucy fell into misery and despair. But even as she suffered, Lucy benefitted from certain factors that would eventually help her escape the darkness.

She had a trusted friend who exposed her to new perspectives, including those provided by

Andrew Doyle

,

Glenn Loury

, and John McWhorter. She also came from a family that valued debate, real debate — the kind where you win when you provide the best argument, not the quickest reference to Hitler.

And she remembered that winning requires persuasion.

“You know, it's funny,” she says with a wry grin, “in my experience, people don't respond super well to being told that they're bigoted monsters. In fact, it almost seems like it makes them less likely to listen to what you have to say.”

Lucy experienced this realization when she was 19. Meanwhile, the decades-older Eight Percenters running campaigns and posting on Bluesky remain baffled as to why the people they routinely slur as racist, sexist, transphobic, Hitler clones aren’t wild about their worldview.

It Wasn’t Always Like This

The funny thing is progressives used to be masters of persuasion.

Consider Hollywood.

Those who make movies and shows have long demonstrated the capacity to connect with people who disagree with them. The moving picture is probably humanity’s most persuasive invention, and creators used it to win over America on issues ranging from cannabis to gay marriage.

Progressives have long known how to make their worldview seem inviting to others. But then woke happened.

And it’s not just that they’ve forgotten the most basic rules of persuasion. Today so many Eight Percenters seem untethered from reality. Why do progressives think they have a shot of attracting young males who listen to Joe Rogan when they can’t even stop repelling committed lefties like Mark Cuban?

I wonder how things will shake out.

Maybe in a couple years I’ll stop complaining about Eight Percenters because I’ll be referring to members of that tribe as Three Percenters.