Liberals: Stop Retreating From The Mainstream

Photo (cropped) by abdullah ali on Unsplash

[I wrote this before the Jimmy Kimmel news, but following Kimmel’s canceling it’s more important than ever, in the face of fascist, government mandated censorship, to be relentlessly vocal and loud everywhere you can.]

This may be an unpopular opinion among the Bluesky Puritan left, but I think liberals need to get off their high horse and return to Twitter. If you think X is a cesspool of Nazis, incels, and the kind of idiots who think Elon Musk and Donald Trump are 4-dimensional chess geniuses, you’re just letting these people dig deeper into their delusional rabbit holes with no pushback at all from rational, sensible liberals like you.

I’m not saying you have to spend hours every day arguing with anonymous accounts there, or even interact with anyone. It’s just that purely from a persuasion standpoint, as the social media environment is fracturing into multiple separate ecosystems, people are self-defeatingly limiting their reach and butterfly effect change in the world by announcing that they’re too morally pure to participate. It can actually be really easy. I merely keep open a bunch of browser tabs for Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, Spoutible, Facebook, and Substack Notes, and, when I want to post something, I go down the line copying & pasting it into posts on each platform. It takes about 30 seconds to blast my thought or joke to all…