Years ago, New York City and Chicago declared themselves sanctuaries for illegal migrants. No human being is illegal, went the thinking. But after southern governors sent asylum seekers northward, their arrival in progressive jurisdictions strained public services and city budgets. Soon, with minds newly focused by over $10B in “migrant-related costs,” NYC Mayor Adams and NY Governor Hochul began looking for a way out—either to limit their hospitality or get the feds to carry the burden. In Chicago, Mayor Johnson charged that, by encouraging migrants to seek his city’s hospitality, Governor Abbott of Texas was “attacking our country.” When it came to sanctuary, they didn’t mean it.
Proud of following the science, progressives ridiculed the disinformation that, they thought, fueled opposition to mask and vaccination mandates during the Covid pandemic. It wasn’t always thus. In 2004, their urge to resist disinformation flagged when CBS relied on a fake document to level accusations of draft evasion against George W. Bush. Hollywood took the side of the falsifiers with a movie boldly entitled, Truth. In 2016-17, resistance flagged again when an obviously false report on collusion between presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russia triggered a long saga of investigation and credulous media coverage. After the hoax was revealed to have started as a partisan campaign maneuver, few progressives backtracked. When it comes to combatting disinformation, they don’t mean it.
In Citizens United, the Supreme Court disallowed restraints on corporate campaign spending. Of course, progressives were dismayed. They abhor the role of big money in politics, which only amplifies the voice of the rich. But in recent years, several blue billionaires have received progressive absolution: Mark Zuckerberg spent some $400 million on election operations in 2020, George Soros has amply funded the campaigns of progressive prosecutors, and Sam Bankman-Fried funneled ill-gotten crypto gains to leftist causes. When it comes to money in politics, progressives don’t mean it.
Progressives adamantly oppose voter suppression. It’s racist and it endangers “our democracy.” Hence, they favor voting methods not widely used in other liberal democracies—ballot harvesting, drop boxes, mail-in ballots, extended voting periods, and easing of voter legitimation. In view of their obvious merit, the procedures themselves do not necessarily require actual votes in support. During the Covid pandemic, for example, some progressive-leaning jurisdictions happily circumvented the constitutional requirement of legislative approval by deferring to government officials or judicial edicts in determining voting procedures. Sometimes voting is just superfluous. The Florida Democratic Party set an example by not allowing anyone but Joe Biden to appear on primary ballots. The Colorado Supreme Court is trying to simplify the democratic process further by striking Donald Trump off the ballot. When it comes to voter suppression, progressives consider the preferred outcome.
Progressives view climate change as a catastrophe. Warming will flood small islands, cause extreme weather, and threaten entire ecosystems. Gaia faces a crisis. To solve it we must greatly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. For the moment, however, prominent progressives do not seem paralyzed by worry. Rising sea levels did not stop Barack Obama from buying one mansion near the Massachusetts shore and building another on a Hawaiian beach; presumably, he does not take the long, low-emission sailing route to reach one from the other. Until early 2023, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry used a private Gulfstream jet owned by his wife to get around. Asked about traveling by private jet to receive an environmental reward in Iceland in 2019, Kerry explained, “If you offset your carbon, it’s the only choice for somebody like me, who is traveling the world to win this battle.” Many of the 97,000 official delegates at COP28 in Dubai in 2023 would second the sentiment—not one could be spared in the battle, and meeting via Zoom would have undermined their “actionism.” Thank God for the massive offsets that will compensate for the more than 200K tons of CO2 emissions they incurred. When it comes to the climate crisis, progressives have ways to restrain their anguish.
Progressives have long viewed mass incarceration as a form of oppression. The “carceral state” must be dismantled. But some crimes they gladly see punished. After Derek Chauvin got convicted in state court, the feds piled on for good measure with a separate proceeding and sentence. Progressives lamented the light sentence for Stanford student Brock Turner’s sexual assault conviction. On the other hand, no progressives have protested the long pretrial detentions—in one case lasting over 1,000 days—and sentences imposed on J6 “insurrectionists,” even those without criminal records or physically absent from the Capitol. When it comes to harsh incarceration, progressives—well, it just depends.
In progressive eyes, America suffers from systemic racism. Black and brown people face persistent discrimination. But oddly, progressives have thus far refrained from warning nonwhite migrants about their impending misfortunes. No progressive brigades have mobilized at the southern border to save the poor and huddled masses from the dreadful fate that awaits them. When it comes to systemic racism, it’s almost as if progressives don’t mean it.
Triggered by the bad behavior of movie producer Harvey Weinstein and other celebrities, feminists rallied behind the #MeToo movement. As good progressives, they wanted to cleanse society of toxic masculinity. Even Democratic senator Al Franken experienced their wrath. But the American sense of sisterhood does not cross the ocean. The mass abuse of mostly young white women by immigrant men in Rotherham, England, did not arouse much indignation. Nor did Narges Mohammadi winning the Nobel Peace Prize—“for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all”—cause public celebration. Some progressives were properly outraged at the violent rapes Hamas fighters committed on October 7, 2023, even getting angry at Rep. Jayapal’s “but Israel” shtick. As actress Mayim Bialik noted, her once-vocal Hollywood colleagues, like too many other feminists, stayed mostly mum. When it came to raping Jews, #MeToo turned into #NotMe.
Progressives hate hate speech. It is demeaning. It makes marginalized groups feel unsafe. Some speech is inherently traumatic. It is therefore proper to try and shut down an event that brings a hateful person to a progressive university campus, or to sack Justine Sacco for tweeting a racially tinged AIDS “joke,” or to make Jordan Peterson persona non grata for refusing to follow a law on preferred pronouns. After October 7, however, the safety-first principle did not apply to Jews. In addition to directly harassing Jews in schools and universities, supporters of Hamas and the Palestinian cause defended atrocities committed against Jewish civilians and advocated the forceful “decolonization” of Israel. October 7 was in fact, as Dr. Rania Masri said at UNC, a “beautiful day.” When asked if calls for genocide would violate their policies, prominent university presidents told Congress that it depended on “context.” No safe space for Jews, sorry. When it came to hate speech, those progressive leaders hated some hate a little less.
Progressives, like most people, revile the Holocaust. They made “Nazi” and “fascist” their favorite epithets. Presumably, one reason for the antifascist revulsion was National Socialism’s pretty bad impact on Jews. Never again! Maybe so. But recently, some progressives—a nontrivial number—have turned against the Jews. Online, progressive academics issued threats; in the streets of Philadelphia, others attacked a Jewish baker. As Israel fights to defend itself against Hamas terror, such progressives do not hesitate to accuse the country of committing genocide. It’s just like Nazi Germany, you see. Their favorite slogan now is “from the river to the sea”—the modern version of Juden raus. When it comes to “never again,” what, exactly, do they mean?