A powerful post of Brianna Wu on X:
RIP Progressivism: 2015-2024
When the history books of the progressive era are written, the Sanders campaign will be the first chapter and the Watermelon Freaks will be the final chapter.
We were a quirky, but well meaning political movement that started as a push for universal healthcare and better treatment for minorities.
The problem was, we never came up with any mechanism to regulate our worst ideas. Slowly over the next decade, they became more and more ridiculous. Abolish the police is a great example. Or when corrupt Black Lives Matter leaders were literally stealing $30 million using the name of George Floyd, we didn’t wanna hear anything about it, let we accused of being racist. If declaring your gender with no medical transition and walking into a women’s locker room seemed absurd, it would avoid a lot of headaches to just be silent about it.
Credible progressive leaders like myself were socialized into saying silent, and like a dementia patient, the movement became more and more untethered from reality.
We became such easy, stupid marks, not just unwilling to fact-check anything, but certain we didn’t even have to debate our ideas with the public. And such, we had no defenses when an actual conman came in to hijack our movement.
Funded by Qatar, Russia, and China, foreign antisemites took legitimate criticism of a war, and turned it into a full on war on Jews at home. They formed an uneasy alliance with Islamists, and promised that self-immolating our own country would be the solution to all of our problems. Hell, we became so brainwashed that actually self immolating was praised in the progressive culture.
A steady stream of social media addicted personalities lined up to uncritically bleat nonstop hate for Jews. And like the block that crashes the whole Jenga tower, the public has had enough. Everyone sane is fleeing for the lifeboats while the true believers play on as the Titanic sinks.
The brain cancer is terminal. The patient cannot be saved. Ideas cannot die, and progressive policy ideas will live on. But they will have to wait for a vehicle capable of intellectual honesty and tactics to deliver them.