Yesterday, I described the now-overwhelming body of evidence that the Left, and not the Right, radicalized. Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Political Psychology Lab found that the Left had grown over ten times more extreme than the Right on core issues from 1988 to 2024. That data is backed up by Gallup and Pew data showing a similarly dramatic asymmetric shift on the issues. I noted that the people who radicalized were the college-educated, with postgraduates swinging left after 2010, while every less-educated bloc in America drifted right.
And yet many and often most progressives cling to clearly false beliefs. They believe Anthony Fauci is a hero of science despite overwhelming evidence that Fauci promoted destructive school closures and universal vaccination against the best scientific evidence. Progressives believe ICE is as bad as the Gestapo, or nearly so, a comparison that Democratic lawmakers made repeatedly. They believe police kill unarmed black men by the hundreds or thousands every year out of racial bias, even though the Harvard economist Roland Fryer first found no racial difference in police shootings a decade ago, and newer benchmarking against crime rates and a 2023 review of more recent data have come to the same conclusion. The Left still believes Trump and Republicans are fascists and came within hours of overthrowing the government on January 6. Progressives believe climate change threatens life on Earth. They support “gender affirming” surgeries on adolescents, even though a 2024 study of more than 90 million patient records found that adults who underwent such surgery attempted suicide at 12 times the rate of other emergency room patients and at nearly five times the rate of matched patients who had undergone tubal ligations or vasectomies.