The Impenetrable Liberal Bubble

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, February 08, 2024

 

After Nikki Haley appeared on Saturday Night Live to mock Donald Trump last weekend, you would think Trump would be the most aggrieved party. But instead, it appears Haley’s cameo put SNL cast member Bowen Yang in the front seat of the struggle bus.

 

Following the show, Yang took to Instagram, lobbing a shot at Haley in a post where he suggested that he, for one, didn’t “welcome” her to the show. He has since deleted it.

 

Haley’s sin, of course, is that she entered the inner sanctum of progressivism, a network show that only recently ran a sketch in which it portrayed members of Congress as bad people for questioning university presidents about antisemitism on their campuses. This is a show that allows cast members to lecture its audience on transgenderism and abortion and permits cast members to sing songs bemoaning the end of Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s political careers.

 

But no, Haley’s mere presence was enough to send liberal viewers to their fainting couches.

 

It has been a rough few weeks for Yang. Two episodes ago, comedian Dave Chappelle appeared on the show’s stage during the end credits, and Yang was spotted keeping his distance while looking displeased. Of course, Chappelle is loathed by many on the left for telling “transphobic” jokes, a reaction that tells us much less about Chappelle than about his hypersensitive critics.

 

But these incidents are mere appetizers for what is bound to happen in a couple of weeks when the show welcomes comedian Shane Gillis to host. Gillis was famously hired to be an SNL cast member the same year as Yang; but audio clips emerged of Gillis telling jokes that mock both gays and Asians (Yang is both), and he got the boot before the season even began.

 

Since then, Gillis has worked his way back into good standing with the right side of the general public, releasing a number of edgy comedy specials expressing admiration for Donald Trump. Gillis claims he isn’t “conservative,” but by SNL standards, he might as well be Barry Goldwater.

 

And that is enough to send armies of progressives out to slam the show. One “comedy writer” at Paste magazine suggested that Lorne Michaels, who has guided SNL for nearly 50 years, is “unfit . . . to run a major network show in 2024.”

 

This is all, of course, the by-product of progressives’ inability to accept anyone from the right into their tightly sealed liberal utopia. The left-wing body politic cannot produce the antibodies necessary to cope with a dissenting position, so it forcefully rejects it as a warning to anyone else who might try to encroach on its pristine realm.

 

Naturally, individual television shows and other media platforms and outlets can decide what ideology they want to promote. But here’s the problem: Lefties run nearly everything, from broadcast TV networks to movie studios to newspapers to universities. It is the near blanket disapproval of conservatism in these precincts that caused those on the ideological right to create their own spaces on AM radio and in cable news and in magazines like National Review.

 

But once conservatives did so, lefties peered down their long noses at righties, accusing them of “living in a bubble.” Which may be true, but the right-wing bubble isn’t nearly as impenetrable as the one on the left. And while each side may have information silos, it’s the Left’s silo that encompasses major media conglomerates — producers of the lion’s share of what we see, hear, and read — and nearly the entire U.S. education system.

 

This is why some progressives throw a ridiculous tantrum every time one of their hallowed safe spaces lets in the smallest pinhole of conservative light. Take the reaction this week when the New York Times ran a balanced feature about people who have come to regret their gender transitions. Any time the paper concedes that there is actually a controversy surrounding transgender surgeries and other interventions for minors, it is attacked for “lying” and “contributing to a “climate of violence” against trans people.

 

In fact, the Times is overflowing with examples of its readership turning against the paper. Remember when it ran an op-ed from a University of Virginia student, Emma Camp, in which she said she was afraid to express her true positions in her classes? She was immediately attacked by a slew of academics, apparently unaware they were bolstering her point. The most risible critique was offered by the irony-immune Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose Times-hosted 1619 Project required a number of credibility-destroying corrections after its publication (and which has been debunked by historians left, right, and center). Hannah-Jones said she thought Camp’s story was “particularly thin.” If anyone knows what a “particularly thin” story looks like, it is Nikole Hannah-Jones.

 

And recall the histrionic bleating from academics when the Times and other papers started to take seriously the accusations from conservatives that Harvard president Claudine Gay had plagiarized much of her academic work. Or when Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed encouraging the use of the military to quell urban unrest sent the Times’ newsroom into open revolt, with a group of reporters saying Cotton’s piece “puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger.” Or the struggle sessions that ensued when CNN and Politico hired conservative legal commentator Sarah Isgur.

 

Admittedly, the right is similarly defensive of its own turf. That includes the football field, which some right-wingers view as having been invaded by Taylor Swift as some sort of agent of a Democratic master plan.

 

But it is the Left that owns the patent on performative grievance over being exposed to the other side. It is thus the case that we should have exactly zero sympathy for any of the malignant whiners who bleat about passing encounters with conservatism in their ideological preserves.

 

After all, this is how people on the right have to live their whole lives! We have learned to skillfully set aside politics to enjoy popular culture, whether we are watching an actor who we know probably loathes us or a musician who gets undue attention for advocating a cause we abhor.

 

We would all be better off if the Left showed a similar level of magnanimity when the Right shows up as a houseguest. The kind of understanding Democrats used to have, such as when Sarah Palin appeared on SNL in 2008 and was briefly praised by progressives for being able to laugh at herself. The New York Times even gave her a rave review, calling her “remarkable” and “delightful.” (The episode also happened to grab the show’s highest rating in 14 years.)

 

Notably, her appearance didn’t put anyone’s lives in danger.

 

But it is a new time, when theatrical disapproval is the coin of the realm. In 2024, hell hath no fury like progressives exposed to conservatism on their home turf.