Why Planet Left Is a Parallel Universe

As an acquaintance pointed out recently, when the left babble about a ‘right-wing echo-chamber’, they’re really screeching into their own little mirrors like so many demented parakeets. Not only have multiple studies shown that right-wingers are far more likely to engage with opposing viewpoints, while left-wingers – women especially – are the worst at blocking out contrary opinions, both online and in real life. Sure, there are tiny enclaves almost entirely populated by right-wingers, such as Gab. But Gab gets half the traffic in a month that demented far-left echo chamber Bluesky gets in a day.

When nearly the entirety of the media, entertainment companies, social media and academia are owned and/or curated by the very left-wingers we know are relentlessly censorious, then right-wingers have almost no choice but to be incessantly exposed to left-wing narratives and talking-points. The right knows exactly what the left thinks, because it’s blared through a foghorn at them every day.

The reverse simply doesn’t happen. The left have no idea what the right are really thinking. Left-wingers openly brag that they never watch or read even normiecon media like Fox News or the ‘Murdoch press’. Even a single platform, X, relaxing its pro-left censorship was met with howls of outrage from the left. When the left purport to attack ‘right wing’ ideas, they’re simply howling at straw-men. These people not only don’t know what the other side is saying – they don’t want to know. They want to be profoundly ignorant.

This utter, self-inflicted ignorance of the left explains why debating them rationally is a near-impossibility. They live on a completely alien mental planet to reality. Case in point, this demented Jeremiad from Irish author Sally Rooney.

Last week in Amsterdam at the People’s Congress for the Hague Group – a coalition of nations committed to hauling Israel before the International Criminal Court – Rooney said something extraordinary. Not for its politics, which are entirely predictable, but for what it revealed about the psychological universe she inhabits.

She told the assembled faithful that standing with Palestine was “the honour of our lives”. That it gives us “a reason to go on”. That it helps us “fend off despair” and “live with ourselves”. And, even more staggeringly, that “by standing in solidarity with Palestine, we are learning how to fight for life on Earth”. For Rooney, her activism is her calling. The church may have loosened its grip on Ireland but the spiritual architecture remains.

Rooney has in fact subsumed Ireland’s previous religiously fanatical ignorance (it was just over a century ago that the Irish regularly scored as low on IQ tests as blacks or Arabs do, today) into a modern religiously fanatical ignorance. The one constant is the vicious anti-Semitism.

Of course the cause itself is not just a cause but an omni-cause: that remarkable ideological ecosystem in which Palestine is not merely about Palestine but the gravitational centre around which every progressive concern orbits. Climate catastrophe, corporate finance, big tech, militarism: Rooney linked them all to Gaza […]

This is the omni-cause in full bloom. A world view so totalising that a single political allegiance becomes the key to unlocking every door, solving every crisis, defeating every villain.

It’s also an astonishing testament to not just the religiously fanatical ignorance of the left, but their astonishing arrogance. Like the glass-jawed Muslims they so adore, the left are the world’s greatest cry-bullies. No matter how awfully they behave, how much they viciously bully, persecute, oppress and terrorise others, they have the unmitigated gall to cry that they’re the ‘victims’.

She told her audience not to dwell on what they “stand to lose” by speaking out. “What else,” she asked, “can make our lives endurable in times as dark as these? What else can give us a reason to go on …?” Read that again. Palestine solidarity is what makes her life endurable. It’s what gives her a reason to go on. There’s a relevant clinical concept worth noting here: vulnerable narcissism.

This condition presents as embattled, oppressed and perpetually misunderstood. In their mind, they are the unacknowledged hero, the brave dissenter, the one willing to pay the price that others are too cowardly to pay […] “We may end up out of favour with the media,” she warned.

This all reads like a dispatch from an alternative universe. One where the ‘pro-Palestine’ narrative isn’t near-universally, fanatically, adopted by every institution from academia to the media.

In this world – the real one – there has never been a better time to be a pro-Palestinian activist in the arts. Publishers court them; festivals platform them, lest they face enormous backlash; literary prizes and biennales seek them out. The cultural establishment does not merely tolerate pro-Palestinian voices: it amplifies them, celebrates them and lavishes them with institutional warmth because they are of the moment. And there is nothing the cultural establishment fears more than being caught on the wrong side of it.

What Rooney is in fact describing is the world she and her vile cronies have created for Jewish people. They have, in fact, become the very ‘Nazis’ they incessantly scream that everyone else is – Jews more than anyone else.

Meanwhile, it has rarely been a worse time to be an openly proud Jew in the arts or publishing. The reprisals Rooney fears are imagined to aid her cause; the reprisals that flow in the other direction are not. Ask Thomas Friedman, uninvited from Adelaide Writers Week after a petition led in part by Randa Abdel-Fattah. Ask Elisa Albert, dropped from a New York literary panel by two authors who refused to share a stage with a self-described Zionist. Ask Joanna Chen, whose essay on coexistence was retracted by the magazine Guernica on the grounds it constituted “an apologia for Zionism”. There is even a crowdsourced blacklist, Zion­ists in Publishing, that targets authors for pro-Israel affiliations.

Not to mention the sinister ‘Jew List’ proudly spewed far and wide by a grotesque cabal of demented leftists infected the arts luvvy echo-chamber in Australia.

None of this is surprising. It is the system working exactly as designed: the literary festival functioning not really as a festival for ideas and creativity but as a moral community with its own catech­ism, its rituals of belonging and its largely unexamined orthodoxies presided over by people who believe, with complete sincerity, that they are the suffering saints.

A left-wing echo-chamber, in so many words.