It’s Not the Technology

The Left’s Descent into Ideological Radicalism

By the standards of a dispassionate observer, the American political left has undergone a transformation over the past few decades that is as alarming as it is undeniable. Once it was a coalition of pragmatic reformers, undercover communists, labor advocates, and young idealists. This ensemble can be sold as reality to only the most out of touch American. The Democratic Party and its broader ecosystem have drifted into a fever swamp of ideological radicalism, fueled by a toxic brew of conspiracy theorizing, moral panic, and a deliberate cultivation of fear. Gay race communism and rioting replaced liberation of the individual and mass GOTV drives. This is not a phenomenon driven by the machinations of technology. Tech is the current pitch to explain away what lies at the heart of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Social media and digital platforms are mere tools of coordination, amplifying what is already afoot. The root of this radicalization lies in the left’s intellectual and moral decay, a decades-long indulgence in unhinged narratives and unchecked hysteria, encouraged by a party and its media allies who thrive on a perpetually anxious voter base. The consequences of this trajectory are profound and will be with us for years, threatening not only the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects but the broader health of American political life.

To understand this shift, one must first trash the notion that technology is the primary culprit. The internet, for all its flaws, is a neutral instrument. It is a medium that can amplify both reason and madness. It is a tool. All sides in all nations deal with this. The left’s radicalization predates Twitter’s character limit, Reddit threads and Facebook’s algo. It is not the medium but the message that has poisoned the increasingly fragile minds of the left’s base. The left’s embrace of apocalyptic rhetoric and conspiratorial thinking began in earnest during the George W. Bush era, when the Iraq War and the Patriot Act provided fertile ground for narratives of government malevolence. Anti-Trump messaging is insane, but liberals were going to group therapy to shout at W dolls two decades ago. Those old concerns were not without some basis (civil libertarians had points about government overreach), but the left’s response was not to critique with precision but to spiral into fantasies of dystopian cabals. Bush was always poised to cancel elections. The Bush administration was not merely wrong. It was evil. It was a shadowy regime orchestrating global domination. Such hyperbole became mainstream fodder, seeded by activists & academics and abetted by a media eager for viewers, clicks and outrage. This is why the rehabilitation of W is such a joke to those on the right old enough to remember the ‘00s.

This pattern of conspiratorial excess has only intensified. Consider the left’s response to the 2016 election. The unexpected victory of President Trump was not met with sober analysis of Clinton’s electoral missteps or Obama’s policy failures but with a descent into fevered speculation. Forget considering the many protest Bernie voters or the Midwest blue collar crossover vote. The Russia collusion narrative that we now know was hatched by the Obama administration to help Clinton out ballooned into a sprawling epic of treachery, with Trump cast as a Manchurian candidate and every Republican voter a traitor (when not a Nazi). The entire media leaned into this narrative with gusto, not because evidence was overwhelming but because it was intoxicating. It could stymie Trump in office and deliver viewers. It offered a simple explanation for a complex loss and a way to keep voters in a state of perpetual alarm. The Mueller investigation failed to deliver any concrete results let alone a smoking gun, yet the left’s appetite for conspiracy only grew.

This is not to say the right is immune to its own excesses in our age of conspiracy theories, but the left’s radicalization is distinct in its institutional endorsement and the threat of procedural legal power. Muellertime was as grasping as QAnon yet Mueller could throw people in jail. The Democratic Party and its media lackeys have not merely tolerated but actively encouraged a worldview that thrives on fear and division. The party’s rhetoric increasingly frames political opponents not as fellow citizens with differing views but as existential threats. Republicans are not just wrong. They are fascists, white supremacists, wreckers and deserve the consequences of those old opponents of liberalism. This language, once reserved for the most extreme actors, is now applied to your old Grandma or friendly neighbor, flattening nuance and poisoning discourse. It is also a steady drumbeat. When every policy disagreement is a battle against apocalypse (transwomen are being murdered, 10 years to save the climate, etc.) compromise becomes impossible, and radicalism becomes the default.

The left’s reliance on fear as a mobilizing tool is not a new tactic, but its scale and intensity are unprecedented. The climate crisis is a perfect example. Yet the left’s framing often veers into eschatological territory, with predictions of imminent planetary collapse that brook no dissent. We all may die in five years so do you want to kill the planet you sick climate denier? Dissenters, even those who agree on the need for action but question specific government overhauls of every facet of life, are branded as “deniers,” a term borrowed from Holocaust skepticism to maximize moral opprobrium. This is not the language of persuasion but of intimidation, designed to silence rather than engage. It reflects a broader trend. The left’s increasing intolerance for disagreement, even within its own ranks, has made every liberal all in or kicked out. The purity tests that once targeted moderates now ensnare progressives who stray from the current orthodoxy, as seen in the ritual shaming of figures like J.K. Rowling who is a garden variety lib that disagrees on trans ideology.

The media’s role in this radicalization cannot be overstated. Outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times have not merely reported on the left’s anxieties but have amplified and shaped them. The 24-hour news cycle, driven by the need for engagement, thrives on narratives of crisis. Stories of systemic racism, impending nazi/theocratic autocracy, or environmental collapse are not presented as complex challenges but as urgent, all-encompassing threats to viewers the moment they wake up. This is not journalism but voter manipulation, and it has a clear electoral purpose because a scared voter is a loyal voter. The Democratic Party faces a fragmented coalition and eroded trust in institutions it controls. To counter this it has leaned into this dynamic, betting that fear will keep its base energized. The result is a feedback loop where hysteria begets more hysteria, and the line between legitimate concern and conspiratorial fantasy blurs. There is no rest for the consumer of leftist media, and their anxiety and the “need” to act never lessens.

One need only look at the left’s handling of issues like race to see this dynamic at play. The murder of George Floyd in 2020 was a random death in police custody turned into a national crisis. The protests that followed were not a call for justice but anarchy to win an election. The riots stopped the moment polling turned against Biden. The left’s response morphed into something more sweeping and less grounded. The narrative of systemic racism was stretched to explain every disparity, every interaction, every outcome. Defensible critiques of policing gave way to extremist calls to “defund the police,” a slogan so radioactive it later alienated even sympathetic voters. The media, rather than interrogating this shift, amplified it, framing dissent as complicity in oppression. “Silence is compliance.” The result was a policy debate that was less about solutions and more about signaling moral purity. We are living with the consequences of these knee jerk, municipal policy changes that have made our cities less safe, yet it is still impossible to dissent in left wing discourse. The radical left wing ideas from 2020 are now default 2025 liberal beliefs and it is beyond the pale to criticize them. When you log into Reddit or Discord, that is a requirement to stay in the crowd.

This radicalism is not without cost. This is the ideological environment any American navigates on any media platform. It informs the left for how to think and what to feel. This is the stew that impressionably young or mentally imbalanced individuals sit in as they scroll or tool around online. It’s not Discord or Reddit that makes people radical mass shooters or snipers. It’s that the entire left pushes each other more and more radical in nature and belief and glorifies their terrorists. Obama pardoned Puerto Rican bombers! Luigi has been glorified for almost a year now in meme and mural. The entire party and our mass media spends every single day saying Trump is abnormal and not right. This is an unrelenting stream of incitement aimed at the nation. We should not be surprised a random shooter pops up here or there. It is a miracle there are not hundreds of them.

This will be a battle because the Democratic Party will not rediscover the virtues of pragmatism and persuasion. The radical base is too widespread. Tumblr and academia did the hard work in the ‘10s planting seeds and connecting oddballs. The left will not reject the temptation to demonize opponents and will not engage in debates grounded in reason, not fear. They nominated a woman to the Supreme Court who could not define a woman. We must realize the hard truth that the Democrats’ current path (hysteria and ideological extremism) leads nowhere good. The American left stands at a crossroads. The leadership cadre can rework their entire message, lance the woke boil and tone down their propaganda team or they can see the other side radicalize in response to the left’s band of psychos like we saw last week. The choice is theirs, but even if they can rein in their wild dogs, we will all suffer for it getting this far.