I suspect they’re wildly overrepresented in the items that Twitter pushes onto my screen, but Rhode Island progressives are really something to behold in their reaction to Democrat Governor Dan McKee’s belated and overly hesitant removal of statewide mask mandates.

As I suggested earlier, for many of the recognizable personalities, their rhetoric is probably wholly political and ideological.  They’ve got a primary to win, so whenever possible, they have to paint everything the more-moderate incumbent does as wildly wrong and dangerous.  (To younger generations, this style of politics is relatively new, largely amplified by social media, and it’s making it impossible for anybody actually to govern reasonably.)

Still, they’d get no traction and back off if they didn’t think their primary voters were susceptible to their fear mongering.

Turn now to a series of tweets in which conservative Canadian media figure Ezra Levant predicts how “this trucker rebellion is going to end.”  I’m not sure about Levant’s conclusion, but the series is worth sorting through for a related reason.  Number 9 is the paragraph that really brought it home.  Here’s the text:

That video [of police arresting a tiny old man] is bad enough. But imagine going truck by truck, extracting men, women and children? Here’s a vid from the Coutts border crossing. What’s Trudeau going to do — shoot them? Policing doesn’t work when the bulk of citizens don’t consent.

The video is the key part, though.  It’s not of truckers, but of what looks to be hundreds of people blocking a road by riding horses down it!  The next video is of a bridge that carries 25% of U.S.-Canadian trade completely filled with stationary trucks.

Did you know this was happening?  It’s pretty likely that you did, oh Anchor Rising reader, but do you know because you get your information from mainstream, much less progressive, sources?  Do you think the progressives’ core audience knows the extent of it?  Probably not.

You can bet, though, that the people in public office making high-stakes political decisions are discussing it.  You can also bet that they’re terrified that Canada’s rebellion will light the combustible tinder of American politics.  Distractions like making Joe Rogan bend the knee might forestall things for a few news cycles, but then, they might whipsaw, combine with the trucker story, and add fuel to the fire.

They know this.  And so, they have to begin letting some of pressure out of the fuel tank before it explodes, and easing ridiculous, performative mask mandates as COVID cases evaporate is an easy way to do that.

The lesson of the bubble is an important one to catch, though.  The ruling party and its allies in the mainstream media control people’s understanding of reality so as to make their preferred policies more palatable, but when narrative control is central, rather than tangential — when public relations becomes the core function of government rather than a poorly lit office down the hall — natural incentives will lead to fiction stretching across an unacceptable reality.  As that reality builds on itself, the fiction becomes a bubble.

People who haven’t been given an accurate picture of current events can’t factor everything into their subconscious calculations.  If the trucker rebellion over the northern border can be written off as a temporary lashing out by ignorant people like your anti-mask-mandate neighbors in the Ocean State (as local progressives see us), then mask mandates might make sense (if you believe they have a positive effect).

If, however, we’re on the verge of a collapse of the North American economy that is likely to throw state and federal governments firmly in the hands of the MAGA people, progressives will only be clutching their mask mandates as they sink to the bottom of the political sea, having lost everything.

The dangerous part is when they realize that they are about to lose everything.  The progressives are more likely to call for government violence and fixing elections than to acknowledge error.  The question is how ideologically intoxicated the Democrat Party in the Ocean State has become.

Featured image by Mick DePaola on Unsplash.