No doubt liberals wouldn't believe it, but the reality is that conservatives--or people who liberals believe are conservatives because we think differently than they do--have a rather large range of opinions. I fear that as the culture polarizes, this tendency will be diminished, but as of now, the United States seems to be divided between a liberal monoculture and a conservative diversity of opinions.
No doubt there are many reasons for this--liberals more often look to each other for virtue signals, are less individualistic and admire self-reliance less, but a substantial fraction of the difference has to be the size of the "bubbles" in which we live. Due to liberals' dominance in the culture-producing realm, they can easily avoid being exposed to ideas that challenge the prevailing Narrative.
That’s because because diversity of thought typically requires thought pic.twitter.com/8ZKcI8dfqI
— Joel Berry (@JoelWBerry) June 12, 2025
Conservatives, on the other hand, naturally have a more diverse group of information sources--we can't avoid what liberals say, because they dominate education, academia, news outlets, music, writing, movies, and television. Liberal ideas are inescapable; conservative ideas, to the extent they penetrate liberal bubbles, exist to be debunked and "fact-checked."
Even when liberals fail too massively for anybody to ignore, the story is Republicans "pouncing" and "seizing" inconvenient facts.
And since people dislike having to rethink things, the anti-Republican spin is enough to soothe any concern that reality and the Narrative™ contradict each other.
Helen Lewis writes in The Atlantic about how the liberal misinformation bubble has led liberals astray on alphabet ideology. Now, Lewis still believes that conservatives are "pouncing" and "seizing" on liberals' getting it wrong on gender medicine, but she is among the few liberals who just can't swallow the whole people with penises being female lie.
The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine
— Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) June 29, 2025
How the left ended up disbelieving the science
By @HelenLewis for @TheAtlantic pic.twitter.com/rO7jQlQQ0W
This has brought her closer to realizing that the liberal bubble is filled with misinformation, although she seems to think this only applies to alphabet issues.
What bothers her, as it should, is that liberals keep hearing the same false things and just assume they are true. False things that have horrible consequences. Things like sterilizing and mutilating kids are "life-saving," when in fact there is precisely zero evidence that this is true.
“We often ask parents, ‘Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?’” Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles once explained to ABC News. Variations on the phrase crop up in innumerable media articles and public statements by influencers, activists, and LGBTQ groups. The same idea—that the choice is transition or death—appeared in the arguments made by Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s solicitor general, before the Supreme Court last year. Tennessee’s law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat minors with gender dysphoria would, she said, “increase the risk of suicide.”
But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.
At first, Strangio dodged the question, saying that research shows that blockers and hormones reduce “depression, anxiety, and suicidality”—that is, suicidal thoughts. (Even that is debatable, according to reviews of the research literature.) But when Alito referenced a systematic review conducted for the Cass report in England, Strangio conceded the point. “There is no evidence in some—in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide,” he said. “And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare, and we’re talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don’t necessarily have completed suicides within them.”
Here was the trans-rights movement’s greatest legal brain, speaking in front of the nation’s highest court. And what he was saying was that the strongest argument for a hotly debated treatment was, in fact, not supported by the evidence.
It's a tough thing to swallow--realizing that you have placed your trust in people who lie constantly, although I am not certain she understands it as lying. But at least she understands that trusting the bubble's consensus on this issue has led people to badly misjudge one of the most important issues of the day.
Many liberals are unaware of this, however, because they are stuck in media bubbles in which well-meaning commentators make confident assertions for youth gender medicine—claims from which its elite advocates have long since retreated.
Perhaps the existence of this bubble shouldn’t be surprising. Many of the most fervent advocates of youth transition are also on record disparaging the idea that it should be debated at all. Strangio—who works for the country’s best-known free-speech organization—once tweeted that he would like to scuttle Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, a skeptical treatment of youth gender medicine. Strangio declared, “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” Marci Bowers, the former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the most prominent organization for gender-medicine providers, has likened skepticism of child gender medicine to Holocaust denial. “There are not two sides to this issue,” she once said, according to a recent episode of The Protocol, a New York Times podcast.
Boasting about your unwillingness to listen to your opponents probably plays well in some crowds. But it left Strangio badly exposed in front of the Supreme Court, where it became clear that the conservative justices had read the most convincing critiques of hormones and blockers—and had some questions as a result.
Of course, the poisonous miasma of the bubble's atmosphere is not only generated by gender ideology's stench. The same holds true for many liberal issues, such as the idea that America is systemically racist, or that the world is burning, that capitalism is evil, or that socialism leads to justice.
Conservatives can't avoid hearing what liberals think--and contrary to some people, liberals are neither idiots nor always wrong. It is good that we have our ideas challenged, that appeals to concepts alien to us reach our ears, and that even bad ideas are put out there for us to contemplate.
For instance, we may think that the welfare state is a bad idea, but we have to face the fact that it was conceived for a reason: we need to have SOME form of social insurance so that we can take care of the ill, infirm, and aged. What form that takes can be debated, but liberals are not wrong that this is a problem that needs to be solved. Hearing their ideas, even if they are wrong, is useful.
Libertarians may be unreasonably obsessed with getting high, but their arguments about the failure of the war on drugs should be heard out. Their ideas on harm reduction strike me as failed, but their argument about the failure of the police state to solve the problem is worth contemplating.
To some extent, we all live in bubbles--we can call it a bubble, an Overton Window, or whatever you like. But none of us is living in a free-floating sea of ideas without some structure. For that matter, as much as our Constitution was designed to maximize freedom, it does so by constraining some possibilities. It's how human beings function, and really how any living being does.
But the liberals' bubble is tiny.
Lewis can't seem to consider that conservatives aren't evil--she keeps repeating that conservatives are cruel--but she at least understands that liberals are wedded to ideas not because The Science™ says so, but because their clan says so.
Can this misinformation bubble ever be burst? On the left, support for youth transition has been rolled together with other issues—such as police reform and climate activism—as a kind of super-saver combo deal of correct opinions. The 33-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has made funding gender transition, including for minors, part of his pitch to be New York’s mayor. But complicated issues deserve to be treated individually: You can criticize Israel, object to the militarization of America’s police forces, and believe that climate change is real, and yet still not support irreversible, experimental, and unproven medical treatments for children.
The polarization of this issue in America has been deeply unhelpful for getting liberals to accept the sketchiness of the evidence base. When Vice President J. D. Vance wanted to troll the left, he joined Bluesky—where skeptics of youth gender medicine are among the most blocked users—and immediately started talking about the Skrmetti judgment. Actions like that turn accepting the evidence base into a humiliating climbdown.
It is too much to ask that the liberals who are beginning to grasp that some of the ideas the bubble imposes might be wrong--even "misinformation--extend that idea beyond the ones which they are forced to admit are wrong. Climate change, for instance, will remain beyond question. Or, for that matter, the idea that conservatives are motivated by evil.
But a few are getting closer to that, and a few really have escaped the bubble, and they are, ironically, some of the trendsetters on the right. Many former liberals — and not just those with the zeal of converts — have become intellectual leaders among conservatives. This is because they are bringing new ideas that reinvigorate the intellectual body politic, preventing conservatism from becoming too stale.
The air in any bubble will become stale.
