Conservatives like me can’t avoid leftist ideas. We watch ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN. We listen to NPR. We watch local stations. We read leftist newspapers. We use biased Google and YouTube. We hear leftist ideas every day, so we are automatically prepared to refute them.

But leftists can easily live in a bubble. Few leftists make an effort to watch Fox News and OAN, or listen to talk radio. Most of them avoid conservative ideas like the plague, or even like Covid. On the rare occasions that a conservative is allowed to speak at a university, students remark that they never heard such ideas in their lives.

Living in a bubble is comfortable. Your preconceptions are never challenged. Your ideology is never disputed. Your thinking is never strengthened by having to respond to arguments. But sooner or later, something punctures the bubble. And then what? Leftists are exposed as shallow ideologues, too weak to defend their beliefs except by hurling insults.

That’s what just happened in Virginia. Democrat former governor Terry McAuliffe proclaimed that parents have no right to oversee the education of their own children. That’s what his leftist friends say. That’s what his major backer the teachers’ union says. That’s what leftist newspapers and gurus say. But to McAuliffe’s amazement, that’s not what the vast majority of parents say.

It is a cliché that hikers should never come between a mother bear and her cubs. The reason some sayings become clichés is that they are obviously true. But many of us no longer hike in forests, so many of us have forgotten the cliché. Terry McAuliffe and his advisors forgot it. And on election day, a great many mama and papa bears made their feelings known. The bubble was pierced with a very sharp bear claw.

Make all the leftist politics you want, but don’t mess with our kids.