A liberal is someone who believes in freedom. “Live and let live as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone”. They believe in the freedom to express gender identity as one pleases, gay rights, women’s rights, science, innovation, and progress.
The term has been twisted to refer to a rather shallow-thinking band masquerading as intellectuals.
They’ve taken over our universities and use the outdated 1970’s communist line of thought to argue that poverty is inherently virtuous, and they root for the underdog in everything.
They’re behind the “everyone gets a trophy” mentality because they don’t think it’s fair that there are winners and losers.
They have made offending people a capital crime and have become a communist-inspired thought police. (I lost a friend once for using the word prostitute instead of sex worker).
They think wealth is evil even though many are wealthy themselves, wealthy enough to have attended the priciest universities because their parents and even grandparents before them did too and profited afterwards.
Perhaps their behaviour may even stem from guilt from this wealth, guilt from their privilege. (Most people in this category are very white/WASPy).
They see Jews as privileged because of their reputation for wealth, as wealth to them means someone else was robbed of a fair shot. Discrepancy in ambition and hard work need not apply.
Indeed, the concerns of anyone of privilege must be ignored in their circles in order to “balance” the way society actually works to serve the privileged.
They give people from oppressed groups immunity, blaming their every wrongdoing on their oppression/oppressors.
They start every working group meeting with preferred gender pronouns, statement that they are speaking on land stolen from an Amerindian tribe, and disability adaptations, and then usually forget all of it in the first five minutes.
They know life is not fair but hope their actions will make life more fair.
They have a very shallow definition of fairness and don’t realize that making life fair for some is making it unfair for others (like people who work hard for their wealth, or Jews who see a rise of antisemitism dismissed due to perceived privilege).
Yes, I do understand this distinction. I was part of both of these definitions until suddenly the latter became oppressive to me.
Until I proposed a workshop on antisemitism and QPIRG laughed in my face.
Until I realized that invisible disabilities are often ignored or shoved aside.
Until I realized that these people seldom actually acted to restore justice to Amerindians (I’m using this term to distinguish them from other global indigenous groups), and happily live on their land as colonizers. As if announcing that they have stolen land is good enough by itself.
Meanwhile they, most of whom are the seemingly repentant descendants of colonizers, decry actual indigenous resettlement movements in Israel, Assyria, and Kurdistan, because their beloved Arabists tell them to.
They treat Arabs as sacred cows who can do no wrong when they are one of the most large-scale colonizers in history. But that’s silly! Arabs are oriental/brown, they can’t be colonizers! Prophet Said said so!
Meanwhile they fail to realize that despite the appearances of some of us, Jews are also oriental and were subject to the same kind of disdain and derision from Westerners as Said outlines in his book.
Israel is not a Western outpost. We are inspired by the West but we are not the West. Most of us actually come from oriental lands. Oh, and you didn’t know that Poland and Russia were also considered oriental once upon a time, in the immigrant soup that was 1900’s NYC, where my family lived?
I left because I found these attitudes offensive.
Like, actually offensive. Deeply, deeply offensive.
And you know what? As long as they continue to get offended by trite, trivial matters, they ignore serious matters, seriously offensive things that underlie their entire dogma.
The idea that those they deem oppressed can’t be guilty of the crimes they commit by virtue of it being somehow a cry for help due to their oppression.
The idea that poverty is inherently more virtuous than wealth, regardless of the surrounding circumstances. (Yes there are people who make their money in an evil fashion but what about people like brain surgeons who save lives and entrepreneurs who bust their butts for years to come up with the perfect product?)
The idea that those with privilege deserve any crimes committed against them – or at the very least deserve no sympathy – because it’s a way of balancing the score.
Who believe fundamentalist Christianity is offensive but fundamentalist Islam is not, despite the latter holding more extreme beliefs than the former, because they don’t want to be orientalist.
Who believe liberal, progressive values only really need to apply to the West, giving non-Westerners a free pass for racism [wait, never mind; oppressed people can’t be racist because racism = privilege + power /s], sexism, homophobia, and violence out of an obsession with not appearing orientalist, colonialist, or “othering.”
Who believe “justice” means supporting those they deem oppressed in a conflict only because they’re oppressed, automatically hating the winner and labeling them as “oppressive” even though the internal policies of the “oppressed” might be to blame for their own suffering and loss.
Who refuse to understand that different cultures value different things, who instead favor an ethnocentric “we are all the same” mentality. In so doing, they oversimplify and misunderstand complicated geopolitical conflicts, awarding their sympathy to the party they perceive as 1) the loser 2) less western 3) less like them, in these conflicts,
Who call themselves progressive when they’re truly not, because they don’t believe in freedom, and freedom begets progress.
For forgetting the world has nuance, not realizing that their communist way of life will never work given human nature, who don’t understand right and wrong and rather believe that marginalized and misunderstood perspectives are inherently virtuous by virtue of being marginalized and misunderstood.
Who are not really anti-oppressive, rather hypocrites, because I feel oppressed by them.
