I'm Losing Faith And Trust In Liberals

Liberalism has become a zombie movie. You never know who will get infected with the woke mindvirus and turn on you.

Image by Grae Dickason from Pixabay

I understand why so many rational people find themselves drifting to the right. Or maybe, should I say, persistently pushed.

I met up with a liberal single guy this summer. He slipped into the conversation, “I’m very supportive of LGBTQ,” I think to see how I’d react. “Live and let live,” I think I said. Didn’t seem like the right time to observe Skrmetti got it right.

His comment gnawed at me. Even if we saw eye to eye on my squarely normie view of ‘trans rights’, how do I know he won’t flake on me eventually? How do I know he won’t go woke? Is it something in the avocado toast? What if he comes to believe I’m a fascist for believing drag shows are for adults, not children? What if he becomes an intolerant illiberal? What if he gets bitten by a transwoman???

Who can I trust anymore?

Liberal friendships are fragile; loyalty has become conditional—subject to ‘high’ standards of performative ideological purity. No matter how much one liberal might agree with another, one might be found unworthy of friendship because he pish-poshes reparations. Or thinks #MeToo has jumped the shark.

Conversation with liberals is like tiptoeing through a mine field; you never know what will set them off.

How do I know they won’t succumb to the lure of belonging to a group that love bombs you with affirmation and makes you feel specialer-than-thou by uniting against a common enemy—people who don’t capitulate?

So many of my friends, people I’ve known for years or even decades, slip away into the night, their Purity Balls becoming ever-more-exclusive to rational thought or dissent. One was someone close who didn’t just defriend me on Facebook, but blocked me. We hadn’t exchanged a single harsh word. But she got married and we lost touch, and all she knew me by was my Facebook posts, and I’ll bet she didn’t like my take-no-shit feminism. Hers was fairly ossified, whose commitment to feminist activism was texting ‘Happy International Women’s Day’.

People become disposable; you can toss them and not think too deeply about how little you value genuine human relationships; how devotion to a narrative is more important to you than that she was one of your bridesmaids who put up with your Bridezilla crap for months or that she’s been your best friend since second grade. Lifelong loyalty becomes a used napkin you leave for the waiter to pick up.

To be honest, I deserved a few blowoffs. My mouth runneth over, along with my ego. Sometimes I am possessed by my former know-it-all 21-year-old. I own that. I am absolutely an arrogant asshole sometimes, even as I’ve worked on that for years. I reconnected with one ex-friend by not being an asshole anymore. There are a few others I have to find emails for.

The ones who struck first, with whom I never exchanged harsh words, I bid, as Pagans say, Go in perfect love and perfect trust. After all, it takes an ideological arrogant asshole to defriend one.

A few came as a relief. They ended tiresome late-night phone calls regurgitating self-aggrandizing social justice mind dumps. Wokies are in love with the sound of their own voice. I cherish the peace and quiet.

Research agrees: Liberals are more intolerant

Consistent research, the most recent coming from the Skeptic Research Center, supports my experience of the intolerant left and liberals’ greater willingness to defriend and defamily. It’s most prominent among Zoomers and Millennials but liberals in all age groups admit they’re more likely to cut people off for their political views than those in other political groups.

It’s not just me; the anecdotes proliferate online. A Democratic operative who worked closely with the biggest progressive stars speaks of her shunning after announcing on TikTok that she was breaking ranks and voting for Trump, and went viral. A former Pro-Palestine activist speaks of longtime friends who blocked her when she left the movement. And, leaning into the whole women-are-bigger-political-bitches-than-men angle, you’re less likely to get blocked or deplatformed by your male conservative opponents than by women on your own side.

They can’t trust liberals either. They’re vicious when you break rank.

Which is not to say that conservatives always open welcoming arms to political deviators. The SRC found the stronger one’s views, either side, the more likely one is to cut the cord, and the ‘very conservative’ were more likely to wave bye-bye than more mainstream liberals or conservatives. Millennial conservatives were more likely to go no-contact than moderates on either side. But overall, ‘very liberal’ towered over all the other groups in the intolerance bar chart.

Telling your friends you just defriended another ‘toxic person’ virtue signals higher status to your group, since the less -ist you are about anything, the better a human being you’re considered to be. By casually dismissing the person as a ‘right-winger’, ‘Kool-Aid drinker,’ or a ‘transphobe’, the woke progressive reassures the group her moral purity is never sullied by differing views. Stick within your safe little bubble, as a recent conversation with a progressive I had did. She told herself a pretty little lie about a ‘stolen’ election that didn’t go her way from a fake news site. She didn’t ask herself whether she was reacting with the same denial as Donald Trump’s followers in 2020.

We’ve all lost our social skills over the past mobile-driven decade. Zoomers have almost none, tallying their likes vs negative comments with the calculated efficiency of a CPA. We’ve become angrier, but some of us are working on it. One woke friend I almost defriended when he screamed abuse at me a few years ago apologized sincerely when I finally told him why I wasn’t comfortable with one-on-one get-togethers. He must have done some self-reflection, as he’s not screamed since, when we’ve disagreed on something. On Halloween, we stood together on a dance floor swaying back and forth to the band with our arms around each other. I felt close to him.

There’s hope for those who genuinely value friendship over tribal moral contempt. Why aren’t there more of them? Can’t we develop a vaccine for illiberalism?

No Tyrants! (Except our own)

I’ve written about my multiple takedowns and bans by ‘woke progressive’ blogging platforms and social media.

They don’t like it when you don’t bend the knee.

I met a woman at Toronto’s No Tyrants rally with a T-shirt that read “NO BOOK BANS!” I said, “Great shirt, I hate them too. I’m curious, are you against all book bans or only some?”

Of course, she approved of book bans if they ‘harmed’ people. “But who decides who’s being harmed?” I asked. This is the gotcha with wokies. Like their comrades-in-arms on the right, they think they’re the arbiters.

She proudly informed me she supports all of Canada’s hate speech laws. “They’re censorship,” I pointed out. “You can get in big trouble just for stating scientifically that transwomen are men.” And her mouth took off. I eventually walked away from her verbal diarrhea, but she came up to me a few minutes later. She asked, sincerely, “Why are you even here?” waving her arm around the crowd as though she couldn’t imagine what I might have in common with these people. “Why are you here?” I asked. “Since you’re authoritarian yourself!”

Bad answer. In retrospect I should have challenged her (typical) authoritarian blind spot by saying: “For the same reason you are: I hate Trump’s authoritarianism. I’m quite certain we agree on that. Where we disagree is whether all authoritarianism is bad, or just some. And frankly, someone who wears an anti-book-ban shirt while supporting book bans and speech suppression is an authoritarian hypocrite.”

Clearly, she thought everyone at the protest was just like her. But I know something she doesn’t: Not all conservatives are Trump-loving sycophants. The MAGAs can’t agree on him. Plenty of his voters experience buyer’s regret. His historically low poll numbers indicate he’s less popular than $9 a pound coffee. I’d bet there were several conservatives present that day. But they often feel they can’t speak up, as their side has never been particularly tolerant of internal criticism, either. And God help them if the book ban dictators find out they’re there.

Who can I still trust?

I love my liberal peeps. I’m not a closet Republican slouching towards Candace Owens, and don’t believe I’ll lose my liberal views if I hang out more with conservatives. Rather, I might get a word in edgewise.

People who lean left like me are the Silent Majority. I know I’ve found a comrade in arms when we both question wokeness, after proceeding cautiously, like two strange cats, testing the other to see how much heresy she can handle before she leaps for attack. They’re the keepers: They can handle differences of opinion and believe diversity is only skin-deep. They don’t lecture like the No Tyrants lady. They haven’t adopted hypocrisy as a virtue. They haven’t abandoned compassion as so many liberals have, and which the Republican Party abandoned decades ago. They don’t get huffy when you condemn all antisemites and fascism fans, rather than just the other side’s.

Their skepticism, critical thinking skills, and ability to ask hard questions aloud provide natural immunity to the zombie’s bite.

I’m not worried about turning Republican. I’m worried that when enough liberals embrace illiberalism, they will eventually realize how much they have in common with the other side and realize The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Right now, we normies outnumber both the far right and the far left, but if they unite against us that could change drastically.

Remember, Hitler sent intellectuals and freethinkers to his concentration camps, especially in Poland. We see that same pattern repeat itself over and over in totalitarian regimes whether they’re fascist or communist. We question authority and challenge corruption, we stand up for groups marginalized by the ruling party. We weaken their control. They respond with persecution, pogroms, incarceration, torture, and execution, often public, often cruel, to serve as a stern example to others.

Progressives and liberals think they’re ‘not like that’ yet many embrace antisemitism, the world’s oldest hate crime, which sounds terrifyingly far-right. Yes, I fear ‘progressives’ could turn on all of us. Yes, I think they might one day re-embrace concentration camps. And they’ll start with us, the moderates and freethinkers, so there is no one left to defend their ultimate scapegoats. We are the resistance, which Hitler understood. Once you eliminate us, you can do as you please.

No, I don’t trust liberals anymore. And this is why.

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