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A handful of years after they cheered a president flanked by armed soldiers declaring half the countries to be enemies of the state, liberals are denouncing President Trump as a dangerous authoritarian. The misinformation censors of yesteryear have suddenly discovered that they love free speech and the men who filled D.C. with federal troops worry about the right to protest.
This born-again liberalism fools absolutely no one except the fools virtue signaling it.
The majority of liberals cast aside liberal values, they learned to deplore meritocracy, fair play, freedom of speech and all differences of opinion that did not serve their radical cause. They became leftists who play the cynical game of viewing dissent as either a ‘threat to democracy’ or the ‘highest form of patriotism’ depending on whether they’re the ones in power or dissenting.
That’s not liberalism. It’s a leftist wolf who puts on sheep’s clothing when he’s being hunted.
Liberalism means fundamentally distinguishing between speech and violence. It does not mean, as leftists have come to do, declaring that their violence is speech and that everyone else’s speech is violence. Branding the BLM race riots as the “speech of the unheard”, while also arguing as the New York Times did that, “Free Speech Is Killing Us”, is illiberal totalitarianism.
Free speech isn’t defending the speech you agree with, but the speech you disagree with, and the last time the born-again liberal hypocrites did that was at least a generation ago. The same people who told us that cancel culture was really ‘consequence culture’ are outraged when consequences come for their activists after they spent over a year calling for Death to America.
The cries about the sanctity of academic freedom ring hollow from the establishment that watched conservatives and then even actual liberals and non-conforming leftists being purged from academia until it became a political monoculture. The same liberals now defending campus Hamas riots were fine with campus bans on everything from sombreros to copies of the Constitution. Scrawl a Hamas red triangle and the civil libertarians will jump to your defense who ignored when a campus chalk message in support of Trump was treated like a hate crime.
The old liberal organizations who never said a word when fraternities and sororities were being forced out of Harvard and their members punished, wave the bloody shirt of freedom of association when the Trump administration investigates members of pro-terrorist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine after a year of violence and calls for the murder of Jews.
The federal government has no right to investigate Harvard and Columbia University, they tell us, but when the authorities came for Liberty University and Yeshiva University, they cheered. Unlike suing religious schools to impose LGBTQ values on them, investigating antisemitism at liberal schools is a violation of the rights of the right kind of bigotry at the right kind of university.
The larger issue here is not any of these double standards: it’s the double standard itself.
The spectacle of authoritarians playing libertarians, the thugs who punched you in the face a year ago running to cry to the media when their visas are revoked, and the politicians who were warning about the urgent need to police ‘misinformation’ suddenly talking about the importance of tolerating genocidal views that we might disagree with is the most despicable hypocrisy.
This isn’t even the bare honesty of “when I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles” practiced by Jihadis and Communists. Instead, Jihadis and Communists playacting as liberals practice this without ever saying it openly.
Like Orwell’s 1984, they switch gears without a trace of shame from tyrants to liberals, alternately lecturing about the threat posed by those who disagree with them and then about the virtues of disagreement, deploring and imploring for freedoms of all kinds, limitations on government authority and due process with no regard to anything except their own power.
A generation of this has destroyed liberalism as thoroughly as any totalitarian regime ever could. No ideal can survive a movement that is both pro-censorship and anti-censorship, for the rule of law and against it, for the judiciary and against it, for and against the power of the Senate, the White House and any branch of government depending on their control over it.
Liberalism without a set of rules that apply to everyone is a bad excuse for abuses in fair weather and a worse excuse for immunity in poor weather. Moral blackmail by people who have shown us time and again that they have no morals stops working on anyone except idiots.
If liberalism is not the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear, the mission to fight to the death for the speech you disagree with, and a free society for all then it’s nothing but a lie.
And for the vast majority of self-declared liberals, that is exactly what it has become.
Liberals could have avoided the illiberalism they deplore. They could have stood up to the campaign to ban ‘misinformation’. When the government began telling internet monopolies whom to censor, they could have rallied against it. And when cancel culture took hold of everyone from random teenage boys to respected members of their own ranks over offenses so absurd they could have come from a Russian novel, they could have shown some backbone.
Instead they cheered, they lied and they excused locking people into their homes, filling the streets with troops and censorship of even the mildest dissenting views.
It’s too damn late now for them to pretend that they’re still liberals who want freedom for all.
Under the guise of warning about the urgent threat of the people they disagree with running for office, speaking out or even existing, liberals declared a state of emergency under which civil liberties had to be suspended to save liberalism from those who would destroy it. But the imaginary threat was never more than a justification for suspending the first amendment, and ending free and fair elections, and turning the temporary emergency into a permanent one.
Trump didn’t kill the liberal order. If anything he saved its last vestiges from the liberals who would have enthusiastically done it to death while pumping their fists in the air, canceling a few more artists, writers and journalists, and planting “Hate has no home here” signs on its remains.
If the former liberals honestly want to reclaim a principled liberalism, embrace free speech for all, protect the right to assembly and free press that doesn’t just advocate for their favored causes, and reopen the institutions they hijacked to more than one point of view, they are welcome to do so, but there’s no sign of that taking place because they’re not liberals anymore. They don’t believe in free speech, a free press or any kind of freedom except as a hollow slogan to hide behind when their plans for building a totalitarian state temporarily fall apart.
They’re not liberals. They’re totalitarian hypocrites. Liberalism is dead and they killed it.
Fabien Socialists in America , financed by George Soros . The Fabien Society Coat of Arms is a wolf in sheep’s clothing .
Lots of Hypocrites out there Hollywood’s loaded with them like those who call for Gun Controls while Attending their Award Shows and Surrounded by Armed Police. Donna Mills(Knots Landing)saying Americans need to give up their High Way of Living(You First)Gore the Bores one home uses more Kittowatt Hours in One Month they dese the Average American Household dose in One Year Obama calling for Gun Control with his Armed Protection
Hollywood’s elites who call for Gun Control but make movie after movie glorifying the use of firearms to kill and sell it as “entertainment.”
Just after they came up with Demand a Plan with Hollywierdos Pleading for Gun Control someone came up with one showing these very same Liberal Celeberties using Guns in their Movies
Some Hollywood actors and directors are cool and honest. Clint Eastwood, Denzel Washington, Kevin Sorbo and Dean Cain come to mind. Denzel said publicly in a speech at some university to “honor God in everything you do” and I know Sorbo is a good Christian because he’s on Newsmax and Real America’s Voice a lot and talks about it. He has some cool and obviously well raised sons who appear with him sometimes, too. I assume Cain is a Christian but I don’t know about Eastwood. That guy seems to go his own way and let life happen around him.
Greenfield is right, though. Lefties corrupt everything they get involved with.
Dirty Harry didn’t fool around with armed Robbers or Hostage Takers just left behind a lot of Dead Robbers and Hostage Takers and That was the Good Side of Hollywood
What disappeared was HONESTY.
It disappeared all over the western world during the lockdown hysteria over a common cold.
Time to dispense with the organisation that created the hysteria. The UN.
I think it was long before that. The reason I recognized almost immediately that the COVID-19 panic was just another (if bigger) power-grab by govt. and the elites was that I had been following sites like this that were detailing many earlier such ploys (with the trans insanity being just one example.)
Our Government aggressively, with every means available, including outright lying, prevented the citizens from making informed consent on getting the experimental, untested, mRNA gene altering drug. That is unforgivable.
There might be a simpler and more direct underlying reason for why so many liberals can’t follow any rules of basic human decency and so often display fulminant hypocrisy their most identifiable feature. It’s their nature and liberalism exposes it.
It’s a mistake to think that we are all the same and hence that there are rules that everyone recognizes as minimum requirements for someone to believe and practice, in order to belong in a particular group. I can’t remember where I’ve seen this before or who it was who wrote such a brilliant observation so I might as well take credit for it:
“Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out” If anyone knows who wrote that or where it comes from let me know so I can attribute it.
You always hear some goof say it’s not islum after one of the murderous cult members kills children, babies, women or any other unlucky civilians that are conveniently close. The religion calls for slaughter of others. While this may be an example of a more rigid set of criteria, clear to see and most will be assigned this philosophy without choice, the point is that many converts will pick this because it’s a fit, maybe only subliminally, but nevertheless.
“Liberal” used to be one of my favorite words. But now the meaning has been changed and the word ruined. Now it means useful idiot, leftist dupe.
I could still say “Classical Liberal” but how many are left who know what that means.
It used to mean “Use the carrot, or use the stick?”
How many people are still alive who remember when the main way to get the Donkey to move was to use the stick?
“Leftist dupe” is the heart of the problem. Liberals don’t have the backbone to stand up to the Left (which is something else altogether), but does have a “no enemies to the left” mentality. This results in liberals giving support to the Left which, deep down, doesn’t care for them except as “useful idiots,” as Lenin put it.
“I could still say “Classical Liberal” but how many are left who know what that means?”
Damn. I’m so old I remember.
And I’m a city boy like you but I’ve lived in some weird places and done some strange things so I can tell you donkeys are actually much more reasonable than horses. I don’t like horses, to tell the truth.
You don’t want to fuck with those wild donkeys, though. They roam the high desert in Arizona where I used to live and they weren’t afraid of anything. There were cougars out there, coyote packs and black bears in the mountains but none of them fucked with those donkeys.
Off topic but Alexandria Ocrasio Cretin is about to destroy Schmucky Schemer in the next election. I’m no fan of the Cretin but I’ll be glad to see Schmucky get the boot. I really hate that reptilian Schemer. Or “ophidian,” like Robert Spencer would write.
The little precious college darlings who have killed liberalism will be the next generation of little precious hitlers who will be the ones who practice Nazism and fascism all the while calling Maga the new hitlerism.
Today it’s Tesla autos as the target of their rage. Tomorrow it’s the Tesla owners and the Maga crowd.
OK fine. Make my day.
Multiple books filled with millions of examples could be written on this topic, but you pretty much said it all right here.
Liberalism is the rule by those ostracized in high school. The earlier they were ostracized, the more vehement their need for revenge. The rest is just drool dripping from their braces.
Good one! I agree that lefties tend to be resentful dweebs. Although if they can’t get laid, I can understand why they’re so angry all the time. I know I would be.
Liberal, shmiberal.
Woven generously into the threads of liberal hypocrisy are strands of its condescension of Americans and the foundational belief that Americans are mostly apathetic and can be manipulated by creating divisive issues to weaken national unity, and breaking moral barriers to destroy communities, families and individuals.
Shmiberals are comparing rejection of transgenderism to the Nazis’ elimination of that element in Aryan society; yet they pass no judgment on the fact that all those ‘doctors’ and ‘surgeons’ abusing and mutilating healthy children’s male and female bodies are all Dr. Mengeles, monsters, profanely, sadistically ‘experimenting’.
Such is yet another example of the sick, well financed, warped, manipulative misappropriation of history to destroy the goodness of the human heart.
Every now and then Daniel tops even himself. This essay, I think, is one of those times.
Hello again THX Original sin is not our fault. Genesis tells us that we are all born damaged and dying through no fault of our own but because of what our first parents did. When Adam and Eve were persuaded to cut themselves off from their Creator, their Source of life, they fatally damaged themselves, and us, their unborn children.
They could not even keep themselves alive, let alone run this beautiful and complex planet. And we are still living in the tragedy that their decision caused.
And can you find me anything in the Christian Greek Scriptures that would cause followers of Christ to persecute Jews, or anyone? On the contrary didn’t Jesus warn that it is those who chose to follow him who would be persecuted and hated by the world.
Hogg and his little band of Useful idiots from MARCH FOR OUR LIVES had Armed Escort while they marched through the Streets demanding Gun Control then Hogg claimed We Don’t Have the Right to Own a Gun(Sorry Sawdust for Brains Hogg but the 2nd Amendment and SCOTUS says otherwise)and Hoggs Pillows are Not selling very much
Who would buy a pillow named “Hogg?”
Mike Lindell sells good ones although some chick I was with recently said she didn’t like them. You know how chicks can be. Sometimes you just let them talk even though you disagree with every stupid utterance they make. I don’t even remember who she was, I just remember her saying that stupid shit.
I got mad when Walmart stopped selling Mike’s pillows.
two things can be true. Both the far left and the Trump right can be enemies of freedom. Alas, that is the state we are finding ourselves in these days.
How are pro-Trump normal people enemies of freedom?
confusion isn’t just for transvestites
Greenfield nails it as usual. Violent protest with which the phony liberal agrees qualifies as “free speech” —which it is the highest form of patriotism to protect. Speech, however, with which the phony liberal DISAGREES represents “a threat to democracy”!
The beauty of the hypocrisy is that the phony liberal ALWAYS gets to label him or herself as everything good and virtuous —along with being super-smart—which is SO very flattering to the ego.
The phony liberal is the Misinformation Traffic Cop who is there to pull over and arrest all those “rightwing domestic terrorists” who fail to virtue-signal properly—even as actual criminals and terrorists (provided they fit the right demographic profile) get a pass on ANY amount of mayhem and devastation they happen to cause along the road.
And, sadly, there are too many judges—along with legacy media, and too many others in the credentialed class—who are the biggest of the phony libs. But I think most people have had enough of the phony liberalism, and see it as the truly dangerous and contemptible nastiness it is.
The mentally, morally, and spiritually deficient Lie-beral Demonocrats are suffering from the insanity of satanity, whose only expertise is bullshitology, masked under the cloak of self righteousness. They have the Look-At-Me-See-How-Nice-I-Am Syndrome AND ARE FUGITIVES FROM TRUTH !!!