Turn on NPR and chances are that you will hear something about Israeli atrocities and Palestinian resistance. This is not in small part to the University protests, largely funded and organized by Islamist organizations funded by Iran and Qatar, largely opposed by the student body but somehow they are the new face of liberalism. How did it happen that the Liberalism that once supported women, supported facts is now supporting some of the worst human rights offenders, some of the worst atrocities, some of the worst offenders of Women’s and LGBTQ rights without any regards for facts? I’m sad to say, the answer is something that I would have never thought five years ago.
Five years ago, the word identity politics was the rallying cry of the Republican Party. As a centrist liberal, I thought it was stupid. I thought that it was ignorant. I thought it was regressive. This is in part because I was an avid listener/reader of NPR and New York Times and the lens I was presented was that we are in the age of anti-racism and women’s rights and Republicans are opposing progress. Unfortunately, we all have biases and sometimes an implicit bias is not against black people, sometimes it is against Republicans who happen to be right and we refuse to listen to them.
Just as liberals watched Trumpism take over, where facts could be ignored and loyalty won over reality, we were in the same transition, we just failed to see it. The transition to anti-fact and identity was happening in the Republican party, and we failed to see that it was occurring to all of America, not just Trump America. As Trump attacked the media, it shifted to anti-Trumpism and began to blindly go after anything that was anti-Trump. Slowly but surely NPR shifted from center to left, and with that, it also gave up on its journalism to stay true to truth but instead embraced anti-Trumpism. The same goes for the Washington Post, New York Times, and every other liberal institution, including the Universities. With each passing day, we ignored the grain of truth in the Republican anger, that indeed middle class was disappearing, that immigration was an issue, and that gender-affirming care may sometimes not be the best idea. Instead of saying: “Yes you might be right, sometimes”. The position was “You’re MAGA, you’re wrong”.
And this is how we got to now. When Jewish people became white and white became wrong. As a result, genocide of Jewish people in Israel on October 7th became resistance and the old adage of ends don’t justify the means have gone out the window. Suddenly we are team anti-Trump and if Trump says yes Israel, we must be pro Hamas, because if Hamas is anti-Trump then they must be right, regardless of how many LGBTQ people they kill, how many women they execute for “adultery”, regardless of how many extrajudicial murders they commit for the crime of alleged collaboration with Israel and since they fight the “white people” in Middle East, they must be fighting colonialism and colonialism is evil.
Suddenly rape is ok, if it’s to help the Palestinian cause. Suddenly baking children in ovens is ok, abducting hundreds of women and children is ok, suddenly corrupt jihadists using hospitals and schools as staging grounds is ok and any response to their rockets and war is justified.
Why? Because facts are gone. Because liberal ideas of women's rights, democracy, and supporting minorities (Jews are 8 million in a place of 1 billion Muslims) have gone out the window if they are the wrong minorities, supported by the wrong majority. Suddenly we can be against Ukraine because it’s a war between “white people” and we no longer care about white people, even if Ukrainians never participated in colonialism and were colonized longer than the Americas.
The Universities were purchased by Qatar but their minds were corrupted long before that. The news organizations were also purchased by Qatar but their minds were also corrupted before that.
Liberalism was the party of Me Too, supporting women. Liberalism was the support of Jewish people against white supremacy. But in 5 short years we went from “Jews will not replace us” chanted by angry white men being abhorrent, to “Jews out of Universities” chanted by antry white women being the mantra of the new liberalism.
So where does this go? Nowhere good. After all, it was Communists in Russia who killed millions for thought crimes, it was communists in Vietnam and Cuba and Cambodia who killed teachers and doctors and engineers for “thinking”. Crimes by the far right are horrible, but the crimes of the far left are no better. The two are opposing philosophies in principle, but in practice, they have one thing in common, a complete lack of ability to recognize a thought different from theirs and a deep need for violent suppression of anything they deem different.
America changed in the last eight years. Not Republicans, not Democrats, not liberals and not Conservatives. All of them. Liberalism is broken, and Conservativism are broken because in America, truth is broken because we forget to think, we forgot about our moral principles, our values and the truth.
