Free Speech is a liberal value. Cancel Culture is a Russian psyop, to instigate conflict.
Republicans have no political platform, except parroting Russian propaganda to demonize liberals and LGBTQ.
Most transphobic MAGA Nazis have never actually met a trans person in real life.
Their hate is based entirely on malicious rumors and vicious hearsay.
But big city liberals do run into trans people occasionally. They’re pleasant and nice.
You gotta watch this. Putin gives an unhinged speech about gay and trans people being satanic demons. Typical fascist propaganda.
Fascists use lies as a weapon, to switch the roles of victim and attacker. Fascists accuse their victims of being the bad guys.
Hitler claimed Jews were attacking Germany, not the other way around. The lies Hitler spread about Jews turned ordinary Germans into bloodthirsty Nazis, and it led to the Holocaust.
That propaganda trick worked so well, fascist dictators have been using Hitler’s playbook ever since.
Putin is also a fascist dictator, and has been spreading absurd propaganda lies about Ukraine to justify his genocidal invasion.
Putin’s anti-gay war on Ukraine: A pervasive ideology of “traditional values” has taken hold in Russia, portraying LGBT rights as existential threats to the nation.
Putin attacks West as 'satanic', hails Russian "traditional" values.
Putin accuses West of ‘Satanism’ and announces annexations in terrifying speech.
Russia now says it must 'de-Satanize' Ukraine. What?
Ukrainian LGBTQ soldiers fight against “darkness” of Russian invasion.
Trump is Putin’s sock puppet and has been using the very same fascist lies to demonize Democrats, that Hitler used to demonize Jews, and Putin used to demonize Ukraine.
These demented psychos are cheering for Putin because they think he’s on a mission from God to kill satanic gay people.
Fascists always worship toxic masculinity and demonize gay and trans people for being too feminine.
The Nazis also thought of themselves as good Christians, and put gay people in concentration camps before they put Jews in concentration camps.
And before Nazis put people in concentration camps, they burned their books.
The first books Nazis burned were medical books by Jewish doctors about gay and trans people.
Sound familiar?
Book burnings from Nazi Germany to MAGA America.
When fascists burn books, it eventually leads to killing the people who wrote those books.
When you demonize a minority group, it always leads to bloodshed. Sooner or later words are followed by actions. That’s the whole point of spreading those hateful lies in the first place: to incite hate and violence.
The last time Republicans won the popular vote was 20 years ago, in 2004.
Republican policies are deeply unpopular with most Americans. That’s why Republicans don’t even bother talking about actual policy points anymore.
When Republicans campaign for an election, they do it by demonizing Democrats and LGBTQ in particular. It’s all they have left.
Republicans can’t tell the truth about anything, because the truth is not on their side. They need to lie about Democrats and then act all self-righteous while campaigning against the lies they put in Democrats’ mouths.
All fascists hate liberals, because liberals believe in freedom, equal rights for all, and democracy.
The words liberal, liberty, and liberate come from the Latin word liber which means free or freedom.
The rise of liberalism in the Age of Enlightenment was the end of the Dark Ages. The end of royal tyrants and the oppressive political power of the church.
Liberalism opposed centuries of dictatorships and supported a democratic government based on the consent of the people: a government for the people by the people.
Liberalism also gave birth to the ideas of the inviolability of private property, individual freedom, and equality before the law.
Liberalism is what makes America great.
A liberal is a freedom fighter. That’s what we’re all about: Fighting for, and guaranteeing everyone’s freedom to be themselves and live a happy life, without being oppressed by someone else.
Liberal
1) favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.
2) (often initial capital letter) noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform.
3) of, pertaining to, based on, or advocating liberalism, especially the freedom of the individual and governmental guarantees of individual rights and liberties.
4) favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, especially as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.
I have never been a fan of political correctness. I don’t care which words people use, as long as they don’t incite hate and violence against others.
The whole point of freedom of speech is that you’re allowed to say things even if other people don’t like it.
In the Dark Ages, fundamentalist mobs used to lynch people for “blasphemy” or “witchcraft” if someone said the wrong thing. You can still see the same type of violent fundamentalist mobs in the Middle East, if you insult the Koran or the prophet Mohammed.
When you have to be afraid of a vicious mob that will try to torment and destroy you if you say the wrong thing, you don’t have freedom of speech.
Liberal comedians like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin used to mock fundamentalist holier-than-thou Republicans for trying to tell people they weren’t allowed to say words like fuck or shit in public.
Today the idea of fundamentalist Republicans punishing people for saying “bad” words like fuck or shit seems ridiculous.
We liberals won that culture war, because deep down all Americans agree that it’s unamerican to tell people which words they can use.
But then something strange happened:
A small online group of liberal zealots began to tell others which words they can use, and organized vicious online mobs to harass and punish people who use a wrong word.
Political correctness zealots are often so vicious, extreme, and unreasonable, that many liberals believe these zealots are not actually liberals at all, but MAGA or Russian trolls pretending to be liberals, to make all liberals look bad, and to give lying Republican politicians a boogeyman to run against.
It sure looks like trolls are weaponizing call-out culture to weaken Democrats.
Millions of leftists are reposting Kremlin misinformation by mistake.
Russia’s troll factory impersonates Americans to sow political chaos.
Black or bot? The long, sordid history of co-opting Blackness: Online trolls and foreign agents love to exploit African-American culture for political gain.
Russian trolls' fake LGBT Facebook group was very popular.
Now Aretha Franklin's song Natural Woman is deemed offensive to trans women: Outrage as activists demand song is removed from Spotify and Apple Music.
Transgender organization wants to ban Aretha Franklin's "A Natural Woman" because they say it's offensive.
No, trans activists aren’t trying to cancel Aretha Franklin’s ‘Natural Woman’ for being offensive.
Troll Twitter account pretends to be a transgender activist group and targets Aretha Franklin’s hit “Natural Woman.”
The list of things these malicious trolls posing as liberal political correctness zealots claim to find offensive is endless. And their list of punishable wrong words constantly changes and grows.
A lot of good, kind people have been falsely accused of being terrible people, because they didn’t get the memo that some arbitrary word is now suddenly a bad word.
Most Americans absolutely hate living in fear of saying the wrong thing in public and having their lives destroyed or “being canceled” for expressing an unapproved opinion or using a forbidden word.
Americans strongly dislike PC culture
On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful.
Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white.
Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part).
These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.
Reality is nothing like this. Most Americans don’t fit into either of these camps. They also share more common ground than the daily fights on social media might suggest—including a general aversion to PC culture.
Political correctness is widely unpopular with Americans of all ages and races, a study finds
It found that even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74% of people aged 24-29 and 79% percent of those under 24 — meaning those who don't see it as a problem are in the minority across all ages.
Study: 80% of Americans believe political correctness is a problem
"Most members of the 'exhausted majority,' and then some, dislike political correctness."
Except among a tiny minority of far-left Americans, political correctness (P.C.) is deeply unpopular. Some 80 percent of people said they viewed P.C. excess as a problem.
I've written several articles for Reason about political correctness and the extent to which a backlash against it may have helped Donald Trump win the presidency. Voters who cited political correctness as a top issue were particularly smitten with the tell-it-like-it-is candidate, and being angry about PC-run-amok was a top indicator of whether a person voted Republican in 2016.
A lot of people go along with political correctness out of fear, not out of conviction. Cancel culture is extremely unpopular. Being in favor of oppressive political correctness is a great way to lose an election.
And that’s exactly why transphobic Republican politicians portray themselves as crusaders against wokeness. It’s their best and only hope to win an election.
It allows Republican politicians to pretend that they’re freedom-loving liberals who fight for popular liberal ideals like freedom of speech, without actually calling themselves liberals.
And they demonize actual liberals as tyrants who want to oppress others by punishing anyone who has a different opinion or uses a wrong word.
MAGA Nazis gleefully use racist and transphobic slurs, and they love when Trump does it, not only because they’re transphobic racists, but because they see it as an act of defiance against tyranny. Just like liberal comedian George Carlin used to do, when he said all the forbidden words he wasn’t allowed to say.
After the N word was banned, racists simply used other racist slurs in public, or invented new ones. Should we ban them too?
Should we ban the term “DEI hire” and punish and destroy anyone who uses it to insult someone?
I don’t think we should. I think that’s how you lose elections.
It’s possible to be a good person, even if you use the wrong words, and to be a bad person, even if you use all the right words.
Context matters. You can use a perfectly harmless word in a racist context, and it will become racist. Any word can become racist, if it’s used by a racist.
Is the word monkey racist? No. But if a racist uses the word monkey to describe a black person, it becomes racist.
Should we ban the word monkey too? No, of course not.
The opposite is true as well: A racist word can be not racist, if someone who is not racist uses it.
Black people have made the N word their own. You hear black people using the N word all the time. Does that make them racist? No, because context matters.
I have a couple of Asian friends, and none of them have any idea why they’re supposed to be offended by the term “oriental.” They don’t perceive it as a racial slur.
In Europe, the word oriental is widely used as a synonym for Asian. Asian restaurants, run by Asian people, call themselves oriental restaurants, and nobody is offended.
Google “oriental restaurant” and you’ll get plenty of search results right here in the US as well.
Are all these Asian restaurant owners racist for using the term oriental? No, of course not, because context matters.
And yet there are political correctness zealots who claim to be morally superior while they try to destroy your life for using a word like oriental, because they decided you’re not allowed to use it.
Who the fuck gave them that authority? Nobody.
Their opinion is no more valid than yours or mine. They don’t get to decide for everyone else which word is good or bad, or whether someone should be punished for using the wrong word.
These trolls don’t speak for liberals. They make other people hate liberals by misrepresenting what we actually stand for: freedom.
We don’t believe in forcing people to be gay or transgender, despite the rumors you may have heard.
We don’t believe in cutting kids’ dicks off. Anyone who claims that’s what liberals or trans people stand for is a fascist propaganda troll who is spreading lies to demonize a tiny minority group to win an election.
Trans people have always existed. But there are so few of them, that you hadn’t noticed them. You only started noticing them a few years ago, when fascists began to target them, and then Democrats stood up for their right to exist.
Liberals believe everyone is allowed to be happy. And if being trans makes you happy, you have every right to be trans.
That’s what it means to live in a free country.
“Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
I just wish that social media companies were able to identify and label some of the Russian troll accounts.
Also, thank you for the work you're doing.