We walk among you. We're silent when you say awful things. But we trash you behind your delusional backs. And we are finding each other. Fear us!
I sat on a park bench texting a friend when three pretty little girls, all in various stages of missing teeth, came up and asked in all innocence, “Where are you from?”
It was refreshing for someone to ask.
I put my mobile down and said, “I’m from the United States. Where are you from?”
“Serbia!” they told me.
“Really?”
“Yes, Belgrade,” replied a younger girl on skates.
They peppered me with questions. We were joined by more little snaggle-toothed Serbians—sisters, cousins, friends. A brother walked up but his sisters pushed him away toward a pair of adults not far off. No boys allowed! This is Girls’ Stuff!
Eventually I was joined by one of the mothers, and the children hie’d off to the playground. Mom’s name was Sara, 32 years old. I told her I was American and we did that immigrant thing I miss from a less-woke decade, chatting about what we liked or didn’t about our mother countries and adopted country.
Sara liked Canada a lot, she said, but she wasn’t sure she would stay. She struggled with whether to continue raising her children (two, with one on the way) here.
“I don’t like what they’re learning in school,” she confessed. “They’re learning weird things.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I don’t like the weird things either.”
She struggled to explain herself. She couldn’t articulate it. And she spoke excellent English.
“I know why you’re afraid to talk about it,” I said. “I know what the weird things are. You don’t want to say them because people get so upset.”
“Yes,” she nodded, eyes wide open, happy to have someone who understands. “And, they should play more.”
“Absolutely!” I thought of Jonathan’s Haidt’s call for more play and less work, and especially less mobile time in the book I’d just finished, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Provincial cell phone bans in the classroom are sweeping Canada this forthcoming school year. ‘T’will be interesting to see how this plays out.
“I’m so glad you understand!” Sara said, smiling.
“There are many of us like you,” I told her. “We’re everywhere. We don’t like what’s going on either. And we’ve been afraid to speak up.”
As the sun set I ambled home to make dinner—I was getting hungry although the pretty, snaggle-toothed girls had given me a brownie—but I decided to check my Substack notifications real quick and there was a direct message request from a recent new follower and fellow indy author, MJ Biggs.
“I've been binge reading your posts and am loving them. It's a relief to find other non-woke liberals--especially ones who aren't afraid to speak up…If you'd ever like to bounce ideas off someone for future posts or just need a person to rant to about the crazy world we live in, I'm around. Thanks again for sharing your radical common sense and centered philosophy with the world. We need it for sure.”
Another one.
A Bad Liberal.
We are everywhere.
And we are tired of fake-liberal nonsensica.
We walk among the ‘woke’
One has to be careful when speaking with strangers. You never know whether they’re One Of Us or One of Them.
I have to share one of my favorite old movie clips about this. I’ve used it probably too often already, but I love it so much. It’s from Tod Browning’s 1932 early talkie Freaks. Highly politically incorrect, I nevertheless relate more to the ‘freaks’ than the beautiful equestrian and her jerkwad hyper-masculine boyfriend.
One minute you’re getting along famously with someone, maybe a stranger you just struck up an acquaintance with or an old friend, gooba-gobbling with them quite happily, and then the next moment they’re standing there shaking furiously, nearly spilling the loving cup, because you said something utterly outrageous like, “I wonder if Kamala Harris will have the courage to support all-female sports teams.”
Suddenly, the person you thought you’d known all their lives or the guy who seemed so nice turns into the Shit Demon from Dogma. Or maybe the Alien bursts out of her chest and screams at you that you’re a f—king fascist who hates puppies and kittens and rainbows and the color pink. Or they just cancel you in front of God and everyone.
You screwed up. She’s one of Them.
(No, not a giant ant. You get my gist. Not to hit the movie comparisons too hard.)
But then, you talk to a stranger in the park and find that—they’re one of Us.
We walk among the Woke and pretend to be like them, like Donald Sutherland before he turned into one of the Pod People.
But sometimes we forget ourselves when we’re working undercover infiltrating the Killer Tomatoes. (Another movie reference. Sorry!)
But here’s the thing: There are far more Undercover Killer Tomatoes than real ones. We are the Exhausted Majority, and we walk among the Woke—the Killer Tomatoes—and know that one day, soon, we will turn them all into ketchup.
According to Hidden Tribes US, only about 8%—8%!!!—of Americans actually hold ‘woke’ views.
How is that we haven’t crushed these Killer Tomatoes already? Why aren’t we pouring Regressive Lefties into ketchup bottles?
We are in the park. We are in your Inbox. We are the people you pass on the street. We seek each other—the Bad Liberals—and huddle together in dark corners whispering to each other even darker heresies.
“DEI is racism!”
“If blackface isn’t okay, neither is womanface!”
“Slavery today is more important than 19th-century slavery!”
“Thomas Jefferson was a great man!”
“Indigenous Americans were brutal savages before the brutal European savages showed up!”
“Antiracism has become antisemitic!'“
“Women should Just Say No to male abuse!”
“I have conservative friends!”
“Me too!”
“Why are ‘anti-misogyny’ laws always about protecting men dressing as women rather than real women?”
“Thanksgiving is a moral holiday!”
“Transing children is gay conversion!”
“No one is born in the wrong body!”
“White skin is not a birth defect!”
“Neither is a penis!”
Here’s a conversation starter to really get Thanksgiving rolling this fall:
“I didn’t vote for either Harris or Trump.”
Maybe we need a Kerchief Signal, like what gay men used in San Francisco in the ‘70s, a clothing article that signals I’m Not ‘Woke’, Either.
Bad Liberals can be hard to detect in a group. They repeat or pretend to agree with some dumbass idea a wokie expresses. One way to detect a Bad Liberal in a progressive conversation is noting whether they just nod and purse their lips at the right times, without saying much, doing the minimum to look like a ‘Good’ Illiberal.
Bad Liberals survive by disguising themselves as Illiberals. I have a friend who does this. She just nods along and sort of goes along with what she’s hearing, but then she rants to me in e-mail.
Bad Liberal-hunting is hard, because when you get it wrong they do that Donald Sutherland alien scream thing.
A few years ago I tested the waters with a liberal, progressive friend whom I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. I’d thought she might be mad at me. Just before the world locked up she got annoyed because I wouldn’t identify as a feminist. I explained I was embarrassed by what feminism had become, that I didn’t want to be identified by all those weak, whiny-ass little women who were near-exhaustion from getting triggered every time then-candidate Donald Trump opened his mouth.
“How can you not be a feminist?” she demanded. “How can you not want equal rights for women?”
I did favor equal rights for women, I explained, but for the last quarter-century I’d called myself an ‘egalitarian’ because that’s what feminism is about, equal rights for women and men. Except that feminism had come to identify itself with weakness, vulnerability, and lack of female agency. It wallowed in victimhood, blaming everything wrong with women’s lives on Da Patriarchy, rather than their own wussy, shrinking selves. It demanded no responsibility, accountability or self-analysis from women, only men.
Grow some labia, girls!!!
Over the course of the pandemic, especially after I started writing for Medium, I reclaimed the feminist label for myself, and took back my power by differentiating my own kind—power feminism—vs the whiny young Medium perma-victims.
You bet your sweet bippy I’m a feminist now, sweetheart!
My friend, over the course of the pandemic, had stopped being a feminist. And a liberal. Although undoubtedly she’d disagree with me.
I tested her to see whether she’d remained liberal—someone I’d rarely disagreed with in the Olden Days—since we last spoke.
When I got to, “Will Thomas has no business competing on a women’s swim team,” my friend shut me down immediately. “That is NOT up for discussion!” she informed me.
I regarded her with dismay. How could this bright and formerly progressive Boomer be so—mind-numbingly pro-men’s rights?
And she was a retired LAWYER, fer crissakes!
No need for facts or evidence anymore. I wonder what she would have said if I’d condemned science-free kiddie sex change operations.
I outed myself as a Bad Liberal. And she outed herself as an Illiberal.
What we need to understand is that there are more Bad Liberals than Illiberals. And, combined with our fellow Bad Conservatives on the other side of the aisle, who aren’t any more into Trump and the Republican’ts than we Bad Liberals are with the Democrapic WokeNazis, we can work together to stop the onslaught of woke authoritarianism and hopefully prevent its replacement by Trump authoritarianism.
Bad Liberals aren’t really bad, of course. We’re definitely on the side of good. Right, just like every other wannabe dogmatic authoritarians, right? Right?
How you can tell you’re not evil
You’re on the side of good when you’re not advocating harm to someone else. Real harm, not the fake made-up harms generated by the Illiberals. Real transphobia is beating up a man because he dresses and acts like a woman. Fake transphobia is whining about people who won’t use your silly-ass pronouns or who don’t want your dick in their changing room, because they know how hard it is for the boys to control that thing.
You’re on the side of good when you’re willing to consider others’ points of view, and recognize that you and your political kin don’t have all the answers, either.
You’re on the side of good when you value facts and evidence over ‘feelings’ and highly subjective experience, which is filtered and diluted by one’s own mostly-unacknowledged fears, biases, prejudices, and dislikes.
You’re on the side of good when you realize that lifting others’ boats who haven’t had your opportunities doesn’t mean you have to settle for a leaky dinghy. You’re on the side of good when you realize ‘equal rights’ doesn’t mean ‘special rights’. (Conservatives have struggled with this one, too.)
In fact, you don’t have to be a Bad Liberal to be on the right side of morality and social justice. You can also be a Bad Conservative.
Thinking for yourself—it’s available to anyone who chooses it.
Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts of more recent articles there too!
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