Please consider reading this and not just scrolling past. I ask you to re-embrace genuine liberalism. Purple America needs you! Yes, I'm serious!
Clockwise from the top left: Photo by Petr Kratochvil at Public Domain Pictures; by Rawpixel; by Rawpixel; the Gender Spectrum Collection
I can well imagine how scary it must be to live in the United States today. The last time Trump won, I snarkily referred to it as the Ignited States, but that doesn’t feel accurate when so many voters slid right, and those who didn’t vote or voted for a guaranteed loser third party candidate are still trying to figure out whether they did the right thing.
I understand your fear, wokefolk. I do. I felt the same fear during Bush II’s America as we embraced POW torture and I thought, “This is not the country I grew up in.” This was not the America into which I was born, the same summer in which Martin Luther King, facing the distant Washington Monument, electrified a nation.
I imagine you must be thinking the same. This was not the country you were born into.
You’re not alone. I felt so strongly about it at one time that I actually did move to Canada. Democracy decline wasn’t the only reason, but it was part of it.
But here’s your horse pill, wokefolk. We lifelong liberals believe, along with our brothers, sisters, and occasionally crazy cousins on the right that you have completely gone off the rails. That you back insane policies that exemplify everything you claim to be fighting against: Racism,
misogyny, antisemitism, colonialism, and your own ‘woke’ Project 2025, begun around 2012.
(Question for you: Was antisemitism ever part of antiracism? Seriously asking.)
Wokefolk, a confession: A few days after the election, many of us felt weirdly hopeful. Just a little. And we can’t stand Trump either! But I’d think while exercising, Well he DOES say he wants to deport all the illegals, starting with the criminal element. Which happened under Harris’s watch! It would sure help with the crime problem!
The sex trafficking of minors has skyrocketed in the US since 2021 - Why? - Podcast, Meghan Murphy at The Same Drugs
Friends, that really really bothered me. Do you have any idea what these victims go through? Mostly underage girls, but some underage boys too? And some of legal age? Do you know what these filthy psychopaths do to these children so that sick fucks everywhere can wank off to it on YouPorn? Do you have any idea how they’re tortured and sexually abused in ways you can’t even imagine?
Wokefolk, you asked us—demanded of us!—that we vote for a woman who is directly responsible for that and never addressed what she’d do to change it. In fact, she couldn’t even think of any mistakes she’d made.
Not admitting one’s mistakes sounds fairly Trumpian. Has he ever publicly done so?
Wokefolk, we’ve been frustrated for decades by progressive liberalism’s softness on crime and terrorism.
You illiberals are the softies. Antisemitism has risen dramatically around the world not just from the Islamofascist right, but from you, who embraced it so readily.
Real liberals know antisemitism is racism. It’s bigotry. Violence is not free speech. You condemn January 6th, but excuse your antisemitic Islamofascist overlords. The Middle East generates hate like it does oil.
And you embrace it.
You—the ‘Defund the police’ set—made excuses—for riots, for smash ‘n’ grabs, for property theft. You called it ‘distributive justice’. Trump calls it—and he’s right—criminal theft. He’s always been short on the details of how he’ll fulfill his promises, but Harris offered only Trump-worthy word salads when asked what she’ll do about, well, anything.
If you look at the charts of how much the Republicans gained with men, women, the working class and almost everyone else, even gay people, it’s dark days for ‘progressives’. Only two demographic groups voted blue rather than red, those over 65 and college-educated white women.
Elitist, privileged, and deeply out-of-touch white women. The rest voted for Trump. Or third parties. Or not at all.
Do you know why gay people voted Republican? I do. You should ask a few.
Red voters weren’t all right-wing. Or racist. Or misogynist.
But you were widely perceived as being so.
Please come back to us, wokefolk. We need you
I’m serious. You were once liberal, too. But then you ran so far to the left as the famous meme shows, that you thought everyone else was right-wing. That’s because literally everyone is to the right of you, but many of us are still left of center.
You’re not a liberal if you don’t adhere to the traditional values of liberalism. You don’t get to re-define them as you have racism, misogyny, the meaning of ‘woman’, and everything else. I state as fact rather than my personal opinion that you can’t re-define liberalism, because this election proved you couldn’t and you didn’t. Plenty of people you regard as your fellow but Bad Liberals just proved you are not in step with us liberalism-espousing liberals. You are, in fact, a very small part of the left, our yappiest chihuahuas. You arrogantly assumed your Project 2025 was a done deal. Yet you forgot that elections periodically trump (ar ar!) everyone’s ideological fantasy projects.
Woke friends, your hearts are in the right place but your brains have taken an extended vacation. You are deeply out of step with Purple America. You don’t ask the obvious questions, and cancel those who do. But the jig is up. You can no longer pretend men are women and women are men because we’ve all just called you out on it. It’s, to be frank, pseudo-scientific bullshit. I’ve covered the problems with the trans movement extensively (some would say ad nauseum). You don’t support women’s rights; you support men’s rights. We liberals know it, even if you don’t.
To be painfully clear, only you, the 8%, believe this. It was a huge losing issue for you. And we’re not even sure you believe your own narrative either.
We, the traditional liberals who would rather make wicked fun of Trump and the MAGAs than ‘cancel’ them, because true liberals don’t believe in censorship, request that you abandon your authoritarian illiberalism and rejoin us. Even as we know Trump may actually do some positive things for America this time around, it’ll only be if he can personally gain from it, and he’ll probably FUBAR it no matter what. And everything else will be disastrous. He’s already nominating some of the lousiest Americans we’ve got to his Cabinet.
I mean, here we go again. He wanted to appoint a suspected sex trafficker and alleged child molester as the nation’s Attorney General, and a woman who’s squoodgy-woodgy with ugly people like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Donnie’s li’l Putie-Pie. Not surprising for a president-elect who admires some of the filthiest dictators on the planet, but while we’re on the subject….
Why do you, as well?
Trump may admire Putin, Kim-Jong Un, Rodrigo Duterte, and Xi Jinping, but wokefolk, many of you worship Hamas, Hezbollah, and stand with Iran: Terrorist groups and governments who hate everything you claim to stand for, especially free women and LGBTQ rights.
So seriously, you’re on the same moral platform as Trump’s Christian Nationalists. In many respects, you are no better than they.
But we know you can be. You used to be. We need you to find your moral compass and rejoin us.
Because Trump is a wannabe dictator. Because Project 2025 is scary, and I for one remember the nasty Christian Right during the Reagan-Bush years. Trump plays well to these people because they’re as morally bankrupt as he. We liberals don’t want to replace your authoritarianism with theirs.
America voted against you—literally, against you—on November 5th, less a pro-Republican election as an ‘anything but Democratic’ election.
I’ll be blunt, wokefolk: Americans can’t stand you, but there is, in fact, something in this little black bag for you, Dorothy. It’s called redemption. It’s a Christian word derived in the 14th century meaning ‘delivery from sin’. Redemption happens if one is genuinely penitent of one’s sins which, in woke progressive parlance, might be described as ‘grievance’, ‘oppression’, or ‘offense’.
Every culture understands redemption whether they’ve heard of Jesus or not. The only human culture we don’t find it in is woke ‘progressivism’. You folks are famous for forgiving no one, especially each other. You cancel, i.e., ruin lives over the slightest transgressions. You’re censorship-mad, and you force self-censorship among those who don’t want to lose their jobs or reputations over the most piddling First World ‘microaggressions’ you can imagine.
We despise you for this. It’s social justice psychopathy; the perps feel no compassion or empathy for their victims. They’re objects, to be destroyed on a self-righteous whim like a child who breaks things for fun.
Say what you like about the most authoritarian Christians in America, but they are better than you in one way: They understand the concept of forgiveness. There is nothing more sublimely moral than to accept a miscreant back into the fold if they committed a real offense, one that violates the fabric of decent society, and then genuinely regrets, apologizes, and makes amends.
An Amish community famously extended compassion to the family of a man who shot and killed five of their children and injured five others. A mother forgave her young son’s killer. The Forgiveness Project collects stories of people who forgave ‘those who trespassed against’ them.
Forgiveness is found in most religions, and is part of reconciliation. It’s easiest to offer when the person who harmed you apologizes. Forgiveness never happens in ‘cancel culture’. No matter how much one apologizes, the mob piles on even harder. Is it a big success when you drive a young person to suicide?
Does it make sense now why you are despised throughout America?
I ask you, wokefolk, to please deviate from your finger-pointing election excuses and honestly address your own faults and mistakes. We know the Democrats didn’t lose for fear of a black President; we’ve already elected one, twice. We know it’s not fear of a female President, because we voted for Biden and Harris in 2020 knowing he might easily die in office.
So please, stop it already.
Trump lies, but so do Democrats: They pretended for far too long what was an open secret in Europe: That President Joe Biden was fuzzy, unsharp, prone to forgetfulness and mixing things up.
The truth is, wokefolk, America didn’t vote for Trump or Project 2025.
They voted anti-Democrat because of you. There’s still a place for you at the American table, but you’re not allowed to throw mashed potatoes at Grandma for voting for Trump or call your dad a fascist because he listens to Joe Rogan.
We need you to exit your bubble, read books and watch videos that weren’t produced by people who never challenge you, and to self-critique. We need you to challenge yourselves with points of view that diverge from your own—and acknowledge that too often, the hate speech is your own. You can choose real progressivism, or, you can stay back there with your fellow social regressives.
You’ve demanded penitence from others and rejected it—and we ask for penitence from you now but we will not reject you if you’re sincere. You have harmed many in your climb to political dominance and you do, in fact, need to apologize to many, just as you demand governments apologize to others.
We may be divided, but we’re still on the same side, and I ask you to rejoin the America that rejected you soundly on November 5th.
We’re not perfect, and neither are you.
We don’t know everything, and neither do you.
We’re not right all the time, and neither are you.
We need to parse the difference between righteous and self-righteous.
Let’s talk!
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