Liberal Hypocrites

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

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.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.