OK, I’ll admit it. Antifa isn’t an idea. It’s really A.N.T.I.F.A., the Alliance of Nefarious Terrorists, Infiltrators, Fighters, and Assassins. We’ve lurked in the shadows for decades, led by a masked man named Blofeld, code named Antifa Commander, but now it’s time for us to reveal ourselves to the world!
Welp, I’ll dust of ye olde membership card – I think I still have it in a drawer somewhere. I wonder if I can still fit myself into that snazzy uniform.
It feels like I’m wearing nothing at all
Stupid sexy Zorsith!
No, liberals are very clear eyed about what Trump is doing: Finding an effective scapegoat that he can use to break America’s rights and liberties so he can further crank up the fascism.
The use of the term ‘liberals’ by the Intercept is not meant to be synonymous with ‘the left’ – its meaning in this context is the political mainstream of the Democratic Party and the left wing of the Republican Party. The term comes from the philosophy of ‘economic liberalism’ and adjacent to terms like ‘neoliberal’ and ‘capitalist’ but inclusive of people who engage in politics consistent with those ideologies without explicitly self-identifying as ideologues.
It’s crazy how many of my fellow americans have been so propagandized to. Taught to self-identify with the ideology responsible for most of the problems they seek to solve. Felling a misguided duty to defend it because they perceive any criticism of it as criticism of themselves.
Especially when most of them are so uninterested and even uneducated in terms of economic ideologies in general. Focusing entirely on social freedoms. Better described as progressive or if we are willing to muddy our terms and the waters socially liberal but not liberal. Still willing to die on the hill defending liberalism, however.
…and everyone is dumber having read it.No, but I will acknowledge it is insane and idiotic for me to spend time educating people who use Billy Madison memes to accuse others of lowing the quality of discourse.
How was the meaning of this word altered so dramatically in the United States? During the First World War, some of the leading Progressive writers began to use the word liberalism as a substitute for progressivism, which had become tarnished by its association with their fallen hero, Theodore Roosevelt, who had run and lost on a Progressive third party ticket. Traditional liberals were not happy to see their label transformed. In the 1920s, The New York Times criticized "the expropriation of the time-honored word ‘liberal’ " and argued that “the Radical-Red school of thought … hand back the word ‘liberal’ to its original owners.” During the early 1930s, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt duked it out as to who was the true liberal. Roosevelt won, adopting the term to ward off accusations of being left-wing. He could declare that liberalism was “plain English for a changed concept of the duty and responsibility of government toward economic life.” And since the New Deal, liberalism in the United States has been identified with an expansion of government’s role in the economy.
– Daniel Yergin, The Commanding Heights
You said it. Not me.
