OPINION BY: John Hawkins

Modern liberalism is a toxic influence on our culture, on our country, and on the world. There are perfectly nice, likable, relatively reasonable (at least when it comes to their own lives) liberals out there. I’ve met them and genuinely like some of them. But liberalism is becoming pure arsenic being pumped into the veins of everything that’s good, true, and worth preserving, and I think we’re getting to the point where it’s reasonable to ask if the country can continue to hold together long-term because of its impact. Attitudes widely adopted by the American Left are genuinely dangerous and make them absolutely intolerable to normal people. For example:

1) Good policy has nothing to do with whether it makes people’s lives better: When it comes to political policy, liberals are children playing with explosives. They don’t care whether the ideas they propose work or not, but they do care a great deal about how those policies make them feel and look to other people. As an example, a program aimed at helping the poor is judged by how compassionate it makes liberals feel and how well it does at the polls, not whether it actually helps poor people. When you are dealing with modern liberals, you are dealing with people who simply don’t care if a policy makes the country better or worse.

2) They are the most intolerant people on earth: Modern liberalism embraces censorship, hates free speech, and can’t even take a joke. Liberals are like the fun police, constantly on patrol, looking for something they can claim to be offended about. They are now so habitually over-the-top in describing things they disagree with that you’d think we were living in Nazi Germany or in their beloved Soviet Union during a purge. Every little thing that offends is “white supremacy,” “Nazism,” or “another Holocaust.” Angry, hyper-sensitive liberals that can’t tolerate free thought aren’t just miserable people, their intolerance makes everyone forced to deal with them miserable as well.

3) They’re so smug, even though they have no reason to be: Liberalism is a 16-year-old girl lecturing everyone on global warming, a not particularly bright 29-year-old bartender from Queens explaining how we need to redesign our entire economy, and a president lying about every facet of an overhaul of our healthcare system and then acting like it was all for our own good when all of his lies were exposed. It’s people with no morals that are absolutely sure that they are morally superior to everyone else, intellectuals that couldn’t handle running a third shift at a convenience store that believe they’re smarter than everyone else, and people who are absolutely obsessed with race calling everyone else racists. Narcissism and liberalism go together like peanut butter and jelly at this point.

4) Their dislike of tradition, patriotism, and the Constitution: Because liberals view the Constitution as an obstacle, patriotism as ridiculous, and tradition as little more than ridiculous constraints invented by old, white guys, they tend to be extremely short-sighted and prone to radicalism. They seldom stop to consider the potential consequences of policies they suggest and then focus on shifting the blame when things go wrong instead of wondering if they did the right thing to begin with. We live in a world where every liberal college graduate still living with their parents thinks they are smarter than Plato and Thomas Jefferson because some political science professor who couldn’t hack it in the real world told them so. Without the ability to appreciate the wisdom of previous generations, liberals tend to be “change for the sake of change” junkies who can never get enough of their fix.

5) Their comfort with lies and demonization: The level of rhetoric liberals regularly aim at their fellow citizens that disagree with them politically has more in common with war propaganda than normal political discourse. “Nazis,” “Fascists,” “Racists,” “White Supremacists,” “It’s another Holocaust,” yadda, yadda, yadda. If people actually believed the rhetoric liberals habitually use to describe ICE, the police, Trump voters, and conservatives in general, there SHOULD BE bloody war in the streets. One of the great ironies of politics today is that liberals are incessantly railing against “hate groups” while liberals have become the biggest hate group in America.

6) Everything is political: Thanks to liberals, EVERYTHING is political now. Nike shoes? Gillette Razors? The NFL? Movies? Video Games? Who goes into what bathroom? Gender pronouns? Whether you’re engaged in “cultural appropriation” based on where you eat or your hairstyle? Liberalism has replaced God for the Left and like your annoyingly religious friend who just converted and over-enthusiastically ties every conversation back to some quote from the Old Testament, they tie everything to their political views. It makes them some of the most tedious people on earth to be around because everything they touch is just another opportunity for them to virtue signal to the world about how woke they are.

7) The habitual hypocrisy is mind-blowing: Liberalism is a guy taking an SUV to a private plane to fly to a conference to talk about how people shouldn’t be allowed to fly or drive in SUVs because of global warming. It’s a media personality claiming Russia decided the 2016 election while calling other people fake news. It’s a politician surrounded by armed security all day demanding that we outlaw guns. It’s spewing hate while calling other people hateful, talking about tolerance while being intolerant, and demanding one set of rules for liberals and one for everyone else. Conservatives are always amazed when run across a liberal that holds liberals to the same standards as everyone else until the other liberals force them to apologize for their momentary lack of hypocrisy.

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BizPac Review.