WE BATTLE THE LEFT BY STANDING UP FOR FREE SPEECH, STANDING UP FOR LIBERALISM:

Obviously, Team Biden figured out that the creation of this new Department of Homeland Security agency was bad politics for them heading into the midterm elections, along with a dozen other obstacles they will have come November.

But this move was also an acknowledgment that people aren’t going to put up with being dictated to by the woke mob anymore, which has seemed to control much of social media, entertainment, and the Democratic Party for the past few years.

I shared this tweet. It went viral.

Much of the replies came from conservatives confused or even offended by my use of the word “liberal.” This is understandable. In modern American politics, “liberal” has long been used to identify people on the Left, Democratic voters, Green Party voters and so on.

What I meant is a definition my fellow libertarians and certain types of conservatives would also recognize. In the simplest terms, the Oxford dictionary defines “liberal” as “willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own.”

In the cultural battle over free speech in the US right now, it is libertarians, conservatives, and a minority of old school progressives standing up to protect free expression, both public and private, and an increasingly authoritarian Left that clearly does not “respect or accept behavior or opinions different” from their own. They want to label speech they don’t like as “disinformation” and cancel anyone who disagrees with their narrow vision of what is socially acceptable in today’s America.

The contemporary Left is not liberal. It is becoming more illiberal by the day. I’m not saying conservatives have never been guilty of similar censorious attitudes, because some Republican politicians still do push illiberal speech policies.

The left’s adoption of the world “liberal” in the 1920s because Woodrow Wilson had so debased “Progressivism” in the previous decade is one of the greatest stolen bases in history.