An Open Letter to American Progressives

Dear Progressives,

Once upon a time, not too long ago, I too desired to be one of you. On paper, so many of our beliefs align. A commitment to environmentalism, to protect the health of our planet long-term. The fight for social justice and against the scourge of racism. Standing up for the working class. Access to affordable healthcare and education for every resident in this nation. I want to work with you to make all of these a reality, except I cannot anymore, in good faith. I’m leaving. Done. Your disturbing behavior and blindness to reality does not allow me to remain. Your extremism has alienated me, and many other people, and this is so unfortunate. Your “Progressive” path is only leading us to a regression, as a country!

Now, of course, I realize that, just as not every Trump supporter is a racist insurrectionist, nor is every Progressive like this. Every person is unique with his or her views; if you are a Progressive who does not engage in this insanity, we’re cool. But just as a significant population of Trump supporters are extremists on the right, so too, are unfortunately a lot of Progressives on the left. These are the willfully ignorant people who this letter is for.

I refuse to participate in a movement that is sensationalized into some perversion of “justice” or “truth”, when it is actually perpetuating the exact opposite. Everything is about race, especially things having absolutely nothing to do with it. You pretend you are “anti-racist”, while actively treating minorities, especially African Americans, like children. You hate white people, cherry-pick Progressive minorities to tokenize, and practice microaggressions against Jews. You redefine the dictionary to suit whatever agenda you are following. Even as you praise, support, and amplify autocratic and problematic regimes, such as China, Cuba, Venezuela, or Iran, you single out just one country, Israel, for boycotts and condemnations. Rather than being thankful and appreciative for your American privilege, you demonize and hate your own country.

As if believing in things that defy logic and common sense aren’t enough, you expect and require everyone else to follow suit. You treat this like some zero-sum game, black or white (pun intended), where you are always the good guys, while everyone even slightly disagreeing with you is the enemy, who must be vanquished and destroyed. You’re nasty, you’re mean, you slander people and fabricate facts, instead of engaging in meaningful difficult and uncomfortable conversations. You exaggerate, lie, and manipulate untruths into facts. You continually perpetuate actual “cancel culture”, attempting, sometimes successfully, to actively destroy the careers and lives of anyone daring to even slightly disagree with you. Rather than listening to diverse perspectives and engaging in healthy debate, you refuse to listen, let alone acknowledge, why at least some your world views may be so problematic. Progressives, what the fuck are you doing? Your current behavior is going to alienate potential allies, and make a mockery out of anti-racism. Your lack of basic economic and common sense, incompetence, and refusal to respect diverging opinions, will not only cause irreparable damage to this country, but amplify the rise to reactive platforms, as we have already seen with Trumpism.

Your obsession with race is out of control! When even completely innocent, unrelated things, such as jogging (let’s conveniently ignore how Ethiopians and Kenyans dominate marathons), Ralph Lauren’s uniforms for Olympic athletes, or a black athlete getting banned for a simple, internationally-standard drugs violation gets manipulated as about “racism”, you are actually making the fight for social justice MORE difficult, by reducing the credibility of actual bigotry, diluting it with irrelevant and unrelated bullshit. You continually make a mockery out of real, valid discrimination, profiting off of it by writing bullshit, for clicks. Rather than continuing to fight for racial equality, you morons do the exact opposite. When you perpetuate stupidity such as classifying students in classrooms by “how oppressed” they are, calling for students to interact with only teachers from the same minority, or accusing someone of “cultural appropriation” for getting a tan, using a “black” GIF, or wearing a hat, you effectively go back in time to “separate but equal”, something sane Americans of ALL colors, who were ACTUALLY anti-racist fought so hard to dismantle.

White Progressives, you can you please stop pretending to be “anti-racist”, when you actually happen to be some of the biggest bigots, yourselves? Are you seriously stupid enough to fail to see how coddling minorities by excusing unacceptable behaviors is fucking racist? You literally expect black people to behave like ill-mannered, irresponsible, stupid children, yet you have the audacity to call yourselves “allies”. Instead of performatively documenting everyone’s microaggressions, perhaps it is YOU who should “do the work” and “unlearn” your own biases. Meanwhile, you black Progressive hypocrites yell at everyone for “tokenizing” minorities, when in fact you are the biggest culprits of it. When a Person of Color dares disagree with you, he or she is suffering from “internalized self-hate. African Americans who disagree with your extreme perspectives are dismissed as a “token black friend”. Attempting to silence sane white people calling out your bullshit by slandering them as “anti-black” is not it, either; Unable to win debates on facts and logic, your only resort is to rule through fear. Why are you so afraid to debate, let alone consider a different perspective, and perhaps even learn a few things?

Perhaps your blindness to your own racism explains why, rather than actively fighting genuine injustices, all you morons are doing are perpetuating more discrimination, utilizing your lies and double standards to manipulate reality. You continually act like white people, especially Americans, are some of the most racist people on the planet, when in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. With a straight face, you argue that slavery and imperialism are both unique solely to white cultures, effectively dismissing centuries of history and common facts. You are blatantly racist against white people! What would you call an author who wrote a book about “black fragility”? How would you react if someone mocked an African American’s “black tears” or “black rage”? Would you be OK with accusing ALL black people of “being racist? Of course not! You would, correctly, call this racist. Why then, would you do this to white people? If you are “woke”, why are your eyes still firmly shut to your own hypocrisy? If you are so “anti-racist”, why are you inventing and normalizing more racism, while discrediting and diluting REAL discrimination?

Bizarrely, rather than opening your eyes to your own hypocrisy, you instead choose to redefine racism itself, as “prejudice plus power”! You now claim, with a straight face, that non-white people “cannot be racist”, just “prejudiced” (yet somehow this interestingly does not apply to, say, when a non-white person does have power, such as if a black, Asian, or Hispanic manager, who “can never be racist” refuses to hire white employees for his or her team, who still can be racist). Under this logic, the results of what you are suggesting become quite hilarious! Now, a white South African yearning to bring back apartheid in South Africa is no longer “racist” because he or she lives under a government and country with black majorities, who hold “power”. A Klansman from the United States magically temporarily stops being racist while he lives in China for 2 years, only to be revert back to a racist, when moving back. A Jew-hating Palestinian from the Gaza Strip and a Muslim-hating Israeli settler both magically lose their racism when immigrating to the United States. A half-white biracial person who wants to kill white people can only be 50% racist….or is it half-racist or maybe….bi-racist? It must be nice living in an alternative fantasy land. You get to, literally, redefine common definitions, then when someone with common sense challenges you on it, you villainize him or her as “not an ally”. What better way to censor, silence, and scare off intelligent debate than to accuse everyone who disagrees with you as not being sufficiently devoted to the cause?

For all your performative bullshit about “social justice”, there is just one minority you are totally cool with “tone-policing”, and “perpetuating micro-agressions” against…..the oldest and most popular scapegoat, the Jews! You make an exception to your very own definition of racism, where “only white people can be racist”; somehow, “Black Lives Matter”, “Hate is a Virus”, “Families Belong Together”, and “Love is Love”…..yet “Zionism is Racism”. Just as you do with “racism”, when a definition does not fit your warped agenda, you just go ahead and change it. Rather than recognizing thousands of years of history, architecture, and culture by Jews in Israel, they now become “colonizers” and “oppressors”, in the same land they were ethnically cleansed from. Who cares about little irrelevant details, such as that under an ACTUAL genocide, significant populations of the victim are wiped out, when you can just yell “genocide, because I said so”, even as the population of the “victim” has increased by 2 MILLION, over the 21st century, almost doubling? Your selective hypocrisy is on full display when you support anti-Semitic hate groups such as Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS), harassing people and companies from associating with Israeli companies, scientists, and professors, even while wearing your Chinese and Indian clothing, filling up your car tank with Saudi oil, and getting drunk off of Russian vodka. How is it possible that one of my friends vocally supports BDS, yet himself has moved to China, and remains conveniently silent on that nation’s own human rights violations? Even your own definition of “White Supremacy”, transforms into in the ultimate “fuck you”, to Jews, who magically morph into “White Supremacists”, despite your own definition of minorities not being able to be racist, nor the fact that ACTUAL White Supremacists chant “Jews will not replace us”. Normal people see right through your scam; you’re not “anti-racist” at all. Just extremely brainwashed, if not outright anti-Semitic.

Your complete detachment from reality and facts is a talent worthy of an Olympic gold medal. Rather than listening to people who have actually lived in Socialist autocracies, like Russians, Cubans, Vietnamese, or Venezuelans, you dismiss their legitimate concerns and accuse them of failing to support the working class, instead tokenizing cherrypicked minorities who share your views. When people in oppressed autocratic regimes, such as Iran, Venezuela, and now Cuba, rise up and demand democracy, or at least reforms, rather than supporting them, you blame the issue not on the governments oppressing these unfortunate people, but on the United States! You gladly support boycotts of Israel, yet with actual seriousness, argue that trade restrictions or embargoes against autocratic regimes are more problematic, than those very regimes that the people are actually protesting against. Some of these so-called Progressive organizations who claim to stand for “justice” and against “oppression”, actually do anything but, like Black Lives Matter (BLM), shamelessly tweeting “Rest in Power #Fidel Castro” upon his death (what exactly does Fidel Castro or Cuba have to do with anti-black racism? What are you doing taking away from your own movement by wading into issues you know absolutely nothing about?) What the hell is wrong of you? Do you fail to see the irony of a “Progressive” supporting autocrats who censor and imprison anyone disagreeing with you? If you actually lived in these countries, you naïve fools be first in line to be jailed! And then you wonder why the GOP accuses Democrats of being “Communists”. You are playing right into their hands, and legitimizing their propaganda! You are alienating moderates and independents, and then wonder why Republicans get elected (hint, it has nothing to do with racism).

Your hatred of the very country you live in is quite disturbing. You revise history, manipulating even heroic leaders such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to appear as violent oppressors, and even attempt to rename schools. You refuse to celebrate patriotic holidays such as Independence Day and Thanksgiving. You actually want to cancel our National Anthem. You remain trapped in the country’s injustices from the past and unfairly apply them to the present. While you refuse to celebrate a country on “stolen land”, other such countries with the same war crimes, including Canada, Mexico, South America and Australia and New Zealand, proudly celebrate themselves. Issues with anti-Semitism in Italy and racism in England don’t prevent either from celebrating their country or being patriotic; only American Progressives continually disrespect this country. Newsflash for the snowflakes! The United States has some dark stains on its historical resume from its past skeletons. We’ve done some fucked up shit. We continue to do other messed up stuff, even today. Guess what? So does every other country in the world! People aren’t perfect, nor their governments. Work on making things better, but never turn your back on the country that raised you, and continues to provide you with opportunities!

For all of your talk about “privilege”, you are completely blind, to your own, as an American. You diss this country as the most racist place on Earth, yet millions of Indians, Filipinos, Mexicans, Chinese, and Africans may die of old age while waiting in line for a green card. Racism is very real, and so much work remains to fix injustices, yet non-American People of Color are risking their lives, being smuggled in 120 degree trucks, or braving the seas in tiny dinghies, to live here. As disturbing as anti-black discrimination is, my friend from Ghana, ex-coworker from Nigeria, and ex-boss from the Ivory Coast voluntarily immigrated here, and started new lives here. Progressives, while you hate your homeland, minority immigrants uproot their lives to live in this “horrible” country. Why? Is it because while you exaggerate or fabricate “genocides”, others flee here to literally escape a genocide? Could it be that, while you protest in the streets with your signs, others are arrested during live interviews? Perhaps, as you publish stupid clickbait articles on how jogging, coffee, and dogs can be racist, journalists actually reporting real abuses are taken off planes to be imprisoned? Maybe while you tweet each one of your opinions, no matter how extreme, others can’t even get on social media? Is it because you have the power to elect your government representatives, when others can’t even vote? For all your disparagements about the United States, and how horrible it is to live here, you are protected by 27 Constitutional amendments, yet you fail to even realize how lucky you are. So check your privilege, be proud of and celebrate the progress we have made to date, and work on resolving the issues we still have!

Unfortunately, you remind me of the rise of the Soviet Union. Much like you, the roots of this movement began nobly, with employee rights and anti-racism as key components of the platform. As the movement became more powerful, however, instigators rose to power and leveraged violence, fear, propaganda, and slander to hijack the cause. By the time the Soviet Union became the official government, the workers it was supposed to protect were dying of famine, consumer goods became scarce, and anti-semitism once again became rampant. Progressives, I legitimately fear that if you don’t do some soul-searching, if you fail to check the more extremists elements of your party, if you continue living in an alternate utopia, we may end up in a similar situation. Your alienation of potential allies, of moderates, and of sane realistic people, may well bring back the ghosts of 2016, reelecting Donald Trump to a second term. Sadly, given a choice between you in power, or Trump, I’m no longer sure which one may be worse….