Save Me From NPR Liberals

I came back from 10 days abroad more liberal than I was when I left. Don’t worry. I’m rapidly being pushed back to the center.

I think the main reason I found myself feeling more lefty is that my usual diet of liberal media was interrupted. No NPR. No PBS. Only a limited dose of the New York Times. Without those sources around to annoy and harass me, I found myself drifting back to my liberal roots. Now that I’m home and plugged back in I find myself coming back to my senses.

It confirms what I’ve thought for years. I haven’t really become much more conservative. Rather, it’s a certain kind of liberalism that pushes me to the center. Basically, I just don’t want to be like these people.

I think of it as NPR Liberalism. The other day I read a piece by one of my favorite right-center commentators, Jonah Goldberg, in which he wrote that if the Times was reporting on an imminent crash of an asteroid its headline would read, “End Of The World Tomorrow. Women and People of Color to be Hardest Hit.” That about sums it up.

We’re going to generalize here, but these NPR Liberals cluster in big cities and college towns, like Madison. They have four-year or advanced degrees. They tend to be more affluent, but that’s not as strong an indicator as education and geography. They’re almost all white people, though they feel deeply guilty about that and would change it if they could. They make up for it by being more offended by racism than Black people and inventing offense where none was intended.

Also, just by virtue of listening to NPR, they are well informed. In fact, another quote I love is, “Liberals believe that God would do what they would do if he knew as much about the topic.”

NPR Liberals obsess about things the rest of us don’t care much about or they take positions on things we do care about that are highly unpopular. In another recent column, Goldberg reviews a new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, by Ruy Teixieira and John Judis. He writes: “Teixeira and Judis focus on four issues that tend to turn off more voters than they attract — at least in the way Democrats frame them: race, immigration, transgenderism and other forms of what they call “sexual creationism,” and climate change. None of this is to say Teixeira and Judis are conservatives on these issues. Their point is that, by prioritizing extreme framing on these causes to the exclusion of the Democrats’ traditional economic populism, progressive activists led millions of white working-class voters to feel like the Democrats no longer cared about people like them. And now, evidence suggests some of the non-white working class is going with them.”

And these NPR Liberals, who make up less than 10% of the population and far less than half of Democrats, do tremendous damage to their own righteous causes. That’s because people just can’t stand them — not just the positions they take, but their condescending attitudes. I truly believe that about half of Donald Trump’s support comes from folks who support him just to annoy NPR Liberals.

And in Europe I could just forget they existed. I don’t know. Maybe they were all around me and talking about “oppression” and “privilege” and “intersectionality” and “marginalized communities,” but they were doing so in German and so I didn’t know it. Either way, it was a true vacation.

And, without being reminded of how much I disliked NPR Liberals, I started to revert to being a liberal myself. But that’s all over now. I’ve tuned back in to learn how much of an oppressor I am just by virtue of committing the four great sins of NPR Liberalism: I am a middle-aged, straight, white male. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

So, I’m recovering rapidly. My moderation will fully return just about the time I get my sleep cycles back in rhythm with Central Standard Time.