A critical look by a non-American at far right conspiracy believers in US politics

I am nearly a caricature of what right wing cartoonists think of as a “liberal.” I’m visibly nonwhite, openly feminist, occasionally blue hair, etc etc. I’ve had people absolutely gobsmacked that I’m not a gun totin,’ lib hatin,’ Trump humpin,’ conservative. Even people who’ve seen my social media and had multiple extended conversations with me. People will look at everything I am and everything I say and go “yeah neat that’s awesome. So like, you also want to literally kill liberals, right, Best Friend?” And it’s like…..not even that idea that “oh people just keep their opinions to themselves around aggressive conservatives.” I really don’t. My “liberal” friends really don’t. These are people I’ll sit with and have conversations with that are entirely civil and often in general agreement as long as you don’t bring up political affiliation. “Oh yeah of course gay people should be allowed to get married, love is love and it’s none of my business. Banning abortion is sexist and frankly just medically unwise. I don’t think guns should be banned outright but we need stronger background checks. Pull the troops out of the Middle East, no more deaths for oil. The immigrants I know are hardworking, honest people. There’s no reason religion should be part of our government.” Sure, not all of them, not even most, but actually, a whole fucking lot.

Many of these people do not know what a liberal is, and some of them are in fact liberals themselves in almost every facet except their voting history. But they spend so much time consuming media painting liberals as inhuman monsters with slimy tentacles that they just do not understand what the word means. They have internalized “liberal” to mean not a set of social or political beliefs, but a synonym for “bad.”

Something I’ve noticed is how often people like this look at someone expressing bad behavior heavily associated with conservative or conservative-adjacent groups, sometimes even when that person is openly expressing conservative viewpoints, and say “ha, look at that liberal.” It will be a 50something year old white rural man wearing a thin blue line t-shirt and screaming anti gay slurs from a lifted pickup covered in Trump stickers, and they’ll say “wow, see, that’s liberals for you.” They will even see explicitly conservative talking points they oppose and dismiss them as “liberal.” But the minute that their own opinion comes out of the mouths of one of the few boogeymen they can recognize as liberal (Biden, Pelosi, AOC), then suddenly they don’t have that opinion any more, or they just…..choose to interpret their boogeyman as having said something completely fictitious. Biden will say “I’m giving everyone a pony for their birthday this year,” and the pony loving conservatives will hear “I’m putting a horses head in your bed,” because that’s a liberal and liberals are monsters!