What's a "white liberal"? I use this term as a pejorative, by the way. A white liberal is someone who is completely delusional about who and what they are: they're plebs who believe they're part of the patrician, ruling class. They ape what they think a ruling class person does.
For example, when I was in my early 20s my friends and I would go to the Blossom Music Festival in the Summer and watch the orchestra and have a picnic and sip wine and eat cheese. I don't even like wine. It's very rare to have a good bottle of wine. In my brief years of wine drinking, I discovered it was totally random to get a good bottle. A particular bottle of "cheap" wine might be really good and tasty. An expensive one might be a step above vinegar.
Anyway, did I ever really want to sit on the lawn and drink wine and listen to the orchestra? If I'm honest, the answer is "no". It was never really my idea... It just sort of emanated from somewhere into that group I was in. It was a ritual thing to do to be one of the "good people".
The thing the good people are emulating is what they imagine the wealthy patrician people do. It's not even necessarily the case that super wealthy blue blood families are all sitting around and listening to the orchestra... if they are, they don't really know why they are doing that either. Somehow classical music is "good" and most other kinds of music are common or bad.
An even less entertaining way to spend time is to dress up in a tux and go to an orchestra performance inside at an auditorium. I did that many times, even though I knew I didn't like it. Generally the orchestra will play "classical" music in that setting, but will also throw in some modern piece that's painful and boring to listen to. The musicians might appreciate it for it's novelty and technical complexity, but an audience member--even a long trained musician person will end up wasting 20 minutes of their life listening to noise.
I think all this behavior is a negation of what white liberals imagine the "working class" people do--like drinking beer, having cookouts and riding around on ATVs or whatever. The white liberals think that's all lowly somehow.... I don't even know why they think that. I did at some point, and my friends did too. It's way more entertaining and probably healthier to be outside having fun and hanging out with friends and being active, or talking about fun topics than sitting around listening to an orchestra make awful noises while sipping wine.
How did people ever get the impetus to do that? I'm not even really sure how I did. I don't think it was from seeing examples of it in movies or TV for me. It was mainly something I learned by osmosis in college, I think.
Another variation on that theme is the TED talk. It invites the white liberal to imagine they're part of the ruling class patricians, and it fits in with that NPR listener, summer music festival concert lifestyle, too. The "white liberal" can play at being a patrician even though they're lowly as any roofer or plumber or maybe even more so. Some plumbers are making bank. Some white liberals have $200,000 in student loan debt and make $25 an hour--however, those white liberals are certain that sitting on the damp lawn and listening to Beethoven's 2nd Symphony for the 10th time makes them "sophisticated". They also believe having the "right" opinions make them sophisticated too. In 1920, the "right" opinion might have involved thinking lead in gasoline was good, or cigarettes were good. Several decades later, the "right" opinion turned out to be the opposite.
I think my white liberal experience goes a long way to explaining why white liberals are so uniformly sure that it's good to get a mystery substance that includes anti-freeze injected into their body to possibly prevent them from getting a cold. It also explains why they're sure anyone who isn't sufficiently retarded to agree to that procedure is "bad and stupid". They probably ride around on ATVs and drink beer instead of sipping wine and listening to the orchestra, too.
They imagine they're just like Bill Gates, but they don't have all his billions of dollars, and he's on "their" side too. He's not some grifting sociopath or representative of a group of people that literally despise everyone else, nah he's a good guy wine drinker music listener, too. Right?
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