Funny!

In China for instance, they have a word for these people. They are called “baizuo” or the “white left” on social media. Which is interesting, because even though China has its fair share of socialists and communists, they don’t have a direct equivalent to our liberal snowflakes. Most of the Chinese are still fiercely nationalistic and anti-immigrant, regardless of political affiliation. That country just doesn’t have a large population of politically correct, affluent liberals (presumably, they were all killed off during the Great Leap Forward). So what does this term mean to the average Chinese citizen?

It might not be an easy task to define the term, for as a social media buzzword and very often an instrument for ad hominem attack, it could mean different things for different people. A thread on “why well-educated elites in the west are seen as naïve “white left” in China” on Zhihu, a question-and-answer website said to have a high percentage of active users who are professionals and intellectuals, might serve as a starting point.

The question has received more than 400 answers from Zhihu users, which include some of the most representative perceptions of the ‘white left’. Although the emphasis varies, baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.

Michael Moore weighed in (da dum bum) on the feud between Senators and Democratic presidential primary candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in an interview with Margaret Hoover on PBS’s “Firing Line” and announced that Americans can mark January 13 as the date Democrats blew any chances they had in the November election and Trump was re-elected.

“It was very sad,” Moore said about the Elizabeth Warren vs Bernie Sanders sexism scandal. “I still, as we tape this, do not understand why Elizabeth’s people did that, and why she just couldn’t. You couldn’t even read in her statement what was really said or what happened.”

“Again, I know her and I’ve had her in my films and I have always loved her, and so I’m just…” Moore said, briefly speechless.

“The focus has to be about Trump, it has to be about the system that gave us Trump, to make sure that doesn’t happen again. And the fact that we would be talking about this — I have known Bernie since the 80s. There’s no way he said anything like the way it’s been reported.“

“So, to be honest, the night that happened my first thought was that they will mark this day, January 13, as the day Donald Trump was re-elected, because once again the Democrats, the liberals, the left couldn’t get it together, couldn’t figure instead of much, so happy to get right in there and fight each other like this.”

“And I’m like, when are we ever going to learn?”

“This is on us, this is not on the Russians, it is not on the Republicans, it is on the Democratic Party for not getting its act together and not using its head,” he said.

It's identity politics. Pure and simple.