The perfomative outrage of White Liberals

The moment I knew that a small but very vocal minority of White Liberals had well and truly jumped the shark into disturbing waters was in February 2024, when a friend confided in me that she’d been messaged by an acquaintance asking how she dared post photos of herself on holiday while there were children being killed in Gaza. This was after a recipe site I frequent had to delete a post due to the number of comments entreating the poster of said recipe to kill themselves for talking about food while there was a war going on, making them a clear supporter of genocide. Another well-known influencer was hounded off of social media altogether for not doing more to speak out against Israel while her infant son was in hospital undergoing open heart surgery.

It didn’t stop there though.

On nearly every post I saw, regardless of its content or purpose, there were dozens of aggressive comments demanding that we all stop living our lives and self-flagellate in dark rooms, allowing ourselves no pleasure or happiness until Palestine is free. And look, I get it. What’s going on there is atrocious and very upsetting, and elicits strong emotions. But what I noticed straight away is that nine times out of ten the target was a woman, and eight times out of ten the perpetrators were White Liberals, many of them also women. Because who do we feel most comfortable telling to shut up about themselves and put others first? It sure isn’t the men. I didn’t see many male celebrities, entrepreneurs, or podcasting bros being entreated to stop posting about their businesses and lives to attend to the crisis (how, exactly?).

Women, especially successful women, have always been easy targets, the ones we love to tear down first. Perhaps because we know that accusations of being uncaring or selfish hit them much harder than men, both emotionally and professionally. Men are allowed to be self-centred in ways that women are not, and will not pay nearly as heavy a price for being characterised in that way.

I became increasingly horrified and disgusted at how the baying internet mob was behaving, even if the cause they advocated for was just. I could see that for some of them it came from a place of frustration, helplessness, and pain, especially if they had connections to the region or were part of the ethnic groups being targeted. I was able to give them some grace because, hey, centuries of being shit on by white supremacy and capitalist exploitation will do that to you. Their visceral reaction, even if excessive, was at least justified. But amongst the White Liberals of the internet mob, I sensed that much of their behaviour stemmed from a desire to be seen to do the right thing. That is, not necessarily the thing they truly believe in and wanted to fight for, but the thing that might get them praise. It was obvioius to me that some of them were desperately trying to prove to themselves and everyone else that they were A Good Person and A Good Ally and therefore also A Good Liberal.

The performative nature of it made me want to retch. Not only because of how transparent it was, these bullies and keyboard warriors masquerading as activists, but because they were successfully silencing and alienating people who actually supported the cause but were unwilling to prostrate themselves before Social Media Court to prove it. Raising awareness and inspiring others to take political action is one thing, but very few will be swayed by insults, shaming, and strong-arming. Since when did people believe they have the right to demand things like this from others, to demand that everyone else feel, think, and behave exactly as they do? How did they - we - get to this place?

I believe that a lot of White Liberals are less enraged about the horrors unfolding in Gaza than they are afraid of being called out themselves. I suspect that many of them, if faced with a Palestinian family on their doorstep looking for food and shelter, would splutter something about it not being a good time, shut the door, and call the police to report suspicious brown people in their all-white neighbourhood. But they feel guilty about that and about their comfortable lives and inherent privileges, so in order to alleviate some of those feelings, they turn guilt away from themselves and aim it towards others, i.e. scream about it on the internet.

Fear and self-preservation are what make normal, everyday people contravert every law and tenet of humanity, like turning in the nice Jewish family next door in 1930s Germany, or accusing a neighbour of witchcraft centuries before that. We might like to believe ourselves evolved and marvel at their cruelty, convinced we would never do the unspeakable things they did. But is it so strange that people might send families to their deaths or jump on bandwagons with pitchforks if it meant protecting themselves and their own families from danger, whether real or perceived? We are incredibly selfish creatures a lot of the time, after all, and survival instincts make people do inexplicable things.

In the case of the witch hunts, neighbour turned against neighbour not necessarily because they believed them to be guilty of witchcraft, but because they did not want the witchhunters to turn their suspicions and ire on them. The reason I make reference to the witch hunts - which I don’t do lightly because it is a compeletely overused and often meaningless analogy (see: every male public figure accused of sexual assault or harassment in the last decade) - is because there are some striking similarities, particularly with regards to sex and gender, that are worth exploring.

At the height of witch-mania, at least half of accusations came from women against other women. Some of them undoubtedly believed that something dark had in fact taken place and felt justified in their claims, but many of these women were making desperate attempts, even if subconsciously, to divert attention from themselves lest the mobs come for them. How could they not worry it was a distinct possibility when they were witnessing normal folks being executed for often ridiculous and baseless claims? And If Jane and Mary from down the road could be taken from their homes and tossed on a bonfire, what was to stop them from meeting the same fate? Why, sending someone else down first, of course.

It is widely theorised that a phenomenon called group polarisation, where a group’s collective opinion becomes more extreme and polarised than the individual opinions of its members, played a large role in the rapid spread of the accusations, driving whole towns into a frenzy. And though it would be easy to assume it was incited largely by ignorance and the religious fervour of the period, because then it relegates that behaviour to the past and reassures us that it could never be repeated, the reality is that it most certainly could, and still does.

People do uncharacteristic things in groups all the time that they would never dream of doing by themselves: rioting, looting, participating in brawls or - ahem - inciting an insurrection. Whether they do so to conform, send a message, quash dissent against one of their beliefs, feel part of something momentous, or to protect themselves from becoming a victim of the mob as well doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they are willing to inflict harm so long as harm isn’t inflicted on them.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that social media provides the perfect landscape for this to occur in modern day society too. Before the rise of the internet, gossip and group-think was mostly local and short-lived, discontinuing when the handful of perpetrators grew bored of their game. But now, with the net cast even wider and the vitriol even nastier and more pervasive, the consequences for those targeted are often far more damaging and enduring. That we’ve reached this point is hardly surprising given the proliferation of ‘outrage news’ outlets like Fox News and the Daily Mail, that this kind of hateful and dehumanising discourse would leak into the collective unconsciousness and become the new normal.

The danger this presents to members of both the right-wing rage machine and the left-wing ‘woke mob’ is not limited to the overwhelming array of information and opinions fed to us in a 24/7 IV drip of anger and what that does to our mental health, but in all the insidious ways it provokes our most primal desires and basest fears. Not only about each other, but ourselves too. And while we spend all our time wringing our hands about the former, it’s the latter we should fear most.

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Postscript: The thought of writing this article a couple of months ago would have felt impossible to me. Even as I was thinking and experiencing these things, I allowed my own fear to override my desire to question it and call it out. I allowed it, and them, to silence me. Instead of standing up to these bullies I ignored them, allowing myself to become extremely distressed and agitated in the process.

Social media became a toxic cesspit where, after even ten minutes, I felt my mental health affected. I was used to being upset by what I read from people with very different opinions and worldviews than me, but to see such disgusting behaviour from those who were supposed to be like-minded peers, and to see it being normalised and celebrated, sickened me. It’s unsurprising that I decided to leave social media and have been much happier for it. In times of darkness, sometimes the most radical thing we can do is relentlessly seek joy.

What gives me hope now is that more and more people are talking about this. Instead of whispered conversations and secretive text messages that start with Don’t get me wrong and I fully support X but… we are saying what needs to be said. We are openly questioning the ‘fall in line’ authoritarianism that has pervaded liberalism (oh, the irony) and are calling out those who are cos-playing as activists to soothe and stroke their own egos. We are remembering why we fell on this side of the spectrum in the first place.

Progressiveness is about looking towards the future and harbouring hope for humanity, believing that we can create a better world together than we ever could alone. Those who violate this basic tenet don’t serve the movement, they serve only themselves.