My 2 cents. I draw a distinction between liberals and leftists, and I despair that so many consider the way the two terms are used amount to nothing but a semantic exercise. If by ‘liberal’ you mean ‘leftist,’ I agree with you...they’re evil. They are rapacious people with a totalitarian impulse, who would be happy with the world as a concentration camp as long as they got to be the guards. I regard liberals as naive idealists. They are people who think that there can be a heaven in this world, and look for human gods to give it to them. Liberals are the livestock of cunning leftists. Leftists understand semantics and the use of language much better than conservatives do, which explains why they make such good use of euphemisms like ‘progressive,’ ‘same-sex’ and ‘undocumented.’ It’s also why they are so dominant in academia and the media. Politics to the left is a study and discipline of how to manipulate the opinions and emotions of the greatest number of people...facts be damned.
Yup, I mean leftist. I make no distinction simply because I don’t see any ‘liberal’ as we used to know them, stand up and attempt to take their name back from the leftists.
I very much believe words mean things. Today, Liberal and Leftist are the same thing. They willingly merged their belief systems to achieve power over the hated right. So they should be treated...in their preferred term ‘equally’.