I Dated a Progressive Liberal - So You Don’t Have To
Another night in Boston, trying to swim in the crowded, heavy dating scene. You guys already read about how my last date went, but here I am still looking for someone who can listen to podcasts with me and discuss them passionately, with better arguments than mine.
I went into this date with a quiet promise to myself — no politics, no heavy conversations. Just be present, get to know the person, and let them get to know me in an open, honest, human way. I wanted it to feel easy for once.
At some point during the date, like I sometimes do, I ask for help with a word or pronunciation. If you follow my Instagram, you know I have a thick accent. I admit I still think in Hebrew most of the time. We talked; he was engaged and curious — but something lingered around us the entire time; I felt his curiosity, he wanted to know where I am from, but never asked, not once. At one point, I mentioned I want to travel to Costa Rica, and I could almost see him searching for a way to ask if that’s where I’m from… without actually asking.
There was this moment where his curiosity showed on his face — and then he pulled back. Like the question itself was a landmine.
If you're wondering how this is possible—how an adult man sitting across from a woman on a date, supposed to get to know her, she is speaking with a heavy accent and asking about English words, yet he still never asks that basic question—let me tell you about microaggressions. This is what progressive culture has done to basic human curiosity. It has turned “where are you from?” from one of the oldest, most personal questions into a potential act of aggression. Microaggressions quietly make us lonelier, more fragile, and more afraid of each other.
What Is a Microaggression, and Why Does It Matter
The term was coined in 1970 by Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce to describe subtle, often unintentional slights directed at people of color. Decades later, it was expanded by Columbia professor Derald Wing Sue into a broad framework that includes asking an Asian American where they were born, telling someone “you speak English so well,” or saying “I don’t see color.” These are classified, in serious academic literature, as acts of violence.
Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, in their landmark book The Coddling of the American Mind, identified the problem precisely: the microaggression framework teaches people to use the least generous interpretation possible in every ambiguous interaction. Rather than assuming good faith and curiosity, they are trained to assume hostility and threat. Haidt and Lukianoff called it “reverse cognitive behavioral therapy.” Instead of building resilience, it builds fragility. Instead of teaching people to interrogate their own emotional reactions, it validates those reactions as absolute truth, regardless of intent.
The result clearly shows what my date demonstrated: a grown man, educated at an elite university, sitting across from a woman with an obvious accent, and spending two hours not asking the simplest question in the world. Not because he didn’t want to know, but because he was afraid.
I felt it. I sensed how he moved around things, testing the edges of stories I shared about my travels, waiting to figure out where I might be from. He wanted to know badly but was too scared to ask. I felt that tension the whole two hours.
This is exactly what those researchers were describing: progressive ideology doesn’t just alter what people express. It strips away their ability to exercise basic human judgment by treating even the simplest curiosity as suspicious.
Studies show that the microaggression framework is achieving the opposite of its intended effect. A meta-analysis of 72 studies found that exposure to microaggressions is linked to anxiety, depression, and stress, but researchers cannot determine whether this is because the slights are truly harmful or because people trained to detect microaggressions everywhere begin perceiving normal interactions as threatening. Harvard’s own public health researchers have pointed out the growing loneliness epidemic alongside the rise of heightened social vigilance, noting that “loneliness is as lethal as smoking.”
The data tracks show that as microaggression awareness has increased on campuses and in workplaces, social trust has collapsed. People report avoiding conversations with strangers. They avoid asking personal questions. They avoid showing curiosity about people different from themselves. They walk on eggshells, a phrase that recurs in survey research on what it feels like to navigate American social life today.
At Brandeis University, the Asian American student association once installed an exhibit to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians. The examples included “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I don’t see race.” A backlash quickly arose from other Asian American students, who felt the installation itself was a microaggression. The association removed it and sent an apology email to the entire student body.
This is what happens when you teach people that offense is always valid and intent is always irrelevant. You don’t eliminate hostility. You create an environment where nobody can say anything at all.
Microaggression results from the postmodern revolution that has taken over Western universities, replacing questions of intent with questions of impact, personal responsibility with group identity, and Western legal traditions with the oppressor/oppressed binary. In this video, what Jordan Peterson emphasizes as particularly dangerous is that this shift is now extending into the legal system itself, as courts and academic institutions move from prioritizing intent to focusing on consequences. This is not reform; it is dismantling. And, as Peterson sharply points out, people who have never spent a day in an Iranian prison are poorly equipped to distinguish between a free society and tyranny.
The Scholarship and the Contradiction
About an hour into the date, somewhere between divorce stories and the question of how many kids were still at home, the conversation drifted to the past. He mentioned that his parents had been poor and that he was the first in his family to go to college. Brandeis had given him a full ride, not merit-based, he explained, but because they wanted to diversify the student body beyond just Jewish students. I said that he must feel enormous gratitude toward an institution like that. He nodded. “Yeah, the Jewish people there are great. They’re not at fault for what Israel does.”
I paused.
I took a deep breath, trying to process what he just said; he had divided Jews, the people whose institutions had shaped his entire future, into Good Jews and Bad Jews. The ones who fund universities, build hospitals, and give out scholarships: good. The ones who demand a sovereign homeland and the right to defend it: guilty by association. This is one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in the book, and he used it as a compliment.
Zohran Mamdani does this. Jeremy Corbyn does it. Half of the progressive activist infrastructure in America does it. The pattern is always the same: validate the Jews who renounce Jewish self-determination, condemn those who don’t. It’s not philo-Semitism. It’s a permission structure that grants legitimacy only to Jews who agree to disappear as a political entity.
I said: “What is it that Israel does?”
“Well, It’s an apartheid state,” he said.
I felt my blood boiling, but I recently watched a video by a remarkable educator who teaches advocacy, and his advice was simple: “When someone makes a political accusation, don’t react. Ask them to define their terms. Because most people who use the biggest words know the least about what they mean.”
“What’s apartheid?” I asked, as if genuinely curious.
“It’s racial segregation, systematic discrimination, and separation based on ethnicity, enforced by the state.
“Interesting,” I said. I watched him settle into the teaching position, visibly enjoying it."Tell me more about it. Give me one example of that in Israel,” I asked.
He thought for a long moment. And he gave me the answer I wasn't really surprised to receive. “Let me see,” he said, while his eyes scanned around the bar, searching for the right words. “Don't get me wrong, I am not that involved; I don’t really follow it that closely,” he said. “I’m training for the Boston marathon. I’m in a choir. I have kids. But it’s really well known and circulating around.”
And there it was.
