OK, here's another thing people are increasingly writing to me about at the moment so I'm going to do a short thread. People are nervous not just about practical concerns of employment etc, but of having their principles misunderstood or not trusting their own principles.

They worry that if they raise concerns about a certain approach to anti-racism or trans activism with advocates of it, that they will be misunderstood as racist or transphobic. They also worry that the people they are disagreeing with might be right. This is a really good thing!

This shows that they have humility & are genuinely open to counterviews & prepared to be reflective & honest with themselves. However, when this causes paralysing self-doubt, it is a problem that prevents the very people we need to be addressing the issues from doing so.

This problem is compounded by the reality that if you are a liberal in the philosophical sense - a believer in individual liberty, shared humanity, reform over maintaining a status quo or revolution - you may never have had to define your liberal values and defend them.

Even though you probably hold those values really strongly on an intuitive level and you know when something is illiberal and needs addressing, you might not be able to find the words to accurately convey what you're concerned about & what you think should be done instead.

What I recommend is spending some time writing a kind of constitution of yourself. Thoroughly think through all the values you hold & articulate them. Thinking about the things that feel very wrong to you & why that is might be a good way to kickstart this.

During this, you will likely find that you don't actually believe some of the things you thought you should or that some of your beliefs need revising or qualifying. You will probably also discover many manifestations of the same principles that you'd not realised were connected.

Anyway, you should end up with a clearer understanding of your own concerns & principles & a greater ability to express them with confidence & to recognise when you might be straying from them due to the influence of other people that you want to please.

And the good thing about having a constitution of yourself is that when something happens that makes you realise you need to make an amendment to it, you have the absolute & sole authority to do that without anyone trying to shoot you.