Lol this is why republicans do it. They hate us both and conflating us deliberately owns libs and leftist at the same time

There's no way to fight this though, because it's entirely a product of right wingers not giving a fuck about what is true. They always just lump their enemies together into a monolithic threat. Liberals don't understand this though, so they keep purging their own party as if that will make the attack ads stop. Stupid bastards are just hurting themselves and us.

The libs have recuperated the term.. It may not be going away so quickly or easily. François Cusset, How the World Swung to the Right: Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions:

It’s true that the young rebels of the 1960s did not always describe themselves as “on the left,” but the period was much more strict and dogmatic ideologically. The term “left” was less present than were its doctrinal variants—Marxism, Leninism, Situationism, Maoism, etc. For everyone, from actors and adversaries to observers, these were pos sible contemporary forms of the idea of “the Left.” The idea was still alive, as it had been transmitted Introduction / 11through the social struggles of the nineteenth century, from the Belgian miners to the female workers of the Laurence Mills, from the New Deal to the Popular Front and the Marxist revolutions of the twentieth century. A historical continuity was still inscribed in the very idea of “the Left.” Today, however, no one mentions that anymore. The word is only faintly whispered by some, or pronounced with a twinge of shame. After all, it seems that the left/right polarity has become perfectly artificial. It was born with the first revo lutionary assembly of 1789 in Paris, where the arbitrary nature of a single chamber suddenly designated as “the Right” those who were seated to the right of the rostrum, whereas the Girondins, the Montagnards, and the antiroyalists were on the left. This rhetorical convention has had two centuries of rich history, but we can very well let it go. The more serious question concerns the doctrinal and programmatic content of the terms “right” and “left,” and their relevance today. On my end, the only reason to keep the term “left” is if it maintains one fundamental meaning, a meaning that is more vague than its doctrinal content but sharper than debates in the chamber: that is, the sense of conflict. “Left” implies an antagonistic position, a power of resistance, and a very general sense of counterhegemony in action. Hegemony today is maintained through conservative values, the entrenchment of norms, the exclusion of minorities, and via the chaotic triumph of neoliberal capitalism. If all we maintain in the use of the term “left” is this very general sense of active counterhegemony, we are also taking the risk of removing or modifying its precise historical ingredients: statism, social justice, hospitality, and the redistribution of wealth. But those notions have themselves evolved. To take a simple example, the social equality traditionally defined by the socialist project did not take into account sexual domination, or the postcolonial question, or the question of invisible and unheard minorities. If we want to integrate those issues, which are crucial contemporary questions today, we can no longer keep the same doctrinal content for the old term “left.” To stop the unfortunate cycle of recent decades, we must reinvent everything.