some more quotes to illustrate the hijacking. sorry if you posted some already.

“Fascism has taken up an attitude of complete opposition to the doctrines of Liberalism, both in the political field and in the field of economics”. –Benito Mussolini

Are modern liberals economic liberals? NOT AT ALL. Therefore they cannot be true political liberals

The idea that political freedom can be preserved in the absence of economic freedom, and vice versa, is an illusion. Political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom. Ludwig von Mises” ( a true liberal in 1933)

H.G. Wells was of the greatest influences on the progressive mind in the twentieth century (and, it turns out, the inspiration for Huxley’s Brave New World). Wells didn’t coin the phrase as an indictment, but as a badge of honor. Progressives must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis,” he told the Young Liberals at Oxford in a speech in July 1932.

In 1927 H.G. Wells couldn’t help but notice “the good there is in these Fascists. There is something brave and well-meaning about them.” By 1941 no less a figure than George Orwell couldn’t help but conclude, “Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany.

“The “progressives” who today masquerade as “liberals” may rant against “fascism”; yet it is their policy that paves the way for Hitlerism. Ludwig von Mises 1940

In the 1920s, the New York Times criticized “the expropriation of the time-honored word ‘liberal’” and argued that “the radical red school of thought…hand back the word ‘liberal’ to its original owners.”

Economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883 -1950 ) argued the terminological theft. “As a supreme, if unintended compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.

As the Socialist Party candidate for president, Norman Thomas said in a 1944 speech: “The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism,’ they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.” He went on to say: “I no longer need to run as a presidential candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform.”

“I use throughout the term ‘liberal’ in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain. In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this. It has been part of the camouflage of leftish movements in this country, helped by muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that ‘liberal’ has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control.

I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium. This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservatives.”

—F.A. Hayek, in the Forward to “The Road to Serfdom” (1944)

Scholar Leonard Liggio (a self-described classical liberal) holds that social liberalism does not share the same intellectual foundations as classical liberalism. He says, “Classical liberalism is liberalism, but the current collectivists have captured that designation in the United States. Happily they did not capture it in Europe, and were glad enough to call themselves socialists. But no one in America wants to be called socialist and admit what they are.”

Modern-day American liberalism is a descendant of progressivism. A segment of modern-day American conservatism is the direct descendant of classical liberalism.

Only in America do people seem to refer to free-market capitalism–the most progressive, dynamic, and ever-changing system the world has ever known–as conservative.

The liberals in societies from China to Iran to South Africa to Argentina are supporters of human rights and free markets–but its meaning has clearly been corrupted by contemporary American liberals.
True liberalism is the separation of the church, the economy, and the education from the state.