"othering" of nerds isn't restricted to liberals but it is especially hypocritical when they do it. Also liberals are predisposed to "other" nerds because they have chosen nerds to be the symbol of unaware privilege and crude libertarianism so in their thinking nerds deserve no sympathy.
I am somewhat amused by this because I've been a liberal and nerd my whole life, participated extensively in liberal activist circles, and never once encountered this among liberals (the closest to this I've seen would be some segments of the community's reaction to perceived ivory tower intellectuals that are distant from pragmatics, but even that isn't so much an othering as a sometimes white-hot debate about priorities and tactics within the movement.)
Even as a liberal I think there's actually something to this idea. You can see it with things like the financial transaction tax proposals that are clearly meant to hurt nerdy HFTs rather than affect banks. I think part of it is that nerdy HFTs aren't eloquent enough to explain what they're doing and how it benefits the world.
I think viewing the HFT tax propoals as being motivated by anti-nerd rather than a out accumulation of wealth that is perceived to be at the expense of people like the tax supporter where the tax supporter fails to see the social utility of the function producing the accumulation of wealth is, well, a significant case of seeing what you want to see rather than what is actually there.
