Whether you are Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, something corrosive is happening around you: the corruption of the national soul.
We live in a society. Humans are not robots, and reasonable minds fairly will differ. When a candidate wins an election with 98 percent of the vote, we know the election has been rigged. That is what happens in Russia and in Iran and in Arab countries, not here. The legitimate differences of opinion that see neither side scoring even 60 percent in most American elections reflect the understandable tendency for random cross sections of people to differ.
As long as we differ honestly, we really are OK as a society. One time this side wins, and one time that side wins, but the show goes on honorably enough. And so does the Republic.
Where we encounter our greatest risk is when corruption and brazen hypocrisy aggregate to supersede right and wrong. This is true for all sides. Adam Schiff is a brazen liar and has been for years. In an honest world, Democrats also would recoil from him, not elevate him. Likewise, across the aisle, George Santos is an embarrassment and, even, a case study for psychologists, and honest Republicans — much as the GOP covets the congressional seat he flipped from years of Democrat control — should pounce on him without regard to political consequences. Honesty should matter.
Instead, our political society is rooted in a soulless determination to win all battles at all costs. Nasty and even vicious campaigning is a core element of democracy. Although people tell pollsters they despise negative campaigning, those sorts of disparaging ads typically decide elections. Through it all, though, nothing is worse for the national soul than the brazen hypocrisy all around us.
Overnight, the Democrats became the party of mass illegal immigration while Republicans suddenly cared about border security. Neither side has been honest.
We attempt to teach our children to be honest and noble, to admit missteps and to learn and grow from past errors. But in politics, the way of life is to “tough it out.” Deny the obvious, even as it stares the liar in the face. So, Alejandro Mayorkas tells Congress that the border is secure. Of course he is lying. No one needs to travel to the border to know that. The data document the anarchy. Film crews document the chaos on nightly news. Now that governors like Texas’ Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis have gotten wise by transporting illegal immigrants to places like New York City, Martha’s Vineyard, and Washington, D.C., even the hypocrites suddenly will admit the obvious: The border is not secure. It is refreshing to see and hear New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the Witch from Chicago complaining suddenly about illegal immigration. It had been a nonissue for them as long as Obama and Biden were at work only trying to turn Texas and Florida blue.
The hypocrisy is everywhere. When Elon Musk bought Twitter and announced a new direction for that corrupted social medium with all its fake bots and phony followers, a fifth column that helped throw the 2020 presidential election by blacking out all reportage about Hunter Biden’s laptop and Biden family corruption, the Washington Post — among others who dominate the left-wing media — bewailed the threat to democracy unfolding as a billionaire gained control over a means of communication. Uh-huh. And who owns that Washington Post itself? Jeff Bezos, a billionaire who controls that means of communication.
For decades, it was the Democrats who condemned mass immigration at our southern border. Their main constituencies — White, ethnically Catholic, male union laborers in the Midwestern Rust Belt and Blacks everywhere else — were being devastated financially by the influx of desperate laborers willing to accept dirt-cheap wages. Meanwhile, the Republican white-shoe upper class promoted mass illegal immigration because cheap labor maximizes profits.
At least everyone was putting his cards on the table.
And then the Democrats found that millions of Illegals, once granted amnesty, along with their subsequent generations born on United States soil, change elections. Conservative states like California were turning blue, and Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia were moving in that direction. Yes, the Illegals still wreaked havoc on the wages of lower-income Blacks, but the Democrats determined through trial and error that they own Blacks in their pockets anyway, no matter how poorly Blacks fare under them. So, overnight, the Democrats became the party of mass illegal immigration while Republicans suddenly cared about border security. Neither side has been honest.
Democrats suddenly care about the human rights of South Americans and Latinos, while Republicans suddenly awoke to national security and drug cartels? Just wait and see what will change if the Hispanic vote continues moving rightward. In 20 years, if Hispanics emerge as a Republican constituency, the Right will be promoting illegal immigration, and the Left will be bemoaning border security and fentanyl. Assuming America still exists as a country.
And what indeed of security? Until Eric Swalwell, the expression of “sleeping with the enemy” merely conjured an idiom. Thanks to him, it now conjures an idiot. Imagine: a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Judiciary Committee, and Homeland Security Committee literally devoting intimate bedtime to Fang Fang, a spy for China. Talk about China digging its fangs in. And Dianne Feinstein, another California Democrat, this one on the Senate Intelligence Committee, had a spy for China as her chauffeur. Yet these and their party instead denounce their despised Donald Trump as a national-security threat. As proof, they point to classified documents he took from Washington to his private custody. Why, that was so frightening that law-enforcement agents were dispatched to promenade through Mar-a-Lago in an old-fashioned FBI raid while Attorney General Merrick Garland named a special counsel to investigate.
And then it turned out that Joe Biden also snatched highly classified documents from Washington. One batch landed in an office in Pennsylvania. Another batch in his garage. Right near his Corvette. And a few years earlier, thousands of documents, including classified emails, ended up on a computer server in Hillary Clinton’s bathroom. No FBI raids on Clinton or Joe.
In an honest world, Hillary would have been prosecuted for spoliation of evidence when her roughly 30,000 emails about yoga and wedding dresses were scrubbed clean from her servers and her hard drives smashed by hammer. But she was not prosecuted. Meanwhile, Roger Stone’s house was raided in the middle of the night, and he was subjected to a CNN-televised handcuffed “perp walk.” And Peter Navarro was chained in handcuffs and leg irons when refusing to honor a subpoena from the Pelosi-Cheney Jan. 6 Committee, a kangaroo court comprised of Democrats and a few token “Never-Trump” Republicans selected by Nancy Pelosi for her star chamber. Democracy? Justice? Or blatant double standards?
And then the Supreme Court. Democrats never were bothered that their left-wing SCOTUS majority dominated American law, often supplanting Congress as an ultra vires legislative branch, for nearly half a century. They fabricated legal rulings based on justices’ personal whims, not rooted in stare decisis and actual legal precedent. And then a conservative majority emerged, and suddenly the rules governing the Supreme Court no longer were just. With a 6–3 conservative tilt, because John Roberts occasionally sides with conservatives, the Democrats suddenly determined that the court needs four more justices, exactly four, increasing its bench to 13. By coincidence, that would give the Left a sudden 7–6 majority. Or, for greater justice, more enterprising “progressives” pushed to pack the court up to 15.
This kind of dishonesty, the brazen hypocrisy, gnaws at the nation’s soul. Children grow up amid public dishonesty all around them, with greater access to the lies than ever before, thanks to social media and cable TV outliers. Indeed, it is for that reason that I not only always have avoided MSNBC, CNN, and foolish time wasters like The View but even have come to recoil from Fox News opinion shows. I have lost my patience and tolerance for hacks on the left muttering their scripted excuses and hacks on the right countering with theirs. So many of them, on all sides, are not debating theses and antitheses to arrive at a synthesized Truth. Rather, they simply are parroting their assigned lines, albeit with a bit more panache than the fool whom Biden named as his press spokesperson. And even with her — Madame Jean-Pierre — who can doubt that she stands there only because she is a Democrat Trifecta: Black, Woman (whatever that means), and Lesbian. Not because she is the best and the brightest, nor even the good and the coherent. Imagine if the Washington press corps grilled that one the way they abused Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
For that matter, what of a Supreme Court nominee so dishonest and phony that, despite (or because of) her supposed Harvard Law School education, she cannot define what a woman is? That is surprising for truth seekers because she is a jurisprudential mediocrity who never would have been nominated — not in a billion years — if she were not female. Surely, someone in Biden’s office for nominating Black women — Jean-Pierre, the new justice, the U.N. ambassador — knows what a woman is. Maybe the definition can be found in one of those documents in Biden’s garage or in the glove compartment of his Corvette.
The great national danger for all of us is that we will learn to coexist copacetically with hypocrisy, that we will come to accept that “Oh well, that’s politics!”
As long as we recoil from the hypocrisy and lies on all sides, hope for our national soul remains. Once we capitulate, we fall.