America’s Bad Case of Hypocrisy Fatigue

“Indeed all too full is our soul with the scorn of the rich,
with the proud man’s disdain.” (Ps 123:4)

I give all glory to God for answering the prayers of so many faith-filled souls who knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that this election was a do-or-die moment in American history. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that our country was faced with its own possible extinction as a constitutional republic if the political and cultural Left had won.

One writer put it more succinctly than I could have:

Our country really was at the crossroads this election. A Harris victory would have vindicated all the Left’s malicious prosecutions and weaponization of federal law enforcement against their political enemies….if Harris had won, they would have promptly stomped on the gas pedal again, and we would have been hurtling towards the abysmal fate of becoming the South African States of America.

I’m not politically savvy enough to predict what would have come after the loss of this election, but I suspect America would have quickly morphed into something like our nemesis, China, whose overarching social control and surveillance of more than a billion souls is nothing short of colossal.

With the complicity of our modern technological apparatchiks, the elites’ control of our population, a third of China’s size, would have been a walk in the park.

Tolerance Gone Rogue

Which leads me to what I think is the real reason—from a purely secular point of view—the Left lost the election: Americans had a serious case of hypocrisy fatigue.

In my numerous decades of citizenship, I’ve found Americans to be tolerant of bad behaviors to a fault. Tolerance is written into our cultural DNA, and it’s not a bad thing when it is bound to the truth. In this land of the free and home of the brave, we’re hard-wired for freedom.

But for many years now, Americans, to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, have been so open-minded that our brains fell out. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point we crossed a distinct line from tolerating bad actors in our midst to coddling them and letting them run rampant over us (which every bad behavior eventually does when it remains unchecked by sanity.)

• We stood by when the left manipulated our courts and legislatures into agreeing that abortion should be allowed for compassionate reasons…then they made it a “fundamental human right.”
• We generally tolerated the gay lifestyle even when they told us they were coming for our kids …until they did. Alarm bells rang only when drag queens started reading stories to kindergarteners and so-called medical professionals began mutilating pre-adolescents for profit.
• We dutifully acknowledged that we are a nation of immigrants with a heart for the “hungry masses yearning to be free” as it says on the Statue of Liberty…until they blasted open our border and let in hordes of criminals who immediately started to rape and murder our citizens.

When the bad actors in government turned their sites on their most hated political opponent, they became positively dangerous. It’s hardly a partisan act to recognize that, apart from the generation of our founders, no man has made greater sacrifices for his patriotism than Donald Trump.

Trickle-Down Hypocrisy

Yet, it’s not even the treatment of Trump that got Americans’ dander up. The most awful twist in the narrative was the way the vicious hypocrisy of the Left began to trickle down to the masses.

We found out that the sacrosanct rule of law was no longer “equal Justice under the law” but “justice for me and not for thee” and never shall the twain meet. The term “felon” ceased to have any meaning as real felons were released into our communities to continue their dirty work while totally innocent citizens were targeted with false felony charges and given severe prison sentences by our haughty security state overlords.

Suddenly no one was safe anymore, and Americans saw that hypocrisy for what it was: the gross perversion of the only legal standard that can unite a country as diverse as ours.

Other words and terms, likewise, turned out not to mean what we thought they meant. “Sanctuary” cities and states were not actually as welcoming of migrants as they had loudly professed. We learned that a sanctuary was a place for the rich and comfortable to be shielded from the inconveniences of the very migrants they were supposed to be welcoming. 

Governor DeSantis tested the theory when he sent a small number of migrants to “seek sanctuary” in Martha’s Vineyard, and we all watched the pampered elites panic like a coterie of spoiled brats. Within hours they rudely turned away the smelly migrants from their privileged domain. The lesson of that brilliant incident was lost on exactly no one.

More recently, we were told that there was no money for our own citizens who were devastated by a killer hurricane that wiped out entire communities, while our betters in the government were at that very moment making a no-strings-attached gift of hundreds of millions of dollars to a corrupt eastern European government to fight a futile proxy war that did nothing but (further) bankrupt us.

And just this week we have been watching the globalist climate elites increasing their carbon footprint by jetting off to Azerbaijan for a(nother) climate summit which will ultimately lecture the hardworking American taxpayers about the need to tighten our belts so we can pay for their worthless and ineffectual green energy schemes.

We’re Done

The litany of leftist hypocrisy is much longer, but I don’t wish to belabor the point, which in any case is all too clear to most decent Americans. What the election proves is that America got its spine back and collectively said, “We’re done with this.”

Tolerance must be wedded to the truth, and when it is not, it produces hypocrisy: we tolerate preferentially. And when that kind of hypocrisy reigns for so long in a culture, or a religious system, or a government, or a business, people get upset and want to throw it off. In fact, they need to throw it off for national or institutional survival.

If I’m not mistaken, that was very motive that stirred Thomas Jefferson some 248 years ago to pen the document that began with the immortal words, “When in the course of human events….” Public school kids these days may not know anything about that document, but the human backbone of America does.

America finally stood up and said “Enough!” and chose leaders who will do something about this mess we got ourselves into. But even then, our collective voices and votes would have mattered nothing if our cries hadn’t also risen to heaven for help in putting the unclean spirits back into the leftist Pandora’s Box.

If the election showed anything, it proved that our Good Lord hears the prayers of the faithful who turn to Him with such fervor. God saved our country from something that would have been immeasurably worse than even the last four years of unparalleled national dissolution.

But now is not the time to rest on our laurels either. One election, one political party, one dramatic moment of renewal in history won’t work. We have to take back the culture, which is a much larger and more difficult task than even winning a presidential election against all odds.

And that should force us down on our knees again because now we are certain that God hears our prayers. After that, we must pull ourselves back up by our bootstraps like good Americans always do and go to work.