{"id":822,"date":"2026-06-29T15:07:35","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T15:07:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=822"},"modified":"2026-06-29T15:07:35","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T15:07:35","slug":"were-talking-about-hypocrisy-all-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=822","title":{"rendered":"We\u2019re Talking About \u201cHypocrisy\u201d All Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Pick any Trump-imposed<\/span> crisis over the last year, and you\u2019ll find prominent Democrats decrying the president\u2019s actions with an all-too-familiar word. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Trump\u2019s \u201chypocrisy knows no bounds\u201d after he pardoned fraudsters while throwing \u201cbaseless allegations\u201d of \u201cmassive fraud\u201d at the Golden State. It was \u201cbeyond hypocritical,\u201d California Sen. Alex Padilla said, for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act in Los \u00adAngeles after provoking an actual insurrection in DC.\u00a0The Daily Show<\/em>\u2019s Jon \u00adStewart responded to the president\u2019s \u00adattack on a judge who blocked the deportation of Venezuelans\u2014after previously saying it should be illegal to criticize judges he appointed\u2014by straining his voice like a demon doused with holy water: \u201cThe hypocrisy! It burns!\u201d<\/p>

Read more Trump\u2019s \u201cAmerica First\u201d Fishing Policy Is a Recipe for Plunder<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHypocrisy,\u201d like democracy, was passed down to us from the ancient Greeks.\u00a0Hypokrites<\/em>\u00a0was a word for stage actors\u2014different people entirely, \u00adbeneath their masks. But allegations of two-faced dealing are endemic to American politics. Benjamin Franklin took over his brother\u2019s newspaper after he was sanctioned for printing an \u201cEssay against Hypocrites\u201d about the Puritan minister Cotton Mather. (\u201cIt is far wor\u017fe dealing with \u017fuch religious Hypocrites, than with the mo\u017ft arrant Knave in the World.\u201d) Thomas Jefferson later lamented, in\u00a0Notes on the State of Virginia<\/em>, that the spread of Christianity and other religions imposed upon people through violence had made \u201cone half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.\u201d Abraham Lincoln, in 1854, asserted that the existence of slavery \u201cenables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, as now, allegations of \u201chypocrisy\u201d are often infused with a note of spiritual censure. Jesus, after all, condemns the Pharisees as \u201chypocrites\u201d in the Gospel of Matthew. In recent decades, the term has become a favored pejorative for the grifting preachers and fallen \u201cfamily values\u201d politicians of the religious right. There\u2019s something both powerful and irresistible about that critique. It highlights the danger and the fallacy of puritanism: How can you demand that a society conform to a standard that its advocates do not even maintain?<\/p>\n

\u201cHypocrisy\u201d has been a useful framework for deconstructing an insidious strain of American life. But it can also be a bit of a trap. \u201cHypocrisy\u201d assumes that the imposition of values is really about the values. Sometimes it\u2019s as much about the imposition.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s conduct has helped dispel these illusions\u2014or at least it should have. His \u201chypocrisies,\u201d sketched out in late-night Truth Social rants and meandering answers to misunderstood questions, reflect a worldview that is as disturbing as it is coherent. He and his acolytes are telling you who can wield power, and against whom power can be wielded. You have not caught the president and his supporters off their line by noting that they attack others for conduct they themselves engage in; you have captured their essence\u2014a desire for dominance and impunity, and an avowed illiberalism that has been incubating in the conservative movement for generations. Hierarchies of citizenship are the rule. Exulting in \u201cjustice for me and pain for thee\u201d does not necessarily make someone a hypocrite; it might just make them a fascist.<\/p>\n

Show me a case of Trumpian hypocrisy and I will show you a president living his values, with the unpleasant but predictable belligerence of a mob boss protecting his turf. Take the weaponization of the federal bureaucracy against broadcasters and the targeting of ordinary citizens for protected speech. His administration has threatened to suspend the licenses of broadcasters whose coverage of the Iran war is insufficiently flattering, leaned on Disney to fire Jimmy Kimmel for comments about the Charlie Kirk assassination, and attempted to deport a Turkish grad student for expressing support for Palestine in a student newspaper\u2014after previously condemning \u201cfederal censorship,\u201d and declaring that liberals were \u201cdriving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.\u201d It is a reminder that the earlier backlash to purported liberal censoriousness\u2014like the corresponding demand to replace \u201cDEI\u201d with \u201cmeritocracy\u201d\u2014was always about which voices were sacrosanct and which were an affront. It is the uncensored frustration of having to share space with the kinds of views (and the kinds of people) they considered illegitimate. Free speech, as the\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s Adam Serwer has written, means \u201cthey can say what they want and you can say what they want.\u201d<\/p>

Read more Our Climate Models Are Missing Something Crucial<\/a><\/p>\n

Republicans are not roiled by contradictions when they spread conspiracies about mail-in voting by Democrats while casting mail-in ballots themselves. They are manifesting a deep-seated belief about who America is for and who it is not. It\u2019s all right there in the racist Department of Homeland Security memes and the appeals from Vice President JD Vance for a\u00a0\u201chomeland\u201d\u00a0free of neighbors who aren\u2019t like you. Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism\u2014it\u2019s an ethos.<\/p>\n

It is not even hypocrisy to complain about election fraud and then attempt to\u00a0commit<\/em>\u00a0election fraud by, say, telling an official in \u00adGeorgia to \u201cfind 11,780 votes,\u201d as Trump did in 2021. They are both attacks on democratic systems by someone who never truly subscribed to them\u2014that<\/em>\u2019s the important part. Hypocrisy is a distraction that reduces core questions of power and ideology to a meta-commentary.<\/p>\n

There is something overly familiar about seeing a Republican politician accused of hypocrisy. \u201cIt\u2019s so blatant, the hypocrisy,\u201d\u00a0The Daily Show\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0Stewart said during an episode covering Trump\u2019s censorship of free speech. \u201cIt\u2019s so old-school\u00a0Daily Show<\/em>\u00a0gotcha.\u201d For a late-night host, it\u2019s an easy punch line. But as a broader criticism, it flattens the exceptional and discourages you from thinking deeper about the structures of power. It\u2019s precisely because \u201chypocrisy\u201d is a tag that you could lob at so many political figures over the last quarter century that it feels so insufficient to describe our current leaders. In a weird way, it\u2019s almost not cynical\u00a0enough<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I confess: I\u2019m a hypocrite, when it comes to hypocrisy. I\u2019ve written plenty of these stories in the past. I\u2019ll write them again. There is still value in laying out the ways in which public figures deviate from their professed identity\u2014to establish, for the record, that someone is full of it. Sometimes it just feels cathartic to fire up an old C-SPAN clip and say:\u00a0Can you believe this guy?<\/em><\/p>\n

But I often find \u201chypocrisy\u201d stories limiting because they substitute the deep for the superficial. It feels less like a critique of a particular set of values than a way to talk about politics without having to talk about what politics is about\u2014a language for discussing matters of consequence in inconsequential ways. \u201cHypocrisy\u201d functions as a kind of political scrip, a facsimile of conflict that can be traded back and forth in perpetuity without ever being \u00adexchanged for the real thing. Shouting about it is an impulse in place of an analysis. It blurs the anodyne and the profound. Everyone is a hypocrite, but not everyone is cruel.<\/p>

Read more Trump\u2019s Sons Stand To Profit From The Critical Minerals Arms Race<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes it really is just about power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":820,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nWe\u2019re Talking About \u201cHypocrisy\u201d All Wrong - Moving and Mortgage Hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=822\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"We\u2019re Talking About \u201cHypocrisy\u201d All Wrong - Moving and Mortgage Hub\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sometimes it really is just about power.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=822\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Moving and Mortgage Hub\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-29T15:07:35+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/20ebebef5de53f4d07b5fa6df720cd6c.webp\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1124\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/webp\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=822#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=822\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/6b7c79bcfd888d98f34c5413df7e81a2\"},\"headline\":\"We\u2019re Talking About \u201cHypocrisy\u201d All Wrong\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-29T15:07:35+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=822\"},\"wordCount\":1219,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=822#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/47f7fcfa2d79fadc3dea97f83428bbde.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=822#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=822\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/movingandmortgagehub.com\\\/?p=822\",\"name\":\"We\u2019re Talking About \u201cHypocrisy\u201d All Wrong - 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