Why It Matters That Hypocrisy No Longer Matters

The conservative right keeps getting stronger because we don't properly contextualize and counter what they say.

Photo by Alyssa Eakin on Unsplash

Here’s my attempt to sum up the thesis of this post in a tweetable format before rambling through my thoughts about it:

Conservatives no longer care if their leaders are hypocrites.

They've abandoned claims of integrity to focus on maintaining power.

Their words can thus no longer be taken in good faith.

Repeating their words without contextualizing the bad intentions strengthens their position.

I’m by no means the first to make such points, but I hope this offers a useful fresh angle to the current conversations.

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It’s pretty tough right now. Since I wrote about the rebirth of anti-LGBTQ+ “grooming” narratives last month, the problem has only gotten worse. Almost every day we see another step toward fascism, and I do mean that literally.

Florida is now banning math textbooks because there are cartoons of Black kids urging students to work together to solve problems. Missouri lawmakers now want to ban any trans-affirming care until young people are 25 (but you can still buy a gun at 18!). And just the other week, Texas tried to charge a woman with murder for an alleged “self-induced abortion” that resulted in a miscarriage. These examples might already seem dated or less severe than what has followed by the time you read this.

Florida’s retribution against Disney is also unprecedented. Yes, Disney is a huge corporation that will probably be fine; yes, it seems the biggest burden is going to fall on other Florida taxpayers instead of Disney itself; and yes, Disney’s resistance to the “Don’t Say Gay” bill was tepid at best. Still, here is a government telling a private business: “We don’t like your speech so we’re going to punish you for it.” It’s a flagrantly unconstitutional move — until radically conservative courts invent a reason that it’s not. And if conservatives with governmental power will come after one of the most powerful corporations for such basic LGBTQ+ advocacy, who else is safe?

I’ve started joking with friends that it feels like I’m not pulling my weight as an LGBTQ+ advocate if I’m not being called a “groomer” at least five times a day on Twitter. It’s just such a bitterly virulent atmosphere right now, and I’ve been feeling pretty helpless. What can we do to reverse these trends? What’s the missing puzzle piece? How did the ground change beneath us that things keep getting so rapidly worse?

One thought I keep coming back to is that hypocrisy stopped mattering to conservatives. It’s a change many have observed, but I don’t think we’ve properly responded to it.

What Hypocrisy Used To Look Like

Do y’all remember Larry Craig? He was a U.S. senator from Idaho who spent a total of 28 years in Congress. The Human Rights Campaign gave him a 0 for his record in office, which included support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and opposition to hate crimes legislation that protected sexual orientation. He was about as anti-LGBTQ+ as can be.

In 2007, he was arrested at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport for some restroom toe-tapping — soliciting sex with another man who happened to be an undercover cop. Many people know to giggle at the phrase “wide stance,” but I’m not sure everyone actually remembers it originated as Craig’s defense against the arrest. He pleaded guilty and lingered in his seat for the rest of his term trying to clear his name, but didn’t seek reelection. His impressive tenure in Congress came to a wimpering end and he’s had almost no public profile since.

The narrative around Craig’s scandal was hypocrisy. Here was somebody who wanted to make the lives of gay people worse, but still wanted to get his own rocks off. Even after being caught, he insisted, “I am not gay. I have never been gay,” seemingly convincing no one except maybe his wife. The humiliation so tarnished his reputation that there was no political future for him.

Just 15 years later, I can’t imagine such a scenario playing out that way. I can easily imagine conservatives of today framing Craig as a victim of the “woke left” and elevating his profile after he recommits to anti-LGBTQ+ efforts.

Even if there hadn’t been a gay hypocrisy angle with Craig, you would think having committed a crime would be enough to end a political career. But in a post-January 6th world, even that level of accountability in the public square sounds far-fetched.

The Right Abandoned Integrity In Pursuit Of Power

I’m not sure I really need to convince anyone that hypocrisy stopped mattering on the right, because the evidence is literally everywhere. For thoroughness, here are a couple obvious examples:

• Anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers should be able to make decisions about their own bodies, but not pregnant people or trans people.

• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server was one of the biggest national scandals, but President Trump flushed documents down the toilet and got barely any headlines.

• “Corporations are people,” which means the government can’t require Hobby Lobby to cover its employees’ birth control if it goes against the company’s beliefs, but Florida can punish Disney for its political speech and artistic portrayals that support LGBTQ+ people.

I think one of the quintessential examples was simply conservative groups built on “family rights” supporting Donald Trump at all. Trump’s marriage history or list of allegations from women or “locker room talk” didn’t matter. He was going to deliver on the political wins they wanted, so they got on board.

And that’s really what majorly changed. The right abandoned its “moral integrity” position. They had branded themselves “pro-life,” “pro-family,” “pro-marriage,” and “pro-freedom” for so long, casting themselves as morally superior for the positions they held. But they stopped pretending that consistency with those values mattered; all that mattered was their side winning.

They always had a clear agenda to control people’s bodies and behaviors. Now, though, all you have to do to get credit on their side is toe the line for the policy outcomes. They’re all Larry Craigs now — white men who want to get away with whatever they want while controlling others: who can vote, who can marry, who can make decisions about their bodies, and who can even exist as themselves.

The right has made clear that integrity is no longer a goal. They just want power. So what does it mean if we keep giving them the benefit of the doubt that they are genuine in what the say about… well…. anything?

Power Hunger And Good Faith Are Incompatible

It’s clear that conservatives’ biggest weapon in securing power is fear, particularly around children:

• Teaching accurate history? No, it makes white kids uncomfortable.

• Let people get abortions? No, fetuses are “babies.”

• Acknowledge LGBTQ+ people exist? No, they’re trying to “groom” kids.

This fearmongering caters to people’s base instincts and prejudices. Of course we should teach the history of slavery and try to create a racially more inclusive society. Of course we have incredible data about how access to abortion and other reproductive care is essential to public health. Of course we know that there’s nothing wrong with being LGBTQ+, nothing can prevent people from being LGBTQ+, and how consequential it is to reject people for their identities. But none of these facts matter.

The problem is that we still treat conservatives as if their rhetoric has integrity. Just look at the New York Times’ profile this week of Christopher Rufo, one of the primary drivers of these fearmongering campaigns — first in demonizing “CRT” and now targeting trans kids. Here’s someone who openly admits his manipulative goals but nevertheless he misleads the New York Times about that manipulation, and the article does not include a single educator, LGBTQ+ person, or family impacted by the consequences whatsoever. It just repeats the “parents’ rights” campaign slogan without question and portrays the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation being passed as a “political brawl.”

This is not journalism. It’s stenography. It’s pure elevation of Rufo’s nonsense. It’s helping Rufo spread more fear. It’s a failure to acknowledge that he is not operating in good faith. And this Rufo profile is hardly an exception. Matt Negrin’s Twitter profile doubles as a daily catalog of the media giving conservatives a pass with “both sides” narratives.

To be fair, exposure used to be effective on its own. Having been an opposition reporter myself, it used to be enough to lay out for the readers who was saying what and let them draw their own conclusions. But that’s because we used to all agree that both sides were coming from a place of integrity, and showing how some people were failing to live up to that integrity was all that mattered. The hypocrisy mattered.

We have endured this post-hypocrisy Trumpism for too long to tolerate such courtesies. It is malpractice to take conservatives at their word that what they’re saying today has any sort of moral consistency with what they said yesterday or what they’ll say tomorrow. It is foolish to simply frame their positions as “disagreement.” We require a new vigilance, in which we must always ask and contextualize: How do they think what they’re saying will help them accomplish their goals?

The reality is we know what their motives are. Pretending we don’t, or humoring some notion that they have valid concerns and not just prejudiced fears, only helps them spread the fear. It’s not enough to just hear them out. There must be push back. There must be context.

I’m not talking about censoring anybody’s free speech. No one is lacking for a platform right now, and conservatives’ talk of “cancel culture” is just as much a false fear-mongering narrative as the others. But if mainstream media is going to continue to report on conservatives or invite conservatives for interviews, the stories have to be framed properly. It can’t just be an open platform to speak with no discussion of the consequences or the people impacted. It can’t just be pure fear-mongering without any fact-checking. It can’t just be unfiltered “both sides” stenography that treats bigots and victims as two sides of a “clash” or “brawl” or “division” or whatever synonym the thesaurus serves up for the headline that day.

The same is true for leaders on the progressive side. Avoiding the circus, taking the high road, trying to focus on other priorities — these side-stepping tactics are clearly not working. If voters are being persuaded by their prejudices, then there has to be a counter-narrative that interrupts that prejudice. Fear is clearly driving the narrative, and we can’t expect people in a state of fear to be persuaded by topics not relevant to that fear. The fact that a state senator from Michigan received several days of national headlines for powerfully pushing back against these conservative narratives speaks to the severity of the power vacuum at the federal level.

These are the adjustments I don’t think we’ve made yet. We aren’t accounting for hypocrisy no longer sticking. These conservatives trying to constrain our rights don’t care how they look if they keep winning, and all they need is an audience. And as long as there is silence — as long as no one is confronting them and calling out their nefarious and terrifying motives — they are happy to continue effortlessly filling the void.

I don’t have a magic solution. I don’t think there’s a switch we can flip and immediately undo all the momentum their harmful agenda has. In fact, with the Supreme Court poised to gut Roe in the coming months — creating two separate Americas with regard to abortion access — it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

But we have to acknowledge we’re the metaphorical frog being slowly boiled. We have to take ownership of how bad it’s already gotten and how we need a more forceful response than what has worked before. Biologists have proven that the metaphor is misleading; frogs will actually escape a gradually-heated pot. I hope we can do the same before it’s too late for our democracy. I’m seeing bubbles.

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