Year of the hypocrite: 2024 in preview

Hypocrisy has always been a staple of the political world, and always will be. Like the parents of the past lecturing their children about the dangers of smoking with a Pall Mall hanging out of their mouths, politicians cannot lead on a large scale, in a large country, without warning large numbers of people of moral, fiscal, and physical dangers they personally ignore.

In election years, the normal hypocrisy and double standards endemic to the human condition is turned up to 11, usually to the point where it generates amusement. Since we’re entering an election year where Democrats are unlikely to run on their record (it doesn’t poll very well) or any agenda items not related to abortion, hypocrisy is about all the campaign of President Biden has at this point.

So I’d like to identify a few hypocrisies and double-standards to watch out for in the new year.

First, be prepared for Democrats to spend 2024 bombarding you with the message that you don’t know how good you’ve got it. The higher prices we have experienced recently due to elevated inflation rates will not be going back down, yet they will insist that the inflation they long claimed wasn’t even real (it went from “transitory” to “crisis” awfully fast, didn’t it?) is all fixed.

The government already excludes food and energy (read: gasoline) from its inflation numbers. So no matter how insistent they are that inflation has been defeated, the unaffordability of homeownership, combined with the fact that you can’t walk out of a grocery store for less than $60, will tell a different story. 

Democrats spent the Trump years insisting that all the good economic news of that period — almost uninterrupted until COVID — was a result of old Obama policies. Now they will insist that they inherited a horrible economic mess and are somehow turning it around. In fact, the post-COVID recovery was well underway before Biden even took office. He could have coasted to success by simply doing nothing.

Instead, he has meddled enough that the average American family has lost ground economically, to say nothing of the anxiety caused among lower-and middle-income families by his attempts to let the IRS micromanage their bank transactions as small as $600 (that’ll show those wealthy tax cheats!) and ban their gas stoves. Somehow, Biden’s failure in this regard this will be painted as the fault of a president whose economy Democrats spent years taking credit for. Square that circle, if you can. 

There will also be a lot of talk about Donald Trump’s supposed corruption. Missing in this new year will be what has been missing for the last seven: proof. I’m open to the proposition that any politician is corrupt, but I require at least some evidence. Where are the gold bars? Where are the multi-million-dollar deals and payoffs from shady figures in China and Eastern Europe to the Trump children? I haven’t heard of even one.

Democrats live in such an insulated world that they don’t have to work to get the bobbleheads on television nodding for them. So they don’t even try any more to make a case. 

What won’t be discussed is how one man was already rich and then went into politics, whereas the other went into politics and got very rich. It will go unexplained and unmentioned how Joe became the family Bank of Biden, offering six-figure loans to family members whose multiple LLCs take in foreign money but produce no marketable goods or services.

There are always people who live by the mantra, “It’s different when we do it.” But if something is wrong, then it must be wrong. The person or party to which the offender belongs should not matter. 

I’m all for holding politicians I agree with to high standards. I want them to be accountable for whatever their actions are, as everyone should be. People should be loyal to ideals, not to politicians. When double standards are your only standards, you don’t really have any standards at all. 

Democrats put Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) in a leadership position for impeachment against Trump for “trying to block the certification of an election.” Raskin’s first act as a Member of Congress had been to attempt to block the certification of the 2016 election. Go figure.

They now scream about “protecting democracy,” while simultaneously advocating for (and celebrating) a ballot-purging campaign in multiple states so audacious that it would make the Iranian mullahs blush. The crusade to remove Trump’s name from the ballot by “self-executing” bureaucratic fiat evinces their lack of true concern for democracy, exposing as insincere all of their claims that Trump himself is the greatest danger to democracy. 

The 2024 election will be about whatever issues it ends up being about. But the undercurrent of all of it will be hypocrisy and double-standards. The modern Democratic Party, controlled by its progressive fringes and insulated from public opinion by its massive media echo chamber, could not exist without it. 

Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).