So many examples to choose from in 2020, we’ll narrow it down to just two.
By Paul Angel
It’s apropos that I am writing this in the month of January, named after Janus, the two-faced god of pagan Roman lore. Janus is many times depicted positioned at the threshold of a doorway, one face looking to the past and one through the door to the future. Because of his two faces, Janus has also become a symbol of duplicity, deceit or hypocrisy, thus the adjective “Janus-faced” for a liar or hypocrite.
And, if one word could be chosen to encapsulate the year 2020, I would choose the word “hypocrisy.” Last year we witnessed hypocrisy on a grand scale in America, demonstrated most frequently by our political, financial, medical, and religious leaders, who brought the commission of hypocritical deeds and words to new heights—a high art, one might say.
We endured sanctimonious politicians piously preaching about the moral imperative of wearing face masks inside our homes, demanding we shutter and destroy our own businesses and ordering us proles to stay put in our bunkers or face the wrath of a George Soros-funded prosecutor. We saw Big Tech and the leftwing media help rig an election and denying it ever happened. We saw unmasked rioters lauded while unmasked Americans trying to take their children to a park were arrested and charged with crimes. We saw looting described as “reparations” and the First Amendment vilified as an outdated racial precept of white control over the levers of political power.
This, at the same time these same decisionmakers freely broke their own rules, getting caught dining on $300-a-portion appetizers, not wearing their bejeweled masks in public, hitting the high-end beauty shop for a blow dry or flip-flopping on medical advice because the “experts” were too foolish to admit they knew little more about staying healthy than the average American.
Here are but two examples of 2020’s record-setting hypocrisy.
Example No. 1: Recently, according to multiple news outlets, Mayor Muriel Bowser’s D.C. Metropolitan Police Department arrested Henry “Enrique” Tarrio on destruction of property charges. Tarrio is the current head of the Proud Boys, a pro-Western culture organization described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “hate group” and the ADL as “anti-multicultural.” In English, that means they are white supremacists, and have been smeared as such by numerous media outlets.
Tarrio faces charges for burning a Black Lives Matter banner that had been taken from an African-American church during “Stop the Steal” rallies in D.C. in November 2020, when his saga all began.
Tarrio is a self-described Afro-Cuban man, yet, somehow, he is a white supremacist. But facts and truth matter not to the propagandists of the new left.
Now compare the depiction of Tarrio with the hypocritical mainstream media coverage of those snotty, young, affluent—and embarrassingly white—neo-Bolsheviks screaming racial epithets in the faces of black cops manning the police lines during the 2020 riots. These blue-haired, pasty-faced dopes were portrayed as stainless heroes.
Our lesson from 2020? Light a church on fire and assault a few cops and you’ll be fine. Take a Marxist banner from a church and burn it—or rally in support of Western civilization—and you are begging for serious legal trouble. (We shudder to think what might have happened to Tarrio had he been a freckly cheeked, pale-faced, MAGA-loving ginger.)
Example No. 2: And now, perhaps the biggest act of hypocrisy on record thus far, though, as we said earlier, there are hundreds of further examples we could cite that could easily define 2020:
After spending most of the year defending anarchist terrorists, Black Lives Matter militants and Antifa thugs wrecking the once-beautiful city of Portland, Mayor Ted Wheeler has decided that—golleee!—Antifa really is dangerous. One might have thought he would have come to that conclusion after 212 straight days of violent and destructive looting and rioting had occurred starting way back in late May. Forgive Wheeler, though. The man (and I use that term lightly) was so afraid of being called a racist, he was stricken with political paralysis and, on numerous occasions, rejected President Donald Trump’s offers of National Guard assistance for fear he might offend someone with a brick, a blow-torch, a skateboard or an incendiary device in his or her hand.
Now Wheeler finally says he might actually have to get tough on Antifa:
My good faith efforts at de-escalation have been met with ongoing violence and even scorn from radical Antifa and anarchists. . . . In response, it will be necessary to use additional tools and to push the limits of the tools we already have to bring the criminal destruction and violence to an end. . . . It’s time to push back harder against those who are set on destroying our community and to take more risks in fighting lawlessness.
In other words, “Help! Please, Joe Biden! Send in the National Guard!
Everybody suspects that another reason wimpy Wheeler turned down help in quelling the riots was because he did not want to be upstaged by President Trump. Wheeler decided to hand over the streets of Portland to the mob rather than be humbled in public by a man who had called him a few unflattering names.
But even in utter humiliation, Wheeler could not resist the opportunity to play the divisive race card, the old hypocrite. He wants to know, he asks, why “largely white, young, and some middle-aged men” are trying to destroy the livelihoods of so many Portlanders. The Tartuffian Wheeler, of course, moved out of his apartment in downtown Portland months ago, after energetic Black Lives Matter militants showed up at his posh Portland pad and started making loud speeches and banging percussion instruments disrupting the good mayor’s nightly dreams of ending “systemic racism.”
The lesson to be learned from Example No. 2? Light a city on fire, riot all night long, throw Molotov cocktails, destroy millions of dollars in property, attack hapless citizens, routinely break Covid mitigation protocols, disrupt businesses and harass the mayor, and you probably won’t face any consequences—for seven months, at least.
Let’s hope 2021 is a lot less deceitful, duplicitous, double-dealing, hollow, dissembling, dishonest, sanctimonious and specious. And, most of all, less hypocritical. But don’t count on it. Unfortunately, there will always be Deep State meddlers pulling the strings of politicians and a controlled press repeating whatever lie they have to to get faltering ratings up.
Hypocrisy is what they all love to dine on. And, evidently, in 2020, it tasted pretty good.
