Weaponized Hypocrisy
When the Lie Is the Strategy
Their hypocrisy isn’t a flaw—it’s a weapon.
And the world, you may have noticed, has never been what we were told.
We are living in the age of weaponized hypocrisy.
It’s not just double standards. It’s not just "rules for thee, none for me." It is a strategy. It is power asserting itself through contradiction, through cruelty, and through the confident grin of someone who knows they will never be held accountable. It is psychological warfare. When Trump mocks decency, when Republican leaders snicker at violence and grief, when billionaires tweet about bootstraps from the comfort of their tax havens and trust funds, they aren’t being ironic. They are purposely triggering us. Daring us to believe our own eyes, to speak up, to hold the line. And when we do, they laugh harder. They don’t know shame. It doesn’t work on them.
But it still works on us—those of us who believe in fairness, decency, and dignity. Those of us who were raised on happy endings, who thought the cavalry would always come and that they’d always be the good guys. We carry the burden of a story that was never true for everyone. We believed in the guy on the white horse. Others—like Black Americans, Indigenous communities, and those of the global South—knew better. They were never given the luxury of believing the system would save them. All of this doublespeak, pain, and injustice is just another day in the life of a brown person. The rest of us have the “protection of complexion,” and a belief in fairy tales. Everything we thought we knew was filtered through a fantasy—one designed to comfort, not to clarify. One designed to ensure the status quo and to hide and excuse our transgressions.
We live in a world that idolizes people who make money off of money, while treating the people who make the world work like disposable parts. The baristas, the janitors, the nurses, the truck drivers, the farm workers, the Social Security lady at window number five—all devalued, disrespected, worked to the bone, and grateful for the opportunity. Meanwhile, the men who gamble with entire economies—who build fortunes by exploiting cheap labor overseas and around the corner—are paraded on magazine covers and cable tv as visionaries. They buy influence. They buy lawmakers. They literally buy mercy.
And here at home, immigrants are exploited for their labor, hunted by masked “law enforcement,” separated from their children, and locked inside detention centers where some die without ever committing a crime. Others are quietly deported or sent to foreign prisons for nothing more than daring to build a life of peace and prosperity for their children and for the American communities they quite literally help build, feed, clean, and sustain. They risk everything for an American dream that no longer exists for far too many of us. They did not steal it. It was stolen by people who have never once met the word “enough.” People who want to turn our world into Mordor and our people, no matter where they came from, into orcs who passively labor under the Eye of Sauron for his power and his glory and his ring.
Immigrants are made inhuman. They are accused, by an actual felon with untold buckets of blood on his hands, of heinous crimes—without proof and without the opportunity for a defense. And the people who exploit them are never punished They’re only left to scream about how they can’t get their yogurt made, their fields picked, or their cattle raised and slaughtered if they have to pay a living wage to an American who may or may not show up again after their first day grueling day on the job. The business owners want their cheap, experienced, and dependable labor back and the profit it generates. That’s why this whole immigration mess is such a damn farce. It’s a reality show for racist sadists, being produced in real time for their viewing pleasure.
And somewhere in Iran, there is a little boy playing with a Gameboy, just as there’s a little girl in America filming a TikTok dance in her bedroom. Both of them may be obliterated by men who will never see their faces. Because someone, somewhere, decided that war will help their poll numbers. That death is cheaper than peace. That children’s and grown-ups' lives are an acceptable sacrifice for the next oil contract, the next campaign donation, the next mineral “deal.”
And in Gaza, the horrors pile higher each day. The terrorist attacks on Israel were horrific. No one should excuse or diminish the brutal loss of life and the trauma of survivors. The perpetrators, Hamas, should have been held accountable. But what has followed is not justice—it is siege and starvation. It is families shot while waiting in line for scraps of food that survived the hands of crooked officials and thieves. It is neighborhoods flattened, hospitals bombed, mothers and children buried under rubble. The inhumanity echoes history's darkest hours. And the most painful part? That history’s deepest wound could become justification for new wounds on defenseless others. It defies comprehension. It breaks the soul. This isn’t about anyone’s ethnicity or religion. This is about justice—and demoralizing hypocrisy.
How do we stay sane in this? How do we keep going when it feels like we’re being dragged behind a machine we didn’t build, but can’t seem to stop?
We start by naming it. All of it. With clarity. With fury. With hope. We recognize the psychological warfare we are being subjected to for what it is. Hypocrisy is an extremely effective weapon when used to confuse, demoralize, and dominate. It triggers our outrage, which makes them laugh, and hides what they want to be hidden. We stop expecting them to be shamed by it. We continue to call it out, but we stop allowing it to eat our souls. We have important work to do. Our souls are needed as are our clear minds.
Next, we stop expecting the powerful to fix what they profit from. We stop expecting them to care about us. They do not. Not even if we voted for them or buy their stuff. So, we organize. We show up. We write and make art. We build communities that refuse to forget what justice looks like. We protect each other. We grieve loudly. We tend our cactus gardens or make bread. We remember the names of the people they want us to forget.
And we do not let our humanity become collateral damage.
Because they may own the media, the money, and the megaphones. But we own something they can’t fathom: a conscience. A sense of proportion. And the audacity to believe that all people—whether playing a game in Tehran, sheltering in Ukraine, or making tortillas in Phoenix—deserve to live.
That’s where we begin.
And as they try to erase our history—ban books, whitewash slavery, use a blow-dryer on the Trail of Tears, and criminalize truth—we will not forget. We will download the truth, write it in code, in story, in song. We will bury it in hard drives, in journals, in paintings, in the walls of our homes. We will pass it like sacred fire, so that no matter what happens—even if the tide turns dark—the truth will survive. All of it. Whether it’s needed tomorrow or a thousand years from now, someone will find it and know we were here. We fought. We remembered. And we never stopped believing a better world was still possible—and that everyone in it mattered.