The 100 Day Pretender

Why Calling Out Hypocrisy Never Works

Donald Trump has been in office for 100 days, again. Both social and mainstream media are giving us “in-depth” summaries of his actions since taking office. Fox News cheers as Trump “steams ahead” on his campaign promises. MSNBC decries his “lawless 100 days”. The Guardian calls it “delusions of monarchy coupled with fundamental ineptitude”.

One of the recurring themes of the commentary on both sides is the impact on free speech. A leitmotif of the alt-right for the past decade, free speech is supposed to be having it’s day. For Trump supporters, his dismantling of DEI initiatives and trans-rights are just that. For everyone else, his assaults on the press, the universities, and his deportations of pro-Palestinian demonstrators represent a shocking attack on the liberties the Founding Fathers sought to enshrine.

What really stands out are the calls of hypocrisy. Way back in February, Zeteo.com published a piece calling out “MAGA’s Free Speech Hypocrisy on Full Display After JD Vance’s Munich Speech”. The authors contrasted Trump calling for the imprisonment of journalists against JD Vance’s attack on European governments for not supporting free speech. A glaring contradiction, indeed. Likewise, on this platform just last week, Caitlin Johnstone argued that “Trump supporters don’t understand free speech” because:

The Trump administration continues to arrest and deport people for criticizing Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza and the US empire’s support for it — and Trump’s supporters continue to applaud these abuses. To call this hypocritical after the way these people spent years rending their garments about the erosion of the First Amendment would be a massive understatement.

There’s something undeniably real in the claims of hypocrisy. It’s almost vulnerable in its sincerity. The cry for reason from the speaker: “They said they wanted free speech but now they’re destroying it! Surely you can see the inconsistency? The bait-and-switch? It’s one rule for MAGA and another for everyone else!”

And yet, no matter how loud it’s shouted, “your side is hypocritical” never convinces anyone. And that fact can really drive people crazy.

Ruminating on why your uncle can’t see the folly of Trump’s tariffs can exacerbate your own distress. Repetitive negative thinking can increase the risk of mental and physical ill-health. Political polarization and contentious elections can increase stress, anxiety and depression, especially for individuals who feel powerless or deeply invested in policy outcomes.

In this post, we’re going to look at a different way to engage with political debates. One that, hopefully, can bring us all closer to calm.

1. Hypocrisy, the commonest sin

There is something special about the charge of hypocrisy in political discourse. It’s an exceptionally common attack:

"Republicans claim to be 'pro-life' when it comes to abortion, but they oppose gun control that could save lives."

"Democrats claim to oppose corporate power, but they cheer when Big Tech censors conservative speech.”

"Brexiteers claim to want sovereignty, but leaving the EU made the UK more dependent on outside trade deals."

It’s one of the surest ways to belittle an opponent. It feels like an indisputable “gotcha” moment.

The problem is, we’re all hypocrites when it comes to politics. No one really applies a single uniform principle in the same way across all contexts. To do so would be absurd.

As Kant once said, “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”. He was right. If you’re looking for consistent thinking, don’t ask anyone about their politics.

Our inconsistencies and biases have been so well-documented by psychologists that we might as well give up pretending:

• In 1990, Ziva Kunda demonstrated how we all use motivated cognition to process information in ways that support our pre-existing beliefs about politics and diminish the perceived value of other world views.

• In 2006, Taber & Lodge showed that partisanship colors not just our values but our very perception of reality including facts, events and even visual information.

• In 2017, Dan Kahan showed how people reject political facts that threaten their group identity to maintain their belonging and self-image.

This has led to a plethora of excellent books in recent years like Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, Lewis & Lewis’s The Myth of Right and Left and Leor Zmigrod’s The Ideological Brain. All of this research points in a similar direction: we don’t derive our political positions from the application of principle. We jump to them using intuitions. Those intuitions have been nurtured ahead of time through a strange mix of genetics, child-rearing, peer influence, and brain wiring. When we think we’re “forming” a political judgement, we’re actually just reacting to what feels right, or wrong, what makes us angry or calm, disgusted or animated. Then we hastily construct some half-baked reasons to justify the positions we’ve already taken.

The big question is: why? We don’t take the same approach to toolmaking, or bridge-building, or coding, or math or science.

Given how important political decisions can be, how deeply they can affect our lives, why are we all so dumb when it comes to politics?

Perhaps there’s an alternative explanation. Perhaps the psychologists haven’t shown us that we’re really bad at political thinking. Perhaps they’ve shown us that, when we talk politics, we’re not really thinking about politics at all.

2. Error theory

In 1977, philosopher J.L. Mackie published a book called Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. In it, he argued that all moral judgments are systematically in error because they presuppose the existence of objective moral values, but no such values exist.

So when we say “murder is wrong” we might use the same form of language as when we describe something, e.g., “the table is three feet tall”, but technically that’s an error. Being wrong is not an objective property, according to Mackie. So we can’t really describe something as “being wrong” like we can for height or mass. The fact that we speak like we can just means we are all taking part in a shared but false assumption about morality. Moral speech isn’t meaningless, thought Mackie, but it is systematically false. This position became known as the “Error Theory” of morality.

So if we’re not describing reality when we talk morals, what are we doing? Mackie didn’t really have a good answer. Several later philosophers presented their own. One, named Simon Blackburn, argued that, when we talk morals, we’re not describing reality, we’re expressing attitudes or commitments. In his view, “murder is wrong” might mean anything from “Yuk! Murder!” to “I condemn murder” or “I commit to not murdering people” or “I commit to discouraging others from committing murder and punishing them when they do” etc. The expression might vary, but it won’t ever be replaced by a description of objective reality.

Blackburn went on to discuss how moral attitudes cluster into larger social phenomena — like traditions, political cultures, national myths. He acknowledged that political discourse functions a lot like moral discourse: it's about expressing commitments, rallying solidarity, signaling loyalty, and coordinating attitudes. And he gestured toward the idea that group identities (like nations, classes, movements) help stabilize and coordinate these shared attitudes between people and over time. Crucially though, he never quite spelled out how that coordination would take place.

3. Social identity theory

This is where the work of psychologists Henri Tafjal and John Turner can help. In the 1970s, they developed Social Identity Theory as a way of explaining how people construct their personal identities through membership of social groups like nations, religions, political affiliations or sports teams.

The basic idea is that a person’ sense of who they are is strongly tied to their group memberships. According to this theory, we typically construct and maintain our individual identities by:

1. Categorizing the world into groups (“us” versus “them”);

2. Adopting the identity and clothing of our in-group; and then

3. Devoting endless energy to favorably comparing our in-group to the various out-groups we define it against.

Most importantly, Tafjal and Turner showed that group membership affects our perception, emotion, information processing, and behavior; all in ways that help to bolster the in-group and derogate the out-group.

Putting all this together, we can understand political discourse as an expression of group-aligned attitudes rather than a description of how to live. And its an expression that helps coordinate group-based attitudes under conditions of identity threat and competition. In other words, "principled-sounding" political claims (e.g., "everyone deserves freedom") are better understood as identity markers, helping to maintain group cohesion and moral elevation.

For example, when Joe Rogan watched the prosecution of the 2024 race rioters in England, he claimed that ‘free speech is under attack’ because white Englishmen weren’t allowed to incite violence against immigrants. This wasn’t a genuine description of English law. It was a way of rallying solidarity among his group, signaling loyalty, coordinating attitudes among his followers etc. Sure, he justified it by “doing some research” into prosecution numbers, but to pretend he reached his position by following the evidence is ludicrous.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean we have to become moral relativists about politics. Unlike Mackie, we can be straight-up realist about political values. Let’s agree that inciting violence against immigrants is evil. We can still hear Rogan’s claim as a way of signaling loyalty to his white male in-group while positioning himself against “the Libs”. We can see it as a cowardly use of violence against men, women and children to boost his own self-image and build his audience. He’s not a hypocrite, he’s an asshole. Take it seriously, but not literally.

4. Dissolving the hypocrisy

Looking at political speech this way can help us to dissolve the hypocrisy a little. Instead of getting mad at how MAGA voters can possibly think they’re in favor of free speech, just admit they haven’t really thought about free speech at all. And neither, probably, have you. That’s ok, because when we talk about free speech, we’re not usually describing a system of governance that, on balance, considering all the alternatives, we think would yield the best results for the most members of society. Most of the time we’re expressing our affiliation to a cause. If we’re describing anything at all, its the type of group we’d most like to call our own.

On this analysis, hypocrisy is to be expected, not overcome. The act of differentiating your in-group and your out-group means finding difference between them. Focusing on the oppressed freedoms of your in-group while ignoring those same oppressions in the out-group is one way to reinforce that difference. Its one way to underscore the perceived (though often false) distinctness of our in-group in our own minds.

And beyond hypocrisy, this style of thinking can help us understand some of the more maddening features of modern discourse:

• Polarization: Why political discourse becomes so intense and inflexible — it's not just about policies, it's about defending self-identity.

• Moralization of political disagreement: Disagreeing politically feels like a deep personal or moral betrayal because it's perceived as an attack on one's group (and thus oneself).

• Use of high-flown moral language: Political actors use language of "justice," "rights," "freedom," etc., because it signals group loyalty and mobilizes group pride.

• Resistance to persuasion: Rational arguments often fail because they threaten identity, not just beliefs.

This is important, because, as we know, thinking too much about politics really can damage your mental health. Especially when that involves ruminating over hypocrisies and inconsistencies in something your crazy uncle once said.

So let the charges of MAGA-hypocrisy on free speech dissolve a little in your mind. Trump and his bandwagon aren’t maddeningly inconsistent. We don’t need to lose sleep wondering how anyone can be this blind. They’re not blind. They’re just not looking.