For weeks, the pandemic double standard has been obvious. The same people who sent SWAT teams to arrest business owners, the same people who hauled a man to jail in front of his daughter for playing alone in a playground, the same people who tried to put a woman in prison for opening her hair salon a few days early, have endorsed and even participated in mass gatherings of thousands of people. Politicians who clucked their tongues and laughed at Republicans for contracting COVID-19 managed to say, out of both sides of their mouths, You shouldn\’t have attended a mass indoor gathering, then, before and after attending mass indoor funerals for John Lewis.

Even De Facto Plague King of America, The Reverend Doctor Fauci, steadfastly refused to “opine“ on whether protests should be limited by government force during the pandemic. This refusal would have been laudably neutral if not for the fact that Fauci, until protests came up, was happy to opine on, and issue personal dictates banning, literally any other field of human endeavor or social interaction. Fauci was happy to tell us that our economy needed to shut down functionally forever, that all shaking of hands had to stop for the rest of our lives, that schools should be shut down and sports shuttered, and — most recently — that we should all be wearing goggles in addition to our masks.

Somewhere in there Fauci managed to admit that he and other government officials lied to our faces about the utility of masks, incidentally, because they wanted to manipulate consumer behavior in order to preserve the available supply of protective gear. How we then give credibility to anything this lying hypocrite has to say is beyond me. But we\’re supposed to feel sorry for Dr. Fauci because he and his family have been receiving threats.

While I condemn the cowardly act of threatening anyone, I fail to see how Fauci has the gall to be surprised. It\’s weird: When you have the ear of the president and you\’re fond of making hypocritical, inconsistent, and sometimes completely fabricated declarations that harm and control people\’s lives while preventing them from going to work — all while refusing to condemn public protests in which thousands of people gather in proximity —  it\’s difficult to see you as motivated by a concern for public health alone. Resentment and hostility tend to follow that sort of behavior. You\’d think someone as smart as Dr. Fauci is alleged to be would understand that.

I\’ve also found it repugnant that some people are willing to “spike the football“ when people who didn\’t “believe in the pandemic“ contract the virus and die. The most recent example was Herman Cain, but there have been others. Too many people are willing to throw up their hands and dance in the end zone when a “COVID denier“ gets sick. How can we take you seriously, and how can we believe you are truly concerned for public health, when you celebrate the death of those who “deserve it“ because they didn\’t agree with you? These people weren\’t evil; they were just wrong. Should the penalty for being wrong be death? I\’m reminded of the woman screaming at a maskless child in public, telling the entire family she hopes they die — all in the name of keeping people safe from COVID-19.

Hypocrisy on this scale, and to this magnitude, is not merely a double standard at work. It is not an oversight. It is not simple inconsistency. It\’s just lies. The people telling us what we must do are fond of telling us that if we don\’t do it, we will die. They then exempt themselves from the rules they\’ve dictated to others, proceeding to do whatever they wish. When charges are dropped against protesters who burned a city, but the owners of a gym are arrested for opening their doors against public health orders, somebody is lying. This “rules for thee but not for me“ attitude stopped being inconsistent and became simple gaslighting weeks ago.

What\’s worse is that this virus is legitimately dangerous. I have lived in fear of contracting it, of dying from it, of spreading it to my loved ones, for a quarter of a year now. When our leaders behave as if the virus doesn\’t apply to them or their politics, they destroy the public\’s trust in their orders. Those in authority of been abusing their power in the name of public safety for months now; we have been tolerant of it because most of us do not want people to die unnecessarily. Lying to us about the pandemic, telling us that some animals are more equal than others when it comes to quarantine guidelines, is utterly corrosive for public support of these rules.

The result is that fewer people will comply, more people will become infected, and we\’ll all be worse off. The reason for this will be only too obvious. It will be because left-wingers like Fauci and the Democrats don\’t want their own lifestyles hindered by the orders they bark at others.