No more hypocritical of an institution will you find than politics. The shamelessness with which many in the arena will decry the actions of their opponents only to pursue those same actions themselves ranges somewhere between jarring and disturbing. It’s so detached from the way normal people interact across the vast expanse of the United States.

How does Rep. Adam Schiff spend half a decade bleating about Russian collusion only to doctor evidence multiple times in his quest to bring down Donald Trump? How does CNN’s Jake Tapper ban anyone who even tacitly questioned the 2020 election from his show while he himself spreads baseless election conspiracy theories?

That’s where we are, though. Schiff is welcome on Tapper’s show anytime despite the litany of documented lies the congressman has told. Meanwhile, after spending the last year appropriating Joseph Goebbel’s language about the “Big Lie,” Tapper is now pushing his own version of it.

"Make no mistake: the conspiracy could have worked and it might work next time," says @jaketapper of the ongoing efforts to restrict US voting rights.

"Pay attention to who they're lining up to count the votes and… think about whose votes they don't want to count." pic.twitter.com/tPBwVALL1D

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) January 16, 2022

Tapper isn’t alone, of course. The president himself, following the epic defeat of his so-called “voting rights” bill (which is really a federal attempt to rig the 2022 election) last week, went before the press ranting and raving about “who gets to count the votes.” Aside from the obvious senility-driven anger at play in such a reaction from Joe Biden, one is left asking what the heck he’s talking about?

Biden, appearing to admit defeat on ending the filibuster & nationalizing elections, randomly starts shouting: States’ voter reform laws are “about who gets to count the votes! Count the vote! Count the vote!” pic.twitter.com/66LpGL1ckQ

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 13, 2022

So what are Biden, Tapper, and others talking about with these unsubstantiated assertions regarding vote counting? Well, the technical answer is that they aren’t talking about anything. At least not anything that actually exists. Despite the wild rantings of these leftwing ideologues, the votes of the next election and all those after will be counted just as they’ve always been counted, i.e. by local election officials at the county level. That’s been a hallmark of our decentralized elections system since this nation’s founding. That Democrats want to federalize and centralize so much now, wiping away common-sense state guidelines and procedures, should be a dead giveaway as to what their real goal is.

Tapper feigns moral superiority as he implores us to “pay attention to who they’re lining up to count the votes,” providing no evidence of his vague claim. That’s not by accident, though. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

The goal here is to sow doubt in the next election by convincing people that not only will voters be suppressed (false), but also that those who do vote won’t even have their vote counted. Now, doesn’t that sound an awful lot like the kind of rhetoric Tapper spent the last year decrying as “delegitimizing our elections?” You see, questioning our elections is good again because it’s Democrats who are lined up to get waxed in November.

The same people who can’t stop talking about January 6th and clutch their pearls anytime a Republican mentions voter fraud are suddenly very interesting in pretending that our elections are not, in fact, free and fair. How very convenient, right? And if you ask them about their hypocrisy, they’ll insist that when they do it, it’s different. Because, unlike voter fraud, which absolutely, unequivocally doesn’t exist by their telling, mythical voter suppression is everywhere. They make that claim with a straight face despite the fact that black Americans vote as a percentage on par with white Americans.

Nothing Tapper and the rest are saying makes sense because it’s not supposed to make sense. The end game here is to drive another wedge into the heart of the American populace. And what better way to segregate people into their respective camps than to claim that one side winning literally means the end of the democracy? Such a “threat” to the country can justify anything, after all. That Tapper knows exactly what he’s doing makes his behavior all the worse.