The Great Pretenders

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

My punditry career has so far spanned nearly a dozen years. I had to make a decision early on in my career about what type of pundit I wanted to be. Did I want to be a famous household name who gets invited to all the best parties with all the “best” people? Or did I want to be a voice for change, for principle, and for illumination?

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The former would involve me changing some things about my personality. I would need to become a bit more hardline, more partisan, more bombastic and more deliberate about publicity and public attention. The latter would mean I may never make the same type of money some of my “louder” colleagues make, but I could earn a living by just being myself and being true to my personality, even if it’s not the most marketable thing in the world sometimes.

I chose the latter. I like money. I like it a lot. But I value my sanity more and I inherently knew that to turn myself into some type of conservative character in order to provide a broader market appeal would eventually drive me crazy. I’m not suggesting every famous conservative is “playing a character” for their audience, but I am saying that I would have to be playing one to even come close to the type of energy some of our most famous conservative personalities exude.

It would be a lie. And if there is one thing I’ve learned about myself as I enter my middle-aged years it’s that I have little tolerance for lies.

I will not be bullied into believing a lie just to appease squeaky wheels. I will not lie about who I am in my speech, thoughts, or expressions just to appease an audience. I will not lie about the truth just because the powers-that-be tell me it’s for the greater good.

These days I do feel a little bit crazy, because I feel like we are being asked to live a lie everywhere we go, around every bend.

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The Democrats in power have been so insanely inept as a governing body over the past months that the entire nation (and as a result, many other parts of the world) has been thrown into complete and utter chaos. It is so obvious that even the stenographers in the left wing press are starting to complain.

And yet, the only response seems to be to play pretend. The Democrat party and their sycophants have become The Great Pretenders, and we are all supposed to follow right along despite what is so very obviously right in front of us every single day.

The Great Pretenders tell us not to believe our lying eyes or trust our lying ears.

Worried about an unprecedented $3.5 trillion dollar “infrastructure” bill that includes the destruction of the independent contractor jobs and hundreds of billions in giveaways to special interest groups?

Don’t be. According to Democrat math $3.5 trillion dollars = $0 dollars.

Just pretend that the $500 dollars in groceries you just bought on your credit card won’t cost you a thing as long as you pretend that it won’t cost you a thing. It’s so easy!

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They are pretending 2+2=0 right to our faces.

Last week a huge controversy in the media swirled around a single photo of mounted Border Patrol agents rounding up migrants amassing at the border. One photo that showed the mounted agent in motion appeared to include a “whip” of some sort. Social media outrage ensued and the President’s spokeshole came out to tell the American people that the problem at the border has been solved.

Oh, not the mass illegal immigration being sanctioned by Democrats. No, whips…whips and horses. Jen Psaki reassured Americans that the horrors of whips would no longer be visible at the border as the agents involved in the photo had been relieved of duty and the use of horses has been banned.

Eventually the photographer who snapped the image managed to be heard above the constant din of the Great Pretenders and explained that what we were looking at in the photos was not a whip, but the horse reins in motion. It didn’t matter. The pretense was already on the books and now even though every witness and even the person who took the photo says those were reins, not whips, the administration has already decided on their narrative. Even Axios retracted their reporting on the “whips” but we’re still left to pretend that the problem at the border is Border Control, not a mass invasion of migrants who refuse to use the plethora of doors available for legal entry into the country.

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This administration and their state-level allies in politics and media are asking us to pretend everything we can see with our own eyes doesn’t exist.

We know children carry the lowest risk for COVID complications and yet we are masking them, testing them, and still hold the threat of closing their schools over their heads ever single day. There’s no evidence our children can’t carry on normally in the classroom and yet there is no shortage of panicked Americans who believe their 4-year-old child carries the same risks as their 94-year-old grandmother. The Great Pretenders have said so.

We’re banning people from participating in normal life if they’re not vaccinated for COVID but we’re letting admittedly unvaccinated and untested illegal immigrants stream across our borders by the millions, only to disappear into a population that is still constantly being threatened by lockdowns if they don’t “behave” according COVID tyranny.

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We’re being told those icky Trump voters are the ones holding up vaccination rates, but in reality the most hesitant among us belong to Black and Hispanic populations. Additionally, there is an entire subset of Americans who have already contracted the virus, have antibodies and don’t feel they need a vaccine. The Great Pretenders only want us to see MAGA (insert crazy-face emoji here).

Trump has been deplatformed nearly out of public existence and yet we are asked to pretend he’s still “ruining” this nation, even though the Democrats have near complete control of the Executive and Legislative branches.

Every day I go somewhere where I am forced to live a lie…the lie that my cheap, janky cloth mask will miraculously protect me and others around me from contracting COVID. I am asked not to wonder aloud why, if not wearing a mask is now considered akin to a death sentence, we simply just mandate the cure-all of masks and forget about coercing hesitant people to take a vaccine that can still allow for infections anyway. If masks are so vital, why do we need any other solution?

But instead the lies are plastered to our faces and we’re just supposed to grin (privately, as no one can see your face anymore) and bear it.

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Everywhere you look, at every turn there is another leftist Democrat lying to you. Their only defense against their dismal record is to pretend such a record doesn’t exist. Nothing to see here.

I can’t live these lies and I won’t. If I seem crazy to you sometimes, that’s because I do feel like I’m being driven crazy. I am surrounded by Great Pretenders who keep asking me to exchange the truth for their lies.

But I made the decision long ago to never be pulled into a lie just for my own comfort. I’m not about to start now.

The Great Pretenders have us trapped in this never-ending, amateur, horrible one-act play.

I want my money back.

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