You hear it all the time: The right are a bunch of moral hypocrites, constantly abusing the language of religion and values for their own selfish ends. They're so bad at living up to their own rulebook that they can't even manage the country's balance sheet properly despite being damned as profits-before-people monsters every time they try to cut spending. They watch the CBC and take public transit and then… and then!… they have the audacity to complain about these things in a most irony-free fashion. They bash the left for being whiny snowflakes, and then they go and point out how people are biased against them, which is, of course, the exact same thing as being whiny snowflakes.
Not only is this the most ridiculous use of a strawman, and not only do the left-wingers who use this strawman think they're being super clever, but they fail to notice that the reason why people give conservatives the benefit of the doubt on religion, on values and on economic issues is because no matter how much conservatives fall short in these areas (and they sure do, often), they are at least trying to hold the line. Someone who talks the talk without walking the walk is a hypocrite, but they have infinitely more credibility than someone who does neither and, indeed, makes a virtue out of doing neither.
That's why conservatives, and lots of other folks too, get rankled when allegedly compassionate lefties call for the whacking of a Premier, or when they sneer at out of work blue-collar folks, or when they excuse murder and violence as just an unfortunate byproduct of their plan to perfect the world, or when they stooge for Beijing while mocking the right for being Trump lackeys, or when they call Jews anti-Semites, or use conspiracy theories to further their own conspiracy theories.
But of course the new trend in left-wing circles is to write off this justified calling out of the fact that the left's collective pants are on fire as the product of disinformation-peddling, astroturfy, false-consciousness-creating "right-wing mobs", usually originating from some place in Russia or being funded by right-wing dark money. This from the people who have elevated online mobbing to an art form over the past few years. This from the people who like to complain about how gaslighting others is bad. This, while the best the right can actually do when it comes to "ginning up outrage" is unfunny junk like the CPC's Heritage Minute "parody" without actually stopping to ask if they can use the footage and then delete it after being called out, and THEN try to spin to the effect that the whole thing was some kind of epic 4-D chess maneuver because they got a bunch of earned media over it.
If the lefties have a point about the falseness of these backlashes, it is that the right should have realized by now that the left has no moral authority over them, and thus their attempts at shame are to be written off without a second thought. They cannot be held to standards, because they have none. Railing at Justin Trudeau for his ethical lapses is pointless because there was never any reason to expect ethical behaviour on his part in the first place. By the same token, appealing to values, be they religious or fiscally conservative or any other sort, will get the conservative base to turn out, but not the crucial 5-10% needed for victory, because there is no reason to expect that there is a threshold where Trudeau's behaviour will turn that many people off of the Liberals to the point where they will get over their misgivings about the CPC.
And most of all, we must remember that these resentful lefties will never see the error of their ways or realize that they are driving society closer to tribalism, because they must hate conservatives, and normalize hatred of conservatives, in order to keep the rest of their progressive program running along. Since their hatred is good and right, while the right's hatred is bad and wrong, they do not concern themselves with shame.
