When Donald Trump first sailed into the Oval Office, his detractors shrieked that his blunt rhetoric was dividing the country. His supporters pointed out that Trump wasn’t so much creating division as he was revealing divisions that had been growing in America for a long time.
The reaction to the novel Wuhan coronavirus did the country a similar service, by revealing a new fault line: two sets of rules, which were applied differently to Americans depending on their membership in certain political cliques. For the average American who assumed his political leaders still shared the belief that all men are created equal, it was a cruel betrayal.
Coronavirus lockdowns alerted Americans to an uncomfortable reality: the institutions to which they’d entrusted their liberties were no longer trustworthy. If the 2024 election is any indication, they got the message.
In the Covid times, hardworking people were deemed “nonessential” and lost their jobs while watching Tony Fauci’s net worth climb. They were banished from church while thousands gathered in the street to worship George Floyd. They watched their kids fall behind in school while Nancy Pelosi and Lori Lightfoot broke the rules to get their split ends trimmed. Their dying loved ones left this world alone, while Obama danced with Hollywood stars at his 60th birthday bash. To add further insult, those loved ones were denied proper funerals, while 10,000 people gathered to eulogize a drug-addicted criminal in a gold casket on television. Only some Americans were authorized to print their opinions online, while others were punished and censored.
The delusion that we were “all in this together” didn’t survive for long. A certain set of rules applied to the BLM protesters, the Democrat politicians, and the Hollywood elites, and another set of rules applied to everyone else. Americans started to realize they were being had.
When Covid vaccine mandates rolled out, the dichotomy was even clearer. For the vaccinated class, there were jobs, service academy appointments, college acceptances, and social acceptance. For the unvaccinated, there was talk of denying them entry to airplanes, restaurants, and stores, or even putting them into camps.
Once the double standard was exposed, it became visible everywhere. The Bidens got away with selling White House access because of their last name, while Trump was relentlessly prosecuted for made-up crimes because of his. Peaceful pro-life protesters were dragged to prison while abortion supporters got away with firebombing pregnancy clinics. Ukrainian oligarchs got billions while we watched the buying power of each paycheck shrink. Our government seemed more interested in caring for citizens of other countries who broke our laws than in looking after its own. Our president was more interested in apologizing for using the term “illegal” to describe Laken Riley’s murderer than he was in apologizing to Riley’s family for inviting her killer across the border. Our speech was muzzled as a “threat to democracy” while partisans gleefully dismantled our republic.
Nearly 8 in 10 Americans told Trafalgar Group pollsters in 2022 that they felt they were living under a two-tiered justice system.
If Covid brought the double standard into focus, the racial turmoil of 2020 confirmed leftists’ belief that it was a good thing. Americans were given different rules to live by, depending on the color of their skin. White Americans were expected to engage in public spectacles of guilt and self-hatred for their own inherent racism, examine their white fragility, pay “reparations” to their black friends, and accept fault for all of society’s ills. Black Americans were encouraged to celebrate their “black pride” and demand preferential treatment. The Smithsonian released an infographic saying traits like being “polite” or on time were hallmarks of “whiteness,” with the overly racist implication that black Americans should not be expected to do either. Hiring quotas were installed to reflect the principle that black and white people should be treated differently.
The ideology represented by the shorthand “DEI” turned this discrimination into a $9 billion industry. DEI didn’t just institutionalize racial discrimination, it also implemented discrimination based on sexual preferences. While white guys got blamed for society’s faults, white guys who dressed up as women got special victim status and Bud Light brand deals!
Americans who still believed God created each man and woman with equally valuable souls were offended at the creation of artificial hierarchies that turned true equality on its head, doling out special privileges based on a person’s race, politics, or sexuality. As institutions — from media to academia to government — led the way in imposing those hierarchies, Americans stopped trusting them.
Like Trump’s uncovering of deep-rooted political divisions in 2016, that loss of trust was as necessary as it was uncomfortable. It almost certainly played a role in Gen Z’s rightward swing. It was a huge step in shrinking the power of the leftist-dominated corporate press, which beclowned itself by uncritically repeating the government’s talking points about masks, vaccines, lockdowns, and Covid’s origins. And it laid the foundations for Americans, after four years of the Biden regime, to embrace Trump’s swamp-draining attitude more enthusiastically than ever.
The years of Covid paranoia and power-grabbing were an experiment in trusting The System, and whether Americans accepted or rejected it revealed as much about them as the 2016 election did. But it also revealed a lot about The System — and all the institutions of power that comprise it — to Americans.
They realized the system wasn’t going to save them. They were going to have to do it themselves.
Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
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