My uncle has an expression whenever he is mired in a deep political discussion, he asks, “who’s ox is being gored?” It means that we tend to only care about the unfairness or injustice of an act or situation when it negatively affects us, when it is our ox that is being gored. But when it’s someone else’s ox, we tend not to care that much, especially when we benefit from the goring of their ox.
This week, we had a perfect example of that expression in the form of Bernie Sanders. In a recent rant, he said that right now was, “the scariest time in his lifetime” because there is “a movement toward authoritarianism” in our country. He lashed out against “the power of the oligarchy in general – Mr. Musk owning Twitter and able to send out his messages to hundreds of millions of people.” Taking aim at the oligarchs running the major social media companies is problematic for D.C. Democrats. Senator Sanders had no problem when Jack Dorsey owned Twitter, and he with Mark Zuckerberg, and the other social media giants banned conservative points of view on their platforms.
Senator Sanders did not go on an unhinged rant about authoritarianism when all of these social media outlets blocked a former President and the current leading Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, for four years. He didn’t say a word because he and his party benefited from conservative voices being shut down and censored on social media. They applauded when Donald Trump had his accounts blocked on these platforms. In fact, many of the D.C. Democrats were pressuring these companies to censor conservatives and silence Trump. Now that Elon Musk owns Twitter, conservative voices are now allowed to express themselves again and left-wing messaging no longer goes unchallenged, Sanders is suddenly concerned about the social media oligarchy. When that oligarchy benefited him and his party for the last 10 to 15 years, he remained silent because it was not his ox that was being gored.
In the same rant, Sanders also warned about Amazon founder and Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos’s changing the editorial outlook of the Post to a more free market, libertarian viewpoint, as another sign of authoritarian rule. He said, “you combine that with the fact that people like Bezos, the second-wealthiest person in the country, fired or got rid of most of his editorial staff and turning it into a right-wing thing.” For the last 40 years, every major newspaper, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago tribune, the LA times, and hundreds of others have had a hard left wing bent; they were not objective straight news publications. They were pushing left-wing narratives and agendas that Sanders agrees with, so he said not a single word. Why? Because it was not his ox being gored. He was benefiting from the hard left-wing slant of all the major newspapers in the country. He didn’t care about the bias of these newspapers then because it was only the conservatives being targeted.
Sanders continued by warning that, “Trump is suing major media outlets and is threatening to investigate PBS and NPR. So, it’s not only the power of money, it’s also combined with that the movement toward authoritarianism.” Did Sanders rant like this and warn of hard movements toward fascism when Barack Obama had two AP journalists that he didn’t like arrested, or when Fox News was sued for $500 million because Tucker Carlson happened to question whether the 2020 election was legitimate? Of course not.
His final dire warning was about threats to our Constitution. He said, “when you have the vice president saying, well, in his judgment the courts don’t have the right to stop unconstitutional acts of the president, man, that is authoritarianism. He is now trying to end what the Founding Fathers was [sic] pretty smart about, creating a form of government where there were checks and balances… That is a scary moment.” This call to protect the Constitution, is the most comical of them all. The last two Democrat Presidents, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, used the United States Constitution as toilet paper. The Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for Joe Biden by a stroke of a pen to wipe out student loan debt, but Joe Biden did it anyway, defying the Supreme Court and violating our Constitution. And Bernie Sanders did not say a word because he supported Biden’s actions which were tantamount to the Democrats buying the votes of younger Americans by wiping out their student loan debt.
Barack Obama ran roughshod over the Constitution for 8 years. Not only did Obama order the murder of an American citizen on foreign soil, and weaponized the IRS against his political opponents, he also stated to the voters that if Congress did not pass the laws that he wanted to be passed, he “had a phone and a pen”, indicating that he would create the law – that Congress did not have the votes to pass – unilaterally through executive action. Obama rewrote existing laws with a stroke a pen like – the 1998 WARN Act, the 1988 TANF Program, and Obamacare. He signed into law the DREAM Act by Executive Fiat granting amnesty to tens of thousands of illegal aliens. And Bernie Sanders did not warn of authoritarianism of Obama’s actions, nor did he speak reverently about the importance of checks and balances when Obama and Biden were ignoring or overriding the other two equal branches of government.
We were told for 8 years under Obama and 4 years under Biden, that the filibuster in the Senate was a “relic of Jim Crow.” Obama said it; Biden said it; and they both called for ending it. Now that the Democrats are in the minority in both houses of Congress, the Democrats have already used that “a relic of Jim Crow”, three times this year to stop Donald Trump’s agenda. So, when your ox is being gored, the filibuster is modern-day Jim Crow, but when you’re goring the other guy’s ox, the filibuster is a necessary tool to maintain the rights of the minority.
We are all hypocrites; it is very difficult to be a human being without having a level of hypocrisy to us because we all look at things, at least initially, from our point of view, and then, it becomes very difficult to weigh other points of view equally as our own. Where the rubber meets the road for the United States is that our Constitution which defines our country, was framed to negate the negative impacts of the innate human hypocrisy that will inevitably dwell in all of our leaders. That is what checks and balances, and our Bill of Rights is all about, maintaining a consistent, objective, unbiased application of our laws and Constitution. But for far too often recently, our leaders have been allowed to circumvent our Constitution with impunity. And the further both sides continue to go down this road, the more the hypocrisies in all of us will start controlling our politics which will render our Constitution powerless. And I am afraid that we are closing in on that place.
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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.