Is this “right-wing hypocrisy,” or is it the right’s coherent vision for enforcing a very specific social order? What is it going to take for liberals to understand that “hypocrisy” is not a charge for which right-wing authoritarians must answer at the risk of losing clout, but a tenet of and testament to their power? It’s really not complicated: Dahm and his ilk don’t care about protecting children; they care about “protecting” certain children from certain things (like books and drag queens) that they consider threats to a white supremacist patriarchal social order. That’s it! With this understanding, what’s even the point of pretending to debate a creep like Dahm on policy particulars?

ointing out so-called right-wing hypocrisy might make the Jon Stewart-watching crowd feel superior to their political foes, but it does nothing to actually build a movement capable of overcoming them. In fact, it does worse than nothing; its smugness serves to flatter the sensibilities of its liberal viewers while obscuring the way political power is built and used in this country.

Charging a person (like Dahm) or group (like Republicans) with hypocrisy, frames the issue (protecting children, for example) as something having to do with appealing to individuals’ senses of reason or conscience and ignores the existence of social and economic systems that help maintain a status quo in which children are not only murdered in their schools and turned into cheap laborers, but are in general considered property of their parents, often to their own detriment. It’s obvious but worth saying: If such problems could be solved by merely pointing out politicians' perceived hypocrisy, they would’ve been solved by now.