Whataboutism and the Truth

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, July 10, 2026

 

Let’s say Johnny Cash was the guy he pretended to be in “Folsom Prison Blues” and shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Now Johnny’s in Folsom Prison. One day, he sees Willie, a guy he hates, shiv another inmate in the cafeteria line. During lockdown, the guards come to him and ask if he saw anything. He says, “Maybe. What’s in it for me?”

 

Johnny works out a deal. In exchange for snitching, he gets some extra time in the conjugal trailer, a couple of years shaved off his sentence, his guitar in his cell, and a promise to keep his identity as the informant secret. (As Gandhi famously said, snitches get stitches, and all that.)

 

Now, if you’re a cop or the warden, you have lots of reasons to be skeptical about Johnny’s story. First of all, he committed a pretty heinous murder. Second, he has beef with the guy he’s dropping a dime on. Third, he has a personal, material interest in you buying his story.

 

In short, he has a lot of motivation to lie.

 

That doesn’t mean Johnny is lying. It means you should bring a lot of skepticism to his claims and ask for details or corroborating evidence that backs up his story. But the fact remains: He’s either telling the truth, or he isn’t.

 

Now, let’s say Johnny says, “What Willie did was evil. He killed that guy just because he cheated at cards.”

 

It is an unassailable moral fact that Johnny—the guy who murdered someone just to watch him die—is an outrageous hypocrite. He’s sitting there condemning someone for murdering a cheater. Cheating is not a good reason to murder someone, but it’s a lot better than murdering someone just to enjoy a stranger’s suffering and death.

 

Johnny is a very bad person. (Just to be clear: We’re still talking about the hypothetical one, not the real-world, super-terrific Man in Black.) In fact, we already knew he was a bad person because he’s a convicted murderer. He’s also a hypocrite. But as bad as hypocrisy is, premeditated murder is worse—at least according to my Judeo-Christian, Western, Anglo-American, Eurocentric tradition. Any romantic notions of him being a Byronic hero with a code are null and void.

 

He’s still not lying.

 

Hitler could say 2+2 is 4, that the Treaty of Versailles was deeply unfair to Germany, that German shepherds are great dogs, or that Benito Mussolini had terrible table manners. None of those things would be rendered false just because the person saying them was a bad person.

 

Hypocrisy mania.

 

I’m going to assume everyone already knows the basic details about the Graham Platner story. In the wake of the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine being credibly accused of rape this week, a lot of people got very defensive about their past support for Platner. I should back up and explain that, prior to this week, support for Platner varied, depending on who the supporter was. Some asserted he was a fantastic person and that his sketchy past was proof of his authenticity. Others suggested that his obvious lies, gross statements, and Nazi tattoo were regrettable, but the primary voters in Maine should not be second-guessed and/or that his flaws were minor when stacked up against the moral imperative to defeat Sen. Susan Collins and give Democrats a viable path to take back the Senate.  

 

But the rape charge was too much, and most supporters withdrew their support. I think many of these people were sincere in their condemnation, but I also think other motives were at play. His poll support was waning, and people lost confidence that there wouldn’t be more revelations yet to come, given that he’s been saying from the outset that there was nothing troubling about his past.

 

But let’s talk about the defensiveness. Progressive activist Neera Tanden insists that “[t]he absolute worst people are the Republicans who attack Dems on Platner while they cheer a President who has been credibly accused of assault by 13 women. That hypocrisy is off the damn charts.” Here she is telling former Rep. Peter Meijer he doesn’t get to “throw stones” at Democrats when “you have stood by Donald Trump.”

 

Now, I’ve had some fairly minor disagreements with my friend Peter Meijer, but it takes some chutzpah to say that to a guy who lost his seat in Congress because he bravely voted to impeach Donald Trump, particularly when Democrats spent nearly half a million dollars to boost the MAGA Republican who ended up beating Meijer in the primary. Also, not to go all Norm Macdonald, but I think the “absolute worst people” in this situation are the ones who rape or assault people, not the hypocrites who are inconsistent in their condemnations.

 

We’re all communists now.

 

Hannah Arendt argued that one of the annoying things about communists—and ex-communists who held on to their rhetorical tricks—was to dispute facts by questioning motives. When you think about it, the whole Marxist project rests on this kind of reasoning. The ruling class does and says what it does and says in order to protect its material class interests. Any talk about God, justice, or anything else is merely cover for the true motives of the elite. It’s a really clever trick because it makes you immune to any new facts or arguments.

 

The communists had a related annoying habit, commonly referred to today as “whataboutism.” When Americans criticized the Soviet Union’s brutality and oppression, the Soviets would point to America and say, “and you are lynching Negroes,” or “Over there they lynch Negroes” (“U nich negrov linchuyut”). In 1980, the great former dissident and future president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, called this one of communism’s “commonly canonized demagogical tricks.” This tactic arguably became more widespread after the fall of the Soviet Union, as former KGB agents and the like took over the country.

 

The canonization has metastasized. Whataboutism has gotten into the American bloodstream. (This shouldn’t be too shocking. Lots of KGB projects have taken root here. For instance, the deceitful idea of “Zionism = Racism” was a Soviet invention. Ironically, given how the Soviet Union discriminated against “lesser” populations, the whole tactic was ripe for some whataboutist comebacks.)

 

Here’s the thing: The Americans criticizing the Soviet Union were right about the Gulag, the repression, torture, censorship, etc. And the Soviets were right about the evil of lynching (however much they exaggerated the claim that this was U.S. policy, particularly in the late 20^th century). Indeed, one of the reasons a lot of Cold War intellectuals argued for civil rights reforms was to inoculate ourselves against Soviet propaganda around the world. It wasn’t the primary reason, but it was definitely part of the case.

 

It is absolutely true that many Republicans making hay about Platner’s alleged abuse of women are hypocritical—or, if you prefer, inconsistent. After Platner won the Democratic primary in June, The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell wrote that Republican critics of Platner had “no moral authority” to criticize him. She made a very solid case, running through the whole parade of horribles in GOP ranks that Republicans have turned a blind eye to.

 

But, I ask, so what?

 

It’s not a rhetorical question. The answer depends on what we’re arguing about.

 

If the argument is about the moral rot in the GOP, that’s one thing.

 

If the argument is about Graham Platner—which it was!—that’s something else. One can concede all of Longwell’s points about the GOP—you don’t have to, but I’m fine with it for these purposes. How is any of it a justification for, say, Platner’s Nazi tattoo? Or manhandling women? Or any of the rest of his long, gross record?

 

I often have to appear on TV with Republicans who feel the need to defend Donald Trump’s corruption. Last month, I mentioned that Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself. A former GOP congressman snapped back, “Are you talking about Hunter Biden?”

 

Hunter Biden was a corrupt leech on his father’s presidency. How is that an exoneration of Donald Trump?

 

I’ve attributed this form of reasoning to the communists, but that’s probably because I have communism on my mind these days, having spelunked into the cave networks of the Democratic Socialists of America.

 

But the tendency is broader than that, even if it was refined by the Marxists. C.S. Lewis called it “Bulverism” in a 1941 essay of the same name. This is the practice of declaring that the person is wrong while ignoring the arguments that person is making. He wrote:

 

In other words, you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism.” Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father – who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third – “Oh, you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment,” E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.

 

Lewis’ example above speaks to the riot of identity politics in our culture. The sum of the triangle’s sides are dismissed as a “male perspective” in much the same way defenses of Israel are dismissed as Jew talk, defenses of meritocracy are dismissed as white male talk, etc.

 

But in America, partisanship has become a kind of identity. If a Republican says a true thing, it is dismissed because partisan Democrats start from the assumption that Republicans are wrong. If a Democrat says a true thing, Republicans dismiss it because they start from the same assumption about Democrats. If I say something about Trump, it’s because I am anti-Trump, and therefore the conversation can end there.

 

Yes, partisanship can make people lie. Some lies are obvious: “James Talarico is a gay vegan.” Some lies are lies by omission: “I care deeply about respecting women and condemning sexual abuse and that’s why Graham Platner should withdraw,” says the man who forgives or ignores exactly such things from members of his own team. This lie isn’t a lie about Platner, it is a lie about the person speaking. And that’s basically what hypocrisy boils down to: a lie about yourself, what you believe, and what you care about.

 

In other words, just because partisans lie doesn’t mean everything a partisan says is a lie. In my both-sides-y Remnant ghetto, I go most days listening to Republicans saying a lot of true but hypocritical things about Democrats and to Democrats saying a lot of true but hypocritical things about Republicans. I also hear a lot of lies. But there’s no transitive property. Lies are not made true when spoken by people you agree with, and truths are not made false when uttered by hypocrites.

 

Much of our civilization—democracy, liberalism, science, the rule of law, free markets—depends on the ability to make arguments and refer to facts independent of the moral status of the people making the arguments. If everything depends on the moral status of the messenger, no true message will survive contact with the human ear.