In response to a Democrat prosecutor, a Democrat activist and a Democrat jury finding former President Trump guilty of a crime that doesn’t exist based on crimes that they couldn’t define (even right down to the jury finding), Joe Biden and the rest of the party has offered up two meaningless mantras.

“No one is above the law”

and

“We must respect the verdict.”

I already addressed the first mantra. No one is above the law except Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Eric Holder, Hunter Biden, Barney Frank, Al Gore, and every 2020 BLM rioter. Not to mention every 2023-2024 Hamas rioter and the 2017 inauguration Democrat rioters.

Let’s talk about “respect mah verdict”.

In a free country verdicts don’t have to be “respected”. They can be appealed, challenged or just denounced as wrong. Only in totalitarian countries do you have to “respect” verdicts or else.

Americans have a proud tradition of not respecting verdicts. Sometimes verdicts are right and sometimes they’re wrong. Declaring that a verdict is wrong is not the same thing as assaulting a courthouse (the way BLMers did for months in Portland) or barring immigration authorities from functioning.

Democrats and lefties reacted to the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict by rejecting it. When the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, they reacted with violent attacks on pro-life centers, protests targeting Supreme Court justices at their homes and proposals (still ongoing) to pack the Supreme Court.

It’s fine to hate a court’s verdict. The corrosive hypocrisy comes when you play “Respect mah authority” when your side wins and “Rise up!” when you lose.

And that corrosive hypocrisy pervades the way the Left relates to power. When power is held by someone else, it’s inherently illegitimate and must be overthrown. And when it holds power, then it’s a sacred trust that must be protected in order to save democracy.

There’s nothing American, democratic or patriotic about this corrupt double standard. It’s the worldview of a radical revolutionary movement that literally rejects the idea that it can ever lose or be out of power because its metric is not ‘systemic’, but ‘ideological’. It doesn’t care about democracy, the constitution or the rule of law.

And that would be fine if it had the common decency to admit that. But it plays the dishonest game of asserting the sacred supremacy of the systems and laws it rejects when it’s in power while plotting to destroy them the rest of the time.

The authoritarian/revolutionary bait and switch is endemic to leftist systems and is a sickening display.

The Left doesn’t respect verdicts except when it issues them.

A consistent approach is that verdicts don’t have to be respected in a free country. The Left doesn’t want a free country. It’s an authoritarian movement that pretends to be liberationist until the moment it seizes power.

Neither it nor its pretensions nor its authority deserve any respect.