Last week, shortly after it became apparent that California Governor Gavin Newsom had beat the attempt to recall him, major news outlets began to look back on what many considered to be the defining moment in the effort to remove the Democrat from office: the French Laundry incident. 

Although it was already old news by the time Californians cast votes to determine Newsom’s fate, the events of November 2020, when the Governor found himself in hot water for attending a birthday party at which he disregarded numerous of his own COVID-19 safety protocols, were brought back to the attention of national news (e.g. AP News, The New York Times).

From the start of the pandemic, conservatives have generally been more lenient when it comes to enforcing COVID-related mandates, believing instead that Americans should each be free to choose whether or not we’d like to quarantine, wear masks and get vaccinated.

The Left, on the other hand, has distinguished itself as the champion of “science,” preferring to emphasize a strict adherence to the advice of scientific experts, even if at the loss of self-governance and personal freedoms.

Or, it at least pretends to strictly adhere to the advice of scientific experts.

Over the last year and a half, leftist elites – including Gavin Newsom – have had to deal with a serious crisis of character. Even as they preach the importance of following and mandating COVID prevention policies, Democratic politicians can’t help but occasionally show their disdain for such rules, and when they do, Americans are quick to point out the sanctimony.

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Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, recently made headlines when she showed up to the opulent, $30,000 per person Met Gala in New York City wearing a ritzy designer dress emblazoned with the words “tax the rich.” While countless news stories have focused on the apparent hypocrisy of the dress, most have overlooked another layer of hypocrisy surrounding the Gala: the fact that neither AOC nor her high-paying friends were wearing masks.

I’m not saying they should’ve worn masks. I wouldn’t have worn one. Nevertheless, the hypocrisy is stunning. Elsewhere in NYC, masks and proof of vaccination are required to participate in most indoor events, including, for example, Broadway, which reopened after its longest closure in history the night after the Met Gala, but only to vaccinated and masked guests. Does it really come as a surprise that the elites excluded themselves from these rules?

Only two days after the maskless Met Gala, the Democrat mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, was caught without a mask, dancing and singing in a nightclub, in direct violation of her own indoor mask mandate. But this wasn’t her first episode of Covid hypocrisy. Last year, she too attended a birthday party at the French Laundry (ironically the day after Newsom had), and then proceeded to tweet against “gathering with people outside your household.” As a result of her behavior, she was featured as one of the “14 prominent Democrats… accused of hypocrisy for ignoring COVID-19 restrictions,” in an intriguing article by Business Insider.

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More recently, in Los Angeles County, where masks are required both for the vaccinated and unvaccinated, affluent celebrities gathered with no masks or social distancing for the 2021 Emmys Awards. Frustrated viewers quickly took to Twitter to point out the disgusting two-facedness of the whole event. Most were just annoyed that the elites were yet again exempt from the expectations that the rest of society is required to live up to (including their own aides and assistants).

Quite ironically, these elites are actually much more in line with conservatism, although they’d never admit so openly. In most cases, only conservatives actually believe that Newsom should be free to attend birthday parties and that AOC can show up maskless at all the galas she wants. Leftists pretend to look down on such activities, but that certainly hasn’t stopped them from participating. And that’s the problem: not what they’re doing, but the hypocrisy behind it, the hypocrisy of living above the rules you force everyone else to follow.

The social gap between everyday Americans and our “betters” is daily becoming more apparent. And while many of us have long suspected that our so-called leaders don’t really have our best interests at heart, they themselves went to great lengths over the past year and a half to foster and confirm that belief. Perhaps we should remind them that We The People are the ones with the real political power and authority here in America. 

Jakob Fay works for the Convention of States Project, a project of Citizens for Self-Governance.