Trying to figure out who’s Phony of the Year in our mad, Machiavellian third millennium may seem like attempting to identify the chief mosquito in the Everglades. There certainly is no shortage of people today who take phoniness, pretentiousness, superficiality, and deceit to Clintonian heights. But after analyzing the landscape of pseudo-elite lies, I’ve compiled a list of contenders — and have drawn a conclusion.
The Bodacious Bookshelf Boys
The subtle version of Fredo yelling “I’m smart!” in The Godfather Part II, pundits and celebrities are actually acquiring bookshelves with professionally chosen book collections for use as video backdrops — to make them appear intellectual.
Filling in Monday eve on Tucker Carlson Tonight, commentator Mark Steyn amusingly addressed this in a segment titled, “The Fake Bookshelves of the Zoom Elites.” It really is a thing, too. The Guardian ran a May headline reading “The biggest status symbol of our Zoom era? Bookshelves,” while the Hustle’s read, “Want to look smart? Try a credibility bookshelf.”
The latter writes that “there’s a micro-industry devoted to sleuthing out the books that famous people keep on their shelves” (but don’t actually read).
“Cate Blanchett, for one, apparently owns all 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary,” the site continues, because, of course, she doesn’t just go online for information like everyone else.
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Hilarious “Hilaria”
Rachel Dolezal, the woman who posed as black, became president of her local NAACP chapter and even claimed she was the victim of “hate crimes,” can step aside. Now we have Hilaria Baldwin. The “epically thirsty, self-identified Spanish wife of actor Alec, has been outed as a basic white woman from Massachusetts, real name Hillary Hayward-Thomas,” writes the New York Post.
The other Hillary, Clinton, merely claimed to have been named after famed mountain climber Sir Edmund Hillary, despite his not having become famous until a few years after her birth. But “Hilaria” took phoniness to another level still, even feigning a Spanish accent for years to complete the picture.
“The cringiest piece of evidence is a clip from the ‘Today’ show,” the Post relates, “in which Hilaria, speaking in a Spanish accent while cosplaying as some kind of culinary expert, says, ‘We have very few ingredients. We have tomatoes, [sic] we have, um, how you say in Eng — cucumbers’” (video below).
Perhaps Hillary didn’t want Alex to be the only actor in the family. But…how you say in Eng — pathetic.
Below is a video of the ever-entertaining Mark Steyn discussing both the bookshelves and Baldwin.
But the Iberian queen isn’t alone. Channeling Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Cherokee Nation) — who for decades billed herself as American Indian to gain career advantage in affirmative-action-consumed academia — is George Washington University associate professor Jessica Krug.
The white Kansas-born academic pretended “to be a North African-descended black woman or a Caribbean-descended black woman from The Bronx — she liked to mix it up,” wrote the Post in a September 10 piece. She also claimed to be a “historian of politics, ideas, and cultural practices in Africa and the African Diaspora,” the paper further informs.
Krug confessed her deception in a September 3 mea maxima culpa Medium post in which she writes, melodramatically, that for “the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies.” Critics say she only came forward because she’d already been found out and confronted.
You can masquerade as a penitent, too.
Ironically, this desire to shed one’s “whiteness” was portrayed in the ’90s sitcom Seinfeld (short video below). Little did the writers know that in just a bit more than a generation, life would imitate art.
Doesn’t Everybody Lie, Funny Man?
Then there are those who imitate, well, whatever they have to for power’s sake. Enter vice-president-suspect Kamala Harris, who can make a chameleon seem one-dimensional. As with the aforementioned, Harris has a very fluid relationship with her race/ethnicity. But where Fauxcahontas was a non-Indian masquerading as such, Harris actually had an Indian (from India) mother but now bills herself as black. Thus did she tweet December 28 (begins after the below respondent’s comments):
But, hey, it was politics. That’s what Harris might say, anyway. After all, when asked by CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert in August how she could be fully supportive of Joe Biden after having mercilessly slammed his record on race in a Democratic debate, she replied, chuckling, “It was a debate! …The whole evening, literally, it was a debate. It was called a debate” (video below). And that’s called an admission.
The Great and Powerful Fao Chi
Given the above Middle Kingdom moniker by Web wise guys alluding to his China ties, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s high-profile phoniness rivals Harris’s. The octogenary, 52-year bureaucrat flip-flops more than a politician, a phenomenon I documented in my essay, “The Many Masks of Anthony Fauci.” He has probably donned a few more, too, since my exposé went to press in October. But he did essentially admit in early May that he was lying, about mask use in that instance — and now he has done it again.
On Christmas Eve, the media-loving (and loved) head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases admitted that he lied to the American people about herd immunity, though he apparently characterized it as “moving the goalposts.” And this brings us to….
The COVID Con Artists
For most of the year we’ve had lockdowns, masks, church closures, and other onerous restrictions foisted upon us — for our own good — because “the virus can kill us all!” Meanwhile, officials such as Governor Gavin Newsom, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Dianne Feinstein (and Fauci), and others tacitly encouraged large BLM protests/riots; favored big business over small; and, most tellingly, were repeatedly caught violating their own mask, social-distancing, and travel pre/proscriptions (video below). But, hey, maybe the China virus shows professional courtesy to those who pander to Beijing.
Not only that, the COVID Con artists went from “14 days to flatten the curve” to “14 straight days of declining infections” to “can’t reopen till we have a vaccine” to “we can never get back to normal” while remaining in power.
Others Worth Noting (Then Forgetting)
Dishonorable mention goes to American academia, Hollywood, and, in particular, mainstream media. The latter, of course, may seem like a lock for the phoniness title, but their duplicity transcends 2020: It’s more deserving of the Phony of the Century award.
If I’ve missed anyone — and the phoniness is hard to keep up with — mention your candidates in the comments section. But my choice for Phony of the Year award is….
Lockdown Tony Fauci. It’s not just his slipperiness, poise before the camera, his capacity to make every lie sound as convincing as the previous nine, and that he was complicit in visiting upon us one of American history’s greatest blunders: lockdowns and generally obscurantist China virus policy. It’s that he did all that while (with media help) elevating himself to demigod status. One example:
Here’s another:
Fauci was even honored with his own day by Washington, D.C.’s mayor:
And you can’t beat a guy like that (except with a stick — and I’d like a go). So Dr. Anthony Fauci is 2020’s Phony of the Year.
Let us know if you agree or have a different choice. But Fauci will be hard to top. Why, he even has the bookshelves.
