We have now fallen into a bizarre and terrible cycle in the United States in which one side does something bad and the other side then does something similarly bad, then points to the fact that the first side did something bad as an excuse for doing it.
This is a problem. We used to call this “whataboutism.’
Now, people have misapplied the term whataboutism over and over and over in the political context. It is not whataboutism to point out double standards.
Whataboutism is when you do something wrong and instead of saying, “Yes, I did something wrong, but a double standard is being applied,” you say, “I didn’t do anything wrong at all, and it doesn’t matter if I did do something wrong because the other side did it.”
Let’s take this example. Hunter Biden is super-duper-duper corrupt and then somebody on the Right side of the aisle does something super-duper-duper…
