“Both sides.” Two words that function like a narcotic in American discourse. Politicians use them to dodge responsibility. Pundits use them to keep sponsors comfortable. Academics use them to look evenhanded while avoiding risk. The phrase is sold as fairness, but it is really camouflage. It is the rhetorical equivalent of throwing dirt in the eyes of anyone trying to see straight.
Look at January. George Santos built his entire career on lies — fabricating jobs, degrees, even family tragedies. When the scandal broke, how did the press respond? Not with clarity: This man is a fraud. No, it was framed as politicians on both sides have been caught embellishing their records. A con man invents his life story, and the press buries it under “both sides.” That’s not reporting. That’s laundering.
Or take the classified documents fiasco. Biden’s team finds papers in his garage, Trump hoarded them like trophies at Mar-a-Lago. Are these equivalent acts? No. Biden’s lawyers called the archives, turned them in. Trump denied, defied, and obstructed. Yet headlines blared: Both sides face document controversy. The hedge blurs reality, turning a question of obstruction into a grammar game. Citizens are left to conclude there’s no difference — everyone’s corrupt, so why bother paying attention? The smoke is thick, but it’s manufactured.
This trick is not new. “Both sides” was the shield for Vietnam. It was the excuse in Iraq. It was the shrug after Charlottesville, when Trump claimed violence was shared evenly between neo-Nazis and those protesting them. The phrase has history: it exists to flatten moral difference. It insists that the fire and the fire brigade are equally responsible for the smoke.
The press claims neutrality, but neutrality that erases reality is complicity. A headline that equates a lie with a truth is not balanced; it is cowardly. It pretends that democracy is served by pretending there’s no difference between fraud and accountability, violence and resistance, democracy and authoritarianism. This is how the rot spreads — not through open propaganda, but through the constant drip of “balance” that hides who lit the match.
And academia is no better. Panels and papers chase “complexity” to avoid being accused of partisanship. The professor hedges: While both sides raise legitimate concerns… No. Some concerns are illegitimate. Some positions are not arguments but lies. To treat them as equivalent is to betray the very purpose of scholarship. The academy mistakes cowardice for sophistication, and students carry that into public life, repeating “both sides” like a shield against judgment.
The effect is cultural anesthesia. Citizens stop distinguishing between degrees of harm. Every scandal is just another headline. Every abuse is just more “politics.” Outrage dulls into cynicism. That cynicism is the soil in which authoritarianism grows. If everyone is guilty, then no one is accountable. If both sides are always the same, then nothing matters. That is the point of the phrase — to grind down judgment until it disappears.
The truth is, democracy depends on taking sides — the side of fact against lie, of accountability against impunity. There is no neutral ground when one party invents reality and the other clings to it. To invoke “both sides” in these moments is not fairness. It is surrender.
We should call things what they are. Santos is a fraud. Trump obstructed. Biden was sloppy but cooperative. These are not “sides.” These are facts. Language that erases the difference is not balanced. It is cover fire for decay. Citizens who want democracy to survive must learn to hear “both sides” for what it is: the sound of accountability being smothered.