← the whole motif index

🧩 BND Motif Index · M1805

If it were the other side

Someone argues that a verdict goes by whose side did it: the same act is waved off, or called just politics, when one camp does it and is a scandal or a crime when the other does, often shown by imagining the roles reversed.

🗣️ Arguments🗂️ Bad faith🗂️ Hypocrisy

⚠️ A story people tell, not a claim that it's true.

A motif is the shape of a story as its tellers tell it, named the way a folklorist names a tale type, so the same story told about other people, by the other side or in another year lands in the same place. Some of the claims below are true, many are false. Arguing against a story is often a story of its own, its answer (Voter fraud is answered by Voter suppression, Lawfare by No one is above the law), and we file it there; where no answer has a motif yet, the arguments against a story sit with its tellings.

🪜 Its family

what it rests on, what rests on it, and the motifs that answer it

🪜 rests on 🧩 Double standard

🔗 goes with: 🧩 But what about

🎙️ Who it came up with

the shows we follow where its claims came up (5 left-leaning, 0 center, 12 right-leaning so far), colored by the show's lean; the bar is how many of its claims each one heard

  1. 🐘 Clay Travis & Buck Sexton 3 claims
  2. 🐘 The Megyn Kelly Show 3 claims
  3. 🐘 The Michael Berry Show 3 claims
  4. 🐘 Bannon's War Room 2 claims
  5. 🐘 Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words 2 claims
  6. 🐘 Louder with Crowder 1 claim
  7. 🐘 Morning Wire 1 claim
  8. 🐘 PBD Podcast (podcast) 1 claim
  9. 🫏 Pod Save America 1 claim
  10. 🐘 The Dan Bongino Show 1 claim
  11. 🫏 The Kyle Kulinski Show 1 claim
  12. 🐘 The Mark Levin Show 1 claim
➕ 5 more shows

🎙️ 5 more shows

  1. 🐘 The Matt Walsh Show 1 claim
  2. 🫏 The MeidasTouch Podcast 1 claim
  3. 🫏 The Young Turks (podcast) 1 claim
  4. 🐘 Timcast IRL (podcast) 1 claim
  5. 🫏 To the Contrary with Charlie Sykes 1 claim

"Came up on" means one of its claims was heard on the show: told, reported or argued against. We don't yet mark which. Show leans are our own grouping of the shows we transcribe.

📰 In the news

the stories its claims were told about, the most told first (matched by our tools, so a link can be wrong)

🗣️ In so many words

the words that carry it

💬 the tellers' own words: “But Hunter Biden right Republicans?” “but Hunter Biden…? Where is the news media???” “I suppose it's okay if he's white?” “I'm looking forward to the statements of outrage by Farage” “MAGA love to say comedy is legal again until you make a joke about Charlie Kirk.” “Nevermind all the jokes about George Floyd, Renée Good, and Alex Pretti I had to watch them spout” “the double standard that Abdul has held to, which is he is called on to denounce this random ad” “what would the reaction be to a white comedian saying, One year after George Floyd's death, if he said the exact same thing.”

🧶 Its claims

what's been told in this shape, in our words, by who told it: newest first in each; a claim's dots are the shows it came up on, in their lean's color (point at them for their names)

Told on the left 3

claims heard on left-leaning shows, and no right-leaning one

  • 2026-11-03 “Haley Stevens is abandoning her principles by endorsing a candidate running a bigoted and racist campaign.” 2
  • 2026-11-02 “Melania Trump is said to have worked illegally on the wrong visa, yet nobody demands her deportation as they do Ilhan Omar's.” 1
  • 2026-11-02 “Katie Zachariah has deep ties to Communist China through her work at a Chinese law firm.” 2

Told on the right 9

claims heard on right-leaning shows, and no left-leaning one

  • 2026-11-10 “Dave Chappelle made despicable and insensitive comments about the death of Charlie Kirk.” 7
  • 2026-11-01 “Democrats are only mad at Elon Musk because they thought all the tech billionaires were theirs.” 1
  • 2026-11-01 “Democrats tear down white men and call their self-defense hate, while nothing Democrats do is ever called hate.” 1
  • 2026-10-31 “The lawfare left calls its own side's moves, like a second Dan Sullivan on Alaska's ballot, 'politics, not criminality' while treating Republicans' legal acts as crimes.” 1
  • 2026-10-29 “The Department of Justice has been politicized on both sides.” 2
  • 2026-10-25 “Twitter's moderation rules are applied in a partisan way to favor left-wing causes.” 1
  • 2026-10-20 “The Biden administration has targeted Donald Trump with lawfare while failing to do the same to Democrats.” 5
  • 2026-10-20 “Progressives use the Bible to advance their causes while labeling conservative use of the Bible as evil Christian nationalism.” 1
  • 2026-10-05 “Democratic figures are not going to jail for contempt.” 1

Retold online 9

claims many people posted in their own words

  • 2026-11-10 “Posters call MAGA hypocrites for raging at Dave Chappelle's joke about Charlie Kirk's killing after cheering his anti-trans jokes and joking about George Floyd.”
  • 2026-11-05 “A Reform UK councillor charged with 35 offences including 12 counts of rape is held up as proof of the party's hypocrisy on protecting women.”
  • 2026-11-05 “The New York Times hypocritically defines a mandate as a Republican victory while denying Democrats have a mandate when they win.”
  • 2026-11-01 “The media damns Democrats for tactics Republicans use all the time while ignoring the Republicans' own record.”
  • 2026-10-30 “Republicans have run spoiler candidates many times before, but the media and opponents only call it nefarious when Democrats do it.”
  • 2026-10-28 “Donald Trump Jr. hunted an endangered sheep in Mongolia with a Kremlin-linked oligarch who helped pay for his wedding.”
  • 2026-10-25 “Election integrity and the rule of law must be applied equally to everyone without political favoritism or interference.”
  • 2026-10-21 “Donald Trump is gay and expresses his obsession with men's bodies through inappropriate comments at rallies.”
  • 2026-10-16 “Melania Trump obtained an 'Einstein visa' through questionable means.”

Fact-checked 2

claims a fact-checker examined: the verdict is theirs, behind the link

  • 2026-09-25 “Vladimir Putin was barred from the UN General Assembly while Benjamin Netanyahu was welcomed, supposedly exposing the UN’s pro-Israel bias.” 🔎 NewsGuard Reality Check
  • 2026-09-21 “President Joe Biden revoked 440 press passes.” 🔎 PolitiFact

Said by voters 1

claims voters made in The Focus Group

  • 2026-11-06 “A commentator says an evangelical voter excusing Ken Paxton's character would not have said the same of Bill Clinton in 1998.”

M1805 · first seen 2026-11-09 · last 2026-11-10 · what this is · how the index works

👋 About bignews.day · how it works
Rebuilt every hour from the front pages of the outlets we follow.
Lean ratings: AllSides (CC BY-NC 4.0) · reliability: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Everything else (mood, spin, feelings, framing) is our own reading of the headlines.
Our methods log: CC BY 4.0. The motif index, our readings and our other writing: © bignews.day, all rights reserved.
We count visits with GoatCounter: no cookies, nothing personal kept.