Every day, America’s leaders bombard the rest of us with a fusillade of the latest “woke” moral imperatives: “Equity!” “Diversity!” “Climate justice!” “Anti-racism!” “Trans rights!” “Reproductive justice!” “Preserving our democracy!”

Whether in government, big tech, big media or big business, our elites continually invoke these and other sacred mantras of the religion of Leftism, displaying to the world their superior moral virtue – in stark contrast to the vast unwashed peasant class comprising tens of millions of bigots, extremists, white supremacists, conservatives and other deplorables.

Yet, probe just beneath the surface of their “woke” righteousness, their passionate angst over “systemic racism,” “marginalized communities” and “saving the planet,” and it turns out most of these wealthy elites – whose policies are, after all, wrecking the country – don’t really believe in any of the left’s phantasmagoric causes.

They know men can’t have babies.

They know getting rid of police causes crime.

They just don’t care. They’re in it for the money – and the power, privilege and prestige.

Let’s start at the top with Joe Biden: Not only is he obviously unqualified to be president of the United States and leader of the Free World due to his advanced dementia, his decades of lying and fantastical boasting, and his utter lack of accomplishments. But Biden is also dangerously compromised and therefore extraordinarily vulnerable to blackmail. Why? Because of the many years of brazen political corruption, influence-peddling and shady business deals and payoffs between multiple members of the Biden family, including Joe Biden himself, and America’s most formidable adversaries – China and Russia – not to mention other nations, notably Ukraine. This combination of factors has put America and the entire world in greater jeopardy right now than at any time since World War II.

But, at least “the Big Guy” made a lot of money for himself and his family, and that’s what was important to him.

This disgraceful and dangerous dynamic is much the same with many other influential denizens of “the swamp.”

Bill and Hillary Clinton have been “in it for the money” for decades, from Whitewater to the Clinton Foundation, as many books and investigative reports have documented in detail. “No one has even come close in recent years to enriching themselves on the scale of the Clintons while they or a spouse continued to serve in public office,” writes author-journalist Peter Schweitzer in his bestselling book, “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Business Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.” The Clintons’ prodigious ability to exploit their power for personal gain, compared to that “of any other ex-politician, whether a former president, or congressman, Republican or Democrat, to accumulate such a large amount of money in such a short period of time is unmatched,” adds Schweitzer.

Like many in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul have made millions on technology stocks of companies Pelosi helps regulate, amounting to de facto insider trading. In the same way, Biden’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who literally sets America’s energy policy and tirelessly pushes renewable energy projects around the country, has reaped huge profits off her millions of dollars’ worth of alternative energy stocks, whose value is directly affected by her public advocacy.

And then there’s John Kerry, former Democratic presidential candidate and now Joe Biden’s “climate czar.” Kerry’s first reaction to Russia’s murderous invasion of Ukraine was fear that it might divert some of the world’s attention away from “climate change.” However, John Kerry does not truly believe in the catastrophic, near-term, man-caused climate change he preaches. Not when he has spent years cajoling regular people to avoid driving “gas-guzzling SUVs” while flying everywhere in his own private jet.

Noting that Kerry – whose net worth is $750 million and who owns five luxury homes, a 76-foot yacht, a private jet, and of course an SUV – simply “loves luxury,” Daniel Turner, founder of Power The Future, a nonprofit that advocates for American energy jobs, reveals in the New York Post: “Asked about the green contradiction of traveling on his private jet to win an environmental award in 2019, the unserious statesman claimed it was ‘the only choice for someone like me.'”

Concludes Turner: “Take the threat of climate change seriously when John Kerry forgoes the private jets and luxury mega-conferences. Worry about rising sea levels when John Kerry sells his oceanfront mansion.”

Even the colorful freshmen congresswomen of “the Squad,” who if nothing else present themselves as true believers in the most extreme leftwing ideologies and agendas, are really just in it for the money, power and prestige. As one headline put it last summer, “AOC Invests $1.4 Million in Campaign Funds for Apparel Line With Her Initials,” revealing how Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez created and funded a new clothing line for herself.

“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in another move to make herself ubiquitous,” reported the Daily Wire, “paid a political merchandise firm a whopping $1.4 million from her campaign coffers just in the first six months of 2021 to create T-shirts and hats with leftist slogans such as ‘Tax the Rich’ and ‘Abolish ICE’ – much of the merchandise featuring her initials.”

And what about Rep. Ilhan Omar, who infamously tweeted “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby” – “Benjamins” being slang for $100 bills – implying U.S. lawmakers are bribed into supporting Israel? The venomously anti-Semitic Omar was just following the Left’s tried-and-true strategy of projection: Whenever someone on the hard Left accuses others of political corruption or any other crime, sin, fraud or scam, it’s because that is precisely what they themselves are guilty of doing.

Indeed, corruption is Rep. Ilhan Omar’s middle name.

She has been credibly tied to alleged criminal violations including “perjury, immigration fraud, marriage fraud, state and federal tax fraud, federal student loan fraud, and bigamy.” DNA evidence virtually proves she married her own brother and committed immigration fraud, but she has also been connected to voter fraud in the form of illegal “ballot harvesting” in her largely Somali congressional district in Minnesota, while also allegedly violating campaign finance laws. One investigation found that on five different occasions, Omar misspent campaign funds, according to CBS 4 Minnesota. Even more brazen, Federal Election Commission records show Omar’s campaign sent $606,000 to the E Street Group, a D.C.-based consulting firm that just happens to be run by Tim Mynett, Omar’s third husband. That was in addition to the $1 million of donor funds she had previously directed to her husband’s firm. Omar married Mynett soon after both of them divorced their previous spouses.

But wait, many may ask at this point: If it’s really true that all these supposedly super-woke elites are just “in it for the money,” then what about the radical Left’s ideology, the fervent beliefs and causes all these politicians continually espouse, which have totally captured today’s Democratic Party and are metastasizing throughout the country and rapidly destroying it? What about the extreme ideological agendas currently corrupting America’s children, with “drag queen story hour” in pre-school, then full-bore LGBT and transgender indoctrination starting in kindergarten, followed by toxic Marxist “critical race theory” propaganda? What about the ubiquitous America-is-racist ideology that is perverting and transforming American society and culture into a guilt-ridden, divided, self-hating, emotionally crippled shadow of its former self?

Make no mistake: America’s universities and public schools and leftwing nonprofits and think tanks and “woke” activist groups and many other organizations and individuals are, indeed, totally captivated by today’s bizarre Marxist “narratives.” They have been convinced, seduced, intimidated or guilted into believing America is a predatory, racist country, that men are women if they think they are, that little children should be sexualized, that conservatives are Nazis and Trump is Hitler, that capitalism is evil, and that the world will soon be uninhabitable due to global warming. The nightmarish dreams of leftist crazies are indeed alive in all the true believers.

However, that body of true believers does not actually include the leader class, who just pretend for the sake of maintaining and increasing their own power and privilege.

That’s right. The elites in government and business who wield the real power in American life don’t truly believe the radical agendas they force on everyone else.

Leaders of giant companies like Disney self-righteously promote Black Lives Matter, transgender and other radically woke agendas in the U.S., while simultaneously in their lucrative Chinese market remaining silent on the mass confinement of abused minorities in concentration camps and other grotesque civil rights outrages. Meanwhile, politicians go maskless while demanding everyone else mask up; they spend tons of taxpayer money on private police for themselves after defunding law enforcement for the rabble. From Joe Biden to Nancy Pelosi to Chuck Schumer, today’s leader class can be seen on video just a few short years ago passionately evangelizing precisely the opposite positions to those they now advocate, on issues ranging from the crucial importance of border security to the sanctity of the Senate filibuster. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have repeatedly changed their views on same-sex marriage depending on the political winds – Obama claiming in 1996, “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages,” but in 2008 insisting just the opposite, “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage,” but then in 2012, flipping back to, “[I]t is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” Same exact story with Hillary Clinton who, like Obama, claims to have “evolved” on the issue.

They didn’t evolve. They cravenly changed their “views” in order to safeguard and increase their own privilege, wealth and power.

Question: Do such politicians, who have become hopelessly addicted to wealth, power and privilege, really believe in anything outside of themselves? Do they actually have any principles at all – other than personal advantage?

Arguably, many have become so selfish and corrupt, so hooked on the crack cocaine of power, that they no longer retain the internal capacity to truly care about anything outside of themselves. All of their most passionate, fervent-sounding positions are thus contrived solely to fulfill the current day’s requirements to maintain their power. They need their fix.

It’s all about them.

So, this is the surreal political culture now engulfing America: Though the oligarchs have no real principles nor agendas beyond themselves, down in the world of “the unwashed masses,” today’s Democratic Party and the causes it champions resemble one giant religious cult, with millions of people caught up with its various ideological denominations: the Climate Change cult, the Transgender cult, the America Is Racist cult, and so on. Indeed, many people have become total slaves of these and other bizarre leftwing “narratives.”

And yet, society’s elites – from the top politicians to “woke” mega-companies like Nike – know better. Their leaders and policy makers do not truly believe men have periods and can become pregnant, or that Donald Trump is another Hitler, or that Dr. Seuss is a racist. They just play along, they game the system … for the money and the power and the glory. For the ruling class, all the deranged leftwing agendas serve largely as a giant smokescreen enabling them to perpetually virtue-signal while disguising their raw selfishness, greed and personal ambition, their desire for privilege, wealth and fame, and for revenge against their enemies – that is, their desire essentially to be gods.

Still, one may well wonder how it is possible that, for example, someone like Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, a lesbian who openly identifies as “a trained Marxist,” can spend millions of dollars, donated by people wanting to support BLM’s cause, to purchase upscale mansions in southern California. Is she not a “true believer” in her own cause? What is it about leftist leaders that makes them betray everyone, even the people whose very cause they claim to champion? For decades, race hustlers like Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson have become super-wealthy while pretending to address the plight of urban blacks, even though their efforts have served merely to stir up racial hatreds rather than meaningfully address obvious core problems like fatherlessness and family breakdown.

Shedding light on this whole phenomenon, and perhaps better explaining in what way the elites can appear to “believe” in the radical agendas they espouse while at the same time paradoxically “being in it for the money,” is M. Scott Peck, M.D., the celebrated psychiatrist and bestselling author of the classic book, “People of the Lie.”

People caught up with evil, writes Peck, are inherently liars, “deceiving others as they also build layer upon layer of self-deception.” Which is to say, it’s not so much a matter of the elites simply pretending to believe all of the left’s certifiably deranged ideologies – that fossil fuels must be completely eliminated from the earth and that babies aren’t actually human until after they’re born and so on. It’s more like: They have to continually delude even themselves (Peck’s “layer upon layer of self-deception”) into espousing positions they don’t truly believe, as a vehicle and justification for enriching and gratifying themselves – self-interest being what truly motivates them.

Put a little differently, their prodigious ability to lie, the ease with which they adopt and champion a perfectly insane cause as though it made sense – and apparently without suffering any conscience, conflict or guilt – applies inwardly as well. That is, while they’re lying to everyone else, they’re lying to themselves too. They’re like method actors who get deeply emotionally involved in their role and can be very convincing, even to themselves. But in the end, it’s all just an act. They collect their big paycheck and move on to their next role.

One final but crucial point to consider: Why is it that most Republicans are so maddeningly ineffective in countering the ruling Democrats’ rapid dismantling and destruction of America? Even those who espouse correct principles and publicly complain about the Biden administration and Big Tech and other malignant institutions rarely do anything to effectively counter them. Why would that be?

Same reason: Because of money and privilege. For many, though fortunately not all Republicans, various monied powers ranging from big corporate donors to communist China keep them and their political careers alive. They’re just too comfortable with the money, privilege and job security that come with their position as lawmaker, so they betray – however unconsciously – the very people and Constitution they are sworn to serve.

Peter Schweitzer’s most recent bestseller, “Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win,” cites 20 former and current elected Republicans as having compelling political and business ties with America’s foremost adversary, China. Although fortunately many of those named by Schweitzer are no longer in office, one current figure wielding enormous power is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky. McConnell, along with his wife, Elaine Chao, who served as transportation secretary during the Trump administration, “enjoy some of the deepest and most abiding ties to Beijing- linked entities of anyone in Washington, D.C.,” writes Schweizer.

When November’s much-anticipated midterm elections come, America’s very survival will depend on two big things: 1) Election integrity, since cheating will be literally the only hope Democrats have of retaining power, and 2) principled Republican freedom fighters, who don’t care if they serve only one term.

Remember, soldiers are deployed to fight and win battles and preserve their nation’s peace and wellbeing – not to carve out safe, comfortable, lucrative and permanent abodes for themselves on the battlefield.