I was on a panel recently talking about work visas and immigration policy. Despite some disagreement about tactics, we agreed more than I expected on policy. Something else struck me, too. We didn’t interrupt each other. We spoke in turn, deferred to each other, and otherwise behaved civilly.

These days, that seems rare. The Left-wing broadcast media is increasingly intolerant of particular views. A recent report from the Media Research Centre, for example, found that the supercilious CNN host Abby Phillip interrupted liberal guests three times but conservative guests 127 times during a “random sample of 10 episodes” of her news show. In that, she was perhaps just mirroring the West more broadly, in which supposedly “offensive” speech on subjects like gender or race is ever-more heavily policed.

At the same time, however, we are overly tolerant of behavior that is unravelling our society.

We tolerate crime. Woke theories like “abolishing carceral society” (not just prisons but every “institution of oppression,” including deportation centers), and “restorative justice” lead to policies that put dangerous recidivist criminals back on the street. Several U.S. states are developing a system of two-tier justice, where some defendants are treated more lightly because of their perceived racial oppression. The U.K. and Canada are accused of doing much the same.

We tolerate vulgarity from our media and elected officials that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Some of our fringe politicians have discovered the joys of swearing like the middle schoolers I once taught, but without the opprobrium.

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Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic member of Congress from Michigan, said in 2019 that “we’re going to impeach this motherf—er,” referring to President Trump. At the People’s Conference for Palestine, she recently told a “genocide enabling Congress” to “look at this room, motherf—ers – we ain’t going anywhere.” She said the country she lives in was “built on slavery and rape and genocide and oppression.” Bleak, as well as vulgar.

Late-night host Stephen Colbert said “f— you” to Trump on his (soon to be cancelled) show. A few weeks ago, Senator Adam Schiff, famous for making “Russiagate” claims without evidence, told Trump to “p— off” on Colbert’s show.

We tolerate plagiarism. The likes of former president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, have been convincingly accused of using the work of others without credit. She denied the allegations, only then to step down amid a wider controversy over Harvard’s handling of anti-Semitism on campus. A limited review of Gay’s work, instigated by Harvard, seemed to broadly exonerate her, while expressing concern about a pattern of repeated language.

But others, instead of resigning in disgrace, have blamed the accusations on racism or sexism. Often, their institutions have supported them. Universities have to claim they hire on the basis of merit, even when hiring academics who demonstrably have less illustrious careers, publications, and research records than their peers. To concede that some of their diversity hires built their careers on plagiarism would belie that pretense.

We tolerate corruption. In the 18th century, bribery, peculation, and nepotism were the norm in the British Empire and United States. It took two centuries of progress before we expected probity from civil servants and ethical conduct from businessmen. We don’t always get it from native-born Americans, and I could cite many recent examples. But to assimilate recent arrivals to our norms, we need to be especially vigilant about corruption and punish it swiftly and fairly. We’re failing on many levels.

First, immigrants have been implicated in cases of fraud of a type more common in their home countries. In 2025 so far, dozens of people, many of them Somali immigrants, have been convicted in a massive scam that stole $250m from a federal child nutrition program in Minnesota from 2020 to 2022. A couple of months ago, the Department of Justice filed charges against a ring, comprised of both immigrants and native-born, who had defrauded the federal “food stamp” program.

One could see immigrants acting according to the mores of their native lands rather than their new home as a sign of failed assimilation. Or worse, it could show that American standards are slipping.

There is evidence for the latter. Lisa Cook, a governor of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, has been accused of mortgage fraud. She is alleged to have falsely named two houses as her primary residence to secure better mortgage terms, but denies wrongdoing. The Left-wing national media has rallied to her cause; even if she had done what she is accused of, they argue, it’s no big deal. Everyone does it. But so-called occupancy fraud “allows riskier borrowers to obtain credit at lower interest rates,” and “these fraudulent borrowers perform substantially worse than similar declared investors, defaulting at a 75 per cent higher rate,” according to a Federal Reserve report.

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So even if it’s true that many mortgage applicants lie about their primary residence, shouldn’t we stop it? And why not start at the top? Cook is one of the few people setting interest rates for the entire country. If she knowingly cheated on her mortgage applications to get a lower rate of interest, she has no business policing others. The strong appearance of malfeasance alone should make her resign. But her allies seem to object even to the idea of her being investigated.

Also accused of mortgage fraud is New York Attorney General Letitia James. As she foretold in her election campaign, James used her office to prosecute Trump. The perplexing case she brought was that Trump committed civil fraud by over-valuing his properties when obtaining loans from commercial banks. Even though the banks did due diligence, and were happy to lend the money, Trump was fined nearly half a billion dollars in what many see as an unprecedented, purely political prosecution. That award was overturned, but James is now spending precious time and money appealing to get the penalty enforced.

Ironically, James has now been indicted for mortgage fraud, with prosecutors alleging she misrepresented a property as a secondary residence instead of a rental property in order to secure lower interest rates (James denies any wrongdoing). When announcing a win in a case involving real estate title theft, James had previously vowed “to use the law as both a sword and a shield to stop these despicable crimes.” Live by the sword, die by the sword.

With the bulk of our national media obsessed with finding any splinter in his eye, Trump doesn’t get a pass on anything. The same needs to apply to all public officials. Americans need to be tolerant of free speech, but intolerant of conduct that is illegal, immoral, or unethical in our public life. That’s what separates the First from the Third World—for now.