What is going on when people choose to believe the obvious lie over the easily proven truth, the liar over the person pointing out and proving the lie? What is it that makes people stand up for the lie, not with logic or evidence, but with rudeness and denigration? How can people cry out for freedom and stand by proud and smiling while one man willfully and overtly takes away rights and liberties?
“Misinformation is especially likely to stick when it conforms to our pre-existing political, religious, or social point of view, according to the researchers,” Janice Wood wrote in a September 2018 article in PsychCentral. “Because of this, ideology and personal worldviews can be especially difficult obstacles to overcome. This means that if you believe something for political or religious reasons, it’s far harder to change a person’s mind and have them understand a fact that differs from that person’s opinion.”
In other words, our species’ amazing intellect is susceptible to hearing what we want to believe rather than what is, even if believing the lie causes us pain or destroys that which we hold dear.
It is not normal in the United States, a nation that admires firm conviction in the leaders the people elect to represent them, to elect a convict, and even more rare to make up specious excuses and cast blame on the process by which he was found guilty, his own pitiful contentions that he’s being persecuted, not prosecuted, bleated endlessly until the entire MAGA flock, coast-to-coast, can respond in one ovine voice, “it was a Democrat witch hunt!”
No, it wasn’t. Not any more than were the efforts by Trump to effect criminal charges against his rivals and their families; Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, Hunter Biden.
The sole difference is that when applied, the step-by-step procedures of due process proceeded to the conclusion of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt as determined by a jury on allegations against Trump, but fizzled quickly on the accusations by Trump, which were not backed by fact or evidence.
It’s the same for those who choose to believe Trump’s contention that the 2020 election was stolen. Or that January 6 was a peaceful assembly that got a little out of hand but no different than the rioting of the lawless left. In 60 court cases filed contending a fraudulent election, zero evidence was submitted. Trump was impeached for incitement of insurrection but the Senate, with many admitting they believed him guilty, failed to convict based largely on timing, as Joe Biden was in office when the Senate tried the case. A majority voted to convict, 57-43, but they were 10 votes shy of the two-thirds majority required by the constitution.
Does that mean what happened in our nation’s capitol January 6, 2021, wasn’t an insurrection?
Hardly. After extensive investigation and based predominantly on testimony and evidence by Republicans and Republicans who served in his administration, the J6 Committee, noting that Trump had already been impeached for inciting an insurrection, instead opted to recommend the Department of Justice pursue charges including conspiracy to defraud the United States and assisting, aiding or comforting an insurrection.
But the investigation was already underway. By its end, the largest criminal probe in U.S. history resulted in over 1,300 convictions, the most serious charged with seditious conspiracy, a federal crime in which “two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States,”
“Nobody was convicted as an insurrectionist!” is the common MAGA refrain. No, but one was impeached. Donald Trump got away with it.
I can hear the red hat MAGA sheep bleating, I’ve heard the laughable refrain for more than a decade.
“That’s your opinion and I’m entitled to my beliefs and opinions same as you!”
Yes, you certainly are. You are free to believe anything. But you aren’t free to your own facts. If you choose to believe the jester’s lies, knock yourself right out. You are even free to laugh at any proof, logical argument or evidence presented. What you can’t do is insist that anyone else believe you or accept your storied assertion … a lie is and ever remains a lie, spoken under cover of night or in broad light of day.