““Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”– George Orwell
Imagine my surprise when I was perusing Twitter this weekend and found a tweet that asserted that the attack on the capital was not in fact sedition. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the wherewithal to save that Tweet, but subsequent searches found the article in question.
Occasionally we get to witness things first hand. It is particularly incendiary to see someone or some people attempt to tell us that what we saw is not what we saw and what we heard is not what we heard.
Yet, former President Trump attempted to tell us exactly that in his all out war with the mainstream media. He actually said that we can’t believe what we see and hear. When you eliminate the mainstream media then the only thing left is state sponsored media. From there, it is just a quick jump to the world that Orwell created in his novel.
Denial is one way of erasing the past. Most attempt to whitewash it. It isn’t that people didn’t invade the capitol. It is that they did it nonviolently. They had no weapons. The former president told us that they hugged the officers as they came in. They handed them all flowers and chocolates as they came in. If they are guilty of anything it isn’t paying for the tour.
Others resort to whataboutism. What about the protesters in Portland and Minnesota? What about the protesters everywhere else that caused property damage and hurt people. Some of them even had guns. Isn’t that worse than what the people did at the capitol?
Finally we get the conspiracy theorists. Sure, people invaded the capitol and sure they committed insurrection and sedition, but they weren’t the good, honest conservatives that came there to protest. Those were liberal agitators from Antifa and BLM that were trying to get conservatives in trouble.
Add it all up and it’s just pathetic deflection. First of all, we watched the attack. We know the numbers of officers that were either hurt or killed. The irony of the what about argument is that they show their hand on the last argument. Remember, conservatives always accuse you of what they are in fact doing. Certainly not all of the bad actors at protests out of Washington are in fact conservative agitators, but many of them were.
Yet, that doesn’t matter. Let’s say all of them were Antifa and BLM. It is difficult to separate in your mind what was behind the violence and who the violence was against. One group were protesting an election they lost. Others were protesting continual mistreatment by the police. One group attempted to overthrow a government in the midst of a constitutional event. The other group had members get violent in protest and may have damaged private property or injured innocent bystanders.
The point is that when we don’t want something to be true we will try anything to convince ourselves that it isn’t true. Maybe we deny it happened in the first place. Maybe we rearrange our memories to change what happened. Maybe we change the subject and try to get people to focus on something else that happened. Maybe we just change who did it. This is your shame. It’s right here and you can’t run from it anymore no matter how hard you try.
