Denial is a potent ass drug, and approximately 77 million Americans are strung out and hitting the pipe hard. Denial is as much a cause for the lunacy and chaos that exists today as an economic downturn or malaise, more than any fear of socialism and more than a delusional notion of freedom.
Denial is what makes many White Americans believe that they are somehow better than other Americans, primarily based on the color of their skin. Rich and powerful White men have been telling them that it is whiteness” that justifies employing any strategy or tactic to affirm that only Whites have unfettered access to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Explicitly and implicitly, there are White Americans that have convinced themselves they are somehow more American than other Americans. Well, as a Black man, I tell them, I’ll see you a two to three generations in this country and raise you denying that end generations mine has been here. Denial is insidious and dangerous to your health and our democracy.
Denial leads to millions mainlining conspiracies and lies that fuel their paranoia and serve as a balm for their fragile egos. This mindset makes them vulnerable to manipulation to accept and promote politicians and policies counter to their self-interest. When denial is strong enough, it will make a liar of you, deny facts, and make you a dupe for every carnival barker and shyster peddling supremacist snake oil.
The institution of the polio vaccine was much more problematic than the COVID-19 vaccines. Yet, you still had the overwhelming majority of Americans who believed in science, getting vaccinated, which resulted in the elimination of polio. It is challenging to have sympathy or compassion for individuals so profoundly entrenched in denial that they resort to taking livestock medication for parasites (Ivermectin) to pledge allegiance to their “team” while the owners and management of that team are fully vaccinated. Ignorance is not even a viable explanation anymore because once you realize that your team includes unapologetic racists and hate mongers, you should have demanded a trade.
Then I will make anything that establishes facts a complete anathema to tens of millions of Americans. Their distorted and perverted vision of the world rejects science. Who needs peer-reviewed studies when you can hop on YouTube and listen to testimonials from non-experts and con artists? At the same time, there is also an attempt to invalidate historical events and facts, whitewashing history, if it potentially tells the truth about our failures as a society and how many of those failures continue to impact all Americans today. Our education system has never done an adequate job of teaching about the complete American experience, but now many people are willing to act violently to sanitize that history.
Historical facts are considered a matter of opinion or perspective. If they had their way, the Holocaust either would have never happened, or it wasn’t the abomination it was. They also tell you that slavery was a full-employment program and not the atrocity that has led to Institutionalized racism that haunts us to this day. These are the same people that tell Black folks that slavery was so yesterday but still worship the treasonous history of the Confederacy.
Every parent teaches their children unless sociopaths raise you, there are three things you should never grow up to be: a sore loser, a liar, or a cheater. People that support or even tolerate Trump and Republicans have hit the trifecta.
They are sore losers because their denial and sense of privilege run so deep, they could not accept and will not accept defeat in an election that has been deemed the most secure election in our lifetime. The biggest sore loser of all, of course, is Donald Trump. Donald Trump, members of his administration, and his supporters incited an attack on the nation’s capital that led to people being killed, maimed, and traumatized. All of this happened in the name of the “Big Lie.” Thousands of Trump supporters stormed the halls of Congress to enact a cool. The difference between the reaction to the 2016 presidential election and the 2020 presidential election could not be starker. In 2020 the mega supporters brought violence and vitriol, while in 2016, Hillary Clinton supporters brought “Pussy Hats.”
They are liars because their claims of election fraud were spun out of whole cloth. Dead people, immigrants, and convicts supposedly voted illegally for Joe Biden, and Trump claimed he was the legitimate winner of the election. The lies were so ludicrous and outrageously false that even Trump’s appointed judges shut them down time after time. They filed 62 election lawsuits and lost 61 of them. The cases brought forward were so bogus and had no basis in evidence or facts that attorneys that represented Trump are being sued for defamation and may even lose their right to practice law in any jurisdiction.
Finally, we get to the cheating. The most hideous and threatening acts are the Republican efforts to both suppress and subvert the outcome of future elections. Suppose the suppression doesn’t get the result they want, then this subversion will. Republican state legislatures and governors have passed laws designed to eliminate and obstruct the franchise of Black, Latino, Native American, and Asian American voters that helped defeat them in 2020. The justification for these lawyers, fraud that courts and election officials have declared did not happen, phantom fraud. Even Republican election officials push back on these lies. Equally insidious is that these laws have laid the groundwork for them to go in and overturn the results of elections that their candidate’s loss.
These efforts are the most transparent and egregious attacks against our democracy in modern history. Why, oh why does the media treat these people as if they have any credibility? The degree of denial and cognitive dissonance between Republicans and Trump supporters is an existential threat to our democracy and our hopes to become a better union. There is no denying that.
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