One of the toughest things for our side is getting it through our skulls that our opponents are not like us. We assume everybody is like us. We assume everybody is interested in objective truth. We assume facts and evidence can sway everybody. We assume that everybody wants the same thing that we do – a free, prosperous, and secure society. Except none of that's true. Our opponents don't want any of that. Our opponents are against all that. Facts, law, evidence – none of it matters, except to the extent that, at this particular moment, these things can support whatever the objective du jour is.
This leads to the phenomenon that we saw after the shooting of the communist poet woman in Minneapolis. The whole thing is on video. It's documented from every angle. There's no argument about what actually happened because it's all there. We see what happened. Now, one can argue about the meaning of what happened – although they also deny the law which governs the facts – but no one can honestly deny the facts themselves. Except they do, and it's hard to deal with.
It's meant to be.
We watch our opponents take facts that we can see, like that the vehicle physically struck the cop, and deny them. "No, he was never struck by her car," insist Democrat politicians, regime media hacks, and communist internet randos. Except he was.
We scratch our heads, point at the video, and say, "Look right here. He's getting knocked out of the way!" But they still deny it. To the extent that some don't deny it, they minimize it. "Oh, he was just winged," as if that's significantly different. Of course, 30 seconds before, their party line was that the agent wasn't even touched.
It would be bizarre, and it would be baffling, except it's perfectly rational. Yes, their denial of the truth – outright lying – is entirely in keeping with their support for their narrative. If the facts don't support the narrative, it's not the narrative that needs to change. It's the facts.
But this drives us crazy because this isn't how we're supposed to do things. We're supposed to be a democracy – yeah, I know it's a constitutional republic, but go with me for a minute. When you have a democracy, you have the people deciding on how we're going to rule over ourselves. That means everybody gets input. What is that input? That input is an argument. "I think we should adopt the following policy because X." You are arguing for X. When you make an argument, you're using facts and evidence to convince people, to persuade them, to make them come around to see it your way. Counterarguments often claim that the facts are either wrong or misinterpreted.
Let me pause for a second – I'm using the word "facts" like a lawyer uses the word "facts." A "fact" in this usage is not necessarily true. That's why you have the phenomenon of "true facts." In a lawsuit, for instance, both sides present facts, and the jury must determine which facts are true. OK, back to my point.
So, all this leads to the inescapable conclusion that, if you have a democracy, you need citizens who can determine the facts so they can make decisions about their government. This implies that people can change their minds when presented with facts that compel them to reconsider their preconceived notions.
But this is an anathema to the Left, and not just because the facts are against them. The Left doesn't start with the facts and come to its final conclusion. The Left starts with its final conclusion and works backward to the facts. But the facts don't fit the Left conclusion, so what to do? Well, if the facts don't fit the conclusion, you change the facts.
"The guy got hit by the car."
"No, he didn't get hit by the car."
"But it's right there on video!"
"You are just a racist."
The Left is free of truth because the truth will free you from leftism. It's liberating for them. Being bound to the facts and thereby the conclusions they imply creates obstacles to attaining their final objective. Since their final objective is, by definition, good – remember that leftism is less an ideology than a pagan religion for people who have an empty space that should be filled with faith, family, and the Flag – ignoring objective truth is not merely acceptable, but is an affirmatively moral act.
In other words, they see themselves as obligated to lie about what we all know is true. And there are rewards for doing it. There are many stories of people under communism forced to lie when everybody knows what they're saying publicly is a lie, and, of course, the speaker knows it's a lie. It becomes an act of solidarity, a sacrifice to show dedication to their communist idols. What they are sacrificing is their own personal dignity. We see that a lot, not just in people denying what the video in Minnesota shows, but in other things. They deny that Hamas is a bunch of psychotic freaks who rape and murder, though they know Hamas is a bunch of psychotic freaks who rape and murder. They assert that a man, pretending to be a woman, is a woman, even though they know that a man pretending to be a woman is not a woman. They humiliate and degrade themselves by saying something they know is untrue, and that everybody else knows is false, and that everyone knows they know is false, in order to show their dedication to the cause.
It's kind of sick and creepy. It also makes democracy impossible. You can't have arguments if you have people who cannot or will not change their minds in the face of facts. Democracy where people can't be convinced to change their minds isn't a democracy. What it's going to be is a dictatorship because people who do see the truth are going to have to be compelled to accept an outcome based on lies because they're not going to be talked into it. They've got to be forced into it.
Again, this is like every communist dictatorship ever.
So, what do we do? How do we respond to people who are unable or unwilling to change their minds in the face of facts? What's the tactic for dealing with people who lie?
First, you've got to understand what they are and what they're about. Part of the reason they're successful is that we default into believing that people are like us. We sometimes assume, when somebody is gaslighting us outrageously, that they might actually have a point because no one would ever brazenly lie. We assume this because we wouldn't brazenly lie. But we saw this with the ubiquitous claim of "racism" that always gets leveled against us. Everything is racist, yet we know that's not true, and after a while, we just started to ignore it. No one cares if they call us "racist." Jasmine Crockett can launch into one of her minstrel-show tirades, and we shrug. Ilhan Omar can start whining about how we are too mean to these ungrateful Somalis we rescued, and who paid us back with fraud, but the only thing she will get from us is an ironic "Happy anniversary" on the day she married her brother.
We need to do that with everything they say. We must accept reality, the reality that reality doesn't matter to our opponents. We can't argue our way to victory with them. But normal people? Now, they are subject to argument. Normal people do look at facts and do change their minds. The tsunami of Democrat lies about obvious facts is not just an exercise in solidarity, but an attempt to browbeat normal people to the point where they doubt their own eyes. We can't let that happen. That's why we can't abandon the truth. That's why we must make arguments not to the Left but to the Center.
Normal people looking at what happened in Minneapolis can be convinced. They can look at the video, and they'll start asking the questions Democrats don't want them asking, like "What the hell is a mother doing out there blocking cops?" and "Why the hell didn't she just get out of the car?"
We've got to win over the normal people so that we have the political power to enforce our own will. We're past trying to persuade the Left because you can't convince the Left. There's no mechanism to do that, as we've seen. We've just got to do what we've got to do, and the key to that is ignoring all their lies, distortions, and slanders.
We're not here to convince the Left of anything. We're here to defeat it.
Read Kurt Schlichter's JUST RELEASED new bestseller in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic conservative action novel series, "Panama Red," and follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter.
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