by J. Peder Zane
Most of us do the essential things: don’t touch fire, don’t fight alligators, and don’t play in traffic. But beneath these necessary survival strategies, we are boundless reservoirs of illusion.
While many of our unfettered beliefs are specific to us—I seem to be the only one who thinks I have a stunning singing voice—some are universal. The most essential of these is the claim: I am my own worst critic.
Instead, we let ourselves go at every turn. I have a million reasons why I failed at work and I failed my buddies. You see, it’s like this …But woe to the second one who fails. Come on man, stop making excuses..
We instinctively make ourselves the heroes of our own story, inventing stories to turn our flaws into virtue. This animated is always at work in each of us. The positive aspect is that if we don’t love ourselves, who will?
But illusion can also take hold of us on a mass scale – this is the great danger of ideology and fuels the madness of crowds.
We are seeing dire consequences from all of this as the dominant media betrays the very foundations of journalism — starting with demanding that only elected leaders answer questions — to transform Kamala Harris into a cross between Rosa Parks, Franklin Roosevelt, and Beyoncé.
Their bias is so widespread and obvious that it has spawned a cottage industry in conservative media that churns out terabytes of content every day, exposing the false narratives and double standards promoted by Democrats and their laptop supporters. Such debunking is necessary and essential. But there’s also a bit of a fallacy here: despite all the evidence to the contrary, critics somehow believe that their fact-checking and truth-telling will pressure the propagandists to change their ways.
No. They are immune to challenge. They are beyond shame.
How is this possible? To understand why they persist in this inappropriate behavior, daily compromising the values of skepticism, honesty, and truth to power that they claim to value, we must ask ourselves: What higher value do they believe they are serving? What are they telling themselves that allows them to perceive their corruption as heroic?
The answer is obvious: They sincerely believe that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy, an American Hitler. If that is the case, why would you give him a fair chance or push his opponents to the brink?
I know this explanation is not groundbreaking; the Hitler analogy has been criticized for years. But I am not sure we have fully realized how deeply a immense percentage of the nation is in the grip of this delusion.
With textbook symptoms of dementia, they insist that falsehood is truth. Despite indisputable evidence to the contrary, they continue to claim that Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election, that he called all Mexicans rapists, praised neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, advised Americans to inject bleach to fight COVID, and promised a “bloodbath” if he loses in November.
They are not lying when they make these claims – they sincerely believe they are expressing a truth that the rest of us simply cannot see. This makes them immune to reason.
Echoing numerous conversations I have had with educated and committed Democrats, a respected plastic surgeon recently told me, “If Trump wins, there will be no more elections.”
He saw January 6, 2021, as a dress rehearsal for the coming coup — never mind that Trump quietly left office two weeks later. When I asked him how Trump could do that, he said the former president would declare a national emergency and GOP leaders would rally around his call for martial law, rounding up and imprisoning those who opposed him.
I pressed him again for an explanation of how this could all work. “Let’s say Trump and his Republican allies really want to cross this Rubicon,” I said. “They couldn’t do it alone, could they? They’d probably need the Supreme Court, a lot of state leaders, and the military to join them. Do you really think the military would support overthrowing the Constitution?”
He didn’t answer. “Most importantly,” I said, “he would need the support of his voters. Do you really believe that half of Americans think it’s OK to end the election and imprison countless people?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Okay, dokey,” I said, changing the conversation to my concerns about the New York Yankees’ starters playing.
His latest comment suggested the threatening depths of the delusion that so many Democrats mistake for reality. They see not just Trump but the other half of America as an existential threat to our Republic. They may defeat Hitler in November, but what about his tens of millions of brownshirts?
Extreme times will require more extreme measures – more coercion, more censorship, more abolition of rights in the name of freedom. They will heroically destroy our country to save it.
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J. Peder Zane is an editor and columnist for RealClearInvestigations. He previously served as book review editor and books columnist for the News & Observer (Raleigh), where his writing garnered national accolades. Zane has also worked at the New York Times and taught writing at Duke University and Saint Augustine’s University.
Photo “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz” by Gage Skidmore.
