“A man capable of deceiving only others,” instructs a sage old saying, “is not as dangerous as a man capable of deceiving himself.” Bringing this to mind are comments Democrat-turned-independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made recently, talking about an interaction he had with CNN news anchor Erin Burnett two weeks ago.
Kennedy described how Burnett was genuinely shocked when, responding to a question she asked about how President Trump allegedly imperils the Republic, he told her that Joe Biden actually poses the greater threat.
“I can make an argument that President Biden is even more dangerous to the Republic,” he related on The Rubin Report last week. “And she had this kind of astonished look — where, you know, her brain stopped working.”
“And I said the reason for that … is because President Biden did something no other president in history [has done]; a court has found this,” Kennedy explained. “There’s no court that’s found that President Trump tried to steal the election or tried to derail the election or tried to start an insurrection. There may be plenty of evidence that he did that [there isn’t]. There’s no court that’s found that.”
Nonetheless, there are “courts that have found that President Biden was censoring his opponents,” Kennedy continued. “And not just me, although he did censor me, and I did win that suit. So, it’s not me making it up” (video below).
Kennedy “is absolutely correct,” commentator Andrea Widburg says of this. “The media narrative bears no relationship to the reality of who Trump is, what he’s said, or what he’s done.” She then goes on to outline some media anti-Trump lies, writing:
Most recently, the narrative is that Trump is threatening a “bloodbath” and, indeed, the New York Times is working hard to promulgate that belief.
… Never mind that the charge has been shown to be utterly false. Trump used the term in its normal American sense of an economic disaster. For Democrats, there will be blood.
In the same way, George Snuffleupagus called Trump a “rapist.” To her credit, Nancy Mace pushed back against this calumny, which in a normal time and place would be actionable.
And of course, for years we’ve been hearing the “fine people” hoax, which alleges that Trump supports the KKK as well as the “grab ‘em by the p***y” hoax (Trump was speaking hypothetically about avaricious women and rich men), and the Russia collusion hoax.
The list of hoaxes is endless.
But here’s the point: What “RFK, Jr., has revealed is that [many] media talking heads believe them [the hoaxes], Widburg continues. “If Burnett knew (as she should) that the narrative she’s pushing is unrelated to the facts, her eyes wouldn’t have bugged out of her head as they did.” As my article’s opening line (the quotation) informs, too, this point is actually very significant.
“It’s Not a Lie, if You Believe It”
In an amusing scene on the sitcom Seinfeld, pathological liar character George gives his best friend, Jerry, advice on how to beat a polygraph test:
“Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie, if you believe it.” It’s a joke containing a truth.
Many people assess others’ utterances thus: They’re either lying or telling the Truth. Yet there’s a third option:
They can be lying to themselves.
The reason this doesn’t fall neatly in the garden-variety “lying” category is that, to be precise, lying to oneself is called rationalizing. The self-deceived thus don’t actually lie to others, as to “lie” means to utter an untruth knowing it’s untrue. Rather, once they’ve fooled themselves, the fooling of others happens as a matter of course and, do note, with the approval of their own consciences.
While disheartening in a way, this aspect of man’s nature has a brighter side: It reflects how most people don’t want to be phonies, to be tellers of baldfaced lies; they don’t want to be like Russian Revolution author Vladimir Lenin, who unabashedly stated that he intended to change positions whenever convenient; or like “philosopher” Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that, yes, he was contradicting himself — but it didn’t matter. Hence rationalization, which enables people to accept the falsehoods necessary to defend an emotionally appealing but misbegotten worldview while maintaining their sense of their own “goodness.”
Nonetheless, certain people do rationalize more than others, with some being completely self-deluded. It’s important to understand why, too.
We all have emotions, and most seductive sirens they are. And when they dictate wrongly, they must be subordinated to what is right.
The man who’d become our second president, John Adams, made this point while defending British troops (and four civilians) — widely despised at the time — standing trial in 1770 for wrongdoing during the Boston Massacre. “Facts are stubborn things,” he said; “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
That six of the eight soldiers were acquitted reflects how, apparently, many Colonial Americans were able to resist their passions’ dictates. But what makes this more likely?
I myself occasionally experience a desire, an emotion, relating to political/world issues that, while feeling right, I know is wrong. I usually say a prayer during these moments, and this gets at the point:
A prerequisite for subordinating your feelings to something is there being something above your feelings to subordinate them to. There must be a yardstick with which to judge your emotions — namely, Truth.
This can’t happen when people don’t believe in Truth (objective by definition), that eternal yardstick that transcends man. Once we fall victim to moral relativism/nihilism — which defines the Left and, sadly, affects too many conservatives — we’re robbed of this yardstick. There’s then nothing above our feelings to say they’re wrong, and they then can end up being our yardstick for “moral” decisions.
Lest you consider this merely theoretical, know that a 2002 Barna study found that only six percent of teenagers at the time believed in Truth (properly defined). And what was their most common basis for “moral decision-making”?
What “feels right.”
Of course, those morally nihilistic 2002 teens are now middle-aged — and some are in the media.
