The Price of Membership
There are certain false things one must incorporate in one's being if one wishes to be a Democrat.
Last week, second term Georgia congresswoman Nikema Williams from the Fifth District (almost all of Atlanta), introduced a totally rational and constitutional resolution to ban former President Donald Trump - along with people like Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, Peter Navarro, Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Rudy Giuliani, and other figures - from entering the U.S. Capitol.
Some of these people are subject to this persona non grata treatment only because they gave the Trump campaign legal advice but anyone with any connection with the Trump administration or campaign is guilty by association - according to the Democrat narrative.
So as not to be mistaken as a sane person, Williams has been joined by the gas-passing, honey trapped and failed presidential candidate, Congressman Eric “Duke Nukem” Swalwell, who with serial liar and current candidate for Senate, Adam Schiff, are former members of the House Intel Committee.
Likening the target of the bans to arsonists, the resolution states:
“The Sergeant at Arms of the House of Representatives, the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper of the Senate, and the United States Capitol Police shall take such actions as may be necessary to prohibit President Donald John Trump from entering the United States Capitol at any time after the expiration of his term as President.”
Two years hence, Trump Derangement Syndrome lives on.
They just can’t quit him.
Just as Bush Derangement Syndrome and the perpetual hatred of Ronald Reagan are shibboleths of the Democrat Party, Trump the Insurrectionist lives on.
Even though time (and in some cases, multi-year investigations) has revealed none of what the Democrats believed (believe?) about Reagan, Bush II and Trump has any basis in fact, they persist.
In the past week or so, I have mentioned how important narratives are to movements and to groups of people – and I also mentioned that narratives can be true or false, because they are basically stories – but one must wonder why false narratives survive in the face of facts and reality.
They do survive because the people who promote them are the ultimate purveyors of “misinformation”, the have invested so much of their ideology into these narratives, believing them is no longer optional, to be a member of this movement or group, one must believe the approved narrative. There is no other choice – that narrative becomes an organizing principle, a core assumption from which everything else by proximity can derive a classification or a value.
The Democrats have certain things they not only want to be true, but they must also be true for their ideology to survive and continue.
There are a lot of these narratives - collectivism, Keynesian economics, Modern Monetary Theory, CRT, climate change, alternative energy, bail and prison “reform”, a foreign policy of appeasement, speech is violence, abortion is reproductive “healthcare”, Trump colluded with Russia, Brett Kavanaugh is a serial rapist, America is racist - all are examples of things that must be accepted as true, even though their failures are obvious, conspicuous, and legion.
But you must believe them to be a Democrat, or you get cancelled. Excommunication is the enforcement mechanism, the same as it is for religions or cults. If you exhibit any sliver of heterodox thinking or commit the sin of speaking against any of this, as Tulsi Gabbard has done, one becomes a pariah, a racist, a Russian stooge, or even worse – a Republican.
They internalize these narratives, making them not just what they believe, but who they are.
On March 24, 1946, George Orwell wrote in the London Tribune:
“The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Logically, we know Orwell is right. Even though we expect truth will out, until it does, we must deal with people who are adept at “twisting the facts so as to show that [they] were right”.
When an entire political party is based on those twisted facts, it becomes more difficult for the truth to get its shoes on.
Truth deniers and Fact deniers. That appears to be the rules of the game for being a democrat.
"If A is true, then B must be true."
A is false...
"But B is still true!"