It’s maddening, but true.

If there is a choice between confronting a difficult truth and believing an obvious lie many people will choose the latter.

We see a less shocking form of this behavior all the time and likely engage in it more often than we would like to admit. How often have you seen people change their minds in the face of contradictory evidence? At best it happens over time, but you can probably count on your fingers and toes the number of times that people concede that they are wrong in the midst of an argument.

Still, it is shocking when people will meekly accept that a person they claim to trust obviously lies straight to their face. That is a special kind of appalling. Yet it, too, happens often enough. Karine Jean-Pierre will look the Washington Press Corps in the eyes and lie with a straight face nearly every day, and they dutifully report what she says as if it is plausible.

An infuriating example of the gaslighting people can get away with is the new line being pushed by a growing number of COVID-19 tyrants. As fewer people retain the belief that all the mandated measures we were forced to endure were the right things to do, the tyrants who pushed these measures on us have taken to claiming that the mandates never happened.

Yep. Never happened.

In New Zealand, which had some of the most tyrannical policies, the new line from the current Prime Minister (who was instrumental in pushing vaccine mandates) is that there were no vaccine mandates at all.

Didn’t happen.

New Zealand PM @chrishipkins says there was no compulsory vaccination and that people made their own choices.

Yeah right! People made their own choices in the same way that a person being threatened with a big stick "makes a choice" to do something .@P_McCulloughMD… pic.twitter.com/WJcwJaJqQn

— Coronavirus Plushie (@c_plushie) September 3, 2023

Our MSM pulls this same sort of BS all the time on a range of issues. How many clips of reporters denying that there is a shred of evidence that Joe Biden helped his son engage in influence peddling? The Washington Post’s Philip Bump beclowned himself by claiming (again) that there is zero evidence that Joe Biden had anything to do with Hunter’s business, and when pressed left a podcast in a huff. John wrote about it on Friday.

Rest assured, though, that Bump will continue pushing the lie, and vast numbers of people will continue to believe it because the alternative is confronting a hard truth. How many TV anchors have repeated the same lie that there is no evidence that Biden was deeply involved in his son’s business?

Dems parrot the idiotic line that Hunter’s crimes “haven’t been tied to Joe” because WaPo “journalists” like Philip Bump refuse to report basic facts. Instead they rage quit interviews when forced to admit Hunter already confirmed he paid the Big Guy half. pic.twitter.com/IOUEeVKCYP

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) September 2, 2023

It’s not just Bump. Almost every MSM reporter and commentator has had a changing story about Joe Biden and Hunter for years now; the only consistent part of that story is that Joe is totally innocent and ignorant about Hunter’s antics.

Biden is compassionate and loves his son. He is also supremely competent. There is no evidence that Biden and Hunter were in it together. None. Nada. Zip.

Of course, Trump paid a hooker to pee on a bed in Moscow. Lots of proof about that. Enough proof to repeat the lie endlessly.

Tolerating normal political lies is part of life–political spin can be compared to advertising puffery.

But once the spin turns into obvious lies and gaslighting–“there were no mandates,” for instance–it is no longer the politicians we should disdain but the people who back them up and the people who pretend to believe them.

The liars in these cases aren’t the problem–it is their enablers. As we saw in 2022 most of the COVID tyrants got reelected, often with decent margins.

That is infuriating. Is it really too much to ask that people refuse to be gaslighted?

Apparently, it is.