Authored by Kevin Finn via AmericanThinker.com,
Earlier on, I argued why I think it’s useful to debate Leftists online, knowing that it’s unlikely they” change their minds on anything.
But another Leftist tactic is psychological projection, which is ascribing to another person one’s own feelings, thoughts, or attitudes.
Projection is used to relieve a sense of guilt or other unpleasant feeling. Blaming your own problems on someone else seems to be de rigueur in our society of late.
It’s worth noting that there is a great deal of overlap between lying and projection.
In some cases the circles on the Venn diagram would exactly coincide.
Accusations of hypocrisy are also common and it’s worth pointing out the difference between it and projection.
In brief, hypocrisy reflects on one’s own behavior while projection concerns oneself and one’s behavior towards others.
It would be hypocritical for person (A) who frequently rolls past stop signs to say that person (B) should always observe stop signs. It would be projection for person (A) to silently assume person (B) rolls past stop signs. It would be both hypocritical and projection for person (A) to falsely accuse person (B) of rolling past stop signs.
In today’s heated socio-political climate I contend that we’re seeing both hypocrisy and projection being utilized on a daily basis. How many times have we heard a Leftist claim that Donald Trump is “a threat to our democracy”?
The better question to ask is, “Who on the Left has not made that claim?”
The people attesting to this have been noticeably silent on the case of the FBI lying to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in their quest for surveillance warrants on Carter Page.
How much of a threat to democracy was it to conduct what amounts to a coup to remove a sitting president in the final months of his campaign and replace him with someone who never earned a single primary vote? Has that ever happened before in America?
Practically every outlet in the Democrat Media Industrial Complex (DMIC) has accused Trump of being an authoritarian, a tyrant and a dictator. They cite examples such as President Trump is “tearing up trade deals and stepping back from global institutions.” The Paris climate greement placed unfair restrictions on Americans, even while “U.S. emissions of criteria air pollutants that impact human health and the environment declined by 74% between 1970 and 2018.”
President Trump cancelled the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran which enriched the regime while doing little to nothing to curb their nuclear ambitions.
The people who decried these decisions either cheered or were silent when President Biden transferred student loan obligations to the taxpayers despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that it was unconstitutional to do so.
Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris supported the impeachment of President Trump for his telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with “no one is above the law.”
When the transcript of that phone call was released, it was found that President Trump did not, in fact threaten to withhold military aid in exchange for an investigation into Burisma Holdings. At the time, Burisma was paying Hunter Biden $85k/month for … what, his expertise in the extraction, processing, sale and distribution of petroleum products? Joe Biden is on video bragging about withholding U.S. aid to Ukraine unless they fired the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma Holdings.
Response from the Left? Crickets.
The same Leftists who pilloried President Trump for an innocent phone call to President Zelensky gave a pass to then Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton when she illegally used private electronic devices to send and receive classified information, and then destroyed both the messages and the devices after they were subpoenaed by Congress.
The reason for the pass? They claimed she didn’t intend to do anything wrong and “Because the government is awash in secrets, they are regularly mishandled unintentionally.” In other words, “She didn’t mean any harm and besides, everybody else is doing it!”
I wonder how often Secretary of State Clinton emailed President Obama on one of those illegal devices. All emails to the POTUS must be cleared through the White House Communications Agency (WHCA). Ms. Clinton was not using a .gov email address, which means that WHCA and President Obama knew that she was using unauthorized devices. I suspect that when James Comey said that: “No reasonable prosecutor would indict Secretary Clinton” that he was protecting Obama, and not Ms. Clinton.
Those are just a few of the more egregious examples of Leftists employing projection against their opponents in order to distract from their own nefarious actions. The fact that Leftists were engaging in the same, or worse actions that they were falsely accusing Donald Trump and others of committing reveals an entrée of Projection with a side order of Hypocrisy. There are many, many more examples.
For example, Democrats have claimed that:
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– Republicans suppress voters while Democrats founded the KKK, enacted Jim Crow Laws and, more recently committed so many suspicious actions during the 2020 and 2022 elections that Americans have lost faith in our elections.
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– Republicans carried out an insurrection while Leftists rioted nation-wide in 2020.
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– Republicans are Nazis while Democrats imprison grandmothers who pray in front of abortion clinics.
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– President Trump is Putin’s stooge while the Biden family takes cash from Russia, China and Ukraine.
In all of these examples the accusations against Republicans are false (lies) while Democrats have engaged in those or similar behaviors themselves.
So where do we go from here? Speaking for myself, whenever I come across a claim against conservatives or Republicans from Leftists or Democrats I immediately assume that not only is the opposite true, but that their accusation is probably more accurately applied to the Left. This means that to determine the truth I need to investigate the story and find out what isn’t being told. I spend a great deal of time every day sifting through news stories on various news sites. I no longer get my news from the television or print media. This is what I think we all need to do in order to be properly informed.
“An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” –author unknown
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