One of the virtues of being a mentally healthy person in an honest society is that you don’t have to deal with cognitive dissonance. That is, there are no moments when you are forced to accept two entirely conflicting facts or values. Instead, you have the mental freedom to work through the conflict and come out with an honest evaluation.
When people lack that honesty and liberty, the only refuge is delusions and heartfelt lies to themselves. That shows up in a very funny video from February that’s starting to gain deserved traction.
A hallmark of totalitarianism, as George Orwell made so clear in 1984, is that the state has the power to make you accept wholeheartedly things that are not true. Thus, through torture, the “Ministry of Love” interrogator made Winston Smith believe with his whole heart that 2+2=5. Reality took a back seat to the state’s need to dominate people.
That, of course, was a novel, but Natan Sharansky, the one-time Soviet dissident, wrote about exactly that kind of forced, artificial reality in the former Soviet Union. In The Case For Democracy: The Power Of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny And Terror, Sharansky describes how in a society that uses police coercion to force an artificial reality on people (e.g., saying that the economy is thriving, even as people stand in line for hours in the hopes of buying a sausage), one gets three kinds of people: true believers, a few brave dissidents, and those who survive through what Sharansky calls “doublethinkers”:
Doublethinkers live in constant tension from the gap between their thoughts and words. They always avoid saying what is not permitted but also try to avoid saying what they do not believe. But fear societies generally do not leave their doublethinkers such a luxury. They demand from their “cogs” constant expressions of loyalty. In kindergartens, schools, universities, workplaces, religious institutions, public meetings, and elsewhere, doublethinkers must parrot the ideology of the regime and hide their true beliefs. This constant self-censorship can be such an inseparable part of a doublethinker’s existence that it becomes so habitual that the tension between thoughts and words is almost no longer felt.
Sometimes, though, reality forces itself on both true believers and doublethinkers. At that moment, you can see the brains stutter to a halt, as if a grain of sand got caught in the gears. That’s exactly what happened when Brandon Straka confronted two hardcore leftist women who were proudly trumpeting their white support for black women’s wisdom with the reality that many black women support Trump.
The video is laugh-out-loud funny as Straka keeps pushing the women to accept the conflict behind their stated principles (one must trust black women to know what is best for them) and reality (that some black women think that Trump is best for them). The video ends with the two women, like all true believers and doublethinkers, getting the disruptive grain of sand out of their mental gears.
However, I couldn’t help but hope that, maybe, in the quiet of their homes, away from the chants of their peers, some grain of sand remained, marking the beginning of a small pearl of wisdom growing in their resistant minds. That, after all, is often how minds finally change.
“Should we trust black women who voted for Trump?”
— Brandon Straka #WalkAway (@BrandonStraka) February 5, 2025
Watch the brains of 2 white liberal Women’s March Karens short circuit right before your eyes.
Full video in comments! ENJOY! @IngrahamAngle @JesseBWatters @Gutfeldfox @greggutfeld @LaraLeaTrump @tracegallagher @KariLake pic.twitter.com/2zmieSdIX9
Image: X screen grab (cropped).