Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person is grappling with simultaneously conflicting information and cannot accept that an old, false idea is being supplemented by a new, true idea. When it comes to Tyre Nichols’ horrific death at the hands of five Black police officers, we can see that America’s race hustlers, who have created a totalitarian world completely invested in racism as the answer to all questions, have swatted aside their cognitive dissonance with a crazed race theory.

Watching the videos showing the last minutes of Tyre Nichols’ life is just awful. It’s like watching a snuff film because he’s lying bound on the ground as the five officers literally beat him to death. I don’t believe we know yet what led to the officers treating Nichols with ferocity from the moment they first removed him from his car, but I do know that nothing justifies beating a helpless man to death.

But first, two observations that have nothing to do with the main point of this post: First, Memphis is one of America’s most dangerous cities, while urban Black culture has too often centered around explosive violence. It makes sense, therefore, that Memphis’s police culture would reflect these things—violent, out-of-control communities will create violent, out-of-control police. Basically, the video showed what looked like gangbangers in action.

Second, Tyre’s last words were to call for his mother, something I found utterly heartbreaking. No matter how old we get, when we think of the ultimate comfort, it’s that moment, beginning at birth and continuing throughout our childhood, when our mother takes us into her arms and makes the world better. It’s not uncommon for people in extremis to cry out for that primal comfort. As a mother, Tyre’s cry cut me to the core.

But back to the subject at hand.

Image: Tyre Nichols’ helpless last moments. YouTube screen grab.

For decades, going back at least as far as OJ Simpson’s trial, but with increasing urgency since Obama appeared on the scene and then, if possible, even more frantically when Trump upset the Obama applecart, leftists have relied upon a single concept to leverage themselves into ever greater political power: racism. Everything that opposes them, every person or idea, is racist. The Trump years added the alternative phrase “White supremacy.”

Critical Race Theory, whether acknowledged or not, permeates leftist thinking. It goes like this: All Whites are inherently racist supremacists who are simultaneously privileged and fragile because of the hideous racial burden crushing their souls. The corollary is that all Blacks, while pure of soul, are perpetual victims, always on the receiving end of White supremacist privilege. And the sub corollary is that police are White supremacists whose job gives them the power to act out physically the racism that other Whites can show only through “systemic” racism and microaggressions.

What happens, though, when the police who manifestly and brutally victimize a Black man are all Black, too? Well, that’s when the cognitive dissonance kicks in. The old idea is that White cops act out their inherent White supremacy on Black victims. The challenging idea, as seen in this case, is that it was Black cops doing the acting.

Because the race hustlers cannot accept that new idea, both because it runs counter to their identities and because they’ll be shunned by their totalitarian friends, they must devise a workaround. So far, that workaround has been to embrace the “No true Scotsman” fallacy. Here’s how that works:

The core principle is that “No true Scotsman wears underwear under his kilt.” The rebuttal is that “Mr. Angus McDonald wears Hanes tighty-whities under his kilt.” The refutation/fallacy is that “Mr. Angus MacDonald is no true Scotsman.”

In this case, the race hustlers are informing us that Black cops who abuse Black citizens aren’t true Blacks. Instead, they are White supremacists with an internalized White psychology that has overridden their otherwise skin color. You can call this the “no true Black” fallacy—or, as Joe Biden said in a political context, if a Black-identifying person didn’t support him, “then you ain’t Black”:

How is this not satire? pic.twitter.com/wir0lvbjb2

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 27, 2023

White supremacy doesn't just mean white people oppressing people of color. White supremacy pits POC against each other. White supremacy makes POC hate themselves. Internalized racism is a byproduct of white supremacy. Tokenism is a byproduct of white supremacy. It's all connected

— Christine Liwag Dixon (@cmliwagdixon) January 28, 2023

We all have internalized White Supremacy Culture — to the extent that even people of color have subconsciously shown anti-Blackness behaviors. If you want to understand this, there are videos of young Black children expressing self hatred.

— Sharon Shelton Corpening (@shastonwrites) January 28, 2023

If one follows this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, of course, all the Black-on-Black killings that are destroying urban Black America are also the fault of the dominant White culture. Every one of those amoral gangbangers, raised in a fatherless, Godless home, is no longer a “true Black.” We’re all White now.