As a former member of the Democrat party, I still stay in touch with many of its members who are my close friends.  However, one thing that strikes me is that my friends are almost universally in denial of what the current administration has brought upon this once great nation in just two years of being in office.

The reality of a soaring crime rate in our nation's cities, runaway inflation that was once termed “transitory,” our disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan -- which served as the catalyst for Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, all seem to elude them, as if it never happened. When presented with any hard evidence or facts, they are not only in denial, but typically push back with emotion minus facts as if they live in an alternate universe where they can pick and choose the “facts” that fit their own party's narrative.

Recently, in an online exchange with a nationally syndicated Democrat columnist, I was treated to this: “The FBI in recent years identified not Antifa, or anything on the left, as the major domestic threat to the United States. Rather, the FBI has now repeatedly identified right-wing extremists (militias, etc.) as the biggest threat. Indeed, a bigger terrorist threat than anything from outside our borders.” 

I responded with a factual query: “How many deaths in the U.S. are a result of right-wing extremists versus how many deaths in the U.S. have occurred in the U.S. due to fentanyl poisoning (~ 100,000) which can mainly be attributed to our current open borders policy which has only emboldened the Mexican cartels through profits gained from human trafficking and the flood of illegal drugs across the border?” Not surprisingly, there was not a response.

As I recall from my college psychology classes, the condition termed "cognitive dissonance" is defined as: “The distressing mental state caused by inconsistency between a person’s beliefs and an action.” An example of cognitive dissonance would be a health-conscious smoker, this person knows that smoking is bad for them, but they still smoke because they enjoy it. Likewise, I suspect many of my friends from the other side of the aisle are in fact good people, but they are unable to deal with the reality of what the Biden administration has done to our nation in just two years and as a defense mechanism, they pretend all is well. As we saw earlier this week in Moscow, in talks between Putin and China's prime minister, Xi Jinping, where there was once American hegemony, China and Russia now are beginning to dominate the world stage as we dither with climate change and other inconsequential woke issues.

I truly wish my all my Democrat friends well, but they appear unable to cope with what is taking place in America no matter how harsh the reality. Let’s hope they can shake the spell of the cognitive dissonance that now burdens them.

Pretending that all is well in spite of the obvious dysfunction that currently surrounds them was employed by Nero who reputedly fiddled while Rome burned, and we all know how that ended.

Image: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek -Austrian National Library, via Picryl // Public Domain Mark 1.0