Politics triggering cognitive dissonance

Scott Adams (aka Dilbert) writes:

A mass hysteria happens when the public gets a wrong idea about something that has strong emotional content and it triggers cognitive dissonance that is often supported by confirmation bias. In other words, people spontaneously hallucinate a whole new (and usually crazy-sounding) reality and believe they see plenty of evidence for it. The Salem Witch Trials are the best-known example of mass hysteria. The McMartin Pre-School case and the Tulip Bulb hysteria are others. The dotcom bubble probably qualifies. We might soon learn that the Russian Collusion story was mass hysteria in hindsight. The curious lack of solid evidence for Russian collusion is a red flag. But we’ll see how that plays out.

We are witnessing mass hysteria about Charlottesville. Example:

President Donald Trump is accusing Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of telling a “disgusting lie” by saying Trump drew a “moral equivalency” between white supremacists and those who protested them in Charlottesville.

On Wednesday, as Fox News writes, Graham said Trump “took a step backward by again suggesting there is moral equivalency between the white supremacist neo-Nazis and KKK members who attended the Charlottesville rally and people like Ms. Heyer.” Heather Heyer was killed when a car drove into a crowd of counter-protesters at the rally on Aug. 12. Trump has blamed “both sides” for the violence.

Yes, it is a disgusting lie, and the press has been saying it in various ways for a week.

GoDaddy and Google have attempted to censor sites criticizing Miss Heyer. Why? Of all the views to censor, why this? Was she trying to start a riot or something?

Authorities primarily seek to censor the truth, so I can only assume that she was doing something really bad.

And why is it that CNN, NY Times, NPR, Democrat politicians, and other Trump haters are so eager to equate Nazis, KKK, Heyer, and statue-destroyers? I think that they take down these statues because they are trying to start a race war.

A Trump-hater site concedes that Trump told the truth about Charlottesville:

Our media have a problem: they are essentially incapable of covering Donald Trump with anything less than full-on deranged hysteria.

I do not say this as an excess of rhetoric or op-ed theatrics. It is a very real, very pressing problem, only getting worse, and it poses a significant danger to the social fabric of the United States. Twenty-first century American media has the ability to shape our discourse and shift our public consciousness, and it is abusing that power in the worst ways possible. This is likely a bigger problem than any of us realizes.

They are a little late to notice. The press has been lying about Trump for 2 years now, even when his words are so readily available.