Guest Editorial by Ian “The Deuce” Bibby

Imagine for a moment that your political views are basically your religion. Imagine that your religion holds to an eschatological belief in “inevitable progress,” in which “progress” is defined as the ever-expanding dominance of your worldview. Imagine that you are so convinced of this that you actually conflate your views with “the future,” and your opponents’ views with “the past.”

Imagine that this dogma leads you to utter nonsensical non-sequiturs like “It’s 2016!” and “You’re on the wrong side of history!” as arguments for why your views are right and your opponent’s are wrong and don’t actually need to be dealt with rationally.
Now, imagine that your views were defeated in a Presidential election, in which a candidate you consider an affront to everything you hold dear defeated your candidate who you were sure would win, and that he and his supporters did it by openly ridiculing and blaspheming all your sacred cows.

This would create massive cognitive dissonance for you. Your views are the future by definition! But the rejection of your views is also the future now! But that means the future is the future and not the future at the same time! This does not compute! There must be some mistake! It must be an illusion of some sort! He CAN’T win! It’s against the very laws of nature! And yet he did!

The psychological turmoil of this contradiction would probably lead you to do desperate and crazy things to make it all go away, like donate your money to hopeless recount efforts, send death threats to electoral college members and demand they throw the election to the “real” winner, and riot in the streets to relieve your pent-up mental frustration caused by cognitive dissonance.

You’d probably double down on every foolish, totalitarian overreach that cost you the election in the first place, sliming and denigrating everyone who didn’t vote how you wanted as nothing more than a hateful bigot, so that you could reframe your loss in your own mind as MORAL victory.

You’d probably point fingers everywhere but yourself, blaming convenient scapegoats like the electoral system or “fake news” for your loss, in order to rationalize to yourself that you didn’t REALLY lose and your religion wasn’t REALLY rejected, but the “real” winners were simply had by vile sorcery.

You’d probably make an absolute fool of yourself, screaming about how the evil winning candidate was a monster and a dictator, then turn around and coo and fawn over your OWN beloved dictators even more blatantly than you usually do, as your wistful dreams of a better world where all the meanies are trampled underfoot and your views reign supreme run out of control.

Anyhow, I hope this thought experiment helps you to empathize a bit with the SJWs in your life in their hour of hysteria. I mean, you need to understand how they feel if you want to demoralize them (and ultimately decondition them) further.