Psychological Projection Playbook: How Elites Blame You For What They Do

Written by Dr. Everett Piper

A phrase often attributed to Saul Alinsky, author of “Rules for Radicals,” or to Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi minister of propaganda, is “Accuse your opponent of what you are doing, to create confusion and to inculcate voters against evidence of your own guilt.” Although attribution for this quote may be spurious, it continues to resonate with millions for a reason.

Psychological projection is part of our common human experience. It’s a tactic as old as time itself. As Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the snake, and the snake then blamed God himself, so, too, do today’s establishment elites continue to accuse everyone but themselves of the very things they do with impunity.

Consider just a handful of last week’s headlines.

In Oregon, Roderick Theis, a public school educator, was ordered by Elgin and Union school district administrators to remove children’s books he had displayed in his workspace. Why would these proud opponents of book bans do this? Well, the publications in question — “He Is He” and “She Is She” by Ryan and Bethany Bomberger and “Johnny the Walrus” by Matt Walsh — were deemed by these oh-so-tolerant higher-ups to “promote a binary view of gender” that created “a hostile expression of animus toward actual or perceived gender identity.”

For this offense, Mr. Theis was told to remove the books immediately from his office or face “discipline up to and including termination of employment.” Thus, the very people screaming incessantly about conservatives wanting to censor free speech and ban books shamelessly decided to censor Mr. Theis and forcefully ban his books from their schools. “Accuse your opponent of what you are doing to create confusion.” Indeed.

Meanwhile, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, signed the Kelly Loving Act into law, which now allows the state to revoke custody from mothers and fathers who “misgender” their children by defining such parenting as “coercive control.” This law creates legal grounds for the state to take children away from parents who refuse to play along with an 8- or 9-year-old’s public school-induced gender fantasies. It states explicitly that “deadnaming” or “misgendering” (otherwise known as calling your son a boy and your daughter a girl) will henceforth be considered relevant in court decisions determining “the best interests of a child.”

In other words, those who emotionally abuse and intellectually coerce children via their sexual indoctrination are now accusing parents of abuse and coercion for telling their kids that the science-denying garbage about 57 different genders is nonsense.

Now, lest you think such two-faced duplicity is relegated to blue state Democrats, consider the case of St. Isidore of Seville v. Drummond, just across the border in Oklahoma, perhaps one of the reddest of red states. “Republican” Attorney General (and present gubernatorial candidate) Gentner Drummond was giddy after the Supreme Court’s recent 4-4 decision to effectively marginalize low-income parents by prohibiting them from using their hard-earned tax dollars to avail themselves of a state board-approved Catholic charter school.

“This Supreme Court’s decision,” crowed Mr. Drummond, “represents a resounding victory for religious liberty. … This ruling … protect[s] the religious rights of families to choose any school they wish for their children.”

Is it possible to find a more cynical example of doublespeak? Mr. Drummond might just as well have come out and said it: “Even though I just stopped you from choosing the school of your choice, I think you’re dumb enough to think I’m the champion of school choice, and while I just took your religious liberty away, I’ll tell you the exact opposite because I think you’re too stupid to see the lie.” Even George Orwell would blush at such temerity.

Finally, the poster child of such two-faced hypocrisy is America’s new self-declared warrior of fake news, CNN’s Jake Tapper. This is a man who now stands to make millions for his new book, a “courageous” expose of the cover-up of President Biden’s cognitive decline. Yes, this is the same man who just five minutes ago was persistently mocking anyone who dared to challenge Mr. Biden’s fitness for office and, yep, the same guy who literally turned off the microphones of those who challenged his “cheap-fake” narrative. He’s someone whose repetitious chortling of the accepted messaging from the Democratic National Committee sounded more like a parrot that won’t stop saying, “Polly wants a cracker” than it did a human being with an actual heart, mind and soul.

With the likes of Messrs. Drummond and Polis and Oregon public schools, not to mention champions of deceit and distraction such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is now acting like a fiscal conservative, and Anthony Fauci, who still insists he is pro-science while you’re not, the competition is stiff, but, yes, Mr. Tapper wins the prize. He is perhaps the most self-deluded man of the week.

This article was originally published by The Washington Times.