Projection (or Confession?)

One needn't look much farther than these pols own words for a window into their thought processes.

On WJFN-FM in Virginia, creepy, greasy, felonious Steve Bannon intones, “If Democrats don’t cheat, they don’t win.” That sentence illustrates perfectly the nature of “projection,” which Psychology Today defines as “The process of displacing one’s feelings onto a different person, animal, or object. The term is most commonly used to describe defensive projection—attributing one’s own unacceptable urges to another.”

I could stop there, having written the shortest, most on-point commentary in op-ed history, but this is not Twitter, and I owe you, my subscribers, and my editor a few more paragraphs.  

It is commentator John Heilman’s incredibly lucid observation that when Bannon and his fellow travelers make damning accusations, it is almost always projection (or confession).

Here are some examples:

•The hard-right blog, Gateway Pundit, called Cassady Hutchinson, the remarkably composed 23 year old former top aide to the White House Chief of Staff, who testified so bravely about the goings on in the White House on January 6th as, “Another grifter … using Tuesday’s show trials to audition for a spot on CNN or MSNBC.” In this instance we see the move to discredit a fully credible witness by calling her exactly what they are: grifters.

•Tucker Carlson on Fox news has flipped the script, declaring, in a bout of projection fit for an ex-president, that Democrats are the authoritarians, warning his viewers that they are trying to institute a “one-party” system in the U.S., but he told them not to worry as “liberals are too incompetent to overthrow democracy.” It’s projection because undermining democracy is his team’s thing, not the Dems. It is Republicans who have stacked the courts, gerrymandered national and state and legislative districts to be permanently Republican strongholds, passed laws suppressing minority registration and voting, and replaced nonpartisan election officials with people who support the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

•“I’ll tell you what’s happened — and I give the Democrats a lot of credit for this,” said Michael Berry, a Houston-based radio host, “they have convinced a lot of people on our side that it’s not worth it to vote.” This is pure projection. It was the former president who convinced many Republicans not to vote because his ego insisted his loss had to be due to a “rigged election.” The general Republican consensus is that he cost them the Senate with his antic rallies in Georgia where he forgot to talk up his candidates and instead used his appearance to air his grievances and cast doubt on the system.

•The one-man minority that foisted unwanted and cruel change on Croyden, New Hampshire schools wasn’t chastened when he confessed his own misdeeds. Instead, he complained of socialism, and said that his fellow citizens who voted 377-2 to save the schools were a woke, out of control mob. Okay, that’s a double-point bonus score, because it’s both confession and projection.

•Voter Fraud is a Republican go-to projection for their consistent national losses, even though fraud has never existed in numbers big enough to change an electoral outcome. However, the fake electors scheme that certain Republican lawyers and electeds dreamed up to change the 2020 outcome in their favor, was demonstrably illegal, and thanks to VP Mike Pence, didn’t get out of the starting blocks. 

•I have to come back to Tucker Carlson for the grandaddy of projection in theatrically asking, “Why is some foreign-born billionaire [George Soros] allowed to change our country fundamentally?” Considering that his foreign-born billionaire boss, Rupert Murdoch, has spent decades changing our country fundamentally with his media properties—Fox News, The New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal—it’s amazing he could say it with a straight face. Oh, and give him triple-bonus points for using both projection and confession, and then throwing a little well-seasoned anti-Semitism in the mix for good measure. (FYI, Soros supports grass-roots groups with minor funding spread widely, while the Murdoch family degrades democracy on a major scale every day.)

•In what can only be described as projection, Mr. Trump, who has turned making a mockery of America’s laws, traditions, and principles into a hobby, called the Justice Department and the FBI “totally corrupt,” adding that the legal search that turned up many top secret and classified documents, was a “travesty of justice that made a mockery of America’s laws traditions and principles.”

•Florida governor and presidential hopeful (if he somehow manages to sweep the owner under a rug at Mar-a-Lago), a guy who uses legislative and public policy against women, minorities, and public schools at every turn, remains blissfully unaware of his own confessions when he jumps at the chance to vilify the administration for “weaponizing the Department of Justice” by seeking, obtaining, and carrying out a legal search of The Donald’s resort.

Tip your hat to Heilman for his great and sadly lasting insight.

©2022 Jon Sinton