The "Next Big Lie"

The media has taken to referring to Trump's claim that the election was stolen from him as "the Big Lie". Although Trump didn't get the outcome he wanted from telling the Big Lie, he did achieve something, arguably almost as destructive. He proved that you can convince almost half the American population of something that no evidence supports if you tell it often enough and loudly enough.  said that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. 

Certainly, that's not a completely new revelation; Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, relied on the ability to convince people willing to accept his leader's message with a concerted propaganda campaign; George Orwell wrote about its implications in his fictional novel about an authoritarian regime in 1984. But in the "land of the free" it had widely been thought that this could never happen here. It turns out those who held that article of faith, perhaps another by-product of the doctrine of American Exceptionalism, were quite wrong. 

If Trump has taught the GOP, now re-made in his image, anything, its that if the lie is brazen and bold enough, and sufficiently conspiratorial, those who want to believe him can be convinced of absolutely anything. 

So prepare for the next even bigger lie which will be: "while those attending the rally at the Ellipse were Trump's supporters, the people who attacked the capital were actually ANTIFA and BLM who had mounted a carefully planned false flag operation". (And if Sidney Powell gets in on the act, it will all have been coordinated by China and Hugo Chavez, Big Tech, and a communist child sex ring). 

In a way this is completely inevitable. For those who were all in on Trump's first Big Lie, given the clear evidence - in plain sight no less - that he had prepared the ground and, while stopping sufficiently short of the line to avoid be criminally culpable, orchestrated Insurrection Day, coming to terms with that would be unbearable. Since adhering to the Big lie was fundamentally an act of faith, like religion, loosing it will be excruciating. Far easier to accept the Next Big Lie that allows them not to confront the first.