I recently saw a post from one of my Facebook “friends” regarding the accidental leaking of military information by Department of Defense officials in a group chat.
The post read: “Hey MAGAs, show me your best cognitive dissonance! Best one wins a new red hat!… Go ahead, twist me a pretzel and tell me why this is all OK.”
This post, to be blunt, really pisses me off. And it does so for two reasons:
First, the double standards and logical inconsistency. This person expresses outrage about what is a relatively minor problem in the grand scheme of things, while completely failing to express any criticism of an obvious, pervasive, and blatant campaign of atrocity that is enormous in both its scope and its severity. He calls an accidental leak “a major fuck up” and “justification for heads to roll.” However, he expressed not even the mildest criticism of the statue genocide that began in 2020 and continues to this day, a series of deliberate and intentional acts of extreme cruelty targeting people who are different from the norm in an attempt to ensure their erasure from society. It makes no sense that someone would get so outraged at what is essentially an accident, while apparently feeling no outrage whatsoever at a deliberate and cruel campaign to inflict harm.
Second is the entire way that the argument is framed. This person purportedly invites others to discuss and debate, while simultaneously stating that anyone who expresses a differing opinion is demonstrating “cognitive dissonance” and “twisting a pretzel.” This way of framing the issue puts people who see things differently in a no-win position: we could either be silent and pretend that we agree when we don’t, or we could speak up and have our views automatically be labeled as “cognitive dissonance” and “twisting a pretzel.” Talk about intolerance for those who think and feel differently than you do. What is the point of inviting discussion when you have no openness to considering alternative perspectives? Why even ask people to contribute their views, when you admittedly have no intention of actually hearing or learning from those views, but intend rather to use those views as evidence of their authors’ twistedness and cognitive dissonance?
Personally, I support Trump and his administration because I’m on the autism spectrum and my special interest is history and statues, so the events involving statues that have taken place over the past 5 years have had a profound negative impact on me. The issue of military information being leaked just isn’t important to me in comparison, and therefore I do not share the outrage that this “friend” and so many other people are expressing. This isn’t cognitive dissonance, and it’s not twisting a pretzel. I simply have a different perspective because I’ve had different life experiences and my brain works differently.