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\nAP Photo\/J. Scott Applewhite<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Jared Del Rosso<\/a>, University of Denver<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n The U.S. House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection intends to hold another public hearing<\/a>, likely the last before it releases its official report. The hearing had been scheduled for Sept. 28, 2022 but was postponed because of Hurricane Ian.<\/p>\n Through earlier hearings this past summer, the committee has shown how former President Donald Trump and close associates spread the \u201cbig lie\u201d of a stolen election<\/a>. The hearings have also shown how Trump stoked the rage of protesters who marched to the U.S. Capitol and then refused to act<\/a> when they breached the building.<\/p>\n The hearings have aired in prime time<\/a> and dominated news cycles. Still, polling conducted in August by Monmouth University<\/a> found that around 3 in 10 Americans still believe that Trump \u201cdid nothing wrong regarding January 6.\u201d<\/p>\n As a sociologist<\/a> who studies denial<\/a>, I analyze how people ignore clear truths and use rhetoric to convince others to deny them, too. Politicians and their media allies have long used this rhetoric to manage scandals. Trump and his supporters\u2019 responses to the Jan. 6 investigation are no exception.<\/p>\n Commonly, people think of denial as a state of being: Someone is \u201cin denial\u201d when they reject obvious truths. However, denial also consists of linguistic strategies<\/a> that people use to downplay their misconduct and avoid responsibility for it.<\/p>\n These strategies are remarkably adaptable. They\u2019ve been used by both political parties to manage wildly different scandals. Even so, the strategies tend to be used in fairly predictable ways. Because of this, we can often see scandals unfold through clear stages of denial.<\/p>\n In my previous research on denial and U.S. torture<\/a>, I analyzed how the George W. Bush administration and supporters in Congress adjusted the forms of denial they used as new allegations and evidence of abuses in the global \u201cwar on terror\u201d became public.<\/p>\n For instance, after photographs of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq<\/a> were released in the spring of 2004, Abu Ghraib was described as a deplorable but isolated incident<\/a>. At the time, there wasn\u2019t serious public evidence of detainee abuse at other U.S. facilities.<\/p>\n Later revelations about the use of torture at Guant\u00e1namo Bay<\/a> and secret CIA black sites<\/a> changed things. The Bush administration could no longer claim that torture was an isolated incident. Officials also faced allegations that they had directly and knowingly authorized torture<\/a>.<\/p>\n Facing these allegations, Bush and his supporters began justifying and downplaying torture. To many Americans, torture, once deplorable, was rebranded as an acceptable national security tool<\/a>: \u201cenhanced interrogation.\u201d<\/p>\n As the debate about torture shows, political responses to scandal often begin with outright denials. But rarely do they end there. When politicians face credible evidence of political misconduct, they often try other forms of denial. Instead of saying allegations are untrue, they may downplay the seriousness of allegations, justify their behavior or try to distract from it.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just Republican administrations that use denial in this way. When the Obama administration could no longer outright deny civilian casualties<\/a> caused by drone strikes, it downplayed them. In a 2013 national security speech<\/a>, President Barack Obama contrasted drone strikes with the use of \u201cconventional air power or missiles,\u201d which he described as \u201cfar less precise.\u201d He also justified drone strikes, arguing that \u201cto do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties.\u201d<\/p>\n Americans watched the Jan. 6 insurrection on TV and social media as it happened. Given the vividness of the day, outright denials of the insurrection are particularly far-fetched and marginal \u2013 though they do exist. For example, some Trump supporters have claimed that left-wing \u201cantifa<\/a>\u201d groups breached the Capitol \u2013 a claim many rioters themselves<\/a> have rejected.<\/p>\n Some of Trump\u2019s supporters in Congress and the media have repeated the claim<\/a> that the insurrection was staged to discredit Trump. But given Trump\u2019s own vocal support for the insurrectionists<\/a>, supporters usually deploy more nuanced denials to downplay the day\u2019s events.<\/p>\n So what happens when outright denial fails? From ordinary citizens to political elites, people often respond to allegations by \u201ccondemning the condemners,\u201d accusing their accusers of exaggerating \u2013 or of doing worse things themselves, a strategy called \u201cadvantageous comparisons.\u201d<\/p>\n Together, these two strategies paint those making accusations as untrustworthy or hypocritical. As I show in my new book on denial <\/a>, these are standard denials of those managing scandals.<\/p>\n \u201cCondemning the condemners\u201d and \u201cadvantageous comparisons\u201d have been central to efforts to minimize the Jan. 6 insurrection, as well. Some critics of the committee downplay the insurrection by likening it to the Black Lives Matter protests<\/a>, despite the fact that the vast majority were peaceful<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cFor months, our cities burned, police stations burned, our businesses were shattered. And they said nothing. Or they cheer-led for it. And they fund-raised for it. And they allowed it to happen in the greatest country in the world,\u201d Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz said during Trump\u2019s second impeachment<\/a>. \u201cNow, some have cited the metaphor that the president lit the flames. Well, they lit actual flames, actual fires!\u201d<\/p>\n Similar comparisons<\/a> reappeared amid the House select committee\u2019s hearings<\/a>. One NFL coach called Jan. 6 a \u201cdust-up<\/a>\u201d by comparison to the Black Lives Matter protests.<\/p>\n These forms of denial do several things at once. They direct attention away from the original focus of the scandal. They minimize Trump\u2019s role in inciting the violence of Jan. 6 by making the claim that Democrats incite even more destructive forms of violence. And they discredit the investigation by suggesting that those leading it are hypocrites, more interested in scoring political points than in curtailing political violence.<\/p>\n These denials may not sway a majority of Americans. Still, they\u2019re consequential. Denial trickles down by providing ordinary citizens with scripts for talking about political scandals. Denials also reaffirm beliefs, allowing people to filter out information that contradicts what they hold to be true. Indeed, ordinary Americans have adapted \u201cadvantageous comparisons<\/a>\u201d to justify the insurrection.<\/p>\n This has happened before. For example, in a study of politically active Americans<\/a>, sociologists Barbara Sutton<\/a> and Kari Marie Norgaard<\/a> found that some Americans adopted pro-torture politicians\u2019 rhetoric \u2013 such as supporting \u201cenhanced interrogation\u201d and defending practices like waterboarding as a way to gather intelligence, even as they condemned \u201ctorture.\u201d<\/p>\n For this reason, it\u2019s important to recognize when politicians and the media draw from the denial\u2019s playbook. By doing so, observers can better distinguish between genuine political disagreements and the predictable denials, which protect the most powerful by excusing their misconduct.<\/p>\n Article updated to indicate that the House select committee hearing scheduled for Sept. 28, 2022 was postponed on Sept. 27, 2022.<\/em> Jared Del Rosso<\/a>, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of Denver<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n ============================================================== The Furies and I will be back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":48762,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[141,5],"tags":[4649,3729],"class_list":["post-49399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-plus","category-politics","tag-denial","tag-furies","category-141-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Stages of denial<\/h2>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/486010\/original\/file-20220921-8445-u0nvyk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip\")
\nAP Photo\/Jacquelyn Martin<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nScandal strategies in play<\/h2>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/486011\/original\/file-20220921-15489-rstvio.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip\")
\nAP Photo\/Yuki Iwamura<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nTrickle-down denial<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\n
\nAMT, as if it wasn’t already hard enough to determine where truth is. Although Del Rosso’s work may actually make it easier. Certainly he shows that no individual and no group is immune from it. That’s a hard truth but it’s a good one to be aware of if one wants to know the truth.<\/p>\n