I met a new friend a couple months ago, and after we had covered all the important topics of conversation — football, fishing, musicians we saw back when we lived a free-range pre-Covid life — he swung onto the topic of the Capitol insurrection.
“Yeah,” he said, “I hated seeing all those left-wingers posing as Trump fans smash up that building.”
“Wait…what?” I said, struggling to believe that my new friend could say something like that in anything but an ironic, joking tone. But no, he was serious. “You think those people were left-wingers in disguise?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I had suddenly grown a second head. Or maybe a third. I think he said something about my “drinking the Kool-Aid.”
I have read about false-flag conspiracy theorists, but never truly met one in the flesh. But now, here he was, as serious as a man can be when espousing a firmly held belief. It wasn’t a conversation I wanted to pursue, because everyone knows how it would end, so I was eager to change the subject or risk the friendship.
But I wondered if he had ever heard of Occam’s Razor.
Occam’s Razor is the philosophy that believes that, in a situation where several differing possibilities exist, the simplest possibility is probably closest to the truth.
And in the case of the Capitol insurrection, consider all the things you would have to stack on top of each other to believe the possibility that the rioters were left-wingers in Trump hats and flags.
We have video that shows that the majority of the rioters came directly from a Trump rally. Is it believable that Trump held a rally, but that no actual Trump fans showed up? Instead, they were crowded out by liberals wearing MAGA hats, who cheered and smiled throughout his entire speech?
You would have to believe that all those liberal leftists disguised in MAGA hats then desecrated offices of representatives that they secretly love — people like Nancy Pelosi — and they did it to make the world believe that Trumpers did it.
And you would have to believe that when arrested and investigated, their social media footprints would show that they had been “pretending” to be Trump fans for years and years, only visiting right-wing websites and only tweeting right wing rants for all that time, to provide cover for their long-planned false-flag insurrection.
You would have to believe all that and more to think what my new friend thought about the insurrection — that it was a false flag perpetrated by liberals in conservative clothing.
Of course, there’s a simpler possibility.
If you believe in Occam’s Razor, those insurrectionists were exactly what they seemed to be, exactly what they themselves explained they were in their own selfies posted online—diehard Trump fans, stirred to violence by their defeated champion. It’s the simplest possibility, and every fact points in that direction.
Look, if it quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and swims like a duck, it probably isn’t a chicken, no matter how much you wish it were.
So I’m pretty sure that my new friend doesn’t believe in Occam’s Razor as a guiding philosophy. His convoluted philosophical system is more in line with Rube Goldberg.
After I finished talking with my new friend, another fancy word came to mind—”metacognition.” It means, simply, “thinking about thinking.” It means that any time we say: “I think that this is true,” we should ask ourselves the question: “WHY do I think that this is true? What steps led me to this conclusion, and what facts sustain my belief?”
My new friend probably believes that the election was stolen from Trump. He probably believes so because he likes Trump, and that’s what Trump tells him.
But for that assertion to be true, he would have to disbelieve the honest work of 50 state boards of election—many of them run by Republicans—all of whom state that their elections were fair and fraud-free, supported by recount after recount.
And disbelieve the judgment of leading Republicans like William Barr, Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence, all of whom studied the facts and accept the legitimacy of Biden’s win.
And disbelieve Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security, which claims that this was the most secure election of all time.
And disbelieve the judgment of Republican judges, up to and including the Supreme Court with its three Trump-appointed justices, who ruled that the stolen-election claims have no merit, because there is no evidence to support them.
To believe that the election was stolen, he would have to believe in a hidden deep-state conspiracy so efficient and insidious that Trump himself, along with all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t root it out and expose it to the light of day.
Only the slightest bit of metacognition shows no evidence to support a belief like that. All facts point the other way, toward Occam’s Razor: The truth of this election is exactly what it seems to be: Biden won, fair and square, by getting more votes. Trump lost by getting fewer votes. And the margin of votes mirrors pretty accurately what virtually every opinion poll shows about how Americans feel about which candidate they prefer, in case you needed further evidence.
To think otherwise requires a Rube Goldberg chain of beliefs, and Rube Goldberg’s wacky creations are laughable in their absurdity.
Like the false-flag nonsense my new friend seems to believe.
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
