Up until the last few years, I have challenged our human ability to deceive ourselves, to insist on believing what we want to believe, regardless of evidence or logic, and regardless of the harm the deception might do to ourselves and others, not fully understood.
After seeing some things, I’m sadder now, maybe wiser. Definitely sadder. Yet at times it still amazes me how easily some people can turn the truth into what they want, as if the truth were something malleable rather than something hard and solid.
For example, over the weekend, state GOP Chairman David Shafer addressed members of the Georgia Republican Convention at a meeting in Smyrna. Shafer has enjoyed a distinguished career in Georgia politics, serving eight terms in the state Senate, serving on several key committee chairs, and rising pro tem to Senate President. After narrowly losing a GOP primary for lieutenant governor, he became leader of the state party in 2019.
Since then we’ve seen a side of the man I didn’t even know existed. After the 2020 election, Shafer became an active, vocal supporter of claims that the election was somehow stolen, and he began conspiring to overturn its results. Even now, more than 30 months after the election, more than two years after our nation’s Capitol was attacked by angry people who believed what leaders like Shafer were telling them, he continues to spread this dangerous nonsense.
“For the last four years, not a single allegation about what went wrong in 2020 has been seriously investigated by anyone in law enforcement,” Shafer told the audience, amid cries of support. “The only people law enforcement is investigating are those who made the allegations.”
This is of course wrong. Trump’s Justice Department investigated these claims. The FBI investigated these claims, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation investigated, as did investigators from the Georgia Secretary of State. The Trump-appointed US Attorney for North Georgia investigated and was fired by Trump for reporting the election went clean. In recent months, we’ve learned that the Trump campaign has secretly commissioned not one, but two private investigations into fraud allegations, and both have turned up nothing.
But in the eyes of David Shafer, none of that happened. Even now, he has no qualms about his words or actions, including his leadership in efforts to create “alternative voters” who would cast Georgia’s 16 electoral votes erroneously for Trump.
“I don’t regret anything I’ve done in the four years that I’ve been state chairman,” Shafer told the crowd. “There have been times in my life where I’ve done things and then said to myself, ‘Well, I wish I hadn’t done that.’ But there is not a single thing I have done in the pursuit of electoral integrity that I regret or fear.”
A man’s self-deception, however profound, is not usually a cause for general despair, but when you multiply it by millions upon millions, the magnitude begins to matter. In a new CBS poll, 61% of Republican primary voters say they want a candidate who tells them the 2020 election was stolen by Trump. Overall, Trump leads Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis 58% to 22% in this poll, and 75% of Trump voters say they support him because “he actually won 2020.” They want to give him back what they think has been stolen from them.
This is not a healthy place for a democracy, and it provides another important reason for the work of Fulton Country District Attorney Fani Willis and independent attorney Jack Smith in Washington. The David Shafers of the world will never be convinced that Trump lost; it is too ingrained in their personal identity and worldview; If they were acknowledging this gigantic truth at this late point in time, they would be acknowledging far too many other truths as well. So don’t allow yourself such thoughts.
However, if reality matters, if we hope to build our future and our world on a foundation of shared truth, then we must establish that truth, defend that truth. And the courts were created to serve that very purpose.
