That's What They Said

There is a popular internet idea people call the Mandela Effect. It describes the strange experience of remembering something that did not happen, most famously the belief that Nelson Mandela died in prison.

That example has always bothered me.

False memory is real. People misremember things all the time. But Mandela did not disappear into some boutique safe space where history gets twisted into trivia for people who should know better. He walked out of prison. He helped bring down apartheid. He became president of South Africa.

So, first of all, I am not going to make nice with the pop-culture permission slip that lets people trivialize history from the luxury of indifference.

Instead, I am calling this the “What They Said” Effect. It matters because it has a lot to do with where we are right now.

As Americans, we always want to feel like we are at least as smart as the other people in the room. So when someone says, “You remember this too, right?” people begin checking their own minds against the crowd. They let the room tell them what they saw. They let social pressure edit the past.

Harmless?

Not even close. That is dangerous.

Once people can be trained to doubt their own memory, they can be trained to doubt their own judgment. They can be told what mattered, what did not, and what was shocking yesterday but normal today.

That is how Biden’s age became the story, while Trump, standing beside him, wandered aimlessly through a minefield of broken sentences, lost thoughts, and cognitive warning flares, and was somehow treated as acceptable.

It did not matter that Trump refused to accept the results of an election he lost.

It did not matter that he was convicted of 34 felonies.

It did not matter that he left the White House with boxes of government records, including classified material, and fought their return.

It did not matter to the religious right that the man they praised as God’s instrument was caught bragging that celebrity allowed him to grab women by the pussy.

It did not matter that his rallies were cult-of-personality revivals, where grievance replaced policy and applause replaced thought.

It did not matter that he had been found civilly liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

So, if you voted for Donald Trump, if you support Donald Trump, and if you still refuse to acknowledge all of these things, then it may be time to consider the possibility that you no longer reside within reality’s city limits. You have opened the memory hole in your own mind and let the “What They Said” Effect move in, unpack, and start rearranging the furniture.

You have allowed other people to tell you what you remember, what you believe, what you excuse, and what you are allowed to ignore. You have allowed bad men with bitter motives to substitute their narrative for your own eyes.

And if you do acknowledge all of it: the lies, the felony convictions, the assaultive bragging, the stolen-election fantasy, the cruelty, the incoherence, the authoritarian hunger, and you voted for him anyway? You are not simply confused.

You are somewhere worse. You are in the Sunken Place, watching the truth happen in front of you, unable or unwilling to move toward it.

God help you.

I’m just saying.