Opinion: A tactic increasingly used by the political left is to emphatically claim people can’t trust their senses or common sense.

In short, the message has been, “Who are you going to trust? Us, or your lying eyes?”

We’ve seen this tactic used locally in Oklahoma, in national politics, and even on the world stage.

In spring 2024, a 16-year-old Owasso teen committed suicide. The youth, Dagney Benedict, had recently identified as nonbinary and insisted that she be called “Nex” Benedict, and she had been in a fight at school the day before her suicide. Thus, activists proclaimed the suicide was the product of anti-LGBT attitudes in Oklahoma.

But police found the bathroom fight was not related to Benedict’s identifying as nonbinary. And following Benedict’s suicide, information became public indicating Benedict was brutally abused by her biological father as a young child, leading to significant mental health problems.

To anyone with common sense, Benedict’s death was related to horrific abuse, not to Oklahomans’ views on gender issues. But activists still pretended otherwise.

Last year, it was learned that Cherokee Federal, a business arm of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, was involved in migrant processing. Associated concerns were dismissed as the product of conspiracy theorists. Then, just in July, a whistleblower testified before members of the U.S. Senate and told them unaccompanied minors who illegally enter the United States are being released to child traffickers, and that non-governmental organizations contracted to provide processing services are aware of the problem.

“Please understand, this is taxpayer-funded child slavery, sanctioned by our government and brought to you by NGOs like Cherokee Federal,” said Deborah White, a career worker at the federal General Services Administration who was lent in May 2021 to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement (HHSORR).

For months, we were told that President Joe Biden was in peak mental and physical health, despite numerous recordings that indicated growing frailty and mental lapses. The political spin continued until Biden’s deterioration became undeniable.

Similarly, the Paris Olympics opened with a ceremony that included drag queens mocking Christ’s last summer as painted by DaVinci. But when people objected to the disparaging of Christians, officials claimed the event didn’t blasphemously satirize the last supper despite recordings clearly showing otherwise.

The tactic of denying reality not only shows the left cannot defend many of its policy preferences against a backdrop of full transparency, but also that many on the left believe the average voter is an idiot. We’ll know in the weeks and months ahead if voters continue to trust their common sense more than the statements of our supposed elites.

Jonathan Small serves as president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.