What is endearing in the mind of a child is sinister in the mind of an adult.
During JD Vance’s October 31st, 2024 appearance on Joe Rogan, Vance told a story about his son which perfectly exhibits the phenomenon of projection.
I use this analogy a couple of times publicly. What’s interesting to me about toddlers—and, you know, I’ve talked with Tucker Carlson about this—toddlers lie in a way that’s very different from how everybody else lies, right? So, like, if you’re telling a lie normally, you know, “Hey, did you do that thing?” you would say, “No, no, somebody else did it,” or they kind of qualify it a little bit.
Let me give an example. My four-year-old—I’m a big baker, probably not surprised by that—but I’m a big baker, and my four-year-old and I were making an Oreo cake a few weeks ago. My four-year-old is helping me; he likes to help me out a lot when I bake. I go to the bathroom, and the Oreos that we’re supposed to put in the Oreo cake—crumble them up and put them in the cake—half of them are gone when I get back.
I’m like, “Buddy, what happened to the Oreos?” and he looks at me, without a hint of irony or shame, and says, “I didn’t eat the Oreos; you did.”
That’s the way that Kamala Harris lies: “I didn’t eat the Oreos; you did.” Not only does she actively brag—and has her administration actively bragged about trying to arrest her political opponents, but she will go out and say that if Donald Trump is the president, he’s going to arrest his political opponents, even though he already was president and he didn’t do that. (2:10:57–2:12:15)
Projection is one form of defense mechanism: a typically unconscious mental process aimed at mitigating some internal conflict which the individual otherwise struggles to resolve. (Freud started identifying these in the late 19th century.) Projection resolves conflict through displacing, or projecting, unwanted feelings onto others. What is in reality an internal threat—a threat to one’s sense of wholeness and integrity—is unconsciously relabeled as an external threat.1
This phenomenon is endearing when exhibited in the story of Vance’s son. JD Jr. could have faced the reality of his own sin and even confessed to his father—an action that would have deeply shaken his four-year-old sense of self, and which is in all likelihood beyond the scope of a four-year-old’s abilities—or he could have taken action to alleviate the burden of his transgression without a feared confrontation with ego-disillusionment. He chose the ladder, projecting his self-directed judgement outwards at his father. Through making this choice he failed to identify with the transcendence within himself that can recognize mistakes, repent (in the sense of the word’s Greek origin, metanoia: to change one’s mind2), and be reconfigured in service of a higher good. The behavior of Vance’s son is expected and perhaps even unavoidable in children, but in adults it can take on a sinister valence.
The dynamic at work in Vance’s son, as Rogan and Vance discuss, is also demonstrably at play within our country’s leaders including Kamala Harris, although it should go without saying that it is not only members of the Left, but all of us who lean on this defense mechanism to achieve balance within our psyches. Harris employs projection perhaps to avoid confronting the moral depravity of her team’s prosecution of their political opponents. Projection in this instantiation is Harris’ lobbing of accusations at her enemies: accusations which she herself is guilty of, as she is perhaps failing to properly integrate the moral judgements that lurk in her unconscious.
Projection says: “Because I cannot bear to contend with the speck in my own eye, and perhaps because keeping that speck around is serving something I view as good [in a shortsighted, lower sense of the word], I must cover my tracks to maintain the status quo.” A great way to cover your tracks is to accuse your enemies of the very sins you commit. This avoids the painful process of psychological integration and alignment with internal and external reality.