By Steve Huntley

August 3^rd, 2025

Don’t believe your lying eyes.

That pretty much sums up the progressive approach to reality when  someone points out an inconvenient truth.

One of the most glaring examples came, you’ll recall, courtesy of CNN — the infamous video of a correspondent standing in front of an arson fire reporting on “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” during the 2020 George Floyd riots.

This phrase, “mostly peaceful protests,” would be repeated time and again during the wave of murder, arson, assaults on police and destruction of private and government property during the chaos of lawbreaking in those sorry days. Protests are peaceful, or they’re not, our lying eyes tell us.

Equally jaw-dropping were the insults to truth by Biden administration officials responding to images of thousands of illegal aliens pouring across our southern border on a daily basis. Then Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas declared, “The border is closed, the border is secure.”

Believe him, and border czar Vice President Kamala Harris, who said similar things, and not your lying eyes — that was the White House line.

And let’s not forget the instructions of our betters to ignore Biden’s descending into dementia. Videos of him, stumbling, falling, wandering aimlessly, and uttering incomprehensible word salads were damned by his White House and the subservient media as “cheap fakes.” What we really had was a sharp, on-the-ball president — “the best Biden ever,” as one of his media lackeys put it.

Yet Biden’s reelection hopes would soon implode in a jumble of incoherence during a presidential debate. At one point, then candidate Donald Trump spoke for millions of people watching this debate when he declared that he didn’t know what Biden had just said, and he didn’t think Biden knew either.

Still, right after that pathetic display, First Lady Jill Biden was boasting that Biden had answered every question.

But for once, even the Democrats’ obliging media elite had to admit that, well, you’re lying eyes got it right.

It was this kind of gaslighting and other denials of reality — like inflation was under control thanks to the wildly inflationary “Inflation Reduction Act” — that cost the Democrats the 2024 election and returned Trump to the White House with Republican majorities in Congress.

The notion of your eyes fooling you was popularized in the great 1933 Marx Brothers comedy movie “Duck Soup.” In it, Chico Marx is trying to pass himself off as another character and, when exposed, replies, “Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes.” Somewhere over the years “lying” got added.

That was comedy. Now a century later, humorless Democrats, socialists and progressives show their contempt for the rest of us by transforming a joke into a political propaganda ploy to turn reality on its head, to portray fantasy as fact and fact as fantasy.

The latest manifestation of that is the sudden Democrat clamoring for the Jeffrey Epstein files to be released to the public. We’re supposed to erase from our memories that the Biden administration had control of the files for the past four years and we never saw Democrats in Congress showing the slightest interest in getting them out.

Then there’s the Russian collusion hoax, a conspiracy of the Obama White House and Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to kneecap Trump’s first term. New documents about this plot emerged recently, but our betters keep telling us there’s nothing to see.

No one can forget the lies, the censorship, the heavy hand of government and the dictates of bureaucrats with medical decrees during the Covid outbreak. They shut down the economy, closed schools damaging a generation of children and issued arbitrary vaccine mandates. Doctors and scientists who saw more reasonable responses to this pandemic were damned by these bureaucrats as enemies of science.

And let’s not forget the elite universities practicing raw racial discrimination in admissions and hiring. No, our eyes were wrong, they said, they were only trying to bring diversity to their campuses. But we saw that they pursued diversity of skin color while enforcing uniformity in thought from professors and in the classroom.

Likewise, we’re supposed to avert our eyes as the teachers-union cartel abuses and exploits children in public schools. Teacher salaries, benefits and pensions climb while reading and math scores stagnate and even fall. The ones hurt most — minority kids.

European elites, with American progressives nodding in agreement, attack Trump for allegedly not being committed to NATO. We’re supposed to close our eyes to Western European nations falling short of their NATO commitments while building generous welfare states and relying on generous U.S. taxpayers to fund their defense.

Baseless charges of genocide are flung at Israel in its just, ethically conducted war against Hamas, terrorists who use their own people as human shields. As editor Abe Greenwald of Commentary magazine put it so well: “Hamas is the only government in history to say: We’re going to make our own people suffer until everyone watching can’t take it.” Progressives say don’t believe your lying eyes, condemn Israel.

Democratic governors of failing states like Illinois and California tell us to turn our eyes away from their residents fleeing high costs, high taxes and high crime for Florida, Texas, the Carolinas and other Red states. Governors JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom, in their lust for the White House, will try to pull the wool over our eyes to deny the failure and dysfunction of their states and assert they have the formula for a better tomorrow for America.

It’s our lying eyes when we see the failure of communism in any country it’s been tried in. But, no, the radical left wing tells us, socialist Zohran Mamdani, as mayor, would resurrect New York City with government-owned grocery stores, rent control and ever-rising taxes, all leavened with ugly antisemitism.

No doubt readers can add other examples to the ones cited here. That’s how pervasive progressive gaslighting is, it’s hard to keep up with the flood of deception.

Sometimes progressives get fooled by their own lying eyes — or to describe it in another way, we see the blind leading the blind.

Recently the Democrats cheerfully posted on the Internet a chart showing grocery prices hitting record highs this year.

The only problem was that anyone with clear eyes would see that this chart demonstrated that the surge in prices occurred during the Biden presidency years. Too much ridicule, the Democrats took down the graphic. Republicans immediately and joyously resurrected it.

But nothing, not even an embarrassing screwup like that, will stop the far left from working to warp reality and gaslight the rest of us.

And when called out on this deception, the radicals often resort with low blows like vile accusations of racism.

Just to take note of the chaos of unrestrained Muslim immigration into Western Europe will be met with the smear of Islamophobia. Yes, most Muslims are fine people, but there is a significant radical Islamist and jihadist core within that religion that can’t be denied. Nor should we avert eyes from the crime, rape, grooming of young girls for sexual abuse and the tide of antisemitism that flow in the wake of this mass immigration.

Virtually any conservative critique of the far-left agenda faces the prospect of a racism accusation.

Another way of gaslighting us is to find new “rights” to try to blindfold our eyes.

Biological men rob girl and women athletes of trophies and gold medals, and we’re told to shut up in the name of trans rights.

It’s our lying eyes that see “gender affirming care” of children as mutilation and child abuse. It’s our lying eyes that see a teacher hiding a kid’s gender confusion from parents as a despicable attack on the nuclear family, a fundamental foundation of civilized society.

Such are the perverse unrealities of the left’s obsession with race and gender.

Scientific reality and the complexities of biology — chromosomes, reproductive organs, hormones — don’t matter.

What does matter to the high priests of identity politics is a far more simpler attribute like skin color. Anyone not black claiming to identify as African American would be met with ridicule and abuse.

In identity politics, skin color matters, X and Y chromosomes don’t.

That’s the product of the surreal imagination of progressives.

Well, if the far left ever get its wish for slavery reparations and the government starts writing big checks, maybe I’ll transition to black and do it faster than you can say Al “Show Me the Money” Sharpton.

And to anyone who would point to my lily-white skin, I’d have one thing to say:

Don’t believe your lying eyes!

Two can play this game.

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Steve Huntley is a retired Chicago journalist living in Austin, Texas, who spent most of his career, almost three decades, with the Chicago Sun-Times, where he was a feature writer, metro reporter, night city editor, metropolitan editor, editorial page editor and a columnist for the opinion pages. Before that he was a reporter and editor with United Press International (UPI) in the South and Chicago, and Chicago bureau chief and a senior editor in Washington with U.S. News & World Report. Northwestern University Press has issued soft cover and eBook editions of Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America by Truman K. Gibson Jr. with Steve Huntley, a memoir of a Chicagoan who was a member of President Roosevelt’s World War II Black Cabinet working to desegregate the military.