“Look at me, not the facts”: How outrage culture drowns out truth

By Mike Hancock | Guest Commentary, Undercurrent

Chants are designed to sound simple, righteous, and urgent. They compress emotion into rhythm and repetition. They feel communal. They feel moral. They feel inevitable. When shouted in unison, they create the illusion of truth through volume alone. But chants are rarely the message. They are the cover. Beneath them—almost always—lies something far more dangerous.

Today’s chants may vary in wording, but they all orbit the same gravitational center:

Look at me. Listen to me. Ignore the facts.

That is the lie beneath the chants. And it is not accidental.

On the surface, chanting projects moral urgency. It insists that something is so unjust, so unbearable, that ordinary rules must be suspended. Process becomes cruelty. Law becomes violence. Patience becomes complicity. Facts become an inconvenience—if not an outright enemy. The chant tells us that emotion itself is proof, and that intensity confers legitimacy.

But beneath the chant is a deeper assertion: emotion is authority. And once emotion becomes authority, truth becomes optional.

This is how disorder masquerades as virtue.

To see the lie clearly, we must first restore distinctions the chanting deliberately tries to erase. A protester expresses opposition lawfully and peacefully. A rioter commits violence or destruction amid disorder. An insurrectionist participates in an organized effort to obstruct or override the lawful execution of government authority.

These are not semantic games. They are moral boundaries. They tell us where dissent ends and coercion begins. The boundaries separate legitimate protests from intimidation and force.

The chant exists precisely to blur them. When obstruction is renamed “protest,” when intimidation is framed as “speech,” and when enforcing the law is cast as oppression, accountability collapses. Language dissolves. Responsibility evaporates. The chant does not persuade. It does not reason. It overwrites.

And this overwrite is strategic.

The machinery beneath the chant runs on attention, not truth. Outrage is the currency. Volume substitutes for credibility. Visibility replaces verification. The louder the chant, the greater the demand for moral exemption. And once exemption is granted, facts are no longer evaluated—they are dismissed as hostile acts.

This is why facts must be shouted down. Facts impose limits. Limits restrain emotional absolutism. And emotional absolutism cannot tolerate restraint. It requires constant escalation to sustain itself.

So context becomes violence. Evidence becomes harm. Questions become betrayal. Due process becomes cruelty. The chant trains people not to think, but to react—and then treats reaction itself as righteousness. It collapses moral reasoning into reflex.

When tragedy occurs, the chant moves in immediately. Complexity is stripped away. Moral certainty is asserted before facts are known. Grief is elevated into a political weapon. Any detail that complicates the narrative is treated as an insult to suffering itself. Anyone who insists on waiting, verifying, or contextualizing is accused of siding with evil.

But justice does not work this way. Mobs do.

The chant insists it is compassionate. The lie beneath it is coercive.

This coercion becomes unmistakable when sacred language is dragged into service of the chant. Scripture is selectively quoted—not to illuminate truth, but to silence dissent. Jesus’s name is invoked not to call people to repentance, humility, or moral clarity, but to sanctify lawlessness and intimidate opposition.

That is not faith. It is camouflage.

Faith, properly understood, disciplines emotion; it does not enthrone it. It binds conscience to truth, not to volume. When religious language is used to excuse intimidation or disorder, it is not a sign of moral seriousness—it is a signal that moral authority is being impersonated.

When activists disrupt a church service and claim moral authority while doing so, they are not defending the sacred. They are desecrating it. They are announcing that no space—religious, civic, or moral—stands above the chant. Everything is a stage.

Everything is subject to interruption. Everything must submit.

A society that no longer recognizes sacred boundaries will soon recognize no boundaries at all.

And yet, defenders insist this is still just protest. It is not.

The difference between protest and insurrection is not volume or passion—it is intent. Protest seeks persuasion. Insurrection seeks submission. Protest allows disagreement. Insurrection treats disagreement as illegitimate. Protest operates within the law even when challenging it. Insurrection obstructs the law and demands exemption from it.

The chant masks this intent. It cloaks coercion in moral language. Beneath the chant is the threat: Agree—or be targeted. Comply—or be disrupted. Stay silent—or be labeled.

This threat is rarely spoken aloud, because it does not need to be. It is understood.

This is why public officials hedge their words. Why institutions fold preemptively. Why corporations issue apologies for offenses never committed. Why school boards, churches, and civic leaders retreat into ambiguity. Why ordinary citizens self-censor in their own neighborhoods. Fear becomes the enforcement mechanism.

But fear cannot build a republic. It can only hollow one out.

The lie beneath the chants is that order is oppression. In reality, order is mercy. Order is what protects the weak from the strong, the quiet from the loud, the lawful from the lawless. The absence of order always harms the vulnerable first. When enforcement of law is treated as immoral by definition, society does not become compassionate—it becomes predatory, ruled by whoever can shout the loudest and threaten the most.

A nation cannot survive permanent moral exception. It cannot endure when outrage replaces authority and emotion replaces evidence. It cannot function when facts are optional and intimidation is rewarded. Restoration does not begin with shouting back. It begins with refusing the lie—by naming things accurately, rejecting emotional blackmail, and insisting that compassion and truth are not enemies.

History is unforgiving on this point. Societies that elevate emotion above truth do not reform—they unravel. The chant may sound righteous, but the lie beneath it is lethal. When facts become optional, freedom becomes impossible. And when that happens, collapse is not a risk—it is the destination.

Hancock also publishes on Substack. You can check out more of his work here.

Michael A. Hancock is a retired high-tech executive, visionary, musician, and composer, exploring diverse interests—from religion and arts to politics and philosophy—offering thoughtful insights on the intersections of culture, innovation, and society.

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.