The false story about the motives of the Pulse Nightclub murderer is alive and well, despite indisputable evidence that he was attempting to kill people, not LGBT people. Legacy media and politicians cling to the false narrative and we simply must assume (at this point) that they know that their story is false. However, their false story is powerful. It serves as effective cheap signaling and it moves people to anger, including people who should know better. The Pulse story is merely one example of a common phenomenon today. The story itself serves as the foundation for a “truth,” upon which cherry-picked factoids, most of them easily disproved, make everyone in one’s tribe feel the righteous anger. Again, Pulse is one example of many. We could substitute dozens of commonly exchanged “truths” for Pulse. That is what much too often serves as “news” in the year 2021. Glenn Greenwald elaborates.

Whatever Mateen’s motives were, the horror and tragedy of the extinguishing of forty-nine innocent lives at PULSE on June 12, 2016, remains the same. But this enduring falsehood — which continues to deceive many well-meaning people through this very day, long past the point that it has been definitively debunked — is damaging for so many reasons.

Lying about what happened dishonors Mateen’s victims. It harms the cause of LGBT equality, which does not need lies and fabrications to be a just movement. It obscures how often U.S. violence in the Muslim world causes “blowback” — to use the CIA’s term — by motivating others to bring violence to the U.S. as retaliation and deterrence for violence against innocent Muslims. And a major reason for the completely unjust prosecution of Noor Salman was to appease understandable demands within the Orlando LGBT community for someone to be punished, but mob justice rarely produces anything benevolent.

No matter how noble the intent, journalism — and activism — becomes corrupted if it knowingly supports falsehoods. That the PULSE massacre was an act of anti-LGBT hatred is a fiction. Unless you are a neocon, there is no such thing as a “noble lie.” It is way past time for politicians and activist groups to stop disseminating this one.

Seeing that this completely false story still has legs (referring to the murderer’s motives, not the murders themselves which certainly happened), I am reminded of Daniel Kahneman’s discussion of the power of narratives in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman indicates that we crave consistency in our explanations, not completeness, and this craving leads to overconfidence. We are profligate generators of flimsy explanations and we are “rarely stumped.” As a result, poor evidence can make a great story (p. 209). Also, we often believe primarily because our friends believe. Our confidence in our beliefs are preposterous but necessary given our limited cognitive horsepower. That said, once we have our story down pat, it becomes easy to repeat and our confidence in telling that story grows, even if untrue. Confidence results from cognitive ease and coherence, but confidence does not equal truth (p. 238).