From The Propaganda Professor:
Passive/ defensive denial is ignoring evidence about climate change or racism, etc. because they threaten your belief system. Proactive denial is making a deliberate effort to persuade other people to ignore such evidence.
If you want a good glimpse of denial in action, tune in to the Twitter feed of Dr. Kevin Kruse, professor of history at Princeton University. No, no, Professor Kruse himself isn’t the one guilty of denial; he’s incredibly well-informed and well-documented, and he has provided, in concise Twitter threads, some very substantial mini-courses in history that soundly shatter some of the revisionist myths. But the denial comes from his detractors who pop up in his feed and insist that, no matter what kind of sound documentation he presents, he’s wrong because he just is. Some of the attackers advise him to read a history book — apparently quite unaware they’re talking to a man who writes history books.
One of his most frequent attackers is right-wing pundit and former convict Dinesh D’Souza, who has written an embarrassingly inept revisionist book that tries to make the claim that fascism is a leftist movement. (It’s essentially a rehashed and watered down version of a similarly embarrassing book by Jonah Goldberg of National Review infamy.) That’s one of the tropes he keeps lobbing at Professor Kruse — another being that the Southern Strategy is a myth, and that the two major political parties are still essentially the same as they were 150 years ago. Professor Kruse has not only swatted down these false claims but absolutely crushed them with a mountain of irrefutable documentation. And yet, no matter how hard D’Souza gets slammed against the wall, he keeps coming back for more punishment. While he and his fans proclaim that he has “owned” Kruse.
As a rule of thumb, the more frequently someone denies something — particularly without being prompted– the more certain you can be that the allegation is true. (See: NO COLLUSION, NO COLLUSION, NO COLLUSION!!!) No matter how overwhelming the facts may seem to be, you can make them all vanish in a puff just by uttering the magic words “Wrong!” or “Bullshit!” or “Fake New!”. And of course it goes without saying that your denials carry much more weight and substance if you put them in ALL CAPS, WITH LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!