Trump desperately tries to gaslight America as he faces 

humiliation from Lysol-gate

Published April 27, 2020 By Amanda Marcotte, Salon- Commentary

It’s gone mainstream in recent years, but the word “gaslighting” used to be an esoteric term from the world of psychology and domestic abuse counseling. The word refers to the 1944 film “Gaslight,” in which Ingrid Bergman plays a woman whose husband tries to drive her insane by hiding her belongings and otherwise manipulating her environment, and telling her that the changes she perceives are all in her head. Experts in domestic violence developed the term to describe the way that abusers in real life try to manipulate victims. The gaslighter works by denying reality, often when the facts are plain as day, with such conviction and repetition that the victim starts to question themselves and the evidence of their own senses


For instance, this might take the form of the abuser denying that he hit his victim or falsely claiming that she provoked it, and then browbeating her until she accepts the lie and even starts to wonder whether she imagined the whole thing.

Under Donald Trump’s administration, however, the term has ventured into politics. It’s become a way to talk about how Trump and his defenders won’t merely tell lies, but will stand by even the dumbest and most obvious lies, holding their ground until the defenders of reality simply give up fighting. This started from the very beginning of the administration, when Trump and his administration claimed his inauguration crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s, and insisted on repeating that lie and intimidating government agencies into backing it up. Needless to say, this has continued throughout the coronavirus pandemic, dialed up to an extreme.

One might wonder why we need a term with such a complicated back story, when the word “lying” is right there for the taking. The reason is that Trump lies so frequently and in such varying ways that it’s useful to have a taxonomy of Trump lies to understand the various ways his lies work and how best, perhaps, to resist them.

With garden-variety lying, the liar tends to assume the target doesn’t know the truth and so can be made to accept the lie as if it were truth. Gaslighting differs dramatically in that the target actually knows what’s true. They experienced it, heard it or witnessed what really happened themselves. So what the gaslighter must do is convince the target to reject the evidence of their own eyes and ears.



Gaslighting is a useful term to explain what Trump did throughout this past weekend, in response to what we at Salon are calling “Lysol-gate,” in which our president went on national television and suggested that injecting household cleaners into people’s lungs might be a clever idea to fight the coronavirus that the medical profession clearly hadn’t thought of yet.

The reason doctors haven’t considered this idea is that it will kill the patient — and, I guess, also any virus lurking in his or her lungs. Trump is literally too stupid and lazy to know that fact, which was deeply embarrassing for him and anyone who supports him.

The problem Trump faces here is that he’s right there on video, marveling about “the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute” and speculating about an “injection inside, or almost a cleaning, because, you see, it gets in the lungs,” and pompously instructing the federal officials tasked with managing this crisis to investigate this possible treatment.

In the wake of widespread outrage, mockery and meme-creation, Trump turned to gaslighting. The goal is to deny the evidence of our own eyes and ears with such shamelessness and persistence that people start to question whether they heard what they heard, or at least give up trying to insist on the truth.

Trump’s first gaslighting attempt was to try to pretend he was pranking the press, telling a group of reporters the next day: “I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen.”


This is a classic example of how gaslighting differs from plain old lying. Trump is insisting here that those of us who heard him suggest injecting disinfectants in people’s lungs have broken brains — if we didn’t detect the slightest hint of sarcasm in his tone, it’s because we are defective in some way, not because he wasn’t actually being sarcastic. The point is to force people who heard him perfectly well to defend their own ability to hear and see things, knowing full well that there’s no definitive, objective way for human beings to “prove” that they know the difference between sarcasm and not-sarcasm.

But at the same time Trump was implying that only crazy people with broken brains didn’t detect his supposedly obvious sarcasm, he also suggested that only crazy people with broken brains heard him say the word “lungs.” To repeat, he suggested an “injection inside, or almost a cleaning, because, you see, it gets in the lungs.”

“I do think that disinfectant on the hands could have a very good effect,” Trump told reporters later.

This is more gaslighting. It’s about trying to make people question whether, in their eagerness to criticize Trump, they misheard or misinterpreted him. (Never mind that rubbing bleach or Lysol or other household disinfectants on your hands is also a bad idea, since they will burn your skin.) His two arguments contradict each other — he couldn’t simultaneously have been messing with reporters and making an earnest argument about hand-washing — but in a sense, that’s the point. What the gaslighter wants to do is disorient the target so they begin to question their own sense of reality. Flooding them with a bunch of confusing and logically incoherent claims suits that goal.

Since then, Trump has been ranting incessantly on Twitter, throwing out a bunch of scattershot arguments over which government officials he addressed his disinfectant comments to, and whether or not he directly said that coronavirus was a “hoax.” He’s referring to the long-ago controversy following a rally in February where he said that fears about the coronavirus — which turned out to be fully justified — were a “hoax.” This was bizarre but entirely typical Trump hedging, indulged in precisely so he could get into quibbling arguments later about what, exactly, he had described as a hoax.

All these insignificant points of litigation — was he talking to Dr. Deborah Birx or Homeland Security Undersecretary Bill Bryan when he made his “injection” comment? Was he talking about the virus itself or merely the fear of the virus when he said “hoax”? — are also forms of gaslighting. It’s about seizing on minor but irrelevant details the target may have gotten wrong to imply that the target’s sense of reality is irrevocably damaged and therefore they can’t be trusted to understand anything at all.

An abuser in a marriage, for instance, might use the fact that his wife once forgot that his favorite shirt is purple, not red, to argue that she is too stupid and crazy to be trusted when she says that he hit her or that he won’t let her see her friends. Trump is pulling the same trick, using minor confusion over the details of that specific press conference as “evidence” that people didn’t hear him correctly when they heard him suggest injecting disinfectants into people’s lungs.



Because gaslighting works differently than garden-variety lying, it requires a different response. With garde- variety lying, it’s often just a matter of supplying a fact check. But gaslighters put the person who is being lied to on the defensive, and try to make the debate over whether the target is mentally stable enough to be trusted, not the content of the gaslighter’s lies. Trump wants the debate to be about what’s in our heads, which is ultimately insubstantial and unprovable, not what the entire world heard him saying with his own mouth.

Defeating gaslighting often requires more of a meta-response. Rolling the tape over and over to confirm that we all heard Trump say the words he actually said certainly helps, but it’s not enough. It’s important to resist getting mired in line-by-line debates over whether people who are horrified by Trump’s disinfectant comments got the color of his tie right. Instead, we should call out these kinds of diversionary tactics, which are meant to force us into a debate about whether our minds are broken and whether we can literally perceive anything at all. That’s not the issue. The issue is that our president is a lazy, arrogant moron who went on TV and spewed fatuous bullshit about how maybe doctors should look into shooting up patients with poisonous chemicals because, y’know, it’s worth a shot.

Words of the year 2022: We were gaslit in goblin mode

Kirk Swearingen, Salon
December 25, 2022


The words of 2022 were "goblin mode," in the United Kingdom, and "gaslight," in the United States.

In these times of the right's determined distribution of disinformation, conspiracy theories and lazy thinking, those choices make perfect sense.

We are all now more than familiar with gaslighting, which dates back to the original 1940 film "Gaslight," (remade by MGM in 1944, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman), in which a deceitful husband repeatedly lies to his wife about many things, including the gas lamps dimming in the lower part of the house as he secretly lights lamps in the attic, in an effort to shake her sanity.

A real-life example of gaslighting, the word of 2022 selected by the folks at the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, would be, for instance, Donald Trump insisting that he is a good businessman or that the 2020 election was stolen. When any of the scores of open traitors in Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Josh Hawley, refer to themselves as patriots, that would also be gaslighting. The claim in no way fits the reality, and it refutes what anyone of good faith can plainly see, that these people violated their oaths of office and should not be allowed to serve again at any level.

Nazi propagandists knew all about gaslighting, about how if you repeat an untruth over and over again, a surprisingly large percentage of people come to believe it, even in the face of contrary evidence. In recent years there's been no end to the GOP's efforts to gaslight the public, from Trump's ceaseless lies about voter fraud to his claim that all presidents walk away with classified documents to his habit of referring to himself as one of the greatest presidents of all time ("Better than Lincoln, better than Washington").

Earlier this year, I wrote about how Republicans have tried to gaslight us on their "originalist" view of the Constitution, on liberals as sexual deviants, on liberals as an oppressive "elite," on mass shootings in America being "unthinkable" and on how somebody or other (it's never clear who) is coming for you and all your stuff.

"Goblin mode" was new to me. As the Oxford English Dictionary has it, the 2022 winner describes behavior that is "unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations."

For some, the term can describe positive behavior, describing people who reject unnecessary societal norms, which many have done in the face of the pandemic. One could also say that many Republican leaders have been in goblin mode since their frat-boy days, or at least since the Age of Rush and Newt, when they were trained to despise members the opposing party and do absolutely everything to prevent government from functioning normally.

Let's try it in a sentence:

As president, Trump was in goblin mode from the first day he took office, when he watched television all morning in what he called "executive time" [spot the gaslighting?], to his determined effort to attack his own government and destroy all norms, all the way to his lazy, unconcerned response to the Department of Justice's attempts to retrieve stolen classified documents.

The disgraced, twice-impeached, document-stealing, insurrection-fomenting, perpetually lying former president has been in goblin mode since childhood, allegedly cheating to get into college; cheating on his wives, apparently even when they were expecting; harassing, groping and sexually assaulting women ("I don't even wait…"); and cheating competitors (not to mention taxpayers) while playing golf, a game based on personal honor.

But in our era of trolls (meaning those unhappy fellows who find deep satisfaction in annoying others, for example as the proprietor of Twitter), these words bubbling to the top make perfect sense. Because what the far right desires most is never again to have to present policy options — all that hard work of thinking things through and making compromises! — and just somehow "MAGA" a version of America that never existed or even a feudal state of play, where women and other serfs and peasants know their place and only the truly deserving people (who largely happen to be rich white Christian men) have a say in running a government devoted to keeping the masses down.

Think "Game of Thrones," with the dragons replaced by white nationalist cretins who now apparently are game to attack their own country's critical infrastructure and scientific advances like the COVID vaccines that are still saving lives.

Speaking of cretins, Elon Musk has repeatedly huffed and puffed and blown his ram's horn, inviting all exiled trolls back to Twitter so they can taunt and gaslight the public to their heart's content, while he himself, in hyper-goblin mode, repeatedly threatens the ever-shrinking staff of his own company.

Our twice-impeached, document-stealing, insurrection-fomenting former president is a master gaslighter, and has been in goblin mode since childhood.

Five conservative Catholics dominate the Supreme Court, a few of whom appear to definitely hold medieval views on personal freedom and "religious liberty." They gaslight the public by claiming not to be partisan hacks while being wined and dined by conservative groups. Both Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are perpetually and gleefully in goblin mode, the former overturning Roe while quoting 17th-century English jurist Matthew Hale, who was happy to excuse marital rape and to put women to death for witchcraft, and the latter refusing to recuse himself from cases pertaining to Trump's attempted coup, which Thomas' wife worked diligently to foment.

Filmmaker, activist and all-around mensch Michael Moore may dress like he's in goblin mode, but is decidedly not. He correctly predicted there would be no red wave in the 2022 midterms and worked hard to convince the rest of us not to give up hope. He describes those five justices as "priests" in their robes handing down theocratic decisions. As Moore has put it, though the corporate media did its utmost to downplay this, one of the top reasons Republicans did not do nearly as well in the midterms as they hoped was pretty simple: "The right-wing Supreme Court issued a religious edict on June 24 reminding women they are second-class citizens."

In addition, Florida senator and infamous Medicare fraudster Rick Scott annoyed Mitch McConnell and others in the GOP by not gaslighting the public about Republican intentions. He did us all a favor by publishing his infamous 11-point plan to remake our democracy into a theocracy headed by religious zealots, one free of those endless "entitlements" of Medicare, food stamps and Social Security.

As it turned out, most Americans prefer living in a democratic republic that offers at least some semblance of a social safety net.

Armed with these two highly useful and relevant terms, "gaslighting" and "goblin mode," we can hope a majority of Americans will continue to see the endless nonsense coming from the right — especially from its abusive cult leader — in a way many on the right no longer can. As the people who run these high-profile dictionaries know, words matter.

Feminism taught me all I need to know about men like Trump and Putin

Rebecca Solnit
Sat, 25 February 2023 

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolded, I was reminded over and over again of the behaviour of abusive ex-husbands and boyfriends. At first he thinks that he can simply bully her into returning. When it turns out she has no desire to return, he shifts to vengeance.

Putin insisted that Ukraine was rightfully part of Russia and didn’t have a separate existence. He expected his army to grab and subjugate with ease, even be welcomed. Now his regime seems bent on punitive destruction – of energy infrastructure, dwellings, historic sites, whole cities – and rape, torture and mass murder. This too is typical of abusers: domestic-violence homicides are often punishment for daring to leave.

Everything I needed to know about authoritarianism I learned from feminism, or rather from feminism’s sharp eye when it comes to coercive control and male abusers. Sociologist and gender violence expert Evan Stark, in his book Coercive Control, defined the title term as one that subsumes domestic violence in a larger pattern of isolation, intimidation and control. (The book has been so influential that in the UK, coercive control is now recognised as a crime.) The violence matters, Stark writes, “but the primary harm abusive men inflict is political, not physical, and reflects the deprivation of rights and resources that are critical to personhood and citizenship”. This connects it directly to what dictators and totalitarian regimes do to the people under their rule – it’s only a matter of scale. And the agenda at all scales is to control not just practical matters, but fact, truth, history; who can speak and what can be said.

‘Now his regime seems bent on punitive destruction.’ Vladimir Putin attends a concert at Luzhniki Stadium this week, before Russia’s Defender of the Fatherland Day. Photograph: SPUTNIK/Reuters

The antithesis of this is, of course, democracy, which is likewise a principle that works at all scales. A marriage can be called democratic if both parties exercise power equally and are unconstrained and unintimidated by the other. Equally, a marriage can be a little tyranny in which one gains and the other surrenders rights and powers through the union, which was until recently how marriage was defined legally and socially. Likewise we call democratic those nations in which national decisions are (however imperfectly) made by representatives elected by, and accountable to, the public.

At the very root of tyranny, no matter whether it’s personal or public life, lies the belief that the agency and agenda of others is illegitimate, that only the would-be tyrant should control the household or the nation. You can see this in authoritarian politicians’ rejection of the outcome of elections – Donald Trump, or in the Maga candidate Kari Lake’s unsuccessful run for Arizona governor, or the 8 January riot in Brasília to reject Lula’s victory.

One term formerly used to describe relationships between an abusive man and a manipulated woman, gaslighting, became an indispensable word in public life when Trump became president. The gaslighting, the bullying, the fury to crush dissent, the assumption that he should be in charge of everything including facts, the rage, the insistence that every other power and voice is illegitimate: these are all hallmarks of dictators in the domestic and the political sphere. He began his presidency in the shade of a recording in which he infamously advocated grabbing women “by the pussy”; he ended it in the shadow of an insurrection that was a refusal to accept the verdict rendered by more than 80 million voters and the rules laid down by the US constitution.

What’s striking about gaslighting is that it’s an attempt to push a lie or a distortion by using advantages of power, including credibility and social status, to overwhelm the gaslit person or people – or populace. It’s another kind of violence, not against bodies, but facts and truth. In stories of abusive households, the Trump administration and histories of authoritarianism, the men in charge regarded fact, truth, history and science as rival systems of power to be crushed or overwhelmed. And they are rival systems: a democracy of information means what prevails is what’s demonstrably true and substantiated, whether or not it’s convenient to whoever’s in power.

‘Gaslighting is another kind of violence, not against bodies, but facts and truth.’ The former US president Donal Trump speaks to supporters at an event in Florida, 20 February 2023. 

Photograph: Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images

That gaslighting was a staple of the Soviet Union is well known through the work of George Orwell and later historians (when I wrote about Orwell, I found a striking example cited by Adam Hochschild: that when Stalin’s demographers showed that the Soviet population was declining, he had them killed, causing the next round of demographers to offer more pleasing numbers). It’s also true in brutal households, where the first rule is that one must not say that it’s brutal, lest more violence transpire.

Another way that studies of domestic abuse inform our political understanding is “Darvo”, an acronym that the domestic violence expert Jennifer Freyd coined in 1997 for how abusers respond in court or when otherwise challenged. It stands for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. You insist that anyone mentioning what you’ve done is insulting you, is a liar, then insist that your accuser is the abuser and you are the victim, and keep shouting it until you believe it and maybe convince others. Freyd herself, with another psychologist, recently noted “a growing trend in the world of civil litigation: alleged perpetrators of interpersonal violence are filing defamation lawsuits against the individuals who have named them as abusers … For abusers, these lawsuits are an opportunity to enforce Darvo through civil litigation.”

Related: Trump is trying to make a comeback. It’s not working | Lloyd Green

Darvo happens all the time in political life. In the US, the Republicans have a pattern of claiming to defend what they’re attacking and to be the victims of what they’re perpetrating. Or as the New York Times columnist Charles M Blow put it in January, describing the agenda of the new Republican majority in the lower house of Congress: “Understanding that they can’t throw federal investigators off the trail of multiple conservatives – including, and perhaps principally, Donald Trump – they have decided to complicate those investigations by kicking up so much dust that the public has a hard time discerning fact from fiction.” The very mention of those crimes is treated as an insult and an outrage, with those complicit the offended parties, and so they shout down the evidence. Prolonged loud noise is an effective tactic.

Blow mentions that the Republicans in the house are creating the select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which will label the pursuit of Republican crimes, notably Trump’s around January 6, as baseless political vendettas. It’s, of course, a cover-up masquerading as a crusade. He continues: “The Republicans are using a fundamentally Trumpian tactic, accusing others of that which one is guilty of. It was Donald Trump, not the Democrats, who attempted to weaponize the federal government against his enemies.” That’s Darvo at its purest.

Individuals can be bullied into silence and obedience. So can whole populations. And so can facts and truth. Democracy matters at all scales.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist

UK
Great Climate Fight: Show sparks viewer anger at government 'gaslighting'

Kevin McCloud's new Channel 4 documentary was hailed by viewers for bringing climate awareness to primetime television - but at the same time left many furious over the flaws in legislation.

Albertina Lloyd
·Contributor
Wed, November 22, 2023 

Kevin McCloud was one of the presenter of The Great Climate Fight. (Channel 4) (Channel 4/The Great Climate Fight)

What did you miss?

Kevin McCloud's The Great Climate Fight has sparked an outpouring of anger at the government for avoiding legislation to tackle climate change.

The Grand Designs star joined Mary Portas and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to present the new Channel 4 documentary about global warming and the government’s commitment to achieve carbon net zero by 2050.

The show was hailed by viewers for bringing climate awareness to primetime television, but at the same timer left many furious at what some called government "gaslighting".

Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had pledged to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 . (AFP via Getty Images) (JUSTIN TALLIS via Getty Images)
What, how, and why?

In the show, retail consultant Portas looked at the Sixth Carbon Budget, an official document which sets out how the UK can reach zero carbon by 2050.

The Secret Shopper presenter asked why Rishi Sunak's government isn’t working harder to hit those targets.

Property expert McLoud highlighted how poor-insulation in homes results in high gas bills and questioned why housing secretary Michael Gove and construction companies are doing nothing to work towards building new homes to be greener.

And celebrity chef Fearnley-Whittingstall called for an end to the effective ban in England on onshore wind farms, brought in by David Cameron's Conservative government eight years ago.

Viewers were outraged by what they saw.

One wrote on social medial platform X, formerly known as Twitter: "Oh dear, turns out there is an evidence base that some Tory politicians monumentally stupid about the climate crisis, their leaders gaslighting liars, probably corruptly linked to anti-green lobbyists. Who’d have thought so easy for Channel 4 to make The Great Climate Fight?"

Another fumed: "Just watched part one of the Great Climate Fight on @Channel4. Just made me angry that the government are just gaslighting us. They have the plans and technology to transition us away from fossil fuels, they are just unwilling to do it."

Another declared: "The Great Climate Fight @Channel4 Hear how activists like Just Stop Oil are on the right side of history, our government is lying to us & themselves. We have the solution but our government is blocking them! Be angry, be brave, join us on the streets"

And another viewer posted: "Powerful stuff on The Great Climate Fight tonight. Episode 2 tomorrow night on Channel 4. Why can't the governement pay attention to what needs to be done by following the advice of experts & just be open & honest to help take us all on the 'journey' with them? Have a look."

Kevin McCloud had planned to confront Michael Gove at a book launch. (Channel 4 screengrab) (Channel 4 screengrab)

What else happened on The Great Climate Fight?

McCloud was outraged himself during filming for the show when he learned he had been reported to the Met Police.

The TV presenter planned to confront Gove at a book launch, for which he had obtained a press ticket.

Her revealed he had had an email from the organisers of the event saying his ticket had been cancelled and they had informed the police of his plan to attend.

McCloud revealed: “He goes onto say, not only has he cancelled my ticket, he’s also reported me to the Met Police. For what? For impersonation of myself?

“On properly checking, they said I can come. I now have my press pass. For God’s sake! I just want to ask somebody a question.”

The Great Climate Fight part two airs on Channel 4 on Wednesday at 9pm and is available to stream now
Read more: The Great Climate Fight

Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud's shock at being reported to Met Police


Carbon removal is the latest way to fight climate change


World has 14% chance of keeping warming below 1.5C in best case (Bloomberg, 3 min read)

What headline? 'Gaslighting' is Merriam-Webster's word of 2022

Leanne Italie

Nov 28 2022

“Gaslighting” – mind manipulating, grossly misleading, downright deceitful – is Merriam-Webster's word of the year.

Lookups for the word on the US-based merriam-webster.com increased 1740% in 2022 over the year before. But something else happened. There wasn't a single event that drove significant spikes in the curiosity, as it usually goes with the chosen word of the year.

The gaslighting was pervasive.

“It’s a word that has risen so quickly in the English language, and especially in the last four years, that it actually came as a surprise to me and to many of us,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster's editor at large, in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press.

Profile By Gaslight An Irregular Reader About The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes

by Edgar W. Smith

Publication date 1944

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.157375/mode/2up

Strangers on a train: The dark bargain that destroyed the Republican Party

CNN screenshots

Kirk Swearingen,

 Salon
July 24, 2021

This article first appeared in Salon.

As the Republican Party continues on its march toward fascism, it's easy to find yourself making political connections — even when you are trying your best not to think about politics.

Recently I was reading about astrophysics (understanding only an infinitesimal amount) and saw the Republican Party's implosion into Trumpism as akin to the formation of a black hole in space, where truth (instead of light) is unable to escape the event horizon.

I found myself in the same frame of mind while watching Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 classic "Strangers on a Train," about a couple of men falling into a conversation and making an unholy bargain, which one of them thinks is a macabre intellectual exercise not to be taken seriously.

Falling back into the dream of the film, I could not help but see the conniving, unhinged Bruno Antony (brilliantly played by Robert Walker) as a precursor of Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson and their ilk, those who have managed to kill off the old Republican Party and who are hard at work to murder majority-rule democracy — both through voter suppression and by inciting actual violence. For me, Guy Haines (played by Farley Granger) represented Republicans I understood, at least to a degree: Nelson Rockefeller, George H.W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney. To me, those Republicans might have been willing to take advantage of others and perhaps stretch the law to avoid taxes or otherwise enrich themselves, but they would likely have ruminated over it and made sure to attend church service soon after banking the profits. In any case, they believed in the necessity of compromise, the work inherent in politics.

These are the so-called RINOs, or "Republicans in name only," a term which — now that I consider it — was always a form of gaslighting and projection. That term has been used to attack actual Republicans and make them seem like another group Trump voters could despise and blame for their failings and bad impulses — another "other." Newt Gingrich and his chortling crew sent the Republicans who understood that compromise was the way of politics (and who, it ought to be said, also took their oaths of office seriously) the way of the Oldsmobile. It was a Swift Boat operation done on their own people. We could all see they were Republicans, but we were told they were somehow not Republicans, or at least not real Republicans — they were RINOs. The fake Republicans pushed out the real ones.

And there it was: Gaslighting — the favored authoritarian manipulation of "don't believe what you see with your own eyes" — so named for the 1944 film "Gaslight" (directed by George Cukor with Hitchcockian flair), in which a criminal, played by Charles Boyer, purposively undermines the mental health of his wife (Ingrid Bergman, who won an Oscar for the role) by lying to her endlessly and saying that things she has seen with her own eyes are not true. You know, like Donald Trump has done to the public for years — indeed, for his entire adult life.

The overarching gaslighting that the modern Republican Party continues to perpetrate on the American public is that good old yarn about how lowering taxes for the wealthy and corporations will boost the economy — the so-called trickle-down theory, which George H.W. Bush memorably called "voodoo economics," before he was selected as Ronald Reagan's running mate, at least partly to shut him up. It always brings to mind something economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote:
The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man's oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

The actual Republicans — who we are told by the likes of Matt Gaetz are not the actual Republicans — must have thought back in the Tea Party days that the Gingrich plan, the treat-the-opposition-as-your-enemy, shut-down-the-government, win-at-all-costs faction, would be a temporary thing, something to be countenanced for a short time. They clearly felt the same way about the antics of Donald Trump. It was all just kind of an unsettling joke, as Guy Haines thought of Bruno's proposed bargain to trade murders.

In the film, Bruno crashes a party and nearly strangles a woman while re-enacting the murder he has committed, which might remind anyone old enough both of Gingrich's crashing the GOP with his "Contract With America" (often referred to then as "Contract on America") and of the equally oddly named Grover Norquist, co-author of the "Contract," who often said he wanted a government small enough that he could drown it in the bathtub. (That phrasing seemed pretty personal — there's more than a hint of gruesome domestic violence in there.)

What Gingrich and Norquist brought to the party was the end of what used to be called "political comity" — seeing beyond different political positions and working together professionally to reach compromise. You know — pretty much the substance of politics.

There is a scene, both funny and unsettling, in "Strangers on a Train" in which Bruno and his mother (the memorable Marion Lorne, in her film debut) have a chance to catch up, and we learn a good deal about how Bruno became the person he is now. She fusses about his health and his attitude, remarking to her son that at least he had given up on his crazy earlier plan:

Mother: Now, you haven't been doing anything foolish?

[Bruno shakes his head while nuzzling her hand.]

Mother: Well, I do hope you've forgotten all about that silly little plan of yours.
Bruno: Which one?

Mother: About, um, blowing up the White House.

Bruno: Oh, ma, I was only fooling. Besides, what would the president say?

Mother [laughing with relief]: Oh, you're a naughty boy, Bruno! Well, you can always make me laugh.

When the film was made, the politics of the day were focused on the Cold War and distrust of anyone who might be sympathetic to the "other side." Looking at the film today, who could doubt that Bruno, like far too many Republicans, might be a QAnon believer, as well as a delighted supporter of Trump's Big Lie about the election, shrugging off the lack of any evidence while pointing to Chinese and Russian conspiracy websites. (In the film, Bruno works assiduously to plant evidence to tie Granger to the murder that Bruno actually committed.) Bruno would have been delighted to help with the planning for the insurrection of Jan. 6 and would have cheered others on from a discreet distance. And he would just as cheerfully deny everything he'd done. You can never pin down a psychopath. As we all know now, it is not possible to hold the shameless to account. They just cry persecution.

The images of the fight on the merry-go-round — sent into overdrive by a policeman who shoots indiscriminately, killing the carny operating the ride — are unforgettable. Granger's character, like, say, Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, is trying desperately to hang on as Bruno kicks at his hands and the whole contraption seems about to break apart. It does, at least until a carnival employee crawls beneath the carousel to reach the controls, too late to save the ride and some of its passengers.

One story concerning the making of "Strangers on a Train," as told by Ben Mankiewicz on Turner Classic Movies, is that Hitchcock was haunted by his decision to allow the man to crawl under the frantically spinning merry-go-round. For years afterward, Hitchcock said, he got sweaty palms every time he thought about that day. If Donald Trump is directing this insurrectionist flick now in production from Mar-a-Lago Studios, he's more than happy to sacrifice anyone and everyone.

The old GOP is going the way of that merry-go-round, and even if someone were to try to get to the controls now (Who? The Lincoln Project? The Bulwark?) it seems too late to save anything worthy of a democratic republic. Conservatives who are not pro-white supremacy, pro-conspiracy, anti-science, and chock-full of grievances will need to create a new political party someday — and get themselves out of the carnival business, with its glaring lights, mesmerizing sounds and untrustworthy machinery.

Matt Gaetz accuses media of ‘greenlighting’ Trump assassination

Gustaf Kilander
Tue, 5 December 2023

Far-right Florida Rep Matt Gaetz has claimed that the press is “green-lighting” the assassination of former President Donald Trump by reporting on what a second Trump term would look like.

On Monday, Mr Gaetz tweeted “They’re obviously green-lighting assassination” and included a screenshot from a Washington Post op-ed by Post Opinions contributing editor Robert Kagan bearing the headline “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending”.

Responding to Mr Gaetz, Condé Nast Legal Affairs Editor Luke Zaleski noted that “There is nothing you can say or do to confront Maga gaslighting that won’t be met with more MAGA gaslighting”.

“They’ll say anything to make themselves the victim and hero in everything. And there is nothing you can say to do anything about it. That is the MAGA gaslighting paradox,” he added.

The image for the op-ed was a split image with the top being the head of a statue of Roman dictator Julius Ceaser, who was assassinated in 44BC, and the bottom being the face of Mr Trump.

Mr Kagan writes that “the national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking”.

“In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions,” he added. “German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.”

The Post editor goes on to say that the “likeliest outcome” of Mr Trump’s many upcoming trials “will be to demonstrate our judicial system’s inability to contain someone like Trump and, incidentally, to reveal its impotence as a check should he become president”.

“Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers,” he adds.

Mr Kagan argues that if Mr Trump wins in 2024, he’ll “become the most powerful person ever to hold that office” with the “fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term”.

“Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?” he asks.

“Trump might not want or need a third term, but were he to decide he wanted one, as he has sometimes indicated, would the 22nd Amendment block him any more effectively from being president for life than the Supreme Court, if he refused to be blocked?” Mr Kagan notes.

“Today, there is the whiff of a new McCarthyism in the air,” he adds, noting the many baseless accusations of those not on Mr Trump’s side being “communists”.

“The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it,” Mr Kagan goes on to say. “In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not ... if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.”

Mr Gaetz’s followers on X were quick to respond with outrage.

Auron MacIntyre, a columnist at the rightwing outlet The Blaze, wrote: “Nobody talks about it but there were already assassination attempts on Trump. When Trump inevitably becomes the nominee you are going to watch the very last shred of sanity break in the media.”

He didn’t provide any evidence for his claims.

Failed GOP 2022 Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake simply called The Post “despicable”.

Manipulation Politics: Israeli Gaslighting in the United States  

BY M. REZA BEHNAM

 APRIL 26, 2024
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Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv – CC BY 2.0

The Middle East will not be the same in the wake of 7 October 2023. More was breached on that day than the prison wall that Palestinian fighters burst through.  The fantasy Israel has staged-managed, and the United States has parroted, for over seven decades has finally seen the light of day.  The global community can no longer be gaslit.

Merriam-Webster defines gaslighting as “the act of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage.”  The term has resonance for what Israel and the United States have successfully done over a number of generations—create a benign identity for Israel that has never corresponded with its ruthless settler-colonial reality.      

The awful truth is that it has taken the death of over 34,000 Palestinians for many in the United States and the world to say “Free Palestine.”  The mainstreamed Israeli “good guy” narrative that has colonized the U.S. body politic for so long is being whittled away by the horrific images of daily genocide and ecocide from Gaza.    

A country does not become cruel overnight.  It takes intent, years of practice and strategies to effectively hide the cruelty.  Since it declared itself a state in 1948, the occupied territories known as Israel has relied on an elaborate state-run public relations industry to convince Western audiences, particularly Americans, of its bravery and noble intentions.

For over six months, Israel’s brutality has been brought into the living rooms of America.  Until then, Israel had made certain that its foundational myths and beacon of democracy tale dominated American politics and government, religion, journalism, academia, cinema and television.   

Those who have been successfully gaslit, whether consciously or unconsciously, and who wish to maintain existing power structures continue to deny the genocide being live-streamed before their eyes, and have galvanized to crush those opposed to Israel’s war on Palestinians.  

American Politics and Government

For decades, Israel has manipulated U.S. politicians emotionally and financially to advance its expansionist ambitions.  Israeli lobby groups, like the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), have poured billions into the coffers of receptive politicians.  

Pro-Israel spending has fueled Congress’s overwhelming support for the apartheid regime.  Rarely, if ever, do they question why aid is being given to the fourteenth richest (per capita) country in the world.  From 1990 to 2024, for example, the “I am a Zionist,” president, Joe Biden has received$5,736,701 from pro-Israel lobbies.  

In 2024, AIPAC plans to spend $100 million in an effort to unseat progressive members of Congress (eight in number) who have been critical of Israeli policy and who have called for a ceasefire in Gaza.  

In January 2024, The Guardian newspaper published its analysis of campaign data.  It found that congressional members supportive of the war received the most money from Israel lobby groups.  It also revealed that 82 percent of its members support Israel; 9 percent are supportive of Palestine; and 8 percent were equally supportive of both.  

Religion

Israel’s leaders have also capitalized on the powerful force of religion to whitewash their settler-colonial project. They have exploited the ideology of biblical chosenness and divinely sanctioned land ownership to legitimize land theft, to dispossess the Palestinians and to sell its genocidal war on Gaza.    

An Israeli Democracy Index, 2013 survey revealed that two-thirds (64.3 percent) of Israeli Jews consider Jews to be the “chosen people.”  The prominence of this belief has resulted in attitudes and government policies of exclusion, entitlement and ethnic chauvinism.  

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war rhetoric has been suffused with violent biblical references.  He has cynically ascribed the term Amalek—the staunch enemy of biblical Israelites—to Palestinians.  The far-right in Israel has, for a long while, used such references to justify killing Palestinians.

The Evangelical right has stood solidly with Israel; even more so during its war on Gaza.  The Israel, Zionist lobby and Christian Zionist (religious right) alliance have had enormous influence over U.S. Middle East policy.  For every one Jewish Zionist, there are 30 Christian Zionists.   Netanyahu has courted Evangelicals cognizant of the power they exert within Congress.  

Christian Zionism demands of its followers absolute support for Israel, believing that the Rapture and Second Coming of Christ require the gathering of all Jews in Israel, and that supporting Israel will bring God’s blessing on them and on their nation.   

Many American evangelicals, have been cheering Israel’s war on Gaza, believing it to be a prelude to the end times prophecy.  

Christian Zionists have found powerful allies in the White House and in the U.S. Congress.  In the Trump White House, for example, evangelicals held seats of power with the likes of former Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. 

There are at least 100  evangelicals currently serving in Congress, including the Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson.   It has become almost mandatory for members to attend AIPAC and Christian evangelical events, as well as excursions to Israel to assure the apartheid leaders of their continued loyalty.  

Journalism

American public opinion has been molded to look with favor on Israel. Mainstream journalism has become largely a stenography service for U.S.-Israeli interests.  Most of the pundits and so-called experts on television, for example, come from think tanks funded by pro-Israel groups: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Research Institute, The Heritage Foundation and Council on Foreign Relations.  

Intellectually honest analysis or criticism of Israel is met with orchestrated pressure from Jewish lobby groups or with the dreaded label of antisemitism. Such tactics have been used to create a climate of intimidation, which has often led to self-censorship.

It is useful to look at a few examples to understand how alternative narratives regarding Palestine have been discouraged for decades.  

Ariel Sharon, former Israeli defense minister, filed a libel suit after Time magazine ran a cover story in 1983 accusing him of encouraging the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon in September 1982.  In 1984, Americans for a Safe Israel filed a petition requesting that NBC’s license be revoked over its reporting of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.  CBS faced similar criticism for airing veteran reporter, Bob Simon’s “60-Minutes” report about Christians living under Israeli occupation.  A full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal excoriating Simon appeared soon after.  

CNN’s founder, Ted Turner, caused an uproar when he told the Guardian in 2002 that Israel was engaging in terrorism against the Palestinians, resulting in threats to the networks revenue.  Walter Isaacson, then CNN Chair, appeared on Israeli television to denounce Turner and the network’s chief news executive, Eason Jordan, flew to Israel to appease the regime.    

Magazines such as The New Republic, The Atlantic and Commentary have also been influential in creating an Israel-centric worldview.  Pro-Israel syndicated columnists Thomas Friedman, Bret Stephens, George Will and David Brooks—whose son has served in the Israeli army—dominate the op-ed pages of major newspapers.

Since the October assault, a number of journalists have faced censorship, retaliation or dismissal for presenting the Palestinian narrative or for criticizing Israeli violence.  The firing in October of Michael Eisen, editor of eLife, a prominent academic science journal, after he retweeted an article from the satirical Onion titled, “Dying Gaza’s Crticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas,”reflects how censorship has reached into all media platforms. 

All foreign news organizations operating in Israel are subject to Israeli military censors. To suppress the horrors coming from Gaza, Israel has refused to permit foreign journalists independent access to that beleaguered Strip.  Only Palestinian reporters already there have been able to report; for that, they and their families have been targeted.  According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as of 25 April, at least 97 journalists and media staff have been killed and 16 injured since the war began. 

Academia

For over two hundred days, Israel’s supporters have been straining to preserve their stranglehold over American universities.  They are aware that people are losing their fear of Israel’s watchdogs like Canary Mission, Stand With Us and Hillel; groups that have made it their mission to suppress critical discussion around Israel on college campuses.  

Academic freedom has been denied professors who have bravely challenged  accepted Israeli renderings.  Professors Rabab Abdulhadi, California State University, San Francisco, Steven Salaita, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Norman Finkelstein, De Paul are among the academics who have been intimidated or terminated.     

Pro-Israel forces have stepped up their pressure on administrators, as demonstrations on university campuses have grown.   Wealthy donors have used threats to withhold, or have withheld, donations if speech critical of Israel is allowed.  Administrators have responded, dismissing professors, setting limits on free speech, conflating protests with antisemitism and using police to breakup demonstrations.  More than 100 Columbia University students were arrested on 18 April after the university called in the New York Police Department to clear a protest encampment. 

Students reported being  sprayed with a putrid smelling chemical agent at a Columbia demonstration.  They later learned that they were sprayed with a chemical called “skunk;” an agent developed by Israel and that has been used for years by the Israeli military against Palestinians in occupied Palestine. 

Earlier in April, the University of Southern California, citing unspecified security concerns, cancelled plans for a graduation speech by this year’s valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, a Muslim student.  Disappointed,  Tabassum said the school had succumbed “to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice.”

Pro-Israel groups have also looked to Congress to neutralize the growing pro-Palestinian protests.  House Republicans have held hearings to “investigate” antisemitism at America’s prestigious universities.  Thus far, the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have resigned following their appearances.   And on 24 April, Speaker Johnson called for the president of Columbia University, Nemat Minouche Shafik, to step down.  

Safety and antisemitism have been used as weapons to silence campus criticism of Israel.  In November, after Jewish students complained of feeling unsafe upon hearing remarks critical of Israel,  Columbia banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. 

The intensity of Israeli indoctrination is reflected in the reaction of some Jewish students who believe that protests targeting Israel constitute personal attacks on them as Jews.   

Many young American Jews have been raised with the idealized image of Israel as a righteous state, necessary for Jewish safety.  A large number have made the free ten-day trip to Israel sponsored by Birthright Israel, an organization supported by the Israeli regime and wealthy philanthropists like the late Sheldon Adelson.  Birthright, founded in 1999, has played a large role in shaping loyalty to Israel.  Predictably, the reality of the occupation has never been a part of the group’s tour.  

Cinema and Television

Israel loyalists have masterfully utilized the media to shape public perceptions and attitudes.  Movie and television screens have been filled with an abundance of positive, sympathetic images of Israel that have shaped public perceptions.     

Undoubtedly, the 1960 film, Exodus, firmly implanted the heroic image of Israel in the minds of many Americans.  The heroism of the Palestinian people fighting to preserve their homeland from Israeli domination has yet to hit the big screen.     

Beginning with the 1921silent film classic, The Sheik, filmmakers have cast Middle Easterners, Arabs and Muslims as exotic, uncultured, idiotic, lecherous and violent, indistinguishable from one another. 

Although racist depictions of Arabs is not new to the film and television industry, media providers Showtime, Netflix and HBO have amped up the propaganda with series such as Homeland, Fauda (meaning chaos in Arabic), The Messiah, The Spy, and Our Boys.  These dramas, from which many Americans draw their information, portray Israel’s secret police as virtuous defenders of law, hunting down threatening Arab “terrorists.”

Caricatures and negative cinematic imagery have contributed to the destructive dehumanization of Arabs, as witnessed today in Gaza.   The powerful political narrative created around Arabs has allowed Israel’s genocide of Palestinians to become an image on a screen or just another news event. 

For more than eight decades—from photoplay sheik movies of the 1920s to the elaborately produced films of the present—Hollywood filmmakers have perpetuated Middle Eastern stereotypes that have cultivated prejudice and division between peoples and nations.  These stereotypes have created a pattern of socialization that has made the Middle Eastern world distant and vulnerable to attack. 

Conclusion

Although the pro-Israel camp and their allies continue to dominate and influence Congress and the executive branch, they have slowly begun to lose control of the narrative.   

President Joe Biden, however, remains dedicated to the Israeli fantasy.  He has embraced and subsidized a racist supremacist Israeli regime; a 57-year apartheid occupation; squatter colonialism and genocide in Gaza. 

While professing commitment to achieving a Palestinian state, the United States alone vetoed a 18 April Security Council resolution that would have allowed full United Nations membership for the state of Palestine.  And while Israel continues its intense bombing in Gaza, Biden signed legislation on 24 April allocating another $26.4 billion for Tel Aviv to continue its atrocities. 

Israeli gaslighting has reached into and exerted influence in almost every segment of American society.  Consequently, Israel has grown into an entity unbound by borders, exempt from international law and able to commit genocide with impunity.  The horrific images coming from Gaza are, however, are making it increasingly difficult for Israel and its U.S. allies to silence dissent and to continue gaslighting the American public.