Gaslighting and History

The concept of gaslighting is not new, it just seems to be used in voluminous ways in 2022.  We explore the term, some history, and how it affects the politics of today. 

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Gaslighting and History

October 2022

I have always loved the story of the Potemkin villages so much that I used it in the title of a podcast from two years ago. That one was about Joe Biden’s Potemkin campaign, a presidential run that featured Biden in his basement. No rallies, no shaking hands, and firing up crowds. 

The story of the villages by Ishaan Tharoor, writing for Time Magazine back in 2010, is as follows, “Grigory Potyomkin was a dashing 18th-century Russian nobleman who intrigued in courts, smote his enemies upon the steppes and allegedly wooed Catherine the Great. It was while he was courting his nation’s comely Tsarina — at least according to legend — that his name came to forever stand for something insubstantial. For Catherine’s 1783 tour of new Russian possessions in the Crimea, Potyomkin endeavored to show her the best face of the empire. As the story goes, pasteboard facades of pretty towns were set up at a distance on riverbanks. At stops, she’d be greeted by regiments of Amazonian snipers or fields set ablaze by burning braziers and exploding rockets spelling her initials; whole populations of serfs were moved around and dressed up in fanciful garb to flaunt a prosperity that didn’t exist (later precipitating famine in the region). 

Recent historical work has proved the tale in part apocryphal, but the legend stuck. A “Potemkin village” signifies any deceptive or false construct, conjured often by cruel regimes, to deceive both those within the land and those peering in from outside.” 

I often think of this story when considering the term Gaslighting. I have been reading about politics for 30 years and writing for nearly 5, yet this one was new to me. This term, so new that my spell checker keeps wanting to separate it into two words, is defined by Forbes writer Marissa Conrad as “Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that hinges on creating self-doubt. “I think of gaslighting as trying to associate someone with the label ‘crazy,’” says Paige Sweet, Ph.D., an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who studies gaslighting in relationships and the workplace. “It’s making someone seem or feel unstable, irrational and not credible, making them feel like what they’re seeing or experiencing isn’t real, that they’re making it up, that no one else will believe them.”

In other words, the term gaslighting originally emanated from psychology, often involving victims of abuse, whose abusers convinced them that the problem lay with them, the victim, and not their abuser. Psychology Today states, “Gaslighting is an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, perception, and sanity. Over time, a gaslighter’s manipulations can grow more complex and potent, making it increasingly difficult for the victim to see the truth. The term gaslighting comes from a 1938 play, Gas Light, and its film adaptation. Gaslighting can occur in personal or professional relationships, and victims are targeted at the core of their being: their sense of identity and self-worth. Manipulative people who engage in gaslighting do so to attain power over their victims, either because they simply derive warped enjoyment from the act or because they wish to emotionally, physically or financially control their victim.”

As with so much, way too much, of our political discourse, this terminology has broadened beyond its original subject matter to define a particular form of politics, somewhat connected to the term’s original meaning. Beginning in the 2010s, the term has been used to describe the behavior of politicians and media personalities on both the political spectrum’s left and right sides, no doubt linking it back to the original psychological manipulation. Some examples include: “Gaslighting” has been used to describe Russia’s global relations. For example, while Russian operatives were active in Crimea in 2017, Russian officials continually denied their presence and manipulated the distrust of political groups in their favor. Columnist Maureen Dowd described the Bill Clinton administration’s use of the technique in subjecting Newt Gingrich to small indignities intended to provoke him to make public complaints that “came across as hysterical” in 1995. 

And, of course, as the political figure who has dominated discourse for the past seven years, American journalists widely used the word “gaslighting” to describe the actions of Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential election and his term as president as well as his response to his 2020 loss.  

As with manipulating words in other contexts, some mental health experts have expressed concern that the broader use of the term is diluting its usefulness and may make it more challenging to identify the specific type of abuse described in the original definition. Therefore, for purposes of this podcast, I am using a broader definition than a psychologist but still keeping the core meaning, a person in power trying to convince someone that what they believe is real is false, and what is false is real.  

I think of gaslighting as different, or at least a different variation to good old, out and out, well, lying. Telling a whopper, as they say, is something like this; I had a 400 lb. There was tuna on my fishing rod, but the line broke, and I lost the catch. Or, as I once told my father upon being caught with beers in my possession during my high school days, “I bought these myself.” Of course, they were provided, with a buyer’s fee, by my older brothers. One would think it was some sort of Aves code of brotherly conduct that guaranteed my silence, but the real reason was that they were not just older but bigger, and confession may be good for the soul, but my body would suffer.  

The point is that both of these were not only lies but hard to prove. Gaslighting is more akin to “believe me, not yer lying eyes.” The gaslighter will tell you the sky is green and the grass is blue. And this is more than a similarity to the epic Star Trek Next Generation episode where Captain Picard, captured by the martial Cardashian race, is tortured into believing something that is not true. How many lights did he see? In a moment of will, he bursts out that he sees not the number that his torturer suggests but the actual number shown. Yet, in a private consultation with Counselor Deanna Troi, he confesses he actually saw the wrong number of lights. 

Gaslighting could be accomplished with torture (do not give politicians and activists any cute ideas), as we shall see. However, in America today, it is but simple repetition and a narrative that seems to be reinforced by all the usual platforms. It is also common, not just today but in history because it is so convenient for those in weak positions to use it instead of defending their rickety arguments.  

Though slavery had been around for thousands of years and was a common institution in the late 18th century, one might think it would not be vigorously questioned. Yet many founders, including Benjamin Franklin, struggled to reconcile the ideal of the Declaration of Independence with that so slavery and failed to get its abolition into the Constitution. The answers to those like Franklin were specious. Items like slavery are in the bible, Jesus did not specifically denounce it, and one of my favorites, it was better for the slaves to be taken care of where the evil factories of the North would not. 

My answer would have been, if it is so awesome, let’s give them a choice, which would have been met by something not akin to civilized discourse. It was better for prebellum Southerners to gaslight the holding of their slaves because the outcome would be pre-ordained in any debate on the institution’s merits.  

I had mentioned torture in the case of Jean Luc Picard and that Star Trek episode. It is not as if the writers of that episode had far to look for examples. In a 2017 piece for the Los Angeles Review of books, writer Giovanni Vimercati reviews Wladimir Velminski’s Homo Sovieticus: Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny, initially published in German in 2013. The writer notes, “The Soviet New Man, Leon Trotsky wrote in his 1924 treatise Literature and Revolution, would “make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses.” This materialist insistence on the malleability of thoughts and emotions interacted with a recrudescence of pre-Soviet superstition, a form of political sorcery owing more to Rasputin than Lenin.” 

Vimercati later writes, “The scientific management of labor was the prelude to the attempts to manage and control thoughts. Just as the New Man’s actions could be perfected, so could his thoughts — or so a number of Soviet scientists believed.” The problem was that the people of the soviet union, and the Warsaw Pact nations, knew their governance was crap and began to pull away. But not to worry, the Soviets had the answers, “The implementation of televisual mind control would thus need to wait a few decades. Indeed, it occurred just as the Eastern Bloc started to crumble. On October 8, 1989, a month before the Berlin Wall came down; the Soviet viewing audience was confronted by a singular televised event. At 8:30 p.m. on Channel One, immediately after the evening news, a curious character appeared and declaimed in psalmodic tones: “Relax, let your thoughts wander free.” The man, Anatoly Mikhailovich Kashpirovsky, was a licensed physician; prior to his TV debut, he had provided his psychotherapeutic services to the national weightlifting team, which, at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, carried away six gold medals. Kashpirovsky’s aim was to “calm a land beset by turbulence and heal the body politic by setting viewers’ minds to the state’s new goals.” Where the political reformism of Perestroika and Glasnost had failed, televisual mind control would step in and save the day.” This was gaslighting with a bit of TV and much coercion. But the goal was the same, do not believe what is right in front of you.  

I am old enough to remember the Reagan Mondale debates of 1984, but their resonance with me at the time was limited. However, becoming more of a political animal in the 1990s, my recollection of the 1992 campaigns, with three men, not the usual two, vying for the presidency, is still evident. That one was an exciting example of the third candidate spoiler. Did Ross Perot cost HW Bush a second term? Bush certainly believed so, and given the gap between the winner, Bill Clinton, and Bush of 6 million votes, and the fact that Perot has nearly 20 million, it is not hard to make a case that a simple 66% of that for Bush and 33% for Clinton would mean that Bush would then have more popular votes. Further dividing those votes by states, such as WI, GA, PA, OH, and MI, would have provided Bush with the Electoral College.  

Regardless of Perot’s presence, I remember the topics discussed and debated. In 1990 after the Persian Gulf War, Bush’s approval ratings were in the stratosphere to the point where many heavy-hitter Democrats, like Mario Cuomo, did not build campaigns. But an unknown, young governor of Arkansas with a petrifying wife decided what has he to lose. Little did these people know that the good times, and ratings for Bush, were not going to last. In 1991 the economy tipped into recession, and Bush’s numbers dropped. It did not help his conservative cause that he broke a 1988 pledge and raised taxes. 

Bill Clinton focused on the economy in 1992 due to the recession and ran on school choice, balanced budget amendment, opposition to illegal immigration, and support for NAFTA. Political operative James Carville is only suitable in very small, really small doses, but he did provide us with an invaluable phrase of politics, that is, “It’s the economy stupid.”

I know that in 2022, it may seem bizarre that politicians would debate, you know, policy, but the 90s were a crazy time. And in this benighted year, well, there is a dollop of policy but a whole lot of gaslighting. 

On the subject of immigration, it was noted that at least 2 million immigrants had crossed the border this year. Vice President Kamala Harris said, in “Meet the Press,” that the border is “secure.” Asked what that means, she answered, “We have a secure border in that that is a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration.” Well glad she cleared that up. In Georgia, we have pro-life candidate Herschel Walker accused of paying for an abortion in 2009. After denying the charge, the Georgia Senate candidate was told there was a receipt for $700, and the candidate responded that he had sent checks to many people. 

In the Pennsylvania Senator’s race, John Fetterman, a wealthy man who lived off family largesse for the first 20 years of his adult life, portrays himself as a working man with tattoos and a ridiculous hoodie. He also suffered a stroke earlier this year which is clearly affecting his cognitive abilities, but Nah, it is just a hearing loss thing. And to add to the gaslighting on Fetterman, we hear from his … wife, Giselle, who blasted NBC’s Dasha Burns for her portrayal of a recent interview with the Pennsylvania US Senate candidate, accusing the reporter of “ableism” and calling Burn’s behavior “appalling.” The problem is that a Rolling Stone interviewer noted on Twitter that she has been transformed from a reluctant political spouse to a “defacto candidate.” Whoops, gaslighting is not as effective when its effects are stated out loud. Finally, did I mention that I hate Fetterman’s stupid hoodie? Not only is it disingenuous because the man can buy Saville Row suits, but it is also unserious. Is he going to wear the damned thing on the Senate floor?

And even on the guys not on the ballot, but in the minds of voters, we have an increasingly aged 79-year-old Joe Biden, who his obviously fit, and 48-year-old press secretary assures us that she has trouble keeping up with him. Joe Biden, who will not support additional domestic oil or natural gas production, was miffed that the Saudis are decreasing their production and are looking to Venezuela for help, despite decrying that government’s human rights record. We also have Biden on inflation, which at last count was 8.3% higher than in 2021, stating that it is not going up, which means month-to-month increases, not annualized. Oh well, that cleared that up; now I will fork over $15.00 for butter; that in 2019 cost me $10.00, but that $15.00 is the same as in September, so all good. 

This is the same president who passed an Inflation Reduction Act with nothing to do with inflation and a lot to do with green subsidy pork. Biden also used the “crisis” of COVID to wipe out $420 million in student loans while simultaneously telling 60 minutes that the COVID crisis was over. 

And on Trump? Simple question. If the government papers were not important, and this was another FBI boondoggle like the Russian Collusion hoax, why would he have them in the first place? 

And speaking of Trump, the January 6 commission, which should have provided interesting, pertinent, and actionable insights into why a group at a political rally turned mob and attacked the seat of our legislative branch. As Andrew McCarthy of the National Review notes, “If that’s all the committee was — an attempt to correct the failures of the impeachment process — it would have been a completely legitimate undertaking (though whether there’d have been a political appetite for it is a different question). But unable to help themselves, Democrats politicized the committee, too, to everyone’s detriment. The riot was a disgraceful blight on American history, and it thus cried out for a truly bipartisan congressional investigation in which there were real hearings — the kind of traditional, adversarial, credible fact-finding process that Americans across the political spectrum could accept as legitimate.

Democrats instead opted for a show. They even brought in a network-television executive to help them produce it and aired a couple of episodes in prime time. Nonetheless, there remains a gaping hole in their case: They lack evidence that Trump intended a violent riot at the Capitol, much less that he ordered one.” The January 6 Gaslighting Committee may have been apt. 

As noted above, the purpose of gaslighting is to provide an alternative for actual debate and discourse because the gaslighter knows they will lose in an honest discussion. 

It should be noted that the one area where Democrats show any progress is abortion. In reality, most of the country is probably on the legalization of abortion in the first 15 weeks, which would allow time for the procedure to take place in case of rape or incest. Pro-lifers asking for a total ban have been challenged, and we saw this in red Kansas, where they rejected such an approach. The concept of forcing a woman to bring a baby to term after rape is not a position I would necessarily advocate, but I also like this line from Walker. When told by Senatorial opponent Raphael Warnock that abortion should be between two people, a woman, and her doctor, Walker replied, “but there are three people in that room if we count the baby.” And, of course, in many liberal circles, there was the gaslighting hysteria about national, total bans, which Kansas has proved was wrong. And, of course, the omission of that inconvenient baby. 

And the same group of liberal progressives talk about women in terms of abortions but cannot actually define what a woman is. So I would not say Kentaji Brown Jackson’s evasive answer to what a woman is in her US Supreme Court confirmation hearing was not gaslighting because she is not, in fact, a biologist. But she is also not an engineer, a business person, a farmer, or a doctor, and yet she will stand in for these roles as a SCOTUS justice.  

As much fun as watching the Bidens of this world gaslight is, one should not get too sanguine. In 2003 after the invasion of Iraq by the American army, the so-called Bagdad Bob, real name Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, was featured as a figure of fun.  

One of the best of his gaslighting was to proclaim that the American invasion itself was fiction while the presence of US Army tanks behind him could be seen. Yet what was seen as gaslighting at the time sends chills today. In a piece in the Atlantic, author Emily DePrang states that Sahaf’s nickname, “Baghdad Bob,” now denotes someone who confidently declares what everyone else can see is false--someone so wrong, it’s funny. But when read beside the eventual cost of America’s decade in Iraq, “Baghdad Bob” isn’t so funny anymore.”

He stated there were no weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq would prove to be a morass for America and that it was an occupation, not conquest, that would be the challenge, “Sahaf wasn’t just right about the fact that Iraqis would reject American invasion. He was right about how. As predicted, troops were most vulnerable when in transit, especially from “the people of the countryside,” thanks improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Of the more than 6,600 soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, almost exactly as IEDs killed many by firefights.” Adds Deprang. 

In some ways, the point of gaslighting is to distract. But what if the distraction is the central issue all along? It does not take a Nobel Laurette in economics to know that if a government floods the nation with spending, the value of the dollars or money needed to spend will become lessened. If the value of a dollar drops, it takes more of those dollars to buy things. And if the corresponding income does not match the increase in those prices, people will pay more. Inflation.  

This week we announced that two large grocery chains, Kroger and Albertsons, announced plans to merge. The grocery store chains announced Friday that they’ve entered into a merger agreement that values the combined company at about $24.6 billion. The merger would create one of the largest grocery store chains in the US — combined, Kroger and Albertsons operate 4,996 stores nationwide. In addition, the union would see as many as 375 stores spun off and others sold to competitors.

As day follows night, our two socialist New England senators, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren weighed in. “At a time when food prices are soaring as a result of corporate greed, it would be an absolute disaster to allow Kroger, the 2nd largest grocery store in America, to merge with Albertsons, the 4th largest grocery store in America,” Sanders tweeted on Thursday, the Vermont senator adding that the Biden Administration “must reject this deal.” 

Wait what? Corporate greed is the issue, and not regular budgetary spending, which is already $1 trillion in the red, not the extra $6 trillion in COVID spending, nor the $800 billion of green pork boondoggles, nor the $400 million of student loan forgiveness? Yup, it was those evil, pernicious corporations all along! Gaslighting, to be sure. What neither Senator would note is that Americans spend about $1 trillion on food, and the combined revenues of the two stores would be about 18% of that total.  

But what Sanders is really up to is to transfer the concept of inflation over to the private business ledger and far away from the government, and what follows? The absolute disaster of price controls. It is funny to hear the youthful-looking Karine Jean-Pierre talk about being worn out by Joe Biden, who looks all in just walking to the podium. But the gaslighting of Sanders on inflation is not funny; it is the road to a far worse economy than the crappy one we have today.