Americans Are Getting Suffocated By The Deadly Gaslighters
There have always been spin doctors in politics. A spin doctor uses facts to reflect a point of view, the facts may be taken out of context, but they are facts. The job of a spin doctor, also known as a spokesperson, is to give a favorable interpretation of events to the media, especially on behalf of a political party.
Then there are the gaslighters, a skill used mostly by Republicans where there are no facts. Gaslighting is the art of making someone question their own reality. For the gaslighters, if the lie sticks against the political wall, it will be repeated and repeated and repeated until many people assume it must be true or at least partly true. When it isn’t.
The term “gaslighting” comes from the title of the 1944 film “Gaslight,” in which a husband tricks his wife to convince her that she is mentally unwell so he can steal from her. The title refers to the gaslight illumination of the house which seems to waver whenever the husband leaves his wife alone at home.
Gaslighting has been most spectacularly successful regarding trump’s incessant, though baseless claims, that widespread voting fraud by Democrats cost trump a reelection in 2020. All credible evidence shows that the 2020 election was very secure and Democratic and Republican experts, including Trump’s Justice Department, have confirmed that 2020 was a free and fair election.
The facts mean little to 79 percent of Republicans who have been effectively gaslighted and believe the election was illegitimate. Or to the dozens of candidates for state and federal office across the country whose platform includes the claim that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president.
Gaslighting started slowly but has gained notable support over the violent, deadly Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol by trump supporters who were incited by trump who had convinced them that the 2020 election was rigged.
Few lawmakers said they agreed with the initial, weird comments of Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., that the Jan. 6 riot was just another day of “normal tourist visits.” Just as isolated were the words of Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., who said the rioters were “peaceful patriots” who were being harassed by the Department of Justice.
The climate began to change to the point where in February, a Republican resolution censured GOP Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., for their work on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. The resolution accuses Kinzinger and Cheney of “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
At around the same time, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said the riot was not an armed insurrection. And in May, Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, said there was no evidence the riot was an “armed insurrection.” No evidence, except for the makeshift spears, hurled fire extinguishers and the like, that caused grave injuries to law enforcement.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris led a commemoration last week a year after Republicans had condemned the Jan. 6 riot. But rather than speak about trump’s role in the riot, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said “It has been stunning to see some Washington Democrats try to exploit this anniversary to advance partisan policy goals that long predated this event.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a buddy and sycophant for trump, said speeches by Biden and Harris were an “effort to resurrect a failed presidency more than marking the anniversary of a dark day in American history.”
While Biden was lamenting the insurrection, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, considered a potential 2024 presidential candidate, slammed Democrats and the media for making so much hay of the event.
“This is their Christmas, January 6th,” DeSantis said. “They are going to take this and milk this for anything they could to try to be able to smear anyone who ever supported Donald Trump.”
The gaslighting has been quite effective. A June poll by YouGov for Yahoo News found that half of Republicans said either that the riot was justified or that they were not sure if it was. Nearly three-quarters of Republicans said that “left-wing protesters trying to make Trump look bad” deserved at least some blame for the attack.
An exceptionally successful gaslighting is the mantra of the GOP and the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the rest of the gun lobby and so-called Second Amendment supporters that “the government is coming to take your guns away.” The government has no such plans although Biden and many Democrats want to ban semi-automatic, assault style weapons with high capacity magazines that can fire up to 100 rounds. But banning handguns or rifles, no, there are no such plans.
The gaslighters with the NRA heard it differently.
“When the President of the United States says you don’t need guns and ammo…YOU NEED GUNS AND AMMO,” read a tweet from the NRA which had more than 5,000 retweets and 17,700 likes and the Instagram post has more than 163,000 likes. The sentiment is a bedrock for many Republicans along with the white supremacist militias. So much for facts.
When she ran for vice president, Sarah Palin railed against “death squads” that she said were part of Obamacare. Palin was never one to let a good fact get in the way of her gaslighting but the truth is there were never plans for death squads under the Affordable Care Act, which provides health insurance to hundreds of millions of Americans. Palin coined the term and claimed that Obamacare would create a “death panel” of bureaucrats who would triage and decide which Americans were “worthy of medical care.” The fact is that nothing in Obamacare would have led to individuals being judged to see if they were worthy of health care.
Palin was distorting a section of the act which would have paid doctors for providing voluntary counseling to Medicare patients about living wills, advance directives and end-of-life care options. In the end, because of political pressures, the provision to pay physicians for providing voluntary counseling was removed from the law.
The birther theories alleged that Obama’s published birth certificate was a forgery and that he was not qualified to be president because he was really born in Kenya, not Hawaii. Another claim was that Obama was an Indonesian citizen in childhood and thereby lost his U.S. citizenship. Others said that Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen because he was born a dual citizen (British and American).
The birther claims were foundational to trump’s eventual run for president. In 2011, trump told his PR firm, Fox News, that “(Obama) doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim.”
Obama did produce a legal birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii but the victims of the gross gaslighting weren’t buying it and many still doubt his citizenship.
The Swiftboating scandal, another baseless gaslighting, destroyed John Kerry’s 2004 presidential ambitions. During the campaign, Kerry’s Vietnam War record was the focus of a book, “Unfit for Command,” by John O’Neill. Kerry’s war record was further besmirched by a group calling itself the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” The book was later discredited by the damage to Kerry was irrevocable. Defenders of Kerry’s service record, including former crewmates, said allegations made by “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” were lies.
The gaslighters essentially find an issue to be distorted and throw it against the wall. If it sticks, they are off and running. If not, it’s on to another gaslighting.
A recent failed gaslighting involves the Aug. 8, FBI search for top secret documents that trump seized at the end of his presidency and hid at his castle, Mar-a-Lago. Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, said trump may have kept the 20 boxes, including 11 sets marked as top secret or sensitive, in order to write his memoir. It should be noted that trump’s writing was through tweeting and that he may never have read a book cover to cover. The gaslighting never caught on except with maybe the same people, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who believe Jewish funded lasers started California wildfires.
The latest gaslighting, which seems to be gaining momentum, involves Biden’s climate and energy bill that includes funds to beef up the Internal Revenue Service by filling thousands of vacant positions.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, sent an open letter last week warning Americans not to work for the IRS. He falsely claimed that the Democrats’ climate, energy and tax bill would add “roughly 87,000 agents” at the IRS, creating “an IRS super-police force.”
“The IRS made it very clear that one of the ‘major duties’ of these new positions is to ‘be willing to use deadly force.’ … The IRS is making it very clear that you not only need to be ready to audit and investigate your fellow hardworking Americans, your neighbors and friends, you need to be ready and, to use the IRS’s words, willing, to kill them” said Scott who recently criticized Biden for taking a break in Delaware, right before Scott set off on a luxury yacht vacation to Italy.
Turning off the gaslight, the facts are that the IRS isn’t adding 87,000 armed agents, and not even even 87,000 agents. In fact, it’s not even adding 87,000 employees. Considering attrition, the government says there would be around 40,000 vacancies filled over a decade. And that would only restore IRS staffing to around the 117,000 it had in 1990. Further, about 6,500 of the new hires would be “agents” and the rest would be customer-service representatives, data specialists and the like.
The Treasury Department also said the new law will result in a “lower likelihood of audit” for ordinary taxpayers, because technology upgrades will enable the IRS to target the actual tax cheats, the super-rich, wealthiest 1 percent of Americans who defraud the government of more than $160 billion a year.
As far as the armed IRS agents hunting down Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class America, fewer than 1 percent of the new employees would be armed. The IRS has always armed some of its agents who tackle dangerous drug rings and Russian oligarchs.
Scott’s esteemed co-gaslighters jumped on the faux, IRS bandwagon.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said there could be an “army of 87,000 IRS agents” and Cruz vowed that “we WILL NOT FUND these 87k armed new IRS agents who will target the American people.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said he worried about “a strike force that goes in with AK-15s [sic] already loaded ready to shoot some small-business person.”
Not to be outdone, House GOP leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., warned that the “Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you.”
Republican gaslighting also is focusing on the LGBTQ community and transgender people, specifically. Rep. Greene has introduced a bill in Congress that would ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors across the country. Greene and her violently, anti-trans colleagues offer a host of gaslighting that is entwined in lies about sexuality, from the false belief that people choose their sexual preference to the lie that won’t die that gay people are pedophiles.
Gaslighting about COVID-19 was a popular and successful favorite of Republicans and conspiracists and doubtless led to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who may have delayed treatment because of the gaslighting.
Trump said on Feb. 7, 2020, that the COVID-19 virus would weaken “when we get into April, in the warmer weather — that has a very negative effect on that, and that type of a virus.” It didn’t and the pandemic raged on, killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Three weeks later, the would-be wizard trump, trying to limit the political damages, said the outbreak would be temporary because “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” There were no miracles, only despair and death, and COVID-19 is still very much with us.