In George Cukor’s 1944 film adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gaslight, Ingrid Bergman delivers a delightful Oscar winning performance as Paula Alquist, a women whose husband Gregory Anton ---- played with suave demonic flair by Charles Boyer, has convinced is loosing her mind. They have only been married a short time when his psychic deception begins. He takes advantage of her love and immediately begins playing mental tricks on her in order to make her second guess her own sense of reality. He berates her and when she complains, he accuses her of overreacting. He has a knack for turning things around and making himself look like the victim. His chicanery is mentally debilitating and in time, Gregory has rendered Paula defenseless and emotionally spent. He has not endeavored to drug her or to physically abuse her. And yet, she is like a rag doll in his arms. Though in her most solitary moments she is certain that she can hear footsteps in her attic. And she notices that the gaslight in her room seems to dim when she hears them. It is a metaphor for his hidden betrayal displacing her sanity. The suspense formula works for us because no one seems to have a clue as to what Gregory’ is really up to until the very end. Gaslight is a classic thriller that inspired some of the most successful suspense films of the last 70 years, from Hitchcock to Stephen King. In Psychology, the movie inspired a term used to define a body of sociopathic behaviors. It turns out that gaslighting is the favorite sport of some of the most demented minds. Shea Emma Fett explains:
”Gaslighting is the attempt by one person to overwrite another person’s reality”.
With the Trump Administration it appears that gaslighting has hit the big time. Not since Bush The Elder’s video game war sought to challenge our collective sense of reality and Bush The Younger’s WMD “bogus talking points” ten years later led us into a long, costly and ill-fated commitment overseas, has an American president and his administration been caught in a boldfaced lie on so many occasions. Eight months into a communication strategy built upon a flagrant deception (“President Trump had the largest inauguration crowd ---- ever!”) , it now appears that the new administration cannot nor has it any desire to stop speaking to the American people in language that time after time is proven to be demonstrably false. Quite frankly, “EVERYBODY IS LYING AROUND HERE!” When caught, the president and his administration doubles down, deflects, exaggerates, blames the media, transfers, projects and plays the victim. Long before the first votes were cast, this hilarious segment from the October 8, 2016 episode of Saturday Night Live, “Kellyanne’s Day Off “, featuring Kate McKinnon as Donald Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway as she tries to relax on a much-needed day off, speaks prophetic volumes:
Almost one year later, it feels as if this administration is really trying to mentally wear the American people down to the point that we all begin to second-guess our own sense of reality. We are in the midst of a master class in gaslighting. The idea is to anesthetize our common sense until we instinctively accept any blatant deception, like a nation of Stepford Wives or the mindless hoards on the plantation of the evil voodoo master Murder Legendre in Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932). Anyway, it is shameful and embarrassing, but this is what the American people voted for.
Like no one else in American history, Donald Trump has managed to put his name in the mouth of a news maker on nearly every segment of nearly every major platform of the 24/7 news cycle on nearly every single day of the week and this has been going on for more than a year now. I must confess that I don’t even want to see my girlfriend as much as Trump is either on TV or the subject of TV news and we live together! (note: “I’ve just been informed that my girlfriend does not want to see me that much either”). Is the idea to lower the bar so low and to make Trump’s cavalcade of impropriety and nonsense so much a part of our daily lives that we begin to accept it all as normal? It sure looks that way.
The nation’s mainstream corporate media has been turned into a reality TV show named The Trump Administration. Watching the news today can be
rather exhausting. At this pace, the American people are sure to either succumb to the neurotic soap opera or turn away from Big News altogether. Gaslighting is no joke. How many times has someone forced you to question your own sense of right and wrong? How many times has someone tried to convince you not to believe your “lying eyes” even though the video is quite clear for all the world to see? Millions of women have been led to believe that they have caused an abusive man to abuse them and they find themselves yoked to a haunting sense of loneliness and despair. Often this sense of melancholy lingers on long after these abusive relationships have come to an end. It is something that drains the soul. Gaslighting is that powerful. Dictators enjoy saturating the public square with huge statutes and billboards carrying their likeness framed in a grand mythology in order to project their power as just, ubiquitous and overwhelming. It is an often rather effective means of social control in authoritarian countries. In the hands of a classic narcissist who has demonstrated racist, xenophobic and misogynistic tendencies, gaslighting can be a rather devastating tool. Least we surrender our faculties, like a driverless vehicle hacked from afar, we must not lose sight of the fact that none of this is normal!
Never has an American president made such a heart-felt public statement of moral equivalency (first at Trump Tower on August 15 and then one week later in Phoenix Arizona) between Nazis and white supremacists in the United States and those who oppose them. However, let us not forget that the Trump presidency did not simply manifest out of nowhere. Donald Trump has been the id of the Republican Party for quite sometime. We have had a front-row seat to the evolution of what would ultimately become the Trump presidency through the clever gaslighting of the American people by the Republican Party with the invaluable aid of a compliant American fourth estate for nearly a decade.
Trump is the avatar of the radical Tea Party right that was inspired into action by their palpable anger at the results of the 2008 election and their instant tissue rejection of a black president and First Family in the White House ---- teased and nurtured by Republican Party leadership and pushed to the alt right fringes almost a decade later. We do not have to dance around this truth. The imagery of the last decade is littered with the nastiness of crude attempts at political gaslighting. The vast cavalcade of lies great and small may not have always come across as suave and debonair as only Charles Boyer could deliver them, nonetheless some have had rather lasting effects which degrades historiography and can only be repaired if they are confronted head on. For instance, the idea that the Tea Party Movement was born out of a deep libertarian concern for deficit spending (a concern that did not seem to exist for them during the Reagan and Bush The Younger administrations) is intellectually dishonest at best and simply foolhardy at worst. It is an example of one of the more clumsy attempts at gaslighting. The American people are simply not that blind or that stupid. The empirical reality, or “the video that we saw” showed a rather different evolution.
In October of 2008, Dick Army, former congressman (R-TX), author of the Tea Party Manifesto Give Us Liberty, chairman of Freedomworks and the inspirational godfather of the Tea Party Movement, gave us a hint of what was to come:
“There is a certain amount of white people who are not emotionally prepared to accept a black man as president”.
“Wait what?”
“Yep, that’s exactly what he said”
Although Blackfolk had spent centuries in bondage, there were politicians and plantation owners in the 19th century who claimed that many whites were just not emotionally prepared to accept a free black population. More than 150 years later, eerily similar arguments were being made. Then, on Election Day 2008, as the returns were coming in drip by drip, William “abort all black babies” Bennett, the former head of Ronald Reagan’s Department of Education (“who’s watching your children”), spoke from his heart and gave us another clue that a great white backlash was on its way. Bennett made one last desperate plea for white solidarity. He told the CNN election coverage team as well as the worldwide viewing audience, that the election returns were sure to shift in favor of John McCain because, “Culture is more important than politics” (code: white voters would come together and overwhelm the Obama electorate). Bennett was depending upon a demographic calculus that was no longer viable. Obama was able to win the election while loosing the white vote. The calculus would only grow more in favor of a multicultural electorate as the years have gone by, Then, within weeks of the inauguration, former Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachman, who founded the congressional Tea Party Caucus in July of 2010 (which was reconstituted as the Freedom Caucus after becoming a national pariah a few years later) provided the first inspirational rallying cry that Republicans would invariably stoke all the way to
Donald Trump’s successful campaign eight years later. “We must take our country back! ---- For real Americans!” the congresswoman cried out loud over and over again. This prompted Jonathan Capeart at the Washington Post to write: “They keep saying, we must take our country back! But they never say from whom”. On CNN Don Lemon forced the congresswoman to concede that Americanism is not restricted to a single group of people.
In 2013, after shutting down the federal government in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression and two shooting wars overseas, in early October senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-TX) with former Alaska Governor and Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin by their side, headlined a Tea Party rally that marched in colonial regalia from the World War II Memorial to the front gate of the White House. After a few winsome speeches whereby the Tea Party leaders falsely blamed Obama for shutting down national parks and monuments and disrespecting veterans, the small group planted a huge Confederate flag in front of the White House and demanded that President Obama come outside, “put down his Quran and get on his knees” like a lynch mob demanding its pound of flesh. The gravity of a Confederate flag planted in front of the White House, where the African American First Family slept, was virtually ignored by the major cable and broadcast news networks who quickly kicked it off of the 24/7 news cycle, even as it was quickly going viral online. Many on the right celebrated it as a symbolic victory. While many other Americans had a rather different reaction. On MSNBC Joan Walsh of Salon.com expressed trepidation that a darker period was to come. On Twitter, Jeffery Goldberg (@jefferyGoldberg) wrote:
“In many parts of America, waving a Confederate flag outside the home of a black family would be considered a very hostile act“.
Prompting Lee Fang (@lhfang) to respond:
“Waving a Confederate flag at the home of a black family isn’t okay anywhere. It’s a threat of violence”.
Then came the Trump Campaign two years later and the slogan, “Make America Great Again!” (code: back to a time when white skin privilege was all powerful) and the August 11th tiki torch night march of the alt-right declaring, “Blood and Soil”, “Blood and Soil” and “You (meaning blacks), will not replace us!” “Jews will not replace us!” with the lynch-mob attack on Deandre Harris and the terrorist murder of Heather Heyer.
In 2009 the nation was still reeling from an economic catastrophe that had erupted while a Republican President was steering the ship of state. In 2017 another Republican president was publicly making common cause with neo Nazis and white nationalists. If you still believe that the Tea Party was formed and the great white backlash of the Obama era came to be, simply out of a libertarian concern for the health of the American economy, then someone has been gaslighting you. The Republicans teased the ugly beast of racism, got the president that they fought for and now they have become the dog that caught the car.
Since the 2016 campaign Donald Trump’s often questionable relationship to the truth has sparked a renewed interest in gaslighting. What has been missing in the recent literature however, is that gaslighting is not only a phenomenon of abusive marriages and corrupt political regimes; it is also the rhetorical playground of the Psychopathic Racial Personality. The world has known no greater an offender of gaslighting. Lauren Duca sees a synergy in Donald Trump. The shocking terrorist attack in Charlottesville Virginia, Trump’s unhinged “on both sides” rant two days later and his “they’re trying to erase our culture and our history” speech one week after that, put Duca’s words in sharper focus:
“Trump won the Presidency by gaslight[ing]. His rise to power has awakened a force of bigotry by condoning and encouraging hatred, but also by normalizing deception”.
Gaslighting is where you will discover the actual grammar of racism, betrayed in its three most common modes of deception ---- projection, transference and denial. For example, during slavery, the black woman’s body was the property of her white master. Therefore, as a matter of law, she could not be raped. From his time as a slave Fredrick Douglass observed:
“The black woman is at the mercy of her slave master’s brothers, uncles, nephews and sons!”
Nonetheless, after slavery, the almost Jack-The-Ripper like attention that some white men had shown towards black women’s bodies was transferred and projected on to the black male and this bogus caricature of the Black Brute, suddenly not concerned with reconstituting his family and combating the reality of rampant disease in the wake of emancipation, but now somewhere fiendishly on the prowl for white women, was yoked to all black men, only to become the forged rationale for thousands of lynchings throughout the Old Jim Crow era. At times, the frenzied search for a single suspect ended in the destruction of an entire community and the massacre of many innocent men, women and children.
While this is but one of the most egregious examples
of gaslighting, it speaks to an entire rhetorical structure that defines how Americans have traditionally shrouded racism in ritual delusion. Unfortunately, most white Americans only encounter the “invented lives” of black people as the self-projection of their own character and culture has been severely usurped long before they walk into any room. Americans have created a multitude of racist archetypes and caricatures that have had centuries to work themselves into the personal unconscious where implicit bias lives. However, each caricature is actually the product of a rhetorical dance that uses gaslighting to project and transfer the wretched contents of a Psychopathic Racial Personality on to the body of a black victim. And, like the alcoholic’s best friend collective denial is the great enabler that perpetuates the demon seed of American culture. The virus of racism is kept alive through the active avoidance of everyday Americans who suddenly find it “discomforting” to even honestly discuss the reality right in front of their eyes.
Beyond the Psychopathic Racial Personality and creeps like Gregory Anton who wish to control their girlfriends or wives, some of the most profound examples of gaslighting are found in Hollywood’s shaky relationship with historical accuracy and with historiography itself. Over a century ago, movies like The Birth Of A Nation and the Dunning School of historians created a terribly flawed and falsified history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, whose resonance has been so powerful that the enormous damage it has wrought for generations upon American society is only now beginning to be reconciled in the removal of some of the more than 1,500 public displays of Confederate monuments, statues, flags and symbols that exist throughout the United States. How many nations in the world make such a public spectacle out of celebrating treasonous rebels defeated in war? One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War came to an end, they exist as blood-stained artifacts that reveal a troubling disrespect for the humanity of black people. Black lives matter! Out of the 109 public schools named after Confederate generals, 27 are majority African American. How many Jewish children are forced to attend schools named after Hitler and Goebbels? And if they do, what in the world could anyone be teaching them?
However, even more insidious effects of gaslighting upon American society are revealed in the ritual delusion that many Americans use to discuss racism. The discourse is fractured from the very beginning by redesignating it as an issue of “race” rather than an issue of “racism”. While the distinction may seem innocuous, it completely alters the perception of what is actually going on. All of a sudden the victim of the socially unacceptable act is implicated in the offense simply by means of “being while black”. It is a neat trick! Racism is now defined through the point of view of the Psychopathic Racial Personality and the entire society remains in collective denial as long as these are the terms of the debate. All of a sudden the conversation is about a mythical “both sides” when there are no videos of black police offices killing white people or putting their knees into the backs of fourteen-year old bikini-clad white girls. Why does the whole nation need to be healed when Blackfolk are receiving all of the injuries? The victim’s reality has been collectively overwritten. This is how white cops kill unarmed black men, women and children and morality is sent on a rhetorical carousel in a dialogue whose ultimate aim is to talk about nothing. Race is not an operative scientific concept. It is a manufactured social construct used to conjure up the “otherness” of people of color and to implicate that “otherness” in the racist act itself. This is how Trayvon Martin, Jordon Davis and Tamir Rice can be shot dead and without blinking an eye Americans began a discourse on whether they needed a mentoring program, instead of investigating the profile of the men who felt they had the right to take their lives. This is how gaslighting seeks to convince us not to believe “our lying eyes” and how white supremacists are emboldened to act out in violence. Racism dims the light of reason when it is hidden in the attic of human consciousness.
How do you prevent yourself from being gaslighted? It may be easier than you think. However, it is more likely than not that you are already being gaslighted and have no idea that it is happening to you. Simply guard your sense of reality and hold your ground. Do not allow yourself to be swept away into a ritual delusion no matter how many people may have been captivated by what you know simply does not make sense. Understand that television news is entertainment and nothing more. Be aware when something is in the news simply because it sounds “sexy” like “missing emails” Question things like: Why do news makers call a terror group “ISIS” instead of its commonly known real name “DASH”? Ask a professional: What exactly is a private server? What’s wrong with owning one of your own? If possible, confront your gaslighter. Usually, they will overreact and immediate make it all about them, painting themselves as the victim. Notice how quickly the president’s spokespeople cop indignation and scold the press. In the film, Gregory Anton’s most intense anger comes when Paula finds her aunt’s letter, potentially revealing the truth of what he is actually trying to do to her. A thief who has gaslighted you will quietly start heading for the door at the slightest suspicion that he has been found out. The gaslighter exaggerates. Racism becomes more than just anti-social, unjust or immoral, it’s “Repulsive!” And furthermore, it’s disgusting that you would even accuse me of that!” ---- Even though you were not accusing anyone of anything, their heartbeat races and he or she raises their voice. At a Pennsylvania State Tea Party convention in the summer of 2013, a moderator reads off a list of Tea Party principles to his audience. Among his list was something that he admonished them to always keep in mind. “The only people who are racist are people who use the word racist!” Although it is abundantly clear that the vast majority of white Americans do not have a single racist bone in their body, far too many are more concerned with being called a racist than the virus of racism itself. Whatever you’re dealing with, just don’t believe the hype! Don’t allow yourself to become completely worn out like Jake Tapper in the Kellyanne Conway Saturday Night Live video (above). Beyond the grand façade, there is always a vast wasteland of unreality that erodes human intelligence and common sense. It is like the apocalyptic netherworld that Neo was shown before given a choice of pills to take. Never forget what you know to be true, even if you will have to keep it to yourself. It’s that simple. If you are involved in an abusive relationship, consult the local authorities.
After rendering the American electorate psychologically exhausted and demoralized over the course of the 2016 campaign, the Trump presidency is the celebrated result of years of the Republican Party’s relentless rancor, vitriol and ad hominen attacks upon the very notion that a black man could actually hold the office of President of the United States, shrouded in ritual denial and nurtured with the narrative complicity of the mainstream press. Throughout the Obama Administration Big News, in the guise of a greedy puerile propaganda machine, often worked to gaslight the American people by painting an image of great partisan acrimony that was coming from “both sides”, when clearly it was not. In Its Even Worse That It Was, authors Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein make it clear that it was the immediate decision not to work with the black president “on anything” and the continued refusal to work with him at all that caused the extreme partisanship in Washington. The Republican Party spent the last decade simply harassing the black president more than anything else. The Democratic base wanted Bush impeached for sending 5,000 Americans to die in a senseless war overseas in Iraq. But they did not spend eight years acting like children fighting over a jungle gym.
More than eight months have gone by and Donald Trump
has proven that he cannot be “presidential” because he simply lacks the class and character. Compare what we are witnessing to President Obama who assumed the mantle gracefully, demonstrating indisputable class and character and who was “presidential” from day one.
What does it mean for a man who occupies the most powerful office in the world to surrender his moral authority? Not by din of an ill-conceived war or even necessarily a culture of corruption in the White House, but by a dearth of individual moral character? A reckless disregard for impropriety, a wild-wild west of indignation, a shameful lack of maturity proudly embodied in one man whose character is meant to embody the virtues of a nation of three hundred and fifty million people of various cultures and sensibilities. The president is gaslighting the American people. Perhaps the joke is really on us. Perhaps Trump did not really want to be president at all. He just wanted to play one on TV. He certainly acts that way. Remember, this is a president who fired the head of the FBI because he did not like the Bureau investigating Russian collusion with his campaign, only to gain himself the legal equivalent of a proctology exam. You just can’t make this stuff up! Like many Americans I too wish for all of this to be over so that I can simply take a shower. Wait! Don’t you hear the footsteps in the attic? Can’t you see the gaslights have begun to dim?