Even the “greenhouse gaslighting” pun we would make has already been done to death.
Mine has been Oil and Gaslighting.
And yet, it seems that ever-topical Anthony Watts is just now catching on to the idea.
This is the owner of the climate denial Web site Watts Up with That? (WUWT) [No, I'm not giving him a link.]
His post over the weekend claims that a 2017 piece in Psychology Today on the 11 warning signs of gaslighting “is wholly applicable to the climate debate.”
It could have been called the 11 warning signs of Trump.
1. They tell blatant lies.
2. They deny they ever said something, even though you have proof.
…
11. They tell you everyone else is a liar.
Continuing on,
Which, of course, it is. Just in the opposite way that Watts and his readers choose to believe.
That’s exactly the point of organized denial’s campaign of blatant lies (flag #1), like that climate models don’t work, undertaken over at least three decades (#4 is that gaslighting happens slowly over time), rife with projection (#8), like Willie Soon getting over $1 million from fossil fuels for his research and then accusing consensus academics of “prostituting science,” and only believable if you accept only that that everyone and everything that contradicts them, from scientific organizations to thermometers, are lying to you (#11).
Once you’ve been fully gaslit, reality is whatever your gaslighter wants it to be. And everything that contradicts it is just evidence of the conspiracy against you.
As the WUWT post proves, once you’ve been indoctrinated well enough, you’ll convince yourself that the lights aren’t any dimmer, even as you stumble about in the dark. Maybe if Watts hadn’t spent all these years dimming the lights at WUWT, his readers would’ve been able to see his reflection in this post.
Comment
StevenWells
Mojo
I know, I know: the term has taken hold in the national lexicon and I’m spitting in the wind, but none of this is gaslighting. It’s plain, garden variety bullshitting. No one’s doubting their own sanity.
Reasonable people don’t doubt theirs because they recognize bullshit when they hear it. Blind-faith followers of bullshit don’t doubt theirs, either; they’re merely gullible and/or choose to accept the bullshit because it’s what they want to hear.
But no one’s gaslighting or getting gaslit.
And by the way, Patrick Hamilton’s play was written in 1938, but the film versions were made in 1940 and ‘44.
The pedantry alert has now passed.
Fuggedaboudit, Steven.
OK, attempted gaslighting if you must, but the Rs and the Climate Denialists do unquestionably mean to drive the rest of us insane, as a form of Owning the Libz.
The techniques were honed in the cases of
- Lead
- Pesticides
- Acid rain
- Auto safety
- Smog
- Ozone
- Tobacco
and more. Note that the Denialists ultimately lost in each of those cases, but only after protecting the relevant industry profits for decades.