Gaslighting

The media is all abuzz about the "revelations" of Donald Trump's attorney, Michael Cohen, gleefully hoping that the Cohen tapes and testimony will give special counsel Robert Mueller the ammunition he has been looking for well over year. "Collusion!" they cry. "Obstruction!" they exclaim. "Impeachment!" they shout. Back in a world where Trump Derangement Syndrome does not pervade every waking moment of people's lives, things are being accomplished by this president—agreements on trade, a GDP that topped 4 percent, the NoKos taking (for them) a more measured approach to the United States. But other stuff has happened as well, and it's stuff that the Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media definitely, positively, undeniably don't want the voting public to focus on.

But how do the Dems and the media approach a major scandal that clearly originated in the past administration, clearly involved the weaponization of a federal law enforcement agency, and clearly indicated that political appointees in executive positions in that agency were politically biased at best and blatantly and potentially criminally corrupt at worst? They rely on gaslighting, that's how.

Psychology Today defines gaslighting this way:

Gaslighting is a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality. It works much better than you may think. Anyone is susceptible to gaslighting, and it is a common technique of abusers, dictators, narcissists, and cult leaders. It is done slowly, so the victim doesn't realize how much they've been brainwashed.

In the context of the Crossfire-Hurricane scandal, the Dems and their trained hamsters work very, very hard to convince the public that clear evidence of surveillance of an opposing political campaign isn't, that blatant attempts to mislead FISA court judges weren't; that blatant lies by senior government official aren't; that massive redactions of government reports were justified by "national security," that ... you get the point.

Mollie Hemingway writes:

The media reaction to both the redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap applications and President Trump’s tweets was pure gaslighting. They claimed the FISA applications hurt the critics’ case. It wasn’t that they reported the news that critics of the FISA application felt vindicated while defenders of the wiretap applications also felt vindicated. They wrote as partisans in a war with those skeptical of FISA abuse.

The New York Times went with both “Without Evidence, Trump Claims Vindication From Release of Carter Page Documents” and “How a Trump Decision Revealed a G.O.P. Memo’s Shaky Foundation.” The latter headline was in reference to the House Intelligence report. The accompanying article completely ignored the criminal referral from Graham and Grassley that buttressed the HPSCI allegations.

USA Today went with “President Trump, allies dismiss revelations in new court documents tied to Russia probe.” The Washington Post went on a days-long tantrum. See, for example, “Carter Page FISA warrants underscore the difficulty of disproving presidential falsehoods,” “The Carter Page wiretap dispute isn’t a fair fight,” and an error-riddled, tangent-laden “fact” “check” headlined “Over four days, false claims dominated Trump’s Twitter feed.”

This is part of a pattern for the media when they encounter facts related to the surveillance of the Trump campaign. When Department of Justice officials leaked to the media that they had run at least one informant against the Trump campaign, a breathtaking admission by any sense of news judgment, the news was buried in the middle of the story and completely downplayed.

Others joined in with the gaslighting, spending weeks arguing — and I’m not joking here — that running a secret government informant against a campaign is not spying on a campaign.

The Times headline was — hand to God — “F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims.” CNN contributor and Obama director of national intelligence James Clapper told the viewing audience that actually “it was a good thing” that Trump’s campaign was spied on. A Washington Post journalist wrote in defense of obscuring the spying: “Trump’s win: We’re debating a ‘spy,’ not an ‘informant.'”

Think back to the top of this post—gaslighting is intended to mislead and ultimately convince the targets that they can't trust common sense or clear and irrefutable evidence. Gaslighting implies that words written on paper don't mean what they say, that anyone who trusts reality is in fact a conspiracy theorist who is unstable or insane. All of that is gaslighting and we're seeing it employed every single day.

For supposedly respected media sources gaslighting is reprehensible. For the Democrats, it's been business as usual since the first of multiple scandals broke in the previous administration.

The sad reality is that it works, but only so far.

The Dems would prefer for us to believe that Donald Trump colluded with the Russkies to defeat Hillary Clinton using nefarious means. That narrative is also gaslighting, but nevermind. In reality, I suspect the general voting public sensed that scandal and corruption were endemic within the previous administration and acted to 'drain the swamp' by voting for Trump. The voting public also sensed that they were being gaslighted by senior members of the previous administration (think: the Benghazi lies) and decided that continuing its policies (not to mention its corruption) was a bad idea. They voted for not-Hillary.

Is the same thing happening now? That remains to be seen.