Gaslighted: What We Got for Christmas in 2016

We’re now on the very cusp of a new year, and there’s one thing about the passing one that I can say with certainty: THE news story of 2016 is that a huge swath of the American public, stretching from left to right, deeply distrusts both 1) establishment candidates from either party and 2) corporate media. That’s the news story of the year. Period.

But look what our political class and media are up to here at year’s end. For weeks now they been frantically trying to fill that media, both print and TV, with: "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! They’re bombarding us with fake news!”

As a diversion tactic from the true Big Story, you’d have thought they could come up with something better.

To give bite to their claims that “fake news” determined the election, which is absurd on the face of it and absurd down to the bone of it, our leaders last week even passed actual legislation designed to cast doubt on alternative news organizations, legislation that is almost literally state censorship. In America.

What in hell are they up to?

To give yet more bite to their claims, the Obama administration two days ago kicked out thirty-five Russian diplomats, promising yet further reactions to the Russian “aggression” we’ve suffered.

This is major stuff, sure to grab headlines and keep the talking heads talking. Which is just what it is meant to do. Because at present Washington elites’ most important task is to keep us the citizenry from catching our breath and thinking clearly about the year’s real news--namely our widespread and reasonable disgust at these same elites’ decades-long systematic betrayal of our interests in favor of Whatever the Corporations Want.

And here I have to watch non-comatose, intelligent friends on Facebook and elsewhere still debating the question of whether Russia hacked the DNC or, if not, who Wikileaks’ source was. It's depresseing. Because it's irrelevant. It is a diversion from our real story, a strategic diversion that sadly is almost working.

Consider: What if the Russians did hack us? Really--what if? Would there be any surprise in that? Hacking is an integral part of intelligence work. We, the Chinese, the Russians--it's what we do, year in year out. And? If the Russians hacked us, the whole story should be on improving cyber security, not on the question of how evil the Russians are, and certainly not on the question of whether alternative media sources are trustworthy, which is an issue entirely unrelated to cyber security.

In fact the Russian hacking meme was launched in reaction to the abject horror Washington elites felt face to face with the unthinkable. Their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost. Which is not supposed to happen. They thought they were doing so well. And she lost.

In a breathtakingly hypocritical move, the hacking meme was launched simultaneously with the "fake news" meme. Note how these two were rolled out as virtual twins. The clear intent was to create a generalized impression in the public mind: “If we Americans didn't vote for Clinton, it was because the Enemy is manipulating our media!” Which notion is entirely false of course, and doesn't even logically follow from the premise of hacking. Though there may be some evidence of hacking, in fact there is no evidence Russia seeded our press with fake news. (The Washington Post, ever eager to please its masters, did its best to establish a link between the two memes, but failed miserably, as Glenn Greenwald demonstrates. The article is a staggering exposé of just how far journalistic standards have fallen among our corporate media.)

Our leaders prodded these two memes (“Russian hacking”; “fake news”) onto the stage simultaneously in order to make them sing as a duo. That the connecting logic is lacking, that they are not in fact a duo, is unimportant when it comes to manipulating public perceptions. We Americans are being subjected to a sophisticated gaslighting campaign; and frighteningly, to judge by how much media and mental bandwidth space it’s taking up, this campaign is near accomplishing its goal.

Gaslighting, if you aren’t familiar with the term, describes a particular style of psychological manipulation. It seeks to confuse the victim by overwhelming him/her with an ersatz version of reality, a version presented so aggressively and in such an offhand manner that the victim begins to doubt his or her sanity, or at least feels suddenly on unfamiliar ground. The gaslighter befuddles the victim by swiftly changing the focus of attention, and making her argue irrelevant points or swallow illogical givens so as to wear her out. Gaslighting originally describes sociopathic behavior in the context of relationships, but the concept is being used more and more in recent years to describe sophisticated state propaganda techniques. There are many useful articles on the arsenal of gaslighting techniques (here’s one for instance) and if you aren’t familiar with this arsenal, it’s well worth getting up to speed.

In this current instance, which we might call the Great Christmas Gaslighting of 2016, the clear purpose is to obfuscate and confuse the public on five fundamentals:

1) Americans rejected Hillary Clinton because she was the establishment candidate, and Americans had had enough of this kind of politics under the current president. Further, that the mainstream media so clearly sided with Clinton proved to many that she was not to be trusted. Ditto with her and the DNC’s treatment of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries. That Clinton could lose to Donald Trump proves just how deep this distrust was.

2) If the Russians hacked the DNC, that in itself did not cause Clinton to lose the election. She lost, again, because Americans didn’t want another corporate-bought Washington insider in the White House.

3) The origin of the data Wikileaks received is not the main issue for most American voters, regardless of what the media says, and in fact it is almost as likely the data was received via a leak from within the Clinton campaign. But again, in relation to the real news story of 2016, whichever is true matters little to most Americans because . . .

4) No one has credibly disputed the authenticity of the emails Wikileaks published, and those emails, without any “fake” elaborations on their content, were already enough to prove collusion with the media, a conspiracy against Bernie Sanders, and pay to play.

5) The “fake news” scare is itself hollow. “Pizzagate”, the only fanciful conspiracy theory resulting from the Wikileaks releases, was not an elaborate piece of Russian disinformation, but merely the product of a conspiracy-hungry western blogosphere. Westerners don’t need Russia to concoct conspiracy theories, and such theories have always been around. Some elements of the public are always vulnerable to BS claims, but that in itself is no excuse, in America, to support programs of state censorship. Yes, we’re looking at you, Mr. Obama. It will be nice to see you go.

And so: What connection does fake news even HAVE to Russia? There is no connection, even though our establishment pundits are babbling overtime to imply one. I guess they know on which side their bread is buttered.

With the level of public disgust at Washington Business As Usual, our government and corporate media elites are now in panic mode. They are, after all, a class of many thousands of individuals whose very lucrative careers are at risk if they lose public trust, and they see they are losing it fast. Their goal at present is to dominate the conversation with an ersatz version of reality and hope the public changes its focus. They turn to gaslighting as a tactic.

Gaslighting:

1) If they see the public doesn’t trust them and their own political leadership, quick--Point to the leadership in Moscow as a dangerous threat that needs to be dealt with.

2) If they see the public doesn’t trust the media they use to direct public opinion, quick--Concoct a “fake news” epidemic to make the public return to trusting to only mainstream media.

3) Do this all at the same time so that the public will get the vague impression that Russia is behind the “fake news”.

So what did we Americans get for Christmas this year? We got gaslighted. And we’re still getting gaslighted, more so with every passing week, because gaslighting depends on bombarding the victim with false claims, repeating them so often and so fervently that the victim starts to repeat them in his or her sleep.

That the concept grew out of the study of unhealthy relationships with sociopaths is perhaps helpful. The American public has long been in a relationship with a lying sociopath, and that sociopath is the corporatocracy in Washington. For decades, our leaders in both executive and legislative branches, from both parties, have allowed corporate interests to outsource our jobs, military-corporate interests to drag us into one unnecessary war after another, and Wall Street elites to rig our financial markets so as to make us, the population, the big losers whenever those markets crash. And if we react in a sane way, by flatly rejecting more of same, we seem them now battering us with 24/7 propaganda about how our real problem is in Moscow.

Under this constant and systematic abuse, if we are to keep ourselves sane, and keep struggling for a functional democracy, we must not forget the real news story of this year. And so I’ll repeat my first paragraph:

THE news story of 2016 is that a huge swath of the American public, stretching from left to right, deeply distrusts both 1) establishment candidates from either party and 2) corporate media. That’s the news story of the year. Period.

At the start of the new year, then, our questions should be: WHY has this distrust grown so deep and what are we going to do about it? Has it grown so deep because of “Russian operatives”? The suggestion is laughable. Are we going to return to trusting the mainstream media and mainstream politicians, are we going to shun “fake news” sources that don’t look and sound like Anderson Cooper? We’d be insane to do so. So HOW shall we proceed to ensure that we’re not systematically manipulated over the years to come by the same band of corporate predators and fake progressives (Hello, Hillarack Obinton) that have been playing us since the 1990s?

Whatever we do, we must keep thinking and talking about our REAL story. It is only on such solid ground that we might think clearly to change the dynamic that has brought us to where we are. Which is not the best of places.

But at least, as 2017 begins, the establishment is in panic mode. Let’s keep it that way.

Eric Mader

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PANIC: Washington Elites in Full Propaganda Mode

CNN before the election; CNN after the election.
by David Hammond

Well, I honestly thought we had dodged a bullet involving war with Russia by not electing Hillary Clinton, but it looks like I was wrong. Given Clinton's defeat in the presidency, her controllers are now simply attempting to advance the timeline. Never mind the absurdity of the CIA complaining about election meddling, when that's been their particular specialty, in foreign governments, for at least the past seventy years. Never mind that our government has the gall to lie to us about "fake news" when our own Supreme Court has ruled that the mainstream news media is under absolutely no obligation to tell the truth. Never mind that the CIA has a documented history of infiltrating our news media through Operation Mockingbird and who knows what else, and has been called out by the highest members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, decade after decade, for being inherently deceitful from the inside out. Never mind that Julian Assange, top US intelligence officers, and even former UK ambassador Craig Murray have all explicitly stated that the expose of corrupt DNC activity was a leak, not a hack.

I suppose it may also be relevant that exactly twenty years ago TIME magazine proudly reported on the feats of American political consultants who manipulated the Russian election to ensure a Boris Yeltsin win, using a covert plan that involved specialized polling (similar to the Clinton campaign’s weighted polling that split Independents in half, giving her at least a constant 10% bump nationally) a negative ad campaign, propaganda, and other tools of the political manipulation trade.

This latest media propaganda blitz isn't so shocking on its own because similar tactics have presaged every war of choice America has ever been in. But to see so many intelligent people hysterically lap it up while apparently salivating for war with Russia and decrying "fake news" is getting a little creepy.

And the craziest part is that nearly every cheerleader is on the so-called left (of which I have been a lifelong member) when aren't we the ones who are supposed to see through government BS and lies as they goad us into yet another war? Surely such hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance can't be simply because our president is a Democrat, can it? Not even sure if I want to know the answer to that.

America, you are being lied to, yet again. You are being herded into yet another war of choice by powers that will say absolutely anything to get you to believe whatever they want you to believe. As Rahm Emmanuel infamously put it: "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Unfortunately, the establishment candidate's loss is just such an opportunity and they are capitalizing on it fiercely. How can this even happen? They are basically eliminating alternative news media with HR 6393, which was just quietly passed in the House, a bill that is quite literally the beginning of government censorship, with all of social media onboard. And, of all organizations, they're using Snopes as one of their go-to judges of what is “fake”, a widely-discredited source that routinely serves up misinformation, disinformation, and flat-out lies. Germany is even following suit by threatening to sue Facebook for €500,000 for every "fake" post allowed to stay up for more than 24 hours. When this kind of law can pass muster, it really doesn't matter which side of the aisle you are on. It should send a chill down the spine of anybody who appreciates their First Amendment rights. And as always, who is watching the watchers? This is nothing short of a open gate straight to tyranny.

Yet their technique has always been to point frantically to a threat so big and so encompassing that people will be clamoring for whatever medicine they want to sell. Its called problem -> reaction -> solution, and it's been their modus operandi for as long as anyone on the planet has been alive. Of course, they create the problem, fake the reaction, and then enact their preplanned solution, but is anyone really paying attention?

Right now, our government and their pliant mainstream media are engaged in a full-on fake news blitz, telling a lie so big and so outrageous that you'll have no choice but to believe it, or risk thinking the whole world has gone insane. This is called gaslighting, by the way. Look into it because it's one of the newest forms of mass manipulation in the book, and it's being aimed directly at you. Essentially a spin-off of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' famous quip “Tell a lie big enough and loud enough, and people will eventually believe it,” contemporary gaslighting adds subtle techniques of psychological manipulation to disorient the populace into submission.

Of course if Hillary Clinton had won, and the Trump camp were making these same ludicrous accusations, based on the same dearth of evidence, the left would be howling and scowling and ridiculing them day and night. When are people going to realize that, left or right, we are being repeatedly played to acquiesce to the establishment agenda? Naturally, I did not vote for Trump and I do not support Trump. But I have a very big problem with glaring hypocrisy and selective outrage--especially when those playing such games dangerously throw all logic and common sense out the window while risking war with a nuclear power.

The same goes for the idea that we need to overturn this election. Caveat: Unless you are personally willing to fight in a civil war, then please stop immediately. Unless you are willing to throw this country into blind chaos and bloodshed, then please stop. And again, just think: if Trump supporters demanded overturning the election, the left would climb over themselves to use that as evidence of crazed depravity, leveling every possible insult imaginable, and very likely threatening violence. Don't expect that the same thing wouldn't happen if Clinton supporters get anywhere near actually overturning this election.

And isn't it ironic that an establishment complaining about "fake news" was all in for a candidate who openly stated to Goldman Sachs that “You have to have a public position, as well as a private position”? The message is quite clear: It's basically okay to lie to you, the public, as long as we're the ones doing it. But if somebody exposes our lies--Russia for instance, or some recently-murdered DNC staffer, namely Seth Rich, then it's clearly not okay.

And while the mainstream media implicates everybody not named Hillary Clinton for her loss, we're suddenly pretending it's the 1950s again and there's a Russky hiding under every bed and anybody who disagrees with the establishment's deceitful narrative is a Kremlin operative. The fact that our current Democratic Party's primary allies are the CIA, Internet censors, and McCarthyist hacks should strike the sane left observer as alarming, but then this is 2016 I suppose, so God only knows what's possible.

Who can be blind to the painful irony in the fact that the evidence for this supposed “election hacking” is nothing more than "a secret report, leaked by an anonymous insider, backed by no proof whatsoever, from an agency with a history of lying to the public." (Thank you, Estela Jordan, for that concise summary.)

And doesn't it seem a bit odd that the Orwellian NSA, which tracks every detail of our personal lives, somehow can't quite manage to trace this hack? “Of course they can't trace it,” sanity says, “because it's a leak, not a hack.” But plain sanity isn’t going to stop the government and its mainstream media lackeys from telling you otherwise.

According to CNN, our current president warned: "Mr. Putin can weaken us just like he is trying to weaken Europe if we buy into notions that it is okay to intimidate the press or lock up dissidents."

Oh really, you mean as in writing off all alternative and investigative news media as "fake news" while threatening to lock up true patriots like Edward Snowden, thus forcing them into exile? This from the same guy who promised to champion whistleblowers--then went on to prosecute more than all other presidents combined?

And isn't it getting a little hard to stomach that, even if Russia did hack the emails, their only crime was exposing the monumental lies and deceit that have become the hallmark of Clinton, Inc. and the DNC--yet never a single word about that is mentioned? So does this now mean that we shoot all messengers for delivering bad news? That exposing a lie fully implicates you in that lie or makes you a greater threat than the liar? What kind of upside-down, backwards, bizarro logic is that? Even if Russia did it, their only real "crime" would simply be exposing the truth about our so-called leaders.

There's no way the government can pull off this blitzkrieg of deception unless Americans abandon all logic and reason and allow the cognitive dissonance to fully take over. That again is part of the strategy of gaslighting. In insistent and logical tones, the manipulator repeats illogical things. And so our Washington elites continue screaming "Fake news from Russia!" over and over again, screaming it in the face of the universal recognition that the Wikileaks emails are entirely authentic, screaming it and waiting for us to grow uncertain of our mental footing and begin screaming along.

And as always, the final choice here is ours. No, we do not have a truly representative government, but we do still retain some influence. We can take their word for it and simply acquiesce, just like we did with the Iraq war, or we can stand firm and hold them to somewhat sane standards of accountability while boldly calling them out on their clearly illogical lies and propaganda. I pray that Americans make the right choice this time.