If you are unfamiliar with the term “gaslighting,” becoming acquainted with it should be your highest priority. Because it is being used against you on a national scale. And it’s about to get worse.
The term is based on the classic film “Gaslight,” which should also be on your short-list of films to watch if you haven’t seen it, or to rewatch if you have.
If you are also unaware of historian Heather Cox Richardson’s daily reviews on substack, you should also subscribe to those. The July 15, 2020 edition gives us a window into the next stage of gaslighting that the current administration is about to begin.
In her essay, Richardson points out the administration has directed hospitals to begin reporting Covid-19 data to them directly rather than through the Centers for Disease Control, which has been the standard way our government aggregated public health data for 15 years.
She gives a couple of angles on it, but the most important one is that the single biggest factor in successfully gaslighting someone is to isolate them from outside sources of information that may validate their beliefs, and discredit the beliefs you are trying to instill in them. In the movie “Gaslight” the antagonist achieves this by socially isolating his victim, so she has no source other than him by which to judge her sanity.
To do this in political terms, you must control the flow of information to the public.
At first, the Administration, from the president down through the ranks, just stood at the podium and said everything was great, they were on top of it, everything was under control, soon it would be down to just one or two cases, for the “vast majority of Americans, the risk is very, very low,” the U.S. was the world leader in Coronavirus response, and that “We have met the moment and we have prevailed.”*
For those of us who were watching the actual numbers, these appearances seemed more and more as tragi-comic as Baghdad Bob’s press conferences during the Iraq war where he explained how Iraq was defeating coalition forces even as news footage showed coalition tanks driving down the streets of Baghdad.
The Administration finally began to realize that no matter how convincing their lies (to themselves, anyway), they were not working. No matter how many times they lied to the public that Covid-19 is behind us, and that we won thanks to their terrific work, as long as journalists kept talking to other sources, and reporting the raw data, people would know the truth. And the truth is frightening.
Outbreak evolution for the current 10 most affected countries
source: Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center
So the first steps they took to control the information the public received were to sideline and then try to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the nation’s preeminent expert on the pandemic.
But it quickly became apparent to the White House that the public wouldn’t fall for their grade school clique-control tactics of ostracizing and slandering the experts. So, since they can’t completely silence other voices, they’ve taken aim at a lower level – the raw data. The data that continually demonstrates that Dr. Fauci is right in his analysis of the pandemic response.
Once the White House controls the raw data, no independent sources can contradict them.
And then we will have no way of determining our own sanity.
- Vox has a detailed timeline of the administration’s pronouncements on Covid-19