The term gaslight was created by the film Gaslight.
So the planet has made yet another circuit around the sun, and the old year has slunk away, to be replaced by the new year of 2023. Traditionally, the end of an old year and the start of a new one have been been the time when people reflect a bit on what occurred during the previous 12 months and considered what could happen during the next, and we at SBM tend to be no different in that respect. Last year at this time, my last post of the year was entitled As 2021 shambles to a close, the misuse of VAERS by antivaxxers continues apace, to be followed two weeks later—I took the Christmas holiday off—by a more general post, Everything old is new again. The depressing thing that I just realized is that I could very easily have simply repurposed both old posts, changing the years and updating some of the examples used, and they would have been perfectly appropriate for this new year too. In fact, as depressing as it sounds, I could just revise and update Everything old is new again every year if I wanted to, and it would remain just as relevant, likely for however long I have left on this earth and long beyond, assuming that someone took up the banner and kept updating it after my demise. But where’s the fun in that? Or the education? Or at least some minor bit of novelty?I saw a post on Joe Mercola's website on New Years' Eve that inspired me to write this post. An article titled The Year of the Gaslighter was published on the website of a man named C. J.Hopkins. Mercola wants to make it easier for him to monetize his Substack by dying his links after 48 hours.
I'm pretty sure I know where Mr.Hopkins is going.
If you’re unfamiliar with what “gaslighting” is, it’s a term that was coined based on the title of the 1944 American film Gaslight, which was based on the 1938 British theatre play Gas Light by Patrick Hamilton, although the term didn’t become widely used to describe the phenomenon to which Hopkins refers in his article until the last decade or so. Indeed, “gaslighting” was named the 2022 Word of the Year by Merriam-Webster based on its skyrocketing usage. Unfortunately, a significant fraction of that usage appears to have come from those opposed to public health, if my reading of conspiracy websites and social media content is any indication.The husband in the film emotionally manipulates his wife to make her doubt her own grasp of reality and sanity so that he could steal from her. The husband uses a variety of techniques to make his wife question reality in the film. One example of the husband's deception, gaslight illumination of the couple's house that seems to dim and flicker whenever the husband leaves his wife alone at home is referred to in the film. He replies that he doesn't know what she's talking about and insists that the lights are not flickering. The meaning of gaslighting has changed since the 21st century since it was used to make people question their memories and reality. Misinformation propaganda is used to create a false picture of the past in order to manipulate a population. Look at the way it was described.
But in recent years, we have seen the meaning of gaslighting refer also to something simpler and broader: “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage.” In this use, the word is at home with other terms relating to modern forms of deception and manipulation, such as fake news, deepfake, and artificial intelligence.
The idea of a deliberate conspiracy to mislead has made gaslighting useful in describing lies that are part of a larger plan. Unlike lying, which tends to be between individuals, and fraud, which tends to involve organizations, gaslighting applies in both personal and political contexts. It’s at home in formal and technical writing as well as in colloquial use…
It is clear from his October post that it is a broader meaning.
One of the most basic and effective techniques that cults, totalitarian systems, and individuals with fascistic personalities use to disorient and control people’s minds is “gaslighting.” You’re probably familiar with the term. If not, here are a few definitions:
“the manipulation of another person into doubting their perceptions, experiences, or understanding of events.” American Psychological Association
“an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity.” Psychology Today
“a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind. Typically, gaslighters are seeking to gain power and control over the other person, by distorting reality and forcing them to question their own judgment and intuition.” Newport Institute
The main goal of gaslighting is to confuse, coerce, and emotionally manipulate your victim into abandoning their own perception of reality and accepting whatever new “reality” you impose on them. Ultimately, you want to completely destroy their ability to trust their own perception, emotions, reasoning, and memory of historical events, and render them utterly dependent on you to tell them what is real and what “really” happened, and so on, and how they should be feeling about it.
The term gaslighting is used by conspiracy theorists to accuse their critics of what they are actually doing.
Antivaxxers and COVID-19 minimizers use the word gaslighting a lot. A search of the website of the Brownstone Institute for the term "gaslighting" brings up over 20 articles, like this one from October, claiming that we are being "gaslighted" by governments about "lockdown" A search of my favorite antivax and quackery conspiracy site, Natural News, produced a number of uses of the word (and a fair number from before), from everything from COVID-19 to the 2020 election. Gaslighting: How left-wing psychopaths demonize and demoralize their opposition and The gaslighting of the American mind are both excellent examples of projection. Mercola has a lot of articles that use the word. Yesterday, Dr. Peter McCullough, known for having declared COVID-19 vaccines a "holocaust" and tool of "depopulation" a year and a half ago, happily noticed that the word "gaslighting" had been used.
Knowing the claim that they are trying to gaslight you was a major staple of the messaging from COVID-19 minimizers, antimaskers, "lockdown" opponents, and antivaxers. It's all about projection.
In his October post, he went all-in on the conspiracy narrative about COVID-19.
Since the Spring of 2020, we have been subjected to official gaslighting on an unprecedented scale. In a sense, the “Apocalyptic Pandemic” PSYOP has been one big extended gaslighting campaign (comprising countless individual instances of gaslighting) inflicted on the masses throughout the world. The events of this past week were just another example.
Basically, what happened was, a Pfizer executive confirmed to the European Parliament last Monday that Pfizer did not know whether its Covid “vaccine” prevented transmission of the virus before it was promoted as doing exactly that and forced on the masses in December of 2020. People saw the video of the executive admitting this, or heard about it, and got upset. They tweeted and Facebooked and posted videos of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Bill Gates, the Director of the CDC, official propagandists like Rachel Maddow, and various other “experts” and “authorities” blatantly lying to the public, promising people that getting “vaccinated” would “prevent transmission,” “protect other people from infection,” “stop the virus in its tracks,” and so on, which totally baseless assertions (i.e., lies) were the justification for the systematic segregation and persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” and the fomenting of mass fanatical hatred of anyone challenging the official “vaccine” narrative, and the official New Normal ideology, which hatred persists to this very day.
The New Normal propaganda apparatus (i.e., the corporate media, health “experts,” et al.) responded to the story predictably. They ignored it, hoping it would just go away. When it didn’t, they rolled out the “fact-checkers” (i.e., gaslighters).
The kind of projection that I am talking about is the accusation that fact checkers are gaslighters. If you don't believe me, remember that the Pfizer RCT didn't show that the vaccine prevented transmission, even though it was clearly stated that such was not the case. The trial's goal was to show that the vaccine reduced disease. The zombie claim that the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission was exhumed from its grave in October, which is why the first post was published in October. I wrote about it before he published it.
There are a number of studies that show that the vaccines do prevent the transmission of the coronaviruses, but they are not as effective at preventing the Delta and Omicron variant. I pointed out that there is good evidence that the vaccine against COVID-19 can be used to prevent transmission in high-risk situations, such as nursing homes and long-term care facilities. The VET may have fallen for the Delta variant. There is less evidence published for the BA.4 and BA.5 variant due to the fact that they took off a year ago, but there is still a growing body of evidence.
There are many examples, that is just one. It started in 2020 and continues to this day. The epicenter of the first and largest early US COVID-19 outbreak in New York City was written by our very own Dr. Jonathan Howard. His article was in response to an article that was published by the Brownstone Institute. They were relatively empty and saw a drop in visitors. She used five observations to fool her audience into believing her claim.
I will give you a taste of Dr. Hockett's gaslighting by citing two of his refutations.
She backs this claim up by saying “Only 3% of the people who came to New York City hospital EDs during the spring 2020 March” this is because we had little to no testing in March of 2020! The testing we did have was reserved for people who traveled from mainland China.
— Eric Burnett, MD (@Doctor_Eric_B) November 5, 2022
saying our EDs weren’t overrun bc you didn’t see a lot of lab confirmed C19 at that time is ridiculous. on a personal note, we lost an ED physician to suicide bc of the sheer amount of devastation she bore witness to. it’s extremely disrespectful to suggest a this
— Eric Burnett, MD (@Doctor_Eric_B) November 5, 2022
This is very similar to the way in which hospitals canceled non-emergency procedures and went on emergency footing after the swine flu hit. The COVID-19 minimizers said that hospitals were empty because they had discharged every patient who could be discharged. Some people wander through hospitals and emergency rooms taking selfies and posting them on social media to make it look like there are more patients.
This is an example of the same thing.
We had to convert a football field into a patient ward. We needed to expand hospital capacity in the state by 50% to accommodate admissions. Our traditional hospitalist census is around 100-110 patients, that ballooned to 250 during the worst of the surge. save me this excuse.
— Eric Burnett, MD (@Doctor_Eric_B) November 5, 2022
That’s because our hospitals were over capacity and we couldn’t admit every single person with resp symptoms. It’s called triage, you should look it up. Only the sickest covid patients were admitted to the hospital.
— Eric Burnett, MD (@Doctor_Eric_B) November 5, 2022
This reminds me of the whole lie about dying with carbon dioxide.
You understand the concept. The government and public health officials were accused of "gaslighting" by Dr. Hockett. There are a lot of examples.
The projection above doesn't stop him from starting his most recent article off thusly.
Well, it has been quite a year, 2022. I’m officially dubbing it “The Year of the Gaslighter.” I was going to dub it “The Year of the Mother of All Mindfucking Global-Capitalist Gaslighters,” but that seemed like a mouthful, so I’m opting for brevity.
Seriously, if there were an Olympics of Gaslighting, GloboCap (i.e., the global corporatocracy) would take the gold in every event. At this point, the majority of the global masses have been successfully gaslighted into a semi-conscious, quasi-cyclothymic state in which they oscillate, on a moment-by-moment basis, between robotic obedience and impotent rage,” you know, the people “walking around in their masks and prophylactic face shields and injecting themselves with experimental “vaccines” for reasons they no longer even pretend to be able to articulate without gibbering like imbeciles are genuflecting at the feet of an oligarch huckster who they believe has come to deliver them from Wokeness.” Those who are not still walking around in their masks and prophylactic face shields and injecting themselves with experimental “vaccines” for reasons they no longer even pretend to be able to articulate without gibbering like imbeciles are genuflecting at the feet of an oligarch huckster who they believe has come to deliver them from Wokeness.
If you were GloboCap, and in the process of imposing your new official ideology on the entire planet in a kind of global Gleichschaltung op, and otherwise establishing your “New Normal Reich,” and you needed the masses confused and compliant, you couldn’t ask for much more from your Gaslighting Division!
That bit about being delivered from "Wokeness" is definitely referring to Musk, who is insufficiently skeptical to Hopkins, even though he's dismantled the efforts to combat COVID-19 misinformation.
Do any of this sounds familiar? Mike Adams likes to describe those who accept science-based narratives and treatments in medicine with this kind of language. The idea of conspiracy theorists being more aware, intelligent, and clever than the rest of the population is a very flattering one. They aren't sheeples. They are the people with the hidden knowledge. You can become like them if you listen to their conspiracy narratives and compare what the Nazis did to what they said they would do. German political, social, and cultural life were rearranged under the Nazis. It is the German term that Hitler and the Nazis used to refer to the unification of German society. This is one of the Godwins that conspiracy theorists love.
Which leads to the projection.
The gaslighting got underway in January, when the corporate media, health authorities, and other major organs of the New Normal Reich started suddenly “discovering” that the official Covid narrative was “inaccurate,” or, you know, a bunch of lies.
A series of limited hangouts ensued.
Suddenly, it appeared that the “Covid case” and “Covid death” statistics were inaccurate, or inflated, or had been fabricated. The “vaccines” didn’t work. They were killing people. Lockdowns had been a “serious mistake.” And so on. Duplicitous politicians, pusillanimous public-health authorities, perfidious pundits, and assorted other professional sycophants and lying weasels were shocked to discover they had inadvertently been part of the most insidious PSYOP that had ever been perpetrated on the masses in the history of insidious mass-PSYOPs.
The Last Days of the Covidian Cult were upon us! The Corporatocracy had overplayed their hand, and underestimated their opposition, and they knew it.
The kind of evidence C. J. Hopkins uses to accuse "Them" of gas lighting is worth mentioning. It was claimed that 40% of patients in hospitals diagnosed with COVID-19 had been admitted for something else. Both of them came across as pretty ignorant, not knowing how diagnoses are not always straightforward.
And.
Treated an older man last wk who fell at home hitting his head. Found to have a temp of 39. CT-subdural. Died a few hrs later. Turned out to be COVID +. Was this “incidental” or more likely did the illness facilitate his fall? Cause of death on death certificate was the subdural.
— Will Grad (@postgradw) January 1, 2022
It's a gaslighting tactic to use ambiguity in diagnoses to claim that COVID-19 case counts are overstated. There is an article in the New York Times from December 2021 that states that most vaccines in existence at the time would not do a good job preventing infections with Omicron variant but still offer some protection against severe illness.
People with breakthrough cases may experience only asymptomatic infection or mild illness, but they can pass the virus to unvaccinated people, who could fall more severely ill, and become a source of new variants.
We saw that in 2022, not that thevaccines didn't work. He continued to do what he was doing, which was gaslighting. The link to the claim that vaccines are killing people was a single anecdotal report of a British presenter who died of a blood clot after the AstraZeneca vaccine, a rare association primarily observed in women that was detected for this vaccine very early and led to its temporary withdrawal from use, as we His link to the claim that "locking downs were a mistake" is to an article about an interview with David Frost, who said that "locking downs had been a serious mistake." I can only respond with sarcasm about how I always prefer to get my public health takes from a politician than from actual public health scientists, since I am old enough to have done a double take.
Then, of course, Hopkins engages in that favorite of favorite crank gaslighting tactic, portraying science as a cult, even using a favorite COVID-19 minimizer/denier term.
I could cite example after example of COVID-19 misinformation and misinformation peddlers accusing governments, the medical establishment, and public health organizations of "gaslighting" about the Pandemic, but will spare you. The projection is pure.
One might wonder if Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies after reading the title of my post. The answer to the question is both yes and no. The answer is that these years weren't the "years of the gaslighter" as propagandists claim. The years of the gaslighter were the years of the gaslighter because of the misinformation peddlers likeHopkins. It doesn't seem like it will be any different. The gas lighting is worse than ever and looks like it will only get worse.
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