The rise of reverse gaslighting

We live now in an age of reverse gaslighting.

Ordinary gaslighting — the term was popularized by the 1944 movie Gaslight — describes a process of psychological manipulation whose goal is to make ordinary people question their sanity.

Reverse gaslighting, by contrast, aims to convince us that insane realities are perfectly normal.

Imagine: practically the entire population quarantines itself because a couple of government bureaucrats tell them to. Everyone starts wearing little paper masks as patents of their capitulation and, secondarily, as badges of their virtue. Out in the world, they obediently stand six feet away from one another because the same bureaucrats tell them such behavior will “slow the spread” of a seasonal respiratory virus that is dangerous to a minuscule part of the population. This insanity is deemed normal.

So is the insanity of censoring, firing or even imprisoning people who question this insane orthodoxy. In a repellent effort to capitalize on the moral authority of the Holocaust, such dissenters are repudiated as “Covid deniers.” They are ostracized by polite society and subject to all manner of sanctions. All this was insane behavior, but our addiction to reverse gaslighting requires that we regard it, or at least say we regard it, as normal.

Suddenly, certain people are empowered to decide whose businesses are “essential” and whose are expendable. If you own a liquor store, congratulations! Your business is essential. Schools, churches, most restaurants, your aunt’s corner shop: sorry! They must be shuttered. This insanity is accepted, if grudgingly, as normal in the age of reverse gaslighting. You cannot visit your dying grandmother in her nursing home: that interdiction is said to be normal, not cruelly insane.

Imagine: because people like Al Gore, Bill Gates and Greta Thunberg declare that there is a “climate emergency,” politicians enact policies to curtail the use of fossil fuels, the magic key to energy production and hence prosperity. A huge industry of “green energy” initiatives emerges to capitalize on this exacerbated gullibility. As with Covid, all dissent, no matter how well founded, is angrily repudiated as a form of “climate denial,” a tort some campaigners propose to punish with long prison sentences or even death. This rank insanity is transmogrified into normal behavior by reverse gaslighting.

Imagine: biological males — or, to avoid the pleonasm, just “males” — pretend to be females so they can compete as women in sporting events. That practice, and the bureaucracy that encourages and protects it, is insane. But our media, the people we have elected to represent us, and the battalions of unelected minions who enforce the zeitgeist not only insist that it is normal, but insist as well that we pledge our allegiance to its normality.

Imagine: adolescents of various ages start telling the world that there are three “genders,” or thirty, and the world is required to acquiesce, as if this bit of weaponized redefinition were not insane but normal. In many schools and workplaces, any dissent from this pernicious fantasy is deemed a “hate crime,” punishable by mandatory “reeducation,” suspension or worse.

Imagine: a former president whom the regime dislikes emerges as the leading challenger for president. The regime’s response is a tsunami of indictments and other legal actions in multiple states. Among other assaults are concerted efforts to remove this challenger from the ballot. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was removed from the ballot in ten Southern states. But at least that unprecedented action was not hailed as an effort to save “Our Democracy™” as is this new effort to disenfranchise voters. The whole campaign is an instance of public insanity, but the media’s practice of reverse gaslighting proclaims it is simply business as usual.

The list is long. The FBI, which used to pursue gangsters, arsonists and murderers, is weaponized as a praetorian guard for the regime. It now targets pro-life activists, people who visited the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and people who post social media comments that criticize the administration. It also harasses and jails people who worked for or supported Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Tishaura Jones, the mayor of St. Louis, vows to hold business owners accountable for crimes committed in or outside their own premises against their businesses. I write at Easter, and I see that the president of the United States has just issued a proclamation declaring Easter Sunday the “Transgender Day of Visibility.” The United States used to have a southern border. Over the past several years, millions, literally millions, of illegal immigrants, many from polities hostile to the United States, have poured into the country from Mexico. In its latest morsel of lexical creativity, the administration insists that these criminals be denominated “newcomers,” not illegal immigrants. Further, it showers them with free housing, iPhones and government stipends, benefits denied to US citizens. All this is insane, but we are encouraged to tout it as normal.

The deep, the unavoidable, question is where this train of insanity ends. Gaslighting is a form of deception. Reverse gaslighting is a form of self-deception. How thoroughly can a polity deceive itself about basic human realities without collapsing? The United States, the Western world in general, has made a concerted experiment to test that question. I suspect we will encounter the answer a lot sooner and with more brutal velocity than anyone bargained for.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2024 World edition.