ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Gaslighting: How Leftists Demonize And Demoralize Their Opposition
THURSDAY, APR 01, 2021 - 11:40 PM
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,
We have all heard this time honored cautionary mantra:
“All governments lie”.
It’s not a theory, it is a fact that history has proven time after time.
I would only expand on the rule and say this:
All governments, all corporations, all corporate media, all think tanks, and all corporate funded activist groups lie. There is a reason why public trust is at all time lows for the majority of these organizations, and it’s not because they are managed by good and honest people.
If you operate on the assumption that these groups are lying to you most of the time then you will find yourself on the right side of history.
That said, there are questions we need to ask ourselves if we ever hope to change the world for the better and remove these liars from power:
Why do they lie? Why has this become a rule to live by? And, how are they able to lie and get away with it so often?
Well, it’s not because power corrupts. That cliché might be true to a point, but I think it’s a way for people to dismiss the bigger problem because they are afraid to address the ugly truth. The reality is, power does not necessarily corrupt; it’s that the corrupt seek out power.
Governments and other mainstream institutions always lie because psychopathic liars always infiltrate and overrun them. We have very few checks in place to prevent this, and very little is understood about psychopaths in the general public. To understand destructive institutions is to understand the character traits and methods of the psychopaths that run them.
Psychopaths are not very complicated people nor are they all that intelligent, but they often succeed because they are relentless in their pursuits. The common signs of psychopathy include a complete lack of empathy, the obsessive desire for dominance, the use of physical or psychological violence to gain control over others, a narcissistic need to feel superior to everyone else and a habit of playing the victim while victimizing others.
A common assumption about psychopaths is that they are incapable of working in a group or organizing for mutual gain. This is simply nonsense. In reality, numerous studies have shown that psychopaths are adept at finding their own kind in a crowd and even working together as a pack of predators. Some modern examples would be organized crime, cartels, sex traffickers, online scamming groups and religious cults.
Almost all psychopaths are inherent cowards; they will rarely pick on anyone their own size unless they have large numbers. The worst case scenario is fully realized organized psychopathy; the advent of a totalitarian culture in which psychopathic behavior is rewarded and defended by those in authority or influence, while honesty, morality and liberty are punished.
Over the course of generations, psychopaths have used different groups and ideologies to gain control over the public, but today organized psychopaths have chosen the cult of socialism, social justice, fake environmentalism and leftist ideology as their vehicles. Essentially, we are dealing with a modernized version of communism. And if we examine the habits of current leftist and globalist “movements” we will see a lot of similarities to historic communism, not to mention numerous psychopathic behaviors.
The use of “Gaslighting” as a weapon is a classic mainstay of psychopaths and by extension communist regimes, and it is visible EVERYWHERE in politics and the media right now. It’s perhaps ironic that I am publishing this article on April Fools Day, because gaslighting is very much a kind of trick, a con game. And, in order to control people, it helps to humiliate them and make them doubt their own conceptions of reality.
The basic definition of gaslighting is the manipulation of a person by psychological means into questioning their own sanity. In other words, making a sane person believe they might be insane. This, however, is not an adequate explanation of gaslighting. It’s not only about questions of sanity, it is also about questions of principle and morality.
The communist Soviet Union was notorious for gaslighting the public with propaganda that suggested anyone who defied the will of the state and who demanded freedom was “mentally ill”. The Cheka secret police and the KGB had special hospitals set aside for political dissidents called “Psikhushkas”. People of any prominence who were critical of the status quo were immediately disappeared and sent to these facilities after being accused of mental instability.
In Maoist China, especially during the Cultural Revolution, Mao targeted impressionable and gullible Chinese youth, brainwashing them into believing there was “institutional imperialism” hiding within every facet of Chinese society.
The stability of communism in China was under question at the time, and Mao knew a rebellion was possible. So, instead of immediately cracking down with the military, he encouraged Chinese academics and youths to “rebel” and “bring down the secret imperialists”. He redirected social discontent and aimed it at a non-existent ghost so that a rebellion would never rise up against him and the politburo.
Young and dumb Chinese activists thought they were rebelling when they were actually serving the interests of government elites.
Gaslighting in China was pervasive. Any person that held the most remote belief in freedom, free markets, business, private property or anyone that had any objections to the crimes of the communists was forced to undergo a trial, a kangaroo court called a “struggle session”.
During a struggle session, a dissident was sometimes apprehended, or sometimes shamed and compelled to stand before a large crowd of true believers in the communist faith. The crowd would browbeat them with accusations of criminality and immorality, trying to convince them of the evil of their ways. If the dissident bowed and submitted to the collective, begging forgiveness, then they might be allowed to live, but they had to BELIEVE that they had sinned. They had to fully adopt the communist ideology and plead for absolution.
Many victims that underwent such struggle sessions continued to believe they were criminals for the rest of their lives. They believed they were terrible people, even though they had no idea why they were punished in the first place.
Gaslighting is a powerful device for subjugation because it makes good people who love freedom think they are evil people that need to be restrained. It is also a way for a corrupt system to maintain control of the general population because it normalizes psychopathic behavior and suppresses moral conscience by convincing people that morality is “relative” or a “matter of perspective”, and that some abusive and destructive behavior is “necessary” in order to achieve a better world. If you can discombobulate a population into questioning their own morality, or if you can convince then to question their own sanity, then you can prevent them from ever rebelling against you.
These are the tried and true methods of psychopaths. If you ever wonder why abused spouses or family members stay with and even defend their abusers, it is because psychopaths use gaslighting to disarm their victims. If you are crazy or subconsciously treacherous, then maybe you aren’t being abused at all. Maybe, you are being saved from yourself, and maybe society is being protected from you?
And, if you lash out and defend yourself against the abuser, now you are truly a horrible human being. You just attacked your “protector”. You are now a danger to society. You are now a terrorist. The only way to avoid being labeled a terrorist or a madman is to quietly accept the abuse.
I see this control tactic all over the world, and it is becoming rather prevalent here in the US. The capitol building protest is a perfect example. Millions of law abiding Americans have been abused and oppressed by the establishment through lockdowns and censorship, while groups of leftists like BLM and Antifa are allowed to run rampant across the country looting and burning as they go.
Conservative Americans reacted with a protest after the election, seeing that such abuses were likely to be aided in the near future by the federal government under Joe Biden. They raided the capitol building, without armaments, to make a point. Then, they peacefully left.
Afterwards, the media bombarded us for months with the narrative that the capitol protest was actually an “insurrection” and an act of domestic terrorism.
So, BLM gets to loot and burn their way through dozens of American cities and it’s called peaceful protesting. Conservatives protest at a single building and bust through the doors, and it’s considered an act of war. This is gaslighting.
Under pandemic mandates a vast portion of the US has been shut down and hundreds of thousands of small businesses have been lost.
The fear mongering in the media over the coronavirus has been egregious and ridiculous.
Hundreds of thousands of people die every year in America from communicable diseases. Now, suddenly, we are supposed to abandon all of our constitutional rights because of covid?
Anyone who has disagreed with these measures has been called a “conspiracy theorist” and a danger to others. The science is on our side, and always has been. Every element of the pandemic has been exaggerated and overblown. Every statistic supports our skepticism of the government’s response, as I outlined in my recent article
‘The Real Reasons Why Millions Of Americans Will Defy Covid Mandates And Vaccines’.
But, when we cite these facts, we are told by the establishment that we are “lunatics” and “idiots”.
Of course, now we know that the death rate of Covid-19 according to scientific studies
is a paltry 0.26% outside of nursing homes. We also know that lockdowns were completely useless in controlling the spread of the virus, as states with the harshest mandates ended up with the highest infections rates. And, finally, we know that
masks are also useless in controlling the spread of the disease according to scientific studies and common sense observation.
Rather than admitting that lockdowns are pointless, that the masks do nothing and that it is silly to take an experimental mRNA vaccine for a virus that is a non-threat to 99.7% of the population, establishment hacks continue to double down on their propaganda when it comes to covid. The media continues to attack anyone that points out the REAL science as “conspiracy theorists”. This is gaslighting.
And finally, we can’t really have a discussion about gaslighting without mentioning the social justice agenda.
The phrase “white supremacy” is being repeated by corporate journalists and politicians until they are blue in the face. And more specifically, conservatives are being called out as the “biggest terrorist threat” to the US in decades because of our supposed white supremacist tendencies.
The latest “spike” in Asian hate crimes is the new excuse for this propaganda campaign.
Set aside the fact that millions of conservatives
are black and brown, not white.
Set aside the fact that the majority of the hate crimes targeting Asians the past couple years were actually perpetrated by black assailants
(as I noted in last week’s article), and one of them
is even a known BLM activist. Also set aside the fact that
around 50% of all violent crime in the US is caused by black perpetrators according to the FBI. Somehow, all of this anarchy is the fault of white people in general and conservatives in particular.
The race baiting used by leftists the past several years is a prime example of gaslighting – Telling people they are responsible for evils they had nothing to do with and that are completely unrelated to them, then demanding they declare submission and loyalty to an ideology that seeks to enslave them as a means to wash away sins they were never guilty of.
If totalitarian control of the population is to be established in the US and the west, we have to be tricked into thinking our values of freedom, truth and meritocracy are somehow inherently evil. We have to be tricked into thinking we are insane for wanting liberty.
To be clear, there only three ways that the brainwashing and gaslighting of free people will stop:
1) We submit and embrace the false narrative as if it is true and give in to psychological slavery.
2) We separate completely from leftist totalitarians and organized psychopaths and go our own way.
3) We remove the psychopaths from the picture and rebuild without their influence.
Until one of these three things happens, like all psychopaths, leftists and globalists will continue trying to wear us down. This is what they do.
They have seen it work in the past and they are single minded in their objectives.
