This question has no doubt crossed many of your minds if you’ve watched social media (such as Andy Ngo’s videos of riots in the Pacific northwest) and all sorts of rabid misbehavior by what appears to be “children” who appear to be been aged between 17 and 23. Look over the voluminous pages of mug shots of these characters from the Portland City and Multnomah County Police Departments…
…and know many are from affluent homes while others appear as if they crawled out from under a rock. Still, superficially, there is a glass of sameness to them. We’ve talked about Antifa’s “cannon fodder” several times, and even ventured into the realm of asking what can be done about them without shooting them. (Just search “Antifa” or the 4-part series “Masterplan for America’s Mental Breakdown”, in Aug, 2020.)
What we know is they never stood before a judge, were assigned a lawyer, or even heard charges read. They were simply released once whatever they were on wore off and went home to reminisce on the fun they’d had that day, and ready to come back again.
They are about as aware of what they are doing as Pavlov’s dog.
They are only one form of “gas-lightery”, for there is an even larger, much larger, group of Americans, perhaps as many as 70% of voters, who don’t even know these people and their crimes even exist. That is gas-lighting of another scale.
This is largely the Media’s doing, although it is in concert with men and women in Government and Business who know these are all illusions; manipulating and appeasing and profiting from the combined results of their crimes, hoping that for just long enough, maybe as few as 30 days, no one will notice the “the dog that didn’t bark”, giving their scheme away. Just as Rudy Giuliani and his team will likely soon show the Supreme Court the magnitude of the gaslighting that has taken place and the scale of mathematical improbabilities, perhaps Conan Doyle might have summed it up best in those simple five words in one of his mysteries, that the “absence of a signal can be just as revealing as its presence.”
Of course, since the first week of November, the gas-lighting has turned to the Election, and Big Media controls this narrative. And they are not school kids. We know both Twitter and Facebook are filled with gas-lit true-believers, but we also know they are being cynically being used by manipulators at the top. They are as mindlessly ignorant as the writers at HuffPo, or Antifa street warriors. But at their top levels, at the front offices of Washington Post and New York Times and several more, they are cynically (and criminally) conspiratorial, know that Donald Trump did indeed receive a huge majority of the votes on November 3rd, and know that their very existence as organizations relies on the American public never knowing that they have been gas-lighted, or that they are behind it..
America has been a general target of gas-lighting by the media and that part of government we now call “the deep state” for a very long time. I keep working my timeline back as to how long that period is; from the advent of Obama in 2009, to the advent of Clinton, 1992, including some sterling performances by George W Bush and his ilk, who I still want to believe are Category 1 Gas-lits instead of Category 2 Cynics. Someday a better historian than me can write that history.
I the point I raise here is a moral one, not political.
I want to distinguish between the gas-lit Victim, and their Cynical Appeasers, Profiteers and Manipulators, all described by Ayn Rand in her 1971 essay which I called the “Children of the Damned”. Those gas-lit victims are now in their third generation. The moral dimension is perhaps best described by Dante’s depiction of a Hell with many levels, so that the “gaslit-Victim” in Level 3 Hell, say, a Dennison grad donning an Antifa bandana and a tire chain, the victim of a Sociology prof as well as indulgent parents, who like as not were indifferent to things associated with God, especially a moral universe that created the world in which they gained their wealth in the first place (called “forsaking the shoulders they stand on”)….maybe these victims in Level 3 might at least be offered a wet cloth to wipe their sweaty brows from time to time, while the Cynic Gas-Lighters” in Level 8, just one step away from Satan’s private lair, can find not a moment’s pause from the excoriating pain of a scorching heat that lasts forever. (Imagine sticking you hand on a hot burner on the stove. Remember as best you can the pain and the flick of a second it took you to jerk your hand away and scream in agony, then rushed to the nearest cold faucet, and the cabinet that held the salve and bandages. Now, try to imagine that same heat, that same pain, only you can’t burn up in the flames and end it all since you can’t die because you’re already dead. That is how it will be for the rest of eternity. That pain really is much, much worse than listening to Barry Manilow 24/7. That was how Dante described it, at least….unending torture.
The purpose of gas-lighting is not only to turn average people into mind numbed robots who believed Walter Cronkite loved America as much as they did, but is also aimed at select parts of the population, the better-educated where vanity and self-love is rife, in order to turn them into Haters, Ayn Rand’s target victim-group, especially toward “people not like themselves”, which as any anthropologist can tell you, is the foremost form of self-identification of pagan tribal peoples since the beginning of time. Whether a Stone Age tribe on the Horn of Africa, ancient Mayans in Mexico, a Tri-Delt at Cal-Berkeley, or a member of the Harvard Alumni Association, what binds them all together is that their own self-identification largely depends on the notion that they “aren’t like those other guys”…but much, much better. It runs very, very deep in the soul of Man, so much so, history has been able to define it with a single word:
“French.”
This exclusivity is imbedded in the human psyche. We all have it, but as just mentioned, some have carried it to a high art form. But interestingly, by being Christian, and maybe even Jew or Muslim where they are indigenous to the land, “being American” involves a broader social membership, not smaller. It’s what makes us different. No one looks in the mirror and brags to himself, “I’m part of a club that is 350 million strong!”….unless one first considers that our 350 million are only 4% of the world’s population, which is really very exclusive when you start to list all the things Americans can have, and can aspire to, and chase after, and also say “no” to, that other nations’ people are not allowed to do.
Those Cynics who would take that away, in pursuit of their own selfish niche of exclusivity, must first remove Americans from this special status, and pile us in with the other 96% who more or less go through life inside a state-managed cocoon with very limited doors to improve our station. (See my short piece, “Mafia”, to understand this more fully.)
We’ve seen gaslighting in news media for many years, but only really stopped to notice it in the past 3-4 years, all because of the giant coordinated campaign to get rid of Donald Trump, only not because of just what he might to do to undo large swaths of their power base, but that he seems to have already unlocked a back-door to reattaching government to its people, which could end their plans for generations.
The proof of this is found in a simple comment from the Washington Post in a 2007 review of the film “Idiocracy” and the obvious intent of the Media to insure as a few people as possible see it. The 2006 film, “Idiocracy” is a satire about an “average” soldier who is part of an Army hibernation project and wakes up 500 years later to find an America run by young people in their 20s, and that he is by-far the smartest man alive in this new world.
I can’t recall why I saw it, didn’t even think it was particularly good, but in the past four years I have asked myself why no one has mentioned “Idiocracy” as a template for the mental state of three generations of educational gas-lighting we’re seeing now.
The Washington Post’s review in 2007 was a dead giveaway as to why, “few will be eager to see themselves in the filmmaker’s jaundiced mirror.” WAPO let the cat out of the bag that such a generation already existed in America in 2006. (Financially the film was a flop.)
Ayn Rand described a generation of wealthy spoiled brats at Berkeley who had been able to seize the University of California (but in the name of Freedom of Speech, of all things!), that off-Broadway act moving to Broadway and Columbia University by ’68, alongside a wave of several more campus takeovers, including my own, mostly about the Vietnam War, but also stretching its wings to include “Black Power”, the forerunner of Black Lives Matter.
Our most recent reminder of that sort of “Idiocracy” would have been the culture that bred Christine Blasey-Ford, who would have been 40 years old at that time of its release, and still been a member of Berkeley’s next generation, her teenage remembrances of encounters with Bret Kavanaugh more than 20 years after Berkeley. A boozing teen-doxie at the time, she went on to become a professor at Stanford, her PhD earned with an interesting dissertation, Measuring Young Children’s Coping Responses to Interpersonal Conflict, and also earning her own page on Wikipedia in 2018 (every elitist college grad’s dream). But her barking before the Senate committee of Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination accidentally revealed that very same “dog that didn’t bark”, namely that after 30 years, she could still respond to a secret dog-whistle, as yet undefined, and lie through her teeth on behalf of a sisterhood about an event that never occurred just to destroy one man.
So take a look at those mugshots above because for you may be seeing them again in 40 years, one or two sitting on the Federal Reserve.
Believing one’s own stuff
Jonathan Winters, the famous extemporaneous comedian, in the late 50s or early 60s, checked himself into an asylum for a few weeks. When asked why, Jonathan replied, “I started believing my own stuff.”
Don’t ever ask an idiocrat that.
We are always invoked to forgive the sinner, but we can’t necessarily have much power of persuasion to cause them to repent. You know this. And you also know it is way, way over our paygrade to forgive the sin…which the gas-lighting appeasers, profiteers and manipulators attempt to instill in their victims, that they can forgive themselves, to the point of never having to inquire if they’ve ever done anything wrong in the first place.
The best we can hope for is to demand the original OEM parts our national engine came equipped with be re-installed, and let that world wash their mouths out with soap, or in my case, let the unwritten law of hard knocks break their nose. It’s the best we can do.
But I do believe there is are at least 5-levels of Hell difference between the gas-lit victim, even in the media, deepstate and Congress, and the lover of Satan who seeks only power over others.
It’s just above my paygrade to determine which is which.
