Bad Gaslighting Epidemic Sweeps The Elite

by Kurt Schlicter for Townhall

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall

There are three questions that our terrible, terrible ruling class raises whenever it opens its collective kale-hole to lecture us: 1) Does the elite think we are really, really stupid, or 2) Is the elite really, really stupid, or 3) Is the elite all of the above? The last week has been eventful, even by Age O’ Trump standards, and the one enduring takeaway is just how bad these people are at gaslighting us with inept lies that demand we disbelieve what’s happening right in front of us. But it should come as no surprise that our alleged betters are no good at gaslighting because they have proven themselves to be no good at anything.  

Here’s a fun test: can you name something – anything – major in the last two decades that our best and brightest have not screwed up?

I’ll wait.

Gaslighting is their default move because gaslighting is all these losers have. It’s not like they can sit back and let you read their CV of achievements. Iraq, Obamacare, their annoying millennial kids…all disasters. The members of America’s current ruling class are King Midases of failure. Everything they touch turns to suck.

So, because they have no other way to deal with the damning evidence of their utter incompetence, our elite instead tries to convince us that we are crazy for noticing just how lame they are. That’s called “gaslighting,” the straight-faced denial of what’s happening right in front of you that tries to leverage your politeness and deference to convince you that it’s not the elite that’s rotten. You’re just crazy for noticing, you crazed crazy person of craziness.

Take the Northern Syrian crisis – please. I generally side with the non-commie Kurds over the Turks, but facts are facts and facts mean something. We keep hearing how we “betrayed our allies,” but who promised the Kurds that we would fight Turkey on their behalf? It’s a big jump from “Let’s both fight ISIS” to “Take that, NATO ally.” But our garbage media, and our garbage politicians, sort of hand wave away the fact that you can’t “betray” someone by not doing what you never promised to do, especially when no reasonable person could ever expect you to do it.

And then there’s the Kurdish monolith issue – all Kurds are not created equal. There are different Kurd factions and different Kurd groups, and some Kurds are communists. In fact, we’ve designated the very Kurds Turkey says it’s going after (the PKK) as terrorists based on their actual terrorism. Certainly, at the start of the story you probably couldn’t have expected our reporters and our politicians to tell Kurd X from Kurd Y without a program (in a better world, though, we’d expect them to zip it until they could), but when we’re a week-plus into what is allegedly the greatest atrocity ever was (because they think they can pin it on Trump) and they are still pretending that all Kurds are sweet n’ cuddly, they are lying to you.

How about the response on Capitol Hill? We’ve got a bunch of politicians posing and posturing and prancing about over this border incursion half-way around the world and we’re sitting here wishing they would devote some of that wailing and teeth-gnashing to the incursions over our border. But once again, they act like we can’t see the truth sitting right there. As for the Democrats, well, how long would their support have lasted if Trump had used force against…our NATO ally? “You’re helping Putin!” they would shriek. Of course, they are currently shrieking, “You’re helping Putin!” when Trump doesn’t use force against Turkey.

And then there are the Republicans who holler and cry, raging over this terrible situation as if there wasn’t some way for our pols to influence events by, oh, I dunno, offering a resolution declaring war. That’s a thing in the Constitution, I hear.

But taking votes means taking stands, and virtue signaling is no fun if that signal is, “I want you to send your sons and daughters to maybe die to sort out this latest 2000-year-old brawl between this latest bunch of strangers,” and the voters you signal it to are sick of stupid wars that never seem to end.

And then there’s the phony outrage over some silly meme where fake Donald Trump fights fake logos of the fake news. They insist that this year-old YouTube clip is going to spark terrifying violence against…I guess, CNN and MSNBC logos. Of course, these trademarks have remained unassaulted since this silly, fakey vid was created, but never mind that – this is the worst thing ever! Also, you must ignore the fact that the original movie scene the meme was based upon featured the hero massacring a church full of conservative Christians in Kentucky. 

Weird how that realistic cinematic bloodletting matched the seething hatred of traditional Americans we’ve come to expect from our poisonous popular culture, but the Blue Check Mafia has an explanation about why the Christian slaughter was A-OK. See, in the movie, Beanie and Cecil had a magic crystal and the mind control lasers made it so Zippy and Zoopy were actually good guys and shooting a bunch of Jesus people actually means we love Christians and stuff and don’t you see that when they shoot a church full of Christians it doesn’t mean they are shooting Christians, and that if you think it does you are craaaaaazzzzzyyyyyyy? Just don’t pay attention to the real violence outside Trump’s Minneapolis rally.

It’s bad enough that they lie to us, directly and by omission, all the time. But what makes it worse is how their lies are such glaringly obvious fabrications and/or dissimulations that the deepest insult is that they think we might believe them.