In gaslighting, the personal is political
Gaslighting is a very trendy term right now. If you’ve never actually been gaslit (or think you haven’t), you might imagine that it’s a pretentious word for lying. Well, yes — but there’s so much more to it than that.
Gaslighting, according to Wikipedia, is a form of ‘psychological manipulation in which a person or group covertly sows seeds of doubt in an individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception or judgment.”
I think gaslighting is one of the most evil things one person can do to another, because unfortunately I got to watch a master gaslighter at work within my extended family for more than a decade. The brief story that follows perfectly captures the sad reality that we endured.
The gaslighter, who we’ll call X, married a relative of mine after the death of his spouse. X called before Thanksgiving one year and told me that they wouldn’t be coming to dinner, but would come over for dessert. Naively, I did not contact my relative to confirm this. Nothing in my life had prepared me for someone who would lie about when they would arrive at Thanksgiving dinner in order to cause trouble.
You know the rest. X and the relative rolled in just in time for dessert. I will never forget the look of shock and disbelief on my relative’s face at the fact that the turkey had already been eaten — and the complacent satisfaction on X’s at the ensuing uproar. X calmly denied everything. I was branded as the liar. My day, my week, was ruined. X’s was made. The relative was fooled, I was not, but we were both victims.
Why does someone behave this way? I presume long psychological treatises have been written on the pathology of gaslighting, but it seems to me, it is at least in part a twisted grab for power. The gaslighter feels that they cannot prevail simply by being themselves. They need to manipulate circumstances to become a victim and paint their unfortunate target as a scheming monster, when in fact the exact opposite is true.
And that brings us, in a roundabout way, to the recent revelations about the FBI and the Trump/Russia collusion theory. As The Wall Street Journal’s September 25 editorial “The FBI’s Bad Intelligence” puts it: “It was worse than we thought.”
According to the Journal (and other sources), newly declassified documents released by Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham reveal that the FBI relied on a suspected Russian agent — himself a target of FBI investigations at one point — for the information it used to obtain surveillance warrants against former Trump advisor Carter Page.
The article lays out how Ukrainian-born Igor Danchenko was the “subsource” for most of British spy Christopher Steele’s accusations against the Trump campaign in his infamous dossier. Danchenko, as states in the editorial, was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to
2011 “based on concerns he was a Russian agent and a threat to national security.” He left the country in 2010, says the Journal, but mindblowingly (my words) was identified as Mr. Steele’s source in 2016.
The editorial goes on: “The FBI’s realization that it was being fed potential Russian disinformation should have put an immediate halt to the Page probe… instead and incredibly, the FBI failed to disclose this information to the FISA court in all three of its subsequent renewal applications against Mr. Page.”
And as I say above, you know the rest — the long march of the last three plus years, the Mueller probe, and the endless, ceaseless incantation by much of the media and the president’s political opposition that Donald Trump conspired with Russia to win the presidential election.
I will at this point state that I never believed a word of these charges. It’s not because I’m a (moderate) Republican. It’s not because I’m a fortunetelling super-genius who can see into the future. The notion that someone as contrary, stubborn and independent as Donald Trump is somehow working for Russian (a “puppet of Vladimir Putin”) is hilarious to me.
Gaslighters create their own reality and it’s only when you wrench free that you realize how upside down that reality is. My story has a happy ending. I no longer have any contact with my gaslighter — the connection has been permanently severed. I wish America could do the same.