Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in 1944 movie "Gaslight"
By Nancy Thorner -
Are Americans being "gaslighted" when told that the presidential election was on the up and up, that to question the results means you’re a Fascist who should lose your job if you happen to have one or if you happen to have one or be knocked off social media because you’re a threat to democracy?
The term "gaslighting" originates in the systematic psychological manipulation of a woman by her husband in Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 stage play Gas Light and the film adaptations released in 1940 and 1944.
In the story, the husband attempts to convince his wife and others that she is insane by manipulating small elements in their environment and insisting that she is mistaken, misremembering things, or delusional when she points out these changes. The play’s title alludes to how the abusive husband slowly dims the gaslights in their home each evening while pretending nothing has changed to make his wife doubt her own perceptions. The wife repeatedly asks her husband to confirm that the lights are dimmer, but in defiance of reality, he keeps insisting that the lights are the same and that she must be going insane.
Today, we are living in a perpetual state of gaslighting. The reality is: What the media tells us is at complete odds with what we see with our own eyes. We are vilified as deniers, racists, or bigots, or crazy and ill-informed. But we are none of these. We are being gaslighted if we call attention to something that has merit and deserves attention but which others call fantasies of lies.
In 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain, 69.5 million votes to 59.8 million. In 2012, President Obama defeated Mitt Romney 66 million to 61 million. (It marked the first time in U.S. history that a victorious presidential candidate received fewer votes the second time around.)
In 2016, Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in the popular vote count 65 million to 62.8 million.
In 2020, Joe Biden allegedly received 81 million votes to President Trump’s 74 million.
At a quick glance, a couple of things should leap out at you even if you’re not a CPA.
For one thing, the total votes cast for the two candidates started at 129.4 million in 2008, and decreased in 2012 to 127 million, before increasing slightly to 127.8 million four years later.
Then, last November, the number suddenly jumped to 155 million!
Where did all those Democrats suddenly appear from? Is it conceivable that they were holding out for the crime boss for all those years? I mean, it couldn’t be from disgruntled Republicans who were fed up with Trump’s boorish behavior and his silly tweets because he, unlike Obama, actually increased his numbers the second time around by over 11 million votes.
It's a proven fact that Trump increased his numbers among blacks and Latinos.
We know that Hillary Clinton didn’t mount much of a campaign, but it was a lot better than Biden’s, and yet we’re supposed to believe that whereas she got roughly the same number of votes as Obama, Biden received 12-15 million more votes than either of them.
On our side of the aisle, it sounds nearly as stupid to hear Republican politicians and TV pundits ponder the future of the Party in the post-Trump era. Without Trump, there is no future at this point.