THE COLUMN: Gaslighted

In the 1944 motion picture, George Cukor's Gaslight, Ingrid Bergman is the new wife of Charles Boyer, who for sinister motives gradually causes her to doubt her own sanity as he attempts to discover the whereabouts of her late aunt's jewels. It's a classic manipulation of an unsuspecting and vulnerable younger woman by an unscrupulous older man, and the title has entered the language as a synonym for emotional skullduggery. It also perfectly describes the series of malicious hoaxes lately being perpetrated upon the body politic by the "progressive" Left, hiding under the guise of alarmist concern of "saving our democracy," "saving lives," and "saving the planet."

Note well the false "savior complex" inherent in their duplicitous machinations: 

People with savior complex try to feel in control by fixing the lives of others — often in order to distract themselves from their own anxiety or powerlessness, Cynthia Catchings, a therapist, told Thrive Global. Helping others also induces a sense of validation in such people, helping them feel better about their own lives — resulting in an obsessive need to fix in order to maintain this good feeling.

I'm getting a bad feeling about this.

In the shadows of this concerted and ongoing gaslighting campaign we may discern the "Russian collusion" hoax manufactured by a vengeful Hillary Clinton in order to tarnish and then destroy Donald Trump's 2016 electoral victory and thus unleashing a Pandora's Box of horrors that included two illegitimate, failed impeachments and ultimately resulted in his deposition in 2020 when Trump lost the "fortified" election to a senescent serial liar and fabricator, creepy, corrupt Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. -- a lifelong political hack perfectly willing to sell out his own country to China and the Ukraine in exchange for achieving his lifelong dream of never having to get a real job.

With Trump now all but disposed of, and in preparation for the determinative election of 2024, the Left has turned back to two of its favorites bugbears: Covid and "climate change." The first Covid hoax resulted in the spectacular destruction of the Trump presidency, the booming American economy, and most important, the First Amendment's protection of freedom of religion, speech, and freedom of assembly. The nascent repeat of that astounding lie, now playing in grocery stores and on college campuses near you, is further proof of Marx's only noteworthy observation that "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

And yet this malignant dwarf has now returned once more to pester us:

Fauci admits that masks don’t work for the public at large but still absurdly claims masks work on an individual basis.  More subterfuge. pic.twitter.com/UcjOa8flkr

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) September 3, 2023

Meanwhile, on the sane side of this equation, comes the news that "Dr." Jill Biden, the celebrated clothes horse and intellectual titan, has once again -- conveniently! -- tested "positive" for Covid, as if that had any meaning the real world other than making her an even greater laughingstock than heretofore:

Despite being vaccinated and twice boosted, First Lady Jill Biden tested positive Monday for COVID-19, the White House announced. The White House said President Joe Biden so far has tested negative. Jill Biden is fully vaccinated, along with having two booster shots. This is her second time having COVID-19.

How about that? Left unsaid by the Corporate Media are the facts: that the "vaccines" don't work; that they're a greater danger to the human body than Covid ever was; that the "disease" was a manufactured hysteria over a malfunctioning Chinese bioweapon (and one with the same high standards of engineering and effectiveness we've come to expect from China over the last 2,000 years or so) which temporarily supplanted the seasonal, and always evolving, flu. But Covid was needed to take down Trump, and take down Trump it did, with his complete and total cooperation.

"Global warming" is trying to kill me.

The biggest hoax of all, however, is "climate change," an asserted counter-factual that has attained widespread currency through its promulgation by the New York Times and its adoption by the odious World Economic Forum and the anti-civilizational monomania of the Klimate Kult. Millennarian fantasies of destruction have been with us for literally thousands of years, and the idea that the End is Near unless we perform this One Weird Trick continues to play havoc with credulous and weak minds. In my introduction to our book, Against the Great Reset, I began thus:

What is the Great Reset and why should we care? In the midst of a tumultuous medical-societal breakdown, likely engineered by the Chinese Communist Party and abetted by America’s National Institutes of Health “gain of function” financial assistance to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, why is the Swiss-based World Economic Forum (WEF) advocating a complete “re-imagining” of the Western world’s social, economic, and moral structures? And why now? What are its aspirations, prescriptions, and proscriptions, and how will it prospectively affect us? It’s a question that the men and women of the WEF are hoping you won’t ask. 

The notion that puny mankind has it within its power to -- over just the course of the last few years! -- fundamentally alter a global ecosphere of stupefying antiquity is surely the high point of human solipsism, gullibility and credulousness. Hysterical women "scientists" are especially prone to this nonsense: 

A professor and NASA scientist recently shared her “climate grief” and how she copes with the stress in an article for Nature. Kimberley Miner, a professor at Virginia Tech and the University of Maine, shared a story of breaking down in tears when she realized a California drought would mean some blue oaks would die. “A friend sat with me and explained that she had just recovered from an episode of extreme climate grief brought about by studying rapidly changing terrestrial ecosystems,” Miner wrote. Within her circle, five other climate scientists have “severe, emergent health challenges.” 

Here's a sample of this scientist's clear-headed and not-at-all emotional thinking: 

Last September, before the rains came, my field team learnt that it was probably too late for half the blue oaks affected by California’s drought in the region in which we were working. Because of years of ongoing drought, many of the trees would not recover from the long-term water loss and would die. The next morning, I sat outside our science team meeting and cried. 

Climate scientists have advocated for recognition of the destabilization of Earth’s ecosystems for four decades. Even within my lifetime, the climate system has changed noticeably, with hotter summers, longer dry periods and more frequent and severe storms. Some climate scientists have left the field, some have died and some have retired, but even more are just starting their careers. Early-career climate scientists across a range of fields are faced with comprehensive, esoteric challenges as ecosystems begin to cross tipping points. Knowing how to look at these huge changes and still be able to relax at the end of the day can be an ongoing problem.

Amazingly, Mother Nature responded the way she always does in this part of the country: with infrequent but torrential rains, which dowsed sunny SoCal draught and restored Gaia's balance. Problem solved, right? Hah!

Reservoirs were refilled, and many oaks were saved. The hills glowed with yellow and orange wildflowers, and leaves exploded from branches in rapid growth, a benefit of the winter of moisture. For just this one year, the blossoming hills gave me a breath of relief amid the ongoing struggle, and I rededicated myself to continuing to fight for everything we can still save.

In other words, she's learned nothing. Somewhere out there, she is certain, aliens and giant feet and spontaneous combustion are just waiting for her to put a foot wrong:

Still, there comes a time when even the biggest fool wearies of the constant gaslighting, no matter how many cargo-cult witch-doctors' dances he performs. So say hello to "the finite pool of worry." That's right -- just as the Boy Who Cried Wolf eventually ran out of votaries, the cumulative amount of gaslighting may finally be taking its toll. Which of course has the climate nuts very worried that their grift might finally end: 

Our actions today will determine just how bad climate change will become. But which emotions best drive a person to become politically active? Hope? Anger? Persevering through complacency? What if the fundamental challenge is actually our attention?

This last question gets at a particular theory in psychology that has undergone a revolution in the past few years. It’s a hypothesis called the “finite pool of worry,” coined in 2006 by Elke Weber, a psychologist and Princeton University professor. It states that people can only handle so many negative events at a time. So when public concern about one issue rises, another concern should fall. The theory gained attention after the 2008 financial crisis for explaining why heightened economic worries led the public to tune out on climate.

You see, my dear, it was a hoax all along.

Gee, that's too damn bad. But when real crises are at hand, the normal human reaction is to discard worrying about phantasms and concentrate on the threat at hand. Especially where the careerists in the "climate change" movement openly admit to cooking their books in order to sustain the Narrative.

I am a climate scientist. And while climate change is an important factor affecting wildfires over many parts of the world, it isn’t close to the only factor that deserves our sole focus.

So why does the press focus so intently on climate change as the root cause? Perhaps for the same reasons I just did in an academic paper about wildfires in Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals: it fits a simple storyline that rewards the person telling it. 

As Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit is fond of pointing out, the Davos class continues to snap up beachfront property and travel by private jet; "I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who keep telling me it's a crisis act like it's a crisis."

In the meantime, like carnival barkers from time immemorial, they'll continue fleecing the rubes, pocketing their profits, gaslighting the crap out of you, and laughing at you all the way to the International Money Fund.