Several readers have invited me to weigh in on the phenomenon of “gaslighting.” So here goes.

The term “gaslighting” suddenly became ubiquitous in the past couple of years, mostly in the discussions of political events; but I couldn’t even figure out from context what it meant. Finally I had to look it up. Apparently, it is a term that has been around for a while in the field of psychology. Here’s a definition from Medical News Today:

Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse where a person or group makes someone question their sanity, perception of reality, or memories. People experiencing gaslighting often feel confused, anxious, and unable to trust themselves.

But how does the term apply to political news? To investigate, I got out some issues of the print version of the New York Times to see what among its various pieces might best fit the definition. And of course, I quickly realized that essentially every single article that deals with a big issue of the moment — and particularly any article that is part of coverage of some major issue over the course of multiple weeks or months — absolutely fits the definition of “gaslighting.” And not a very subtle form of the phenomenon.

Let’s try to make a list of the biggest stories of the last several years, the ones that have dominated the front page of Pravda for weeks and months on end. Gaslighting or not gaslighting?

• Russia Collusion. Clearly the single biggest story of the past several years has been the “Russia collusion” hoax — the narrative that Trump and his campaign “colluded” with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election. I first noted the ridiculous efforts to create an alternative reality in a post on March 2, 2017 titled “What Is With This Weird Obsession With Russia?” Excerpt: “The New York Times has easily had several dozen articles since the election about the supposedly nefarious relationship between President Trump and/or his team and Russian officials.”  As the drumbeat of stories continued day after day after day, I had further posts on the same subject on March 22 and May 31, 2017. Somewhere in that time period I went for a haircut, and listened to my barber tell me how concerned he was that our new President was in bed with the Russians. I thought it was obvious that the whole story was ridiculous and made no sense; but clearly the reporting was intended to make me and everyone else let go of that reality. Gaslighting! We now know from the Mueller Report and recent documentary disclosures that the whole story was a complete fabrication. Meanwhile, the New York Times and Washington Post both won Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting on the subject, and I haven’t heard anything about plans to return the awards.

• The Climate “Crisis.” For a topic with an endless drumbeat of articles designed to scare you and make you "question . . . your perception of reality,” you cannot top the so-called “climate crisis.” This one has been going on not for mere months or years, but decades, with articles numbering not just in the hundreds or thousands, but the tens of thousands. As to your own perception, if you think it’s no hotter where you live than it was decades ago, there are hard data to prove you right. The highly accurate satellite temperature record shows minimal warming since the late 1970s. For New York City, you can find the real information at Joe Dorish’s weather site — including such facts as that the hottest day on record (106 deg F) was in 1936, that most days over 100 degrees were in the 1930s to 50s, and that the last day to hit a bare 100 deg F was in 2012. Tony Heller at realclimatescience.com makes a sport of showing that high and average temperatures have been declining in the U.S. since the 1930s. Meanwhile a representative article from the New York Times is one from December 2019 headlined “Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ To Irreversible Change.” Gaslighting!

• Systemic racism. If your experience has been anything like mine, every societal institution you have been involved with for essentially your whole life has been involved in attempting to give every possible break to African Americans. The universities that I attended were practicing affirmative action when I attended, and that goes back more than 50 years for college and almost that long for law school. In the forty years that I spent in the community of large law firms, not just my own firm, but every single other firm that I encountered, was actively engaged in attempting to hire and promote more African Americans. From my own direct observations, dozens of these firms for decades have had special recruitment efforts for black and Hispanic students, special “diversity” initiatives, and diversity officers overseeing the efforts. Now we are told that all along all of these institutions have been “systemically racist” to the disadvantage of African Americans and Hispanics. Huh? Sounds like gaslighting to me.

• Coronavirus. Isn’t this a completely non-political topic that ought to be free of the gaslighting scourge? In today’s hyper-political climate, that’s just not possible for anything. The politics here are that everything important must be portrayed to the disadvantage of President Trump or of Republicans. But reality intervenes: the data (easily available at worldometers.info) show that large Republican-run states (Texas, Florida, Georgia) have had less severe lockdowns and earlier reopenings than large Democrat-run states (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois); but the Republican-run states have actually had far lower death rates from the virus. Try to find that out from the coverage in the New York Times. Instead you read over and over that there has been a recent “surge” in cases in the mostly-Republican states of the South and West, without any mention that the surge follows a vast increase in testing and has not been accompanied by a comparable surge in deaths coming anywhere near the rates previously experienced by the likes of New York. Meanwhile, New York — home to far more Covid-19 deaths than any other state — comes in for constant praise. Representative is this piece from today’s New York Times:  “In May, many parts of the United States with low coronavirus infection rates began to reopen. It was a gamble that often resulted in a flood of cases, especially in the South and parts of the Southwest. . . .”  It’s gaslighting all the way down.

My question is, can anyone name a major ongoing story in the New York Times or other mainstream media that is not permeated with gaslighting?