Gaslighting is a painless way to die, if you inhale

Hold still, it only hurts for a moment...

If you are a thinking person and a political conservative, you’re likely feeling a little bit of a sting. That’s natural. It’s just your mind rebelling against the gaslighting. You’ve already survived the onslaught of gas and chemical warfare from the Trump campaign. The fact that you’re here is a strong indicator that you didn’t link from Newsmax or Infowars (if you did, please tell us in the comments!).

Image source: DALL-e (ChatGPT 4-o)

Now you are back, gasping for air. I understand. It’s going to sting a little bit. The mind can only suffer so much retconning before totally rejecting the premise and going back to first principles (“Star Wars is a good story arc”—me in 1999).

We all want to have standards. More than that, we want to believe that the decisions we make using our standards, you know, matter. We want to believe that Five Guys uses better meat than McDonalds. Nobody wants to see the owner of the popular local Chinese restaurant behind Kroger tossing empty Panda Express bags into the dumpster. I have other examples, but they’d surely get me in trouble with the Enclave or the Illuminati. But you get my drift. If we’re going to pay the price for something, shouldn’t there be principle behind it?

And when the illusion of principle has been spoiled, it stings. Once seen, these things can’t be easily unseen (“Get the eye bleach, Doris! It’s behind the bag of chloroquine phosphate”).

I mean, why bother reading Matthew Continetti’s 496-page opus, “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism” if nothing in it amounts to more than a hill of beans today? (It’s an excellent book, regardless.) Why did I need to know that in 1964, Democrats did a complete smear job on Sen. Barry Goldwater, painting him as a reactionary, racist, “mentally unstable, unfit for office, and uncomfortable with his own masculinity”?

That last bit was from publisher Ralph Ginzburg in Fact magazine, in a piece that surveyed a list of psychiatrists (none of whom had spoken with or met Goldwater), pulling quotes like “[he] the same pathological make-up as Hitler, Castro, Stalin and other known schizophrenic leaders.” Another: “emotionally unstable, immature, volatile, unpredictable, hostile, and mentally unbalanced.  He is totally unfit for public office and a menace to society.”

In fact, Sen. Goldwater didn’t have a racist bone in his body. He was a lifetime member of the NAACP, and a founder of the Arizona chapter. As a member of the Arizona Air National Guard, he ensured it was racially integrated before President Harry Truman unwound Woodrow Wilson’s evil segregation policies. He integrated Phoenix public schools before Brown v. Board of Education. But Rev. Martin Luther King opposed Goldwater.

King said of Goldwater’s voting record, “While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racists” (King, 16 July 1964). King feared that Goldwater’s position that “civil rights must be left, by and large to the states” meant “leaving it to the Wallaces and the Barnetts” (King, “The Republican Presidential Nomination”). Electing Goldwater, King said, would plunge the country into a “dark night of social disruption” (King, 21 September 1964). 

In other words, Goldwater believed in character, not central political planning from Washington, D.C. And that didn’t fit into King’s national movement. Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His opposition was principled on his view of the limitations of federal power; that the public accommodations and employment sections of the bill were unconstitutional and would lead to the “creation of a police state.” Goldwater believed that in order to have a civil society built on the fair foundations of racial harmony, people themselves would need to do it through character and political will at the state and local level, not be forced by Washington.

Barry Goldwater had character, but because Dr. King feared that men of evil character would rule, and Democrats pounced on Goldwater’s principled argument, the smear campaign won the day. In 1964, Sen. Goldwater told the Senate: “If my vote is misconstrued, let it be, and let me suffer its consequences.” He did suffer.

From the wreckage of Goldwater’s principles, came President Lyndon Johnson’s template for the last 80 years: a welded-in-place steel and concrete system of federal carrots and sticks that extended federal control down to the pronouns and honorifics used to address patients in hospitals. The Great Society led in a large way to the police state Goldwater feared, and Republicans gladly pitched in the brick and mortar.

We climbed the mountain from Nixon’s EPA, to Carter’s Department of Education, to George W. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security, to Obama’s “phone and pen” Obamacare. Conservatives have to ask what is left to conserve, other than old-time religion (which was the loomcloth of the original progressives in the early 20th century), and perhaps the vestiges of constitutional order?

Then Donald Trump, like Batman’s Joker, drove a dump truck through it all.

It takes no character to pull down the edifice of big government, only to replace it with one man’s will. So, that’s why you’re here. The price of not having Trump do that is either to eat what he’s serving—to believe that there is no chance he is a threat to our constitutional order—the very thing (the only thing?) conservatives are around to conserve; or, to accept that voting against Trump is the only solution.

Not opposing Trump means you have to inhale his gaslighting, which is both prodigious and permanently brain-altering.

But opposing Trump means you don’t get to ask Kamala Harris questions she really needs to answer. It’s funny that Democrats and their liberal avatars in the media think Harris needs to answer for her principles because otherwise, Trump and his forces will answer for her. But that’s not the reason at all. Harris needs to answer because otherwise, everyone has to breathe in the gaslighting surrounding her.

I mean, one month ago today, President Joe Biden was about to appear on the debate stage against former President Donald Trump. Prior to that day, any swirling talk about Biden’s fitness, or mental acuity, was attributed to “cheapfakes” or Republican propaganda.

In just a month’s time, the Democrats and their entire ecosystem have cycled through from that position, to Biden must go because indeed, he is unfit, to Biden is a national hero for putting the nation ahead of himself, to Kamala Harris is the most exciting candidate since John F. Kennedy. The continual, whiplash-inducing story rewrites have produced a gaslighting attack that might be as pungent and poisonous as Trump’s rehabilitation as a national statesman because some nutcase teenager took a shot at him.

Both things can be true: Trump is wholly unfit to be president due to his complete absence of principle and character (or the maleficence of his principle); and, that Trump possesses preternatural gifts of pure luck and iron will to turn what could be the most consequential moment of his life (a few millimeters from ending it) into the most iconic political imagery of his career.

Yet, in order to forget the imagery, and build some momentum to keep Trump out of the White House, Kamala Harris has only the tools of the gaslighter, until she provides something more.

Are we expected to owe Harris our vote, simply because she is neither the crook Donald Trump, nor is she the senescent Joe Biden? To say that she does is to inhale the gaslight, and to do that is to die to principle. And yes, it stings a little, until the gas takes effect, and then, it’s quite painless, I’m told (ask all the people who inhaled MAGA gas—many are quite happy and, unless you’re a fan of MSNBC, fun to be around).

The policy questions Harris faces are pretty straightforward. How does she think the U.S. should face the Israel-Gaza war? Harris snubbed Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu last week, but then met with him. If Harris takes a strong position either way, she’ll lose some votes. Perhaps it’s better to keep gaslighting.

Second, how will Harris handle the border? In California, Harris served as a law and order attorney general. In her career, she’s played both sides of the illegal alien debate. She can go either way. She was/wasn’t Biden’s “border czar” because the gaslighting has now obscured it. Are illegal immigrants really illegal? People care about the border, but maybe it’s best not to know where she stands. That might become a reason not to vote for her.

And what’s Harris’ position on universal healthcare, or the Green New Deal, or a host of other issues that voters in certain parts of the country care about? Her history leaves little clue (except on abortion) what she might really believe. Jonah Goldberg thinks the best argument for voting for Harris is the possibility she’s a political fraud, holding no principled beliefs other than telling voters what they want to hear.

Schrödinger’s candidate. It’s all obscure until you open the box. You have to pass the bill to know what’s in it. You have to elect Harris to know what she believes.

You just have to vote for Harris and trust that she’ll do the right thing, every time.

Or you have to believe that Donald Trump is guaranteed to end the world. According to Trump, if he’s not elected, it’s going to be World War III.

It’s gas warfare on both sides. Take a big breath, and it might get to you. Then you’ll be one of them. Whichever them gets you.

I might hold my breath for the next 100 days. Care to join me?

HOW ABOUT PARIS? It truly was Ville des Lumières for the Olympics Opening Ceremony. Having the Seine and the Eiffel Tower be the venue was an amazing stretch goal, and Paris completely pulled it off! Bravo!

The French, like Megamind, know how to make an entrance.

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