The Gaslighting Will Continue Until It Leaks and Explodes

And I can smell something in the air now

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Over the last few years the media and their allies in universities and governments have told us ever increasingly bizarre lies and, thanks to censorship of “misinformation”, they thought they had got away with it.

Well I’ve got some bad news for you sunshine,
Pink isn’t well, he stayed back at the hotel,
And they sent us along as a surrogate band
We're gonna find out where you fans really stand.
Are there any queers in the theater tonight?
Get them up against the wall.
[choir: Against the wall!]
There's one in the spotlight, he don't look right to me,
Get him up against the wall.
[choir: Against the wall!]
That one looks Jewish!
And that one's a coon!
Who let all of this riff-raff into the room?
There's one smoking a joint!
And another with spots!
If I had my way,
I'd have all of you shot!

Oh sorry Biden moment, skipped a beat. But bear that in mind while I talk about something else.

Back when I was a pimply undergraduate I had friends who worked in pubs. There was one pub in particular where the group of us would tend to get “locked in” after closing time. The landlord of this pub had a cunning way to get rid of the regular drinkers at ~11:10pm that worked like this. About 10:30 he put on some Pink Floyd over the audio - typically the Final Cut but pretty much anything worked. Then gradually he would dim the lighting. Finally after last orders were done at 11pm he’d turn off the music and turn on all the lights. People would finish up their drinks and leave without even thinking about it.

I thought about this a bit in the context of the original play that “gaslighting” comes from where the villain secretly dims the (gas) lights in the house and then denies it when the victim asks. Eventually this denial of reality makes the victim doubt herself and think she is going insane.

In a similar way for the last few years the MSM and the chattering classes in general have steadily increased the gaslighting having discovered during the Wuflu that they could get away with it for a bit. The lying and censoring has steadily increased over the last four years. The Hunter Biden laptop, the Wuflu itself and its vaccines, the whole transmess and so on. This led, at the start of last week, to uniform statements everywhere that Biden was totally fine and that video showing him to be a doddery senile old man were “cheap fakes” disseminated by evil “pouncing” Republicans and other deplorables.

On Thusday night, the world as a whole and the US voters in particular have just had the “stop the music and turn up the lights” moment. Even my wife (Japanese and not a follower of US politics) saw clips of Biden’s debate performance on Japanese TV news and was shocked by how bad he was. In the US 51 million people watched some of the debate and I’ve seen a report somewhere (lost the source) saying that the total that saw clips of it on TV news or social media is comfortably over 100 million in the US so far and at least the same again outside the US. That means that probably about a third of the US electorate has seen at least some clips and probably around a fifth saw the debacle live.

The spinners are trying to claim that this is all normal or adequate. At Axios Alex Thompson provides a good representative example:

In his debate against Donald Trump, Biden often looked lost or slack-jawed, and delivered meandering answers in a hoarse voice.

• Some campaign aides projected calm Friday and framed the debate as just a bad night that they'd recover from. Other Biden aides, donors and senior Democrats were deeply shaken, as Trump and other crowing Republicans questioned his fitness for office.

• Beyond the politics of whether Biden can beat Trump again, the aides expressed new worries about whether the president can carry out his duties through another four-year term.

[…] Biden's miscues and limitations are more familiar inside the White House.

• The time of day is important as to which of the two Bidens will appear.

• From 10am to 4pm, Biden is dependably engaged — and many of his public events in front of cameras are held within those hours.

• Outside of that time range or while traveling abroad, Biden is more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued, aides told Axios.

Thursday's 90-minute debate began at 9pm ET.

Yes the leader of the free world has problems, but he’s totally with it 10am to 4pm when he’s in DC or Delaware and that’s completely fine. Except that it isn’t and in the past people like that radical right-winger (checks notes) Hillary Clinton had ads about how necessary it was that the President be able to respond properly to a “3 a.m. phonecall”. That kind of spin, and the Obama “Yeah not good, but at least not OrangeManBad” defense really don’t cut it.

Look it’s so bad that even a kook like Seymour Hersh¹ can see through the BS. Even my wife wonders who is actually running things the other 18 hours of the day because it clearly isn’t Resident Joe Biden

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Moreover, everyone can see that, despite what Jonathan Turley calls the Casablanca-like protestations of “Shocked”, the MSM as a whole has been deliberately hiding this. Greg Gutfield puts it well:

remember: the media democrat complex is reacting in horror over joe's condition not because they saw it - it's because you saw it.

Holly Math Nerd has, as usual, an insightful substack² on the fallout from the debate, where she writes:

There are only two possibilities. Either the entire media apparatus—everyone from the NYT editorial board to the CNN and MSNBC commentators who held virtual eulogies during the post-debate analysis to the podcasters and Twitterati—knew all along that Biden was non compos mentis and were lying to us, or they failed in their job of pattern recognition and thus didn’t know.

The former is an inexcusable act of treason.

The latter is an unforgivable level of incompetence.

There is no other possibility.

I usually subscribe to the maxims of “cockup before conspiracy” and “sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice” but in this case the required breadth of incompetence is implausible. They all knew, at least in general. What I think they did not know was just how bad things had got but they all knew Biden was heading down the path of senility. They must have known because, like the hound of the Baskervilles, they didn’t bark at things they should have by, for example, complaining about the lack of proper 1:1 interviews or following up on the repeated reports of Biden doing bizarre things. Instead they dutifully repeated White House talking points about Cheap Fakes and misinformation seemingly trying to repeat the 2020 Biden Laptop strategy of loud denial combined with suppression of alternative views.

Well now those lies have been exposed and the general public’s already low trust in the media is going to drop even lower as we enter the suddenly phase of “gradually and then suddenly”.

A couple of years ago on my old blog I wrote about the Trust Thermocline, which riffed off an excellent twitter thread:

The Trust Thermocline is something that, over (many) years of digital, I have seen both digital and regular content publishers hit time and time again. Despite warnings (at least when I've worked there). And it has a similar effect. You have lots of users then suddenly... nope. 

And this does effect print publications as much as trendy digital media companies. They'll be flying along making loads of money, with lots of users/readers, rolling out new products that get bought. Or events. Or Sub-brands.

And then SUDDENLY those people just abandon them. 

Often it's not even to "new" competitor products, but stuff they thought were already not a threat. Nor is there lots of obvious dissatisfaction reported from sales and marketing (other than general grumbling). Nor is it a general drift away, it's just a sudden big slide. 

So why does this happen? As I explain to these people and places, it's because they breached the Trust Thermocline.

…

And here is where the Trust Thermocline kicks in. Because too many people see service use as always following an arc. They think that as long as usage is ticking up, they can do what they like to cost and product.

And (critically) that they can just react when the curve flattens 

But with a lot of CONTENT products (inc social media) that's not actually how it works. Because it doesn't account for sunk-cost lock-in.

Users and readers will stick to what they know, and use, well beyond the point where they START to lose trust in it. And you won't see that. 

But they'll only MOVE when they hit the Trust Thermocline. The point where their lack of trust in the product to meet their needs, and the emotional investment they'd made in it, have finally been outweighed by the physical and emotional effort required to abandon it. 

At this point, I normally get asked something like:

"So if we undo the last few changes and drop the price, we get them back?"

And then I have to break the news that nope: that's not how it works.

Because you're past the Thermocline now. You can't make them trust you again. 

Everything I said there applies now only more so. The MSM hit its Trust Thermocline last week and the twitter files and other revelations about the federal government being in the tank for the democrats mean that it too has hit its trust thermocline.

For the MSM this means that people are simply going to tune them out completely. There is only one way any MSM outlet (other than the Murdoch owned NY Post and WSJ) retains credibility and audience (and hence advertisers) from now on and that is to issue a huge “mea culpa” and then radically reorienting its coverage so as to actually be critical of the Democrats/progressives/Deep State. I don’t think this is going to happen, neither does Lawdog:

While I am extremely cross that y’all have made me feel pity for the political cancer that has been Joe Biden and his 50+year career as an elected parasite on this country, I am even more annoyed that I’m fairly sure that no-one is going to hold the Democrats and the Legacy Media to account for this.

Not a one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the Democratic Party is going to be voted out of office for this.

No Legacy Media companies are going to go out of business for this.

No “journalist” who enabled this bushwa is going to be drummed out of the “field of journalism*” and reduced to asking if I want fries with my meals for this.

I have one quibble, which is that when the media fails to retain any viewers/readers the number of journalists who get to experience funemployment is going to be high. But it will take a while for that to happen. Though quite possibly the new WaPo editors/managers are going to do it a bit quicker.

When (if) Trump comes into power in 2025 and assuming that the Republicans have some kind of majority in both houses of congress, I expect the cutting of bureaucracy to be massive. As I noted in a previous post³ the Deep State is already planning on #resistance. Unfortunately they’ve abused the trust of the electorate so much that various babies are going to be thrown out with the bath water as whole swathes of government are cut out.

Anyway going back to the Pink Floyd lyrics I posted on top.

Back in 1979 when Pink Floyd released the album it was obvious that the evil would-be dictator was some kind of fascist. Fast forward to 2024 and the group putting Jews up against the wall is the Progressive left. They are also the ones that eject gays who object to transgender orthodoxy, blacks who object to being treated as loyal serfs and so on.

And going back to other bricks in the wall, it’s the progressive left who control the educational curriculum. Who maleducate and brainwash on biology, climate change and so on.

We don't need no education.
We don't need no thought control.
No dark sarcasm in the classroom.
Teacher leave them kids alone.

And pace Holly’s other recent post⁴

When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers who would
Hurt the children in any way they could
By pouring their derision upon anything we did
And exposing every weakness
However carefully hidden by the kids
But in the town, it was well known
When they got home at night, their fat and
Psychopathic wives would thrash them
Within inches of their lives.

These days it probably isn’t wives doing the thrashing but other queer non-binaries in the polycule but hurting the children any way they can is right there. Transing them is a far more effective way of ruining them than anything a traditional sadistic teacher could do.

The MSM, progressives and the chatterati in general have been seen to lie exessively about Resident Joe’s mental acuity. The trust in and acceptance of what they push is now going to be questioned everywhere because they’ve hit the trust thermocline. They can’t put the genie back in the bottle no matter how much they try and in fact the more they try the more we distrust them and wonder what else they are lying about.

At its most simple the lights just came on bright again and we can smell the gas leak. The question is do the gaslighters realize we’ve figured out they are lying?

1. WHO IS RUNNING THE COUNTRY?

2. The Smell Was Elephant S*** All Along

3.

4. If Different Perverts Got There First