I have a question. Does Vice-President Harris’s proposed policy of a “ban on grocery store price gouging” constitute “gaslighting” as defined by the experts at Psychology Today?

Gaslighting is an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity.

When a politician tells you they can ban grocery store price gouging, isn’t that gaslighting, straight up? Because, as far-Right misinformation terrorists have reminded us, politicians have been promising to freeze prices for 2,000 years, and it never worked. But what do unbiased fact-checkers say? I suggest: “Don’t Know Much About History.”

I mean. Isn’t all politics a form of gaslighting? Isn’t the whole point of politics to endlessly rehearse your Groucho Marx imitation and say “who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

And here’s a question. Does gaslighting work with anyone, or only with someone that, deep down, wants to believe something that isn’t true?

For instance, I was watching Mark Halperin doing a 2-WAY interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson, and he really wanted Peterson to confirm the liberal line on Trump’s lies. Mark, honey: don’t you understand that all politicians lie, about everything? Experts agree that we humans have a remarkable ability to ignore the lies of the politicians we support and get really angry about the lies of politicians we hate.

So when Kamunist Harris mournfully regrets that “A loaf of bread costs 50% more today than it did before the pandemic. Ground beef is up almost 50%” is that gaslighting or what? Those price rises happened on her watch. But does she apologize for the failed policy of the Biden-Harris administration? Hey no. It’s all the fault of “price gouging” corporations.

I remember the heroic efforts of the price-gouging grocery chains to keep food on the shelves during COVID. Thank you, folks.

But then I worry. When the Trump campaign runs an ad that consists of nothing but Harris’s mournful regret about the price increases of bread and ground beef, does that offend the sensibilities of childless cat ladies -- so easily offended! -- making them feel unsafe?

You see, I can’t forget the time that Rick Lazio invaded Hillary Clinton’s space at a debate in 2000 for New York senator. He went over to her podium and asked her to sign a campaign finance pledge. Oh, the horror! How dare, how dare a male politician invade a female politician’s safe space! Next we know, Trump will be invading Kamala’s personal space to challenge her on her golf handicap.

But maybe Trump, who all agree has a history with women, knows exactly what kind of a woman Kommila Harris is, and knows exactly how to handle her. I must say, I just love that her dad, Donald Harris, was a Marxist economics professor. Donny honey, don’t you know that Marx’s economics was obliterated less than ten years after Das Kapital by the marginal revolution in 1870? So maybe it’s understandable that Donny’s daughter thinks that price freezes on groceries might work.

Let’s get serious. I am trying to understand the present in the ideas of Mattias Desmet in The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Says he:

The escalating social crises of the early twenty-first century are the manifestation of an underlying psychological and ideological upheaval -- a shift of the tectonic plates on which a worldview rests, We are experiencing the moment when an old ideology rears up in power, one last time, before collapsing. Each attempt to remediate the current social problems, whatever they may be, on the basis of the old ideology will only make things worse.

In other words, our Democrat friends are flapping about, frantically woking and censoring and lawfaring, because nothing works like Marx and Marcuse and Dr. Fauci said it should.

It all came together in the late COVID unpleasantness, according to Desmet, when governments all over the world censored science they didn’t like as dangerous “disinformation” and “misinformation.”

“Truth telling is dangerous,” says Desmet.

Yet it is also necessary. No matter how fruitful a social consensus may be at a certain time, if it is not dismantled in time and renewed, it will putrefy and eventually have a suffocating effect on society.

I wonder if our Democrat friends are unwittingly helping to dismantle the old and the putrefied. Put it this way: if you wanted to dismantle a decaying dynasty, why not run in 2016 the most unlikable candidate for president since Herbert Hoover. And then run a senile old man in 2020. And then run the kackling daughter of a Marxist economics professor for president in 2024. Genius!

Like Mark Twain said: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Just don’t forget to change the mantle on the gaslight.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: AT via Magic Studio