And Now We See that Trump is a Gaslighter
Paul Kingsnorth nailed it in 2023 when he said the pandemic response rewired his brain. He saw the unholy trinity of power (Big Government, Big Business, Big Media) weave a narrative so tight it could choke a nation, the kind of thing you’d expect from a dictatorship, not the world’s beacon of liberty.
The Epstein mess is cut from the same rancid cloth. Corporate honchos, state apparatchiks, and media lapdogs bark in unison: “Nothing to see here, folks! Just a dead perv and wild rumors!” But the stench of truth seeps through the cracks. We know there’s more: names, dates, dirty deals, and a Shelob web of complicity.
We thought it was mostly the Democrats gaslighting and coercing us during the pandemic response and vaccination mobilization.
But now it’s the Republicans and, worse, that Rogue Republican with the hot wife who promised he’d cut through the web. That promise was the only thing many voters liked about him.
And now he’s gaslighting us:
There’s no list.
Nobody cares about Epstein.
Just move on.
The Establishment’s gaslighting has become so blatant it’s practically a neon sign.
It might also be the last stop on the totalitarian train line.
For decades, Establishment apparatchiks covered things up and tricked people like me into scoffing at claims that the CIA flooded the west coast with LSD and worked with Charlie Mansion, that the CIA poured drugs into black communities in order to fund the Contras, that Vietnam and Desert Storm were mere boondoggles to the military-industrial complex, that the U.S. government planted more false flags over the past 100 years than Wilt Chamberlain banged women.
But now people like me aren’t falling for it. We didn’t fall for the vaccines; we aren’t falling for Clientless Epstein.
The only thing the Establishment has left? The morons in our electorate who still don’t realize that “Joe Biden” was a hologram and Kamala Harris merely an extension of whatever cabal (still unidentified, btw) who ran the White House from 2020-2024, the dolts who voted for Harris with the “joy” her PR team slathered on her campaign with the deftness of a teenager using Rust-Oleum to paint his car.
The cover-ups aren’t working. The gaslighting has gone from puzzling through shocking to where it sits today: a comedic cultural reference.
Gaslighting has nowhere else to go.
So what’s left?
Maybe just raw, brute force:
“If the rabble figures out they’ve been getting raped and won’t go for it anymore, then we’ll just have to strap them down. If that’s what it takes to keep the graft going, then that’s what we’ll do.”
I was hoping Trump would be the wrench in their gears. That’s why they painted him as Satan incarnate, right? He was a disruptor threatening the Establishment’s cozy racket.
It looks like I was wrong.
The best I can say for Trump in light of his Epstein gaslighting is that maybe, just maybe, he is caught in a gilded circus act: juggling billionaire backers, Establishment weasels, and the 77 million voters who thought he might be different.
He had to agree to play ball with bastards to win in ’24: no oligarchs, no victory . . . just a replay of 2020 when he had zero oligarchs in his corner. Now he’s trying to appease his oligarchs while tossing scraps to the plebeian base. It’s a grim balancing act.
But it doesn’t really matter. Grim balancing act or complete sell-out, it still points to the same truth: the radiation we thought we were shooting into our national cancer known as “the Establishment” didn’t work. Heck, it’s proof that the gamma rays never even left the gun . . . and the Establishment is wearing one giant hazmat suit.
Link to Substack
Eric Scheske
