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Kim Petersen
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The Donald Trump administration has been continuously gaslighting the American people. The examples are myriad. Let’s begin with the tariffs. The United States has imposed them on nearly every country. Ukraine has managed to escape being issued a tariff, so far. Israel, though, has not escaped a proposed 17% Trump tariff, which is bizarre since Israel over the years has been the number one recipient of US aid. It is putting money in one pocket while removing money from the other pocket. Such is the lunacy of Trump’s tariffs that they are even applied to penguins. The amount of the tariffs and the dates for implementation have been in constant flux. Trump and his team insist that the exporting countries will pay the tariffs. That works when the US is the only market for one’s exports.
Second, Trump kept saying no more wars. He would be the man who’d end the special military operation by Russia in Ukraine in 24 hours. He’d stop sending weapons to Ukraine. That supplying of weapons adduces US involvement in a proxy war, as it was under Joe Biden, and continues to be under Trump. Then Trump allied with Israel against Palestinians, exposing his hypocrisy. Trump would whine about how grief-stricken he is about the killing of people in the fighting between Russia and Ukraine. Yet, he takes a decidedly different stance on the killing of Palestinians by Israeli Jews. The Palestinians need to be expunged from the territory to erect a riviera on the beaches of Gaza. And then the “peace president” launched an aggression against Iraq. And let’s not forget that Ansar Allah sent the ill-fated US navy away from the waters near Yemen.
To put absurdity over the top, the genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu has nominated the warmaking Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, a prize he has long pined for. Forthrightly or not, Trump downplays his chances of winning the Nobel recognition he covets: “It’s too bad. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.”
Third, Trump has promised repeatedly to release all the JFK documents, the RFK documents, and the Epstein documents. Trump only made a partial release of the JFK files, many heavily redacted, during Trump 1. He promised the rest would be forthcoming. No release has occurred at the time of this writing during Trump 2. In the latest bit of gaslighting, the public is expected to believe that there are no Epstein files. Apparently, the associates of Epstein can now relax and breathe much easier. As to what became of Epstein videos, files, notes, it leads to a suspicion. There is a high likelihood that this escaping the gun also applies to Trump who had a relationship with the deceased financier Epstein. Equally oleaginous is the poor quality video of Epstein’s cell that has a missing one-minute. In other words, much of the documentation to imprison Epstein is missing, and the same goes for his imprisoned partner in recruiting underage females, Ghislaine Maxwell. Much of the evidence to put her behind bars is now deemed non-existent.
Trump is relying on his bluster (i.e., lies) to confuse Americans — in particular, his MAGA base. The media is on notice that it will be ridiculed for asking questions about Epstein. Said Trump who interjected himself to a question posed by a reporter to Attorney General Pam Bondi:
[su_note note_color=”#a5e0ef” radius=”17″]Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? Been talked about for years. You’re asking, we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things, and are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.[/su_note]
However, the gaslighting surrounding the Epstein sex trafficking ring has caused rumblings among some of the MAGA people.
Such is the power of gaslighting that if some people are told something often enough, even when there is powerful evidence to the contrary, that the gaslighter can confuse the gaslit people. The media and fact checkers have been playing a big role in this.
In a 16 August 2024 essay, professor T.P. Wilkinson wrote: “George Soros, who by his own public admission already enriched himself at the age of 14 with the help of Nazi occupiers of his native Hungary.”
Soros
He had not provided substantiation for this claim, so I asked. He said that he had cited his source in a previous article. Indeed, he had done this in his essay “The Health which I See is Disease (… if the Hierarchical Church so Defines)” on 5 March 2021.
This led me to a 1998 60 Minutes interview, where George Soros openly admits that as a 14-year-old boy he helped Nazis dispossess Jews of their property. It is crystal clear in the video and undeniable. But the mass media has seemingly built up a huge wall of gaslighting around Soros ever having worked for the Nazis against fellow Jews.
Wilkinson does not mince words, George Soros is a serial murderer.
Yet, there are a plethora of refutations of Soros having worked for the Nazis. These charges against Soros can be fought through gaslighting or orchestrated whitewashing. Yet, despite the concrete evidence of the video interview, it is the videotaped words of Soros versus the words that gaslighters use to frame the admission of Soros.
For example, Reuters sets up a strawman. It does not deal with the criticism that Soros helped dispossess Jews of their property for the Nazis. It deflects by stating that Soros was not a Nazi. So Soros wasn’t a card-carrying member of the National Socialist Party of Deutschland. But there is a well-known refrain about ducks. If Soros quacks like a Nazi and behaves like a Nazi, ergo he must be a Nazi.
Newsweek even denies in its fact check that Soros assisted the dispossession of Jewish property for the Nazis. Perplexing. In other words, either Newsweek is lying or it is calling Soros a liar.
[su_note note_color=”#a5e0ef” radius=”17″]Of all the conspiracy theories spun around the 87-year-old [soon to be 95-year-old] Jewish billionaire George Soros – that he is the “puppet master” of all liberals, that he owns Black Lives Matter, that he is secretly building a new world order – the most demonstrably insane may be the claim that he was a Nazi. That is: That the 14-year-old boy who had to hide from his own government during the German occupation of Hungary was a war criminal who sent his own people to gas chambers.[/su_note]
Nowadays, given the proliferation of the internet and the reposting and archiving of e-information, it is nigh impossible to remove regrettable words from the information universe.
If Soros regrets his admission, how then should he elude his own words? When you are a billionaire, you can build your own media empire and gaslight. The Soros Economic Development Fund says:
[su_note note_color=”#a5e0ef” radius=”17″]We invest in critical media companies to foster their growth and safeguard their editorial independence. This work helps to promote freedom of expression and dissent, the fight against disinformation, and the imperative to develop new business models as cornerstones of democracy.[/su_note]
Sounds impressive. However, Xinhua reports on a study conducted by Media Research Center Business:
Soros spent hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in bribes to build his own “network of media ties” so as to manipulate public opinion, U.S. media said.
Is this how Soros manages to use his deep pockets to influence all these media (including, apparently, the Reuters fact check) to deny what he said during his 60 Minutes interview?
I lived in Hungary for two years, so of course, I had heard of Soros and his financial corruption. Reuters did not hide Soros’s shady business practices, headlining “Hungary court confirms $2.5 mln fine on Soros fund,” and reporting, “New York-based Soros Fund Management LLC will have to pay a fine of 489 million forints ($2.5 million) for unlawful trades in shares of OTP Bank.”
Before I had ever ventured to Hungary, I had worked as a dive instructor in the Maldives. At the resort restaurant, I once engaged in conversation with a businessman who worked for a company buying bad debt from companies going under. During our conversation, I brought up Georg Soros. He expressed surprise that a random dive instructor knew who Soros was and asked how I knew this?
My terse reply: “I read.”
However, reading, per se, is insufficient. It may even be harmful. Gaining knowledge is not simply comprehending what one reads. The source of the information, what questions are raised about what is written, analyzing the evidence, and the ability to analyze and rationally consider the information is vital to coming to a reasoned conclusion. This is especially important given the widespread gaslighting and disinformation. It is imperative that readers and viewers regard information with open-minded skepticism.
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[su_note note_color=”#f1efef” radius=”0″]The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post, although, if we publish them, we obviously find them noteworthy and valuable. [/su_note]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
2 comments
Peterson misunderstands what tariffs are. He writes:
“The United States has imposed them on nearly every country. Ukraine has managed to escape being issued a tariff, so far. Israel, though, has not escaped a proposed 17% Trump tariff, which is bizarre since Israel over the years has been the number one recipient of US aid. It is putting money in one pocket while removing money from the other pocket.”
Tariffs are not imposed on a country and a country does not pay money to the US. Tariffs are imposed on products made outside the US in order to protect US manufacturers from the lower wages paid to workers in those countries. Tariffs make foreign made products more expensive by imposing a tax on them as they enter the US.
Of course, there is a negotiation about who will pay the tax — will it be the foreign manufacturer who want to get its products into the US market. Or will it be the US retailer who wants to sell these products.
For example, Home Depot has said it will pay the taxes imposed on imported products and not pass the cost along to consumers. WalMart has said it will pay the taxes but it will pass the cost on to its shoppers. Amazon has said it will do a mix. Japanese car manufacturers have said they will pay the tariffs but they will increase the price of their cars to US retailers who can either pass that cost on to consumers or eat it themselves.
The “gaslighting” that is going on is the very poor level of clarity about what tariffs are. This starts with Trump who often talks about tariffs as if they are punishments for nations he is pissed at. Tariffs are normal. Most countries impose them. The Reagan/Clinton era of “free trade” is over. US corporations can no longer ship their production to low wage countries and then bring the products back to the US for “free.” This fucks over US workers and at least Trump admits that and will make them pay.
The eternal „gaslighting”!