Post-truth, gaslighting and unmasking
This one came out a little chaotic
In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary chose “post-truth” as its word of the year (the shortlist included other buzzwords such as “alt-right,” “chatbot,” “woke,” and “latinx”). This happened the year Donald Trump won the US presidential election after launching his campaign by declaring that Mexican immigrants were mostly criminals, drug traffickers, and rapists. On its website, Oxford stated that “The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States. It has also become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase ‘post-truth politics.’”
Some of those who don’t care for neologisms might say that this term is redundant, that it is nothing more than a pretentious and convoluted way of saying “lie.” But the term is not supposed to refer simply to people in power lying (clearly that has always happened), but to society entering a post-truth era, in the same way that we talk about “post-war” to refer to the period after the end of World War II. Post-truth isn’t just lying, but the social and political order where truth and facts are rendered irrelevant. An order, one could argue, where Israel can spend more than two years perpetrating a genocide widely documented by its own victims, killing more journalists in Gaza than all those who died in both world wars and all US wars from Korea onwards, allow its political and military leaders to openly and publicly express their genocidal intent from the outset, label as anti-Semitic the academics, Jewish activists, and international human rights organizations —even the very UN that granted them the right to establish their country— that have recognized and denounced these crimes against humanity as genocide, and still have this be presented as a debatable issue on CNN or in The New York Times.
For over two years, we’ve witnessed the world’s first live-streamed genocide, and Global North governments and corporate media —as well as their ideological allies in the South— have not only pushed the idea that this was not actually happening, but have equated criticism of this nation-state’s actions with antisemitism and hate speech. And many defenders of Zionism even posit that condemning the genocide of Palestinians means supporting a hypothetical genocide against Israelis —and Jewish people in general— that would supposedly be perpetrated by Palestine, a false and absurd binary that holds that the liberation of a people somehow necessitates the extermination of those denying them their freedom.
Judaism is a religion with around five millennia of history according to its own records, and Zionism, the colonial political ideology on which the contemporary ethnostate of Israel was founded in 1948, only emerged in the 19th century and was mainly developed by secular European Jews. For decades, Zionist propaganda (or, in Israeli terms, its hasbara) has attempted to convince the rest of the world that being Jewish implies being Zionist, and that any criticism of this ideology-project-ethnostate —even that of a Jewish individual or group— is a form of anti-Semitism. According to the Zionist narrative, Palestinians have resisted the colonization of their homeland simply because of an inherent and ancestral hatred of Jews, completely erasing the reality of the military occupation and apartheid regime to which Israel has subjected them to for almost eight decades, and omitting the historical fact that Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted for generations in Palestine before the arrival of the first Zionist settlers. And in all this, I think it is essential to emphasize that equating Judaism/the Jewish people with the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli state is not only completely absurd and fallacious, but also seriously endangers Jewish people and adds fuel to the fire of real anti-Semitism, which is already being exacerbated by the global rise of the far right. I can think of few actions more anti-Semitic than committing the worst crime known to humanity, and defending it tooth and nail while claiming that you are doing it in the name of all Jewish people, proudly waving your Star of David flag.
These tactics of media and ideological manipulation could also be described with another neologism: gaslighting, which refers to a form of manipulation and emotional abuse, especially in the context of romantic relationships. The term comes from the film Gas Light (1944), which tells the story of Paula, a young woman living in Victorian London with her famous opera singer aunt, and who moves to Italy after her aunt is murdered during a burglary. Ten years later, after a brief courtship, Paula marries pianist Gregory Anton, and the couple moves into her aunt’s home in London. Throughout the film (spoilers until the end of this paragraph), a series of incidents lead Paula to suspect that she may be losing her mind. One of them is that the lights —which are gas lights, because we’re in the 1880s— mysteriously dim when Gregory is not home; hence the name of the film. As the plot progresses, we realize that her husband is manipulating her, until it is finally revealed that it was he who murdered her aunt (gasp!). It turns out that their entire relationship was a sham, that Gregory only married her to gain access to a stash of jewelry hidden in his aunt’s house, and that all the incidents throughout the story were orchestrated by him in an attempt to drive her insane and have her committed to a mental hospital. Gas Light was basically a pioneer of the “who did I marry?” thriller subgenre, and decades later the term began to be used as a verb to refer to this form of manipulation and emotional abuse, which aims to make the victim question their own perception, memory, and sanity. In short, gaslighting is not simply lying to your partner, but manipulating them to the point where they conflate questioning your word —and authority— with losing touch with reality.
Perhaps applying a term from psychology and interpersonal relationships to politics is not appropriate or conceptually rigorous, starting with the fact that we are not talking about a relationship between two individuals, but between populations and institutions. And, unlike a romantic relationship, our relationship with the nation-state is not consensual. Yes, we have the option of voting for those who administer the bureaucracy of the oppressive systems that govern our lives, we can change the faces of those who occupy the government, but we do not have the option of ceasing to live under a state, or replacing it with another form of social organization, as we do have the option of telling an abusive partner to fuck off (however difficult that may be in certain cases) or deciding not to live with a partner in the first place. While I may be accused of falling into therapy-speak territory, I can’t help but feel that I am being gaslit when watching the news or listening to bootstrapping and social flat-earther discourse from rich and privileged —or just bootlicking— assholes.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
George Orwell, 1984
During a raid on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, shot and killed Renee Nicole Good through the windshield of her car as she attempted to flee from him and other agents. Despite the existence of witnesses—and videos—of the incident, on January 8, Vice President J.D. Vance stated at a press conference that Renee Good “was trying to ram this guy with her car, he shot back, he defended himself, he’s already been seriously wounded in operations before. And everybody that is repeating the lie that this is some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis, you should be ashamed of yourselves.” Vance also stated: “I can believe that her death is a tragedy, while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making”. The vice president attempted to soften his stance by adding that he believed Good was indeed a victim, but not of the abuse of power by the armed state agent who killed her, but rather of the lunatic radical left that brainwashed her and led her to obstruct the work and question the authority of said agent. In other words: you would have to be crazy to question our authority. Republican Congressman Wesley Hunt was more blunt about it, stating: “The bottom line is this: When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and you get to keep your life.” And far-right businessman and activist Charles Haywood took it even further and basically said the quiet part out loud, tweeting: “As Margaret Thatcher said, ‘now is no time to go wobbly.’ Crushing the Left is all that matters. No backing down, rather escalation. Quadruple force. Give medals to anyone who shoots a Left protestor.” But it’s worth noting that this open and explicit incitement to violence on Twitter (I’ll stop deadnaming it as soon as Elon acknowledges his daughter Vivian’s name and gender) is not evidence of a sudden, organic shift in American political culture, but rather of the fact that the billionaire oligarchs allied with Trump-MAGA are taking over mass media, making the complicity between big capital and the State increasingly transparent.
While we are, in fact, living through a global crisis of misinformation and lack of media literacy, which is only exacerbated by the massive —and unregulated— use of “generative AI” and other emerging technologies, I’m not so sure it’s accurate to say that we’ve entered a post-truth era as such. It seems to me that what we are witnessing around the world, and particularly in the US, is the lifting of a veil. My impression is that the term “post-truth” was coined by American liberals and true believers of the establishment, who saw the Trump and MAGA phenomenon as a cause rather than a symptom, as an anomaly rather than the predictable result of four decades of neoliberalism, austerity, precariousness, inequality, and corruption: people who claim “this is not who we are” when a great injustice happens in their nation founded by genocidal slave masters, people who genuinely believed in the American dream, the myth of meritocracy and the legitimacy of the status quo, people who marched against Trump with signs that read “if Hillary/Kamala were president, we’d be at brunch.” These are the people who think that the oppression, violence, corruption, and injustice which we can now constantly witness through our pocket screens are somehow a novelty or a break with “normality,” rather than constants of human civilization since its inception. People who are only able to recognize the brutality of Empire when its boomerang comes back to hit them in the face.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the George W. Bush Jr. administration fed the American people —and the rest of the world— the big lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, in order to manufacture consensus for invading their country, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as the rise of Daesh/ISIS. Of course, this had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein’s announcement in 2000 that Iraq would sell oil in euros instead of dollars, weakening the petrodollar and, with it, the hegemony of the American empire. In 2011, the US bombed Libya, Gaddafi was killed, and an ensuing civil war devastated the country. Surely it had nothing to do with Gaddafi’s 2009 announcement of a new gold-backed African currency for oil trade. On January 3, 2026, the US invaded Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife, without any authorization from its own Congress. Trump immediately made it clear to the press that they wanted to take over Venezuela’s immense oil reserves, and the head of the recently renamed Department *of War*, Pete Hegseth, retweeted the following image:
Although several conservatives —and liberals— celebrated the removal of the “communist dictator” (for my opinion on Maduro and his government, see this essay by Charles McBryde) and some did try to portray this blatant violation of international law and national sovereignty as an act of salvation and liberation, the US government did not feel the need to make up excuses or justifications. Its position was summed up as: we did it because we wanted to, who’s gonna stop us? It’s the “might makes right” doctrine, the law of the strongest, the most powerful. That has always been the geopolitical order, because that has been realpolitik since time immemorial.
The political reality is that we have never stopped living in empires, just as we have never stopped living in class societies and social orders based on hierarchies and structural inequalities. As British Marxist Grace Blakely cleverly points out: “Trump’s actions have revealed a much deeper truth: capitalism and imperialism go hand in hand. But now, the ruling class is no longer trying to hide it. […] The shift towards mercantilism seen under Trump represents only a rhetorical break with the policy of previous administrations. Biden, Obama, Bush, all spearheaded imperialist interventions – whether outright wars, one-sided trade deals, or the manipulation of global rules and institutions. The difference is that Trump is doing so loudly and unashamedly – because he believes he can convince the American people that imperialism is in their interests, not just the interests of US capital.”
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born:
now is the time of monsters.”
—Antonio Gramsci
(I’m pretty sure this famous line is more of a paraphrase of his words than an actual quote)
“The problem with quotes on the internet is you can never be certain they’re authentic.”
—Abraham Lincoln
The world is undoubtedly experiencing a multitude of crises and 21st century conditions differ considerably from those of the 20th, but the root of major societal issues remains fundamentally the same: we are still at the mercy of powerful elites who are effectively accountable to no one and who are willing to crush us —and, given climate catastrophe, set the world on fire— in order to maintain their wealth, privilege, and status.
It’s clear that we will have to witness, and survive, the death throes of a dying empire and a political-economic system in decay. What remains uncertain is whether we will be able to build a better alternative on top of its ruins, or whether we’ll even have a habitable planet by then.
Only time will tell.