The PC Left Is Gaslighting The Rest Of Us

   'Gaslighting' is one of those politically correct / "social justice" buzzwords that those folks love so much. (And boy, they really do love their jargon, don't they?)*

   But the thing is: the PC / PoMo left is gaslighting everybody else. You might say: they're gaslighting the culture. They shriekily insist on all sorts of insane things that most of us can plainly see are crazy and/or mean/wrong...and they try to convince us that we're the crazy ones. And, if you don't mind me saying so: a lot of us--present company presumably excluded--are falling for it. For example, they insist that races are not biological categories. You know that's wrong, I know that's wrong, presumably everybody not cultified by the PC / PoMo cult knows that that's wrong...but a whole lot of people are, in some sense, convinced that they ought to go along with it...they come to think it, in some sense...to doublethink it, in Orwellian terms. They tell us that we're all racist--that even universities--where racism is avoided like the very plague--are deeply and powerfully racist. They insist that men can become women simply by dressing in traditionally feminine ways, or merely by "feeling like a woman," and that it's patent bigotry to even notice that someone is merely pretending to be a woman...or to be uncomfortable with such a person using the women's locker room. They insist that we live in a "rape culture." They insist that any talk of how a woman might avoid rape is "victim-blaming." They insist that the fact that a woman continued to have sex with and profess love for a man for years provides no grounds whatsoever for skepticism about her claim, after the relationship ends, that she was raped in their first sexual encounter. They insist that we submit to whimsical micromanagement of our vocabulary on the basis of arguments and theories that make no sense at all--and that the tiniest divergence from the ever-changing jargonistic preferences of the PC vanguard is inexcusable prejudice.  And, on top of all that, they insist that all of this insanity is nothing but an ordinary expectation of politeness...and that there is no such thing as PC at all.

   In short, the PC left is gaslighting us all.

   And: liberals are largely going along with it. It seems to me that the population breaks down into: the PC / PoMo left (that's making this stuff up and leading the charge to hector people into accepting it all), "progressives" / liberals (who are either believing it or going along with it because they're effectively gaslighted...or afraid to step out of line), and conservatives (who are basically calling bullshit on it all.) Liberals seem incapable of even imagining that conservatives could ever be right about anything--and many are clueless about the fact that leftists can be anti-liberal. So (as with the paleo-PC of the 80s-90s, it's liberals who are instrumental in the success of neo-PC. Until they wake up and recognize that, at least on this one issue, they ought to be allied with the center-right, the far left's gaslighting of American culture will continue to succeed.

*  Paradigmatically, Smith "gaslights" Jones when Smith is a crazy asshole, but uses psychological chicanery to convince Jones that she's the crazy one. The specifics of the term's etymology are actually really cool--but, briefly, the perpetrator is paradigmatically male, and the victim paradigmatically female. That's why the left likes the concept, of course:they almost always use it to discuss how terrible men are. Their fondness for the term is tied up with their view that it's always misogynistic to call women crazy. Now, granted, I've known assholes in my life who thought their gfs were crazy simply because those gfs called them on their bullshit. OTOH, I've known women who were crazy. Guys who are crazy assholes and girls who are crazy assholes tend to end up in relationships with each other, so... Well, you know how it goes. It's all probably overdetermined. The PC left seems to have never met any actual human beings, so they always seem to be "theorizing" this stuff from a distance.