I appreciate this. I think it’s also extremely manipulative to default to accusing someone else “gaslighting.” it’s a very harsh accusation that shuts down conversation. But, I suppose that is the point.
People can have a good faith disagreement, and perceive things very differently. It doesn’t mean that you are deliberately and maliciously denying someone else’s view.
Another thing to remember is that you are not obligated to engage with somebody who disagrees with you. Some of the people who are accusing others of gaslighting believe that there are people whose entire point in disagreeing with them is to make them waste their time writing rebuttals to their nonsense. Since nonsense is easily generated on the fly by those with no particular interest in the truth, and clearly reasoned rebuttals take time and effort to write, it's exhausting, and not cost-effective. There is an understandable temptation to snarl 'you are just gaslighting' and walk away, which is why around here the meaning of 'gaslighting' has expanded to include 'spouting nonsense which, if you actually intended me to believe it, would make me doubt my sanity'. Just walk away from these conversations. Forget about having the last word. If it helps, recall that the person on the other end may be playing 'guess how many people I can provoke into calling me a gaslighter today' amusement points in their peer and follower group.
"People being untruthful or engaging in intellectual dishonesty and psychological manipulation or exerting social pressure on others to get them to falsify their own beliefs is bad. It is abusive of an individual and also impedes the honest and productive debate we need to determine what is true and resolve complex moral issues and conflicts."
It seems to me that "gaslighting" is probably not a useful term at this time of algorithm-controlled media feeds... soon to be higher-powered by AI. Someone gaslit, in my view, is someone lacking objective interest that has locked into a belief similar to that of faith. It is similar to someone I debate who is a pious Christian on the topic of human morality. There is no room for objective debate as they have adopted the idea of one of faith.
But this behavior is almost ubiquitous now even outside of religion. And I have some understanding and empathy for it, even though it will not stop me from pointing the wrongness I see. The repetition of some idea, meme, narrative or claim will eventually be absorbed as fact by intellectually lazy people, of which most of the human race is. That is them being gaslit. And so almost everyone is gaslit now. So claiming someone is gaslit is almost meaningless.
I try to avoid accusing someone of engaging in gaslighting unless 1) They say "I never said 'X', and 2) I show them a screenshot in which they have said 'X', and 3) there is no explanation forthcoming.
I fully agree that people are way too eager to diagnose the utterances of others as instances of gaslighting. However, it strikes me as very plausible that the majority of extremists sincerely think the other side is gaslighting them; it's hard to spot logical fallacies from your own side and easy to spot your opponent's fallacies. The other side feels much more incoherent (and you've been taught to always trust your feelings), so how can anyone not see that your side is right?
Perhaps it's better to acknowledge that the *feeling* of being gaslit is very real. It takes a leap of faith to see the opposing arguments as good faith arguments. There are plenty of bad faith actors out there on the internet, and very easy to retreat to cynicism.
The overuse of "gaslighting" is a bugaboo of mine, but I think I disagree with your objections here.
I always think of gaslighting as a situation where you are lying to someone in a way that requires them to disregard their own observations. If I insist that I'm wearing a red shirt while clearly wearing a blue one in your presence, I'm gaslighting you. If I insist that I'm wearing a red shirt despite wearing a blue one, but you can't see me, I'm just lying. The quintessential recent example, which I think started the trend of using the term, was Sean Spicer claiming that Trump had the biggest inaugural crowd ever in 2017. That was gaslighting because anyone who saw both Trump's and Obama's inaugurations or had access to the news footage of his and Obama's inaugurations could easily tell that he did not, and he was insisting that they disregard their own ability to judge crowd size. However, people went on to use it any time Trump (or other people) lied about something or they thought they had lied, even if the lie wasn't contradicting their own observations.
I get frustrated when people refer to both as gaslighting because it dilutes the term, which has a particular and useful meaning.
In at least some of your examples, your interlocutors may be wrong that you were gaslighting them, but at least in the Elon Musk example, the accusation likely made sense in context. I'm not inside their heads, but my assumption was that their thought process went something like this:
1) We can both see what Elon Musk did;
2) Any rational person would recognize what he did as expressing Nazi sympathies;
3) you are a rational person;
4) therefore, if you are denying that he was expressing Nazi sympathies, you must be lying and asking me to disregard my own observations of what happened (hence, gaslighting).
There's a problem with their logic, but it isn't that this sequence doesn't describe gas lighting, but that (2) isn't accurate - reasonable people can disagree over whether what he did was expressing Nazi sympathies.
Perhaps a good way to see this is to imagine a more extreme example. Say that, instead of making a particular arm gesture, he went up on stage wearing a Nazi uniform, including a red armband and a swastika, read a passage of Mein Kompf, and finished it off by saying, "I support the Nazi party. Hitler was a good guy. I'm not just trolling here, I really mean it!" Had he done that, and someone had denied that he was expressing Nazi sympathies, I assume you would agree that person was either not a rational person or gaslighting them. It's just that what Musk did didn't come close to reaching that level of obviousness, leaving an opening for rational people to disagree about his intent.
That said, I do agree that, when faced with an instance of what appears to be gaslighting, it's worth considering whether it is just legitimate disagreement. This is particularly true when the issue involves some level of interpretation or value judgment, allowing one side or the other to be wrong or to just disagree. That said, there probably is room for calling out gaslighting even when it comes down to value judgments. For example, if someone claims that the people responsible Rotherham child sexual assaults did nothing wrong, and they aren't otherwise a terrible person, it's probably fair to say that they are gaslighting you.
I think gaslighting has to be understood as an intentional manipulation of someone else when both people know the truth/believe the same thing. Think of the film. The husband knew he was dimming the lights and his intention was to make his wife doubt her own sanity. Your final example isn't one of that. I think we should assume that somebody who claims rape gangs are not morally wrong really thinks that and ask them. "Why when you are otherwise an ethical caring person, do you believe it was OK for these men to rape girls?"
The truthful answer would more likely be something zealous and insane like:
"I believe girls who are out alone and uncovered are whores and offering themselves to these men. They are to blame for tempting the men. Offer a lion a piece of meat and it will eat it. Good Muslim girls don't behave like that." (Actual argument I've seen made by an Islamist zealot)
or
"It's an act of resistance! Britain colonised their countries and abused and raped girls and Muslims still face Islamophobia. We can't go round exploiting and abusing other people for centuries and then complain when we get a taste of your own medicine."
In either case, it's important to believe that the person really means what they say and, in the first case, deport them if this is possible and put them on a watchlist and send them for an intervention by psychologists who deal in extremism. Thinking they don't really believe that and are messing with you is dangerous to girls. In the second case, we might also consider some kind of psychological intervention and deprogramming. In both cases, it's important to recognise that there are people who genuinely believe this and think about how to deal with them.
The truth is unlikely to be,
"I don't actually think it's OK. Like you, I believe that the exploitation and rape of vulnerable girls is morally abhorrent. However, I really want to see if I can make you believe that position is insane and doubt your own judgement."
It's possible that someone might be doing that although its hard to see how it would benefit them. It'd be a weird psychological experiment.
Most often, genuine acts of gaslighting take place in abusive relationships and involve convincing a partner that abusive behaviour is not abusive. e.g., you might see a victim of gaslighting say something like, "He doesn't want to hit me but I drive him to it by being so stupid and not caring enough about him to make the kind of meals he likes and keep the house clean. If I could just be a better wife, this wouldn't happen." The man usually knows that violence is wrong and that there is no justification for it and he wouldn't want other people to know he did it but in the relationship he will manipulate the woman by undermining her self-esteem and making her really believe that she's such a terrible person, anybody would hit her. Or sometimes a woman will do that. My brother-in-law finally got out of a relationship where his girlfriend would throw things at his head and abuse him and he felt it was his fault because he kept saying hurtful things and making her jealous and didn't care about her feelings enough. She knew what she was doing was wrong because she promised him she could change and would get anger management therapy and address issues stemming from her abusive childhood, but while he stayed, she would convince him that he was the problem to undermine his self-esteem and make him think it was all his fault so that he didn't leave her.
This is where the concept of gaslighting is useful and something victims of abuse need to understand so they can learn to recognise that it was done to them so they can recognise that the abuse was not their fault and work on recognising that they are vulnerable to this. A friend recently went through it with a man who convinced her that him not getting a job, blowing all their savings, getting her to support him through college and then not doing what he said the plan was - get a job so they could start a family and she could take a break from hers - was all perfectly fine and if she objected to it, it wasn't really him she was angry with but people who'd abused her in her childhood and it was trauma resurfacing (he was a psych graduate) and she was lashing out at him and trying to control him. A psychologist helped her to see that she kept getting into relationships where she was abused because she was familiar and comfortable with being treated badly because of her childhood and did not healthy expectations of being treated well. A good book on gaslighting that helped her is called "Was it even abuse?"
I’m a psychiatrist and the parent of an 11 year old girl with a neurodevelopmental disorder who was groomed into gender ideology by her school at the age of 10. The only time I have ever used the term gaslighting is to describe the behavior of the people involved. I do not believe that these people thought my daughter was actually my son. I don’t believe that they were intentionally trying to make me doubt my own sanity. But that was result, at least for a couple of months. Does gaslighting require the intent to break someone’s mind? I don’t know but I’ve never experienced something so hideously vertiginous in my entire life.
You raise a good point and I am thinking of writing a follow-up to address this issue of 'intention' that others have also queried.
While 'gaslighting' does literally and originally refer to an intentional psychological manipulation of somebody else into believing something the manipulator knows not to be true too, we also need a term for psychological manipulation into something the manipulator believes, do you think? And so people use 'gaslighting' because it's closest, but, of course, many manipulators are deceiving themselves too or using psychological manipulation in the service of a cause they believe in but it is an ideological narrative that requires mental gymnastics to maintain. A big grey area between knowing machiavellian deception and honestly and openly having a different opinion. And intention may not be the most important issue to someone on the receiving end of a campaign to make them believe something that appears to be insane.
I think I shall write something to address this gap.
I think that would be an interesting read. Also because there are ambiguities in terms of what is actually going on in these instances. There is a weird middle between honestly believing something is true and deliberately misleading another person about something you both know is not. I really do not believe that they thought my daughter was boy. What I think is that they felt that it was morally correct to affirm her new identity regardless of its veracity. They want to be “good people” so badly that the cognitive dissonance is sort of sublimated. Almost like for them it’s both true and not true at the same time. Can a person gaslight themselves?
Yes, I think that's what the mental gymnastics are about. On one level, people know they are not being honest because they have to do that but they believe the higher cause is just and good so it's all in a good cause.
When I first started writing and arguing publicly, it was about religion and there was a phenomenon known as 'lying for Jesus' where dogmatic Christian fundamentalists - usually creationists - deliberately distorted things and ignored evidence because they believed their overall cause was right and morally good. I think what you describe is the same mentality as that.
I’ve never fully understood the nuances of the terms “gaslighting” or “strawman”. They just seemed to emerge out of nowhere on social media, and now everyone uses them.
I'm thinking of what to do for my first podcast. I wonder if it would be useful for me to do one on what the common buzzwords of the culture wars mean?
The misuse of gaslighting annoys me because it is a real thing that most often happens in abusive relationships. A friend who'd had a very abusive childhood experienced it. Her boyfriend, who was a psychology graduate convinced her that whenever she got upset with him for very reasonable things like not keeping his commitments and getting into debt and not pulling his weight etc. she was actually having attachment issues and projecting her past trauma onto him. Because interpreting current events through past trauma is something survivors can do (you're probably aware) she believed him. It wasn't until she described the things she was getting upset about while blaming herself to her friends that we were able to convince her that he was manipulating her into thinking it was her PTSD that made her upset at him doing things like blowing all the savings that she'd earned on alcohol and weed and that it was reasonable to be upset about that!
I would really like to hear a podcast about buzzwords in the culture wars. It sounds really interesting.
Also: this article was very good for clarifying what gaslighting really refers to — and I agree that it’s mostly an element of abusive relationships, and some other term is appropriate to a situation like Spicer and the crowd sizes. He knew he was lying but why not say he told bald-faced lies, spread untrue propaganda, thought he could make fools of the American people, destroyed his credibility by putting obedience to Trump over telling the truth? When people use buzz words, they tend to be imprecise — and isn’t it boring to hear the same words over and over when there are other and better ones more tailored to the specific thing under discussion?
I do have one other question though: are those electric lamps you have used to illustrate this article about gaslighting?
Gaslighting blew up after Trump's first press secretary, Sean Spicer, claimed against all evidence that Trump had had the largest inaugural crowd ever. The claim was that it was such an obvious lie that Trump was likely attempting to manipulate the press and public to get them to doubt their own experience of reality in favor of the one he provides.
I appreciate this. I think it’s also extremely manipulative to default to accusing someone else “gaslighting.” it’s a very harsh accusation that shuts down conversation. But, I suppose that is the point.
People can have a good faith disagreement, and perceive things very differently. It doesn’t mean that you are deliberately and maliciously denying someone else’s view.
Thanks Helen.
Another thing to remember is that you are not obligated to engage with somebody who disagrees with you. Some of the people who are accusing others of gaslighting believe that there are people whose entire point in disagreeing with them is to make them waste their time writing rebuttals to their nonsense. Since nonsense is easily generated on the fly by those with no particular interest in the truth, and clearly reasoned rebuttals take time and effort to write, it's exhausting, and not cost-effective. There is an understandable temptation to snarl 'you are just gaslighting' and walk away, which is why around here the meaning of 'gaslighting' has expanded to include 'spouting nonsense which, if you actually intended me to believe it, would make me doubt my sanity'. Just walk away from these conversations. Forget about having the last word. If it helps, recall that the person on the other end may be playing 'guess how many people I can provoke into calling me a gaslighter today' amusement points in their peer and follower group.
"People being untruthful or engaging in intellectual dishonesty and psychological manipulation or exerting social pressure on others to get them to falsify their own beliefs is bad. It is abusive of an individual and also impedes the honest and productive debate we need to determine what is true and resolve complex moral issues and conflicts."
It seems to me that "gaslighting" is probably not a useful term at this time of algorithm-controlled media feeds... soon to be higher-powered by AI. Someone gaslit, in my view, is someone lacking objective interest that has locked into a belief similar to that of faith. It is similar to someone I debate who is a pious Christian on the topic of human morality. There is no room for objective debate as they have adopted the idea of one of faith.
But this behavior is almost ubiquitous now even outside of religion. And I have some understanding and empathy for it, even though it will not stop me from pointing the wrongness I see. The repetition of some idea, meme, narrative or claim will eventually be absorbed as fact by intellectually lazy people, of which most of the human race is. That is them being gaslit. And so almost everyone is gaslit now. So claiming someone is gaslit is almost meaningless.
I try to avoid accusing someone of engaging in gaslighting unless 1) They say "I never said 'X', and 2) I show them a screenshot in which they have said 'X', and 3) there is no explanation forthcoming.
"Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" is the paradigmatic example of gaslighting.
Thank you. This is a term that has been a puzzle to me since I first heard it. It’s less so now.
I fully agree that people are way too eager to diagnose the utterances of others as instances of gaslighting. However, it strikes me as very plausible that the majority of extremists sincerely think the other side is gaslighting them; it's hard to spot logical fallacies from your own side and easy to spot your opponent's fallacies. The other side feels much more incoherent (and you've been taught to always trust your feelings), so how can anyone not see that your side is right?
Perhaps it's better to acknowledge that the *feeling* of being gaslit is very real. It takes a leap of faith to see the opposing arguments as good faith arguments. There are plenty of bad faith actors out there on the internet, and very easy to retreat to cynicism.
YES.
A couple of my thoughts on it:
https://x.com/ShannonThrace/status/1788597648133431771
https://shannonthrace.substack.com/p/gaslighting-and-other-terms-of-surrender
https://substack.com/@helenpluckrose/note/c-88551658?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1nm3qt
The overuse of "gaslighting" is a bugaboo of mine, but I think I disagree with your objections here.
I always think of gaslighting as a situation where you are lying to someone in a way that requires them to disregard their own observations. If I insist that I'm wearing a red shirt while clearly wearing a blue one in your presence, I'm gaslighting you. If I insist that I'm wearing a red shirt despite wearing a blue one, but you can't see me, I'm just lying. The quintessential recent example, which I think started the trend of using the term, was Sean Spicer claiming that Trump had the biggest inaugural crowd ever in 2017. That was gaslighting because anyone who saw both Trump's and Obama's inaugurations or had access to the news footage of his and Obama's inaugurations could easily tell that he did not, and he was insisting that they disregard their own ability to judge crowd size. However, people went on to use it any time Trump (or other people) lied about something or they thought they had lied, even if the lie wasn't contradicting their own observations.
I get frustrated when people refer to both as gaslighting because it dilutes the term, which has a particular and useful meaning.
In at least some of your examples, your interlocutors may be wrong that you were gaslighting them, but at least in the Elon Musk example, the accusation likely made sense in context. I'm not inside their heads, but my assumption was that their thought process went something like this:
1) We can both see what Elon Musk did;
2) Any rational person would recognize what he did as expressing Nazi sympathies;
3) you are a rational person;
4) therefore, if you are denying that he was expressing Nazi sympathies, you must be lying and asking me to disregard my own observations of what happened (hence, gaslighting).
There's a problem with their logic, but it isn't that this sequence doesn't describe gas lighting, but that (2) isn't accurate - reasonable people can disagree over whether what he did was expressing Nazi sympathies.
Perhaps a good way to see this is to imagine a more extreme example. Say that, instead of making a particular arm gesture, he went up on stage wearing a Nazi uniform, including a red armband and a swastika, read a passage of Mein Kompf, and finished it off by saying, "I support the Nazi party. Hitler was a good guy. I'm not just trolling here, I really mean it!" Had he done that, and someone had denied that he was expressing Nazi sympathies, I assume you would agree that person was either not a rational person or gaslighting them. It's just that what Musk did didn't come close to reaching that level of obviousness, leaving an opening for rational people to disagree about his intent.
That said, I do agree that, when faced with an instance of what appears to be gaslighting, it's worth considering whether it is just legitimate disagreement. This is particularly true when the issue involves some level of interpretation or value judgment, allowing one side or the other to be wrong or to just disagree. That said, there probably is room for calling out gaslighting even when it comes down to value judgments. For example, if someone claims that the people responsible Rotherham child sexual assaults did nothing wrong, and they aren't otherwise a terrible person, it's probably fair to say that they are gaslighting you.
I think gaslighting has to be understood as an intentional manipulation of someone else when both people know the truth/believe the same thing. Think of the film. The husband knew he was dimming the lights and his intention was to make his wife doubt her own sanity. Your final example isn't one of that. I think we should assume that somebody who claims rape gangs are not morally wrong really thinks that and ask them. "Why when you are otherwise an ethical caring person, do you believe it was OK for these men to rape girls?"
The truthful answer would more likely be something zealous and insane like:
"I believe girls who are out alone and uncovered are whores and offering themselves to these men. They are to blame for tempting the men. Offer a lion a piece of meat and it will eat it. Good Muslim girls don't behave like that." (Actual argument I've seen made by an Islamist zealot)
or
"It's an act of resistance! Britain colonised their countries and abused and raped girls and Muslims still face Islamophobia. We can't go round exploiting and abusing other people for centuries and then complain when we get a taste of your own medicine."
In either case, it's important to believe that the person really means what they say and, in the first case, deport them if this is possible and put them on a watchlist and send them for an intervention by psychologists who deal in extremism. Thinking they don't really believe that and are messing with you is dangerous to girls. In the second case, we might also consider some kind of psychological intervention and deprogramming. In both cases, it's important to recognise that there are people who genuinely believe this and think about how to deal with them.
The truth is unlikely to be,
"I don't actually think it's OK. Like you, I believe that the exploitation and rape of vulnerable girls is morally abhorrent. However, I really want to see if I can make you believe that position is insane and doubt your own judgement."
It's possible that someone might be doing that although its hard to see how it would benefit them. It'd be a weird psychological experiment.
Most often, genuine acts of gaslighting take place in abusive relationships and involve convincing a partner that abusive behaviour is not abusive. e.g., you might see a victim of gaslighting say something like, "He doesn't want to hit me but I drive him to it by being so stupid and not caring enough about him to make the kind of meals he likes and keep the house clean. If I could just be a better wife, this wouldn't happen." The man usually knows that violence is wrong and that there is no justification for it and he wouldn't want other people to know he did it but in the relationship he will manipulate the woman by undermining her self-esteem and making her really believe that she's such a terrible person, anybody would hit her. Or sometimes a woman will do that. My brother-in-law finally got out of a relationship where his girlfriend would throw things at his head and abuse him and he felt it was his fault because he kept saying hurtful things and making her jealous and didn't care about her feelings enough. She knew what she was doing was wrong because she promised him she could change and would get anger management therapy and address issues stemming from her abusive childhood, but while he stayed, she would convince him that he was the problem to undermine his self-esteem and make him think it was all his fault so that he didn't leave her.
This is where the concept of gaslighting is useful and something victims of abuse need to understand so they can learn to recognise that it was done to them so they can recognise that the abuse was not their fault and work on recognising that they are vulnerable to this. A friend recently went through it with a man who convinced her that him not getting a job, blowing all their savings, getting her to support him through college and then not doing what he said the plan was - get a job so they could start a family and she could take a break from hers - was all perfectly fine and if she objected to it, it wasn't really him she was angry with but people who'd abused her in her childhood and it was trauma resurfacing (he was a psych graduate) and she was lashing out at him and trying to control him. A psychologist helped her to see that she kept getting into relationships where she was abused because she was familiar and comfortable with being treated badly because of her childhood and did not healthy expectations of being treated well. A good book on gaslighting that helped her is called "Was it even abuse?"
I’m a psychiatrist and the parent of an 11 year old girl with a neurodevelopmental disorder who was groomed into gender ideology by her school at the age of 10. The only time I have ever used the term gaslighting is to describe the behavior of the people involved. I do not believe that these people thought my daughter was actually my son. I don’t believe that they were intentionally trying to make me doubt my own sanity. But that was result, at least for a couple of months. Does gaslighting require the intent to break someone’s mind? I don’t know but I’ve never experienced something so hideously vertiginous in my entire life.
You raise a good point and I am thinking of writing a follow-up to address this issue of 'intention' that others have also queried.
While 'gaslighting' does literally and originally refer to an intentional psychological manipulation of somebody else into believing something the manipulator knows not to be true too, we also need a term for psychological manipulation into something the manipulator believes, do you think? And so people use 'gaslighting' because it's closest, but, of course, many manipulators are deceiving themselves too or using psychological manipulation in the service of a cause they believe in but it is an ideological narrative that requires mental gymnastics to maintain. A big grey area between knowing machiavellian deception and honestly and openly having a different opinion. And intention may not be the most important issue to someone on the receiving end of a campaign to make them believe something that appears to be insane.
I think I shall write something to address this gap.
I think that would be an interesting read. Also because there are ambiguities in terms of what is actually going on in these instances. There is a weird middle between honestly believing something is true and deliberately misleading another person about something you both know is not. I really do not believe that they thought my daughter was boy. What I think is that they felt that it was morally correct to affirm her new identity regardless of its veracity. They want to be “good people” so badly that the cognitive dissonance is sort of sublimated. Almost like for them it’s both true and not true at the same time. Can a person gaslight themselves?
Yes, I think that's what the mental gymnastics are about. On one level, people know they are not being honest because they have to do that but they believe the higher cause is just and good so it's all in a good cause.
When I first started writing and arguing publicly, it was about religion and there was a phenomenon known as 'lying for Jesus' where dogmatic Christian fundamentalists - usually creationists - deliberately distorted things and ignored evidence because they believed their overall cause was right and morally good. I think what you describe is the same mentality as that.
I’ve never fully understood the nuances of the terms “gaslighting” or “strawman”. They just seemed to emerge out of nowhere on social media, and now everyone uses them.
And so often, people use them wrongly!
I'm thinking of what to do for my first podcast. I wonder if it would be useful for me to do one on what the common buzzwords of the culture wars mean?
The misuse of gaslighting annoys me because it is a real thing that most often happens in abusive relationships. A friend who'd had a very abusive childhood experienced it. Her boyfriend, who was a psychology graduate convinced her that whenever she got upset with him for very reasonable things like not keeping his commitments and getting into debt and not pulling his weight etc. she was actually having attachment issues and projecting her past trauma onto him. Because interpreting current events through past trauma is something survivors can do (you're probably aware) she believed him. It wasn't until she described the things she was getting upset about while blaming herself to her friends that we were able to convince her that he was manipulating her into thinking it was her PTSD that made her upset at him doing things like blowing all the savings that she'd earned on alcohol and weed and that it was reasonable to be upset about that!
I would really like to hear a podcast about buzzwords in the culture wars. It sounds really interesting.
Also: this article was very good for clarifying what gaslighting really refers to — and I agree that it’s mostly an element of abusive relationships, and some other term is appropriate to a situation like Spicer and the crowd sizes. He knew he was lying but why not say he told bald-faced lies, spread untrue propaganda, thought he could make fools of the American people, destroyed his credibility by putting obedience to Trump over telling the truth? When people use buzz words, they tend to be imprecise — and isn’t it boring to hear the same words over and over when there are other and better ones more tailored to the specific thing under discussion?
I do have one other question though: are those electric lamps you have used to illustrate this article about gaslighting?
Gaslighting blew up after Trump's first press secretary, Sean Spicer, claimed against all evidence that Trump had had the largest inaugural crowd ever. The claim was that it was such an obvious lie that Trump was likely attempting to manipulate the press and public to get them to doubt their own experience of reality in favor of the one he provides.