Taken from the title of the 1944 film Gaslight, the term “gaslighting” has firmly entered the American lexicon over the past several years. The film, an early entrant in the psychological thriller genre, features a husband who works to slowly convince his wife that she is experiencing delusions, convincing her not to trust what she is seeing with her own eyes. It’s from this origin that we arrived at the modern use of the term to describe a form of psychological manipulation in which someone is made to doubt their own senses and sanity. It is a technique most often employed by conmen and abusers. Now, it is being adopted en masse by the Christian nationalist movement in America to defend their political project from hard-earned criticism.
truth and liberty
Leadership Institute Training: Action Items for Newly Conservative School Boards
This weekend, approximately 30 school board members, activists, and engaged citizens attended the Leadership Institute’s School Board and Education Policy Summit at the Colorado Springs Marriott. Founded in 1979 by Morton C. Blackwell, the conservative activist who was the youngest delegate for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and served as special assistant to Ronald Reagan, the Leadership Institute is an “explicitly conservative” 501(c)3 nonprofit that conducts a variety of political trainings across the country.
DAVIS: Onward Christian Soldiers – A Woodland Park Investigation
If a germ touches me, it dies,” the faith healer proclaimed at the height of the pandemic. Not everyone was so lucky: though he personally claimed to be protected by faith-based immunity, Andrew Wommack’s constant flouting of local health ordinances, his desire to pack the sanctuary at Charis Bible College with hundreds of people at a time, led to multiple fatal outbreaks of the virus in Teller County. Now, three years later, Wommack’s ministry empire has infected Woodland Park with a new strain of contagion, this time through the ballot box.