Since his rise to the political stage in 2015, Donald Trump has emphasized the urgency of a linguistic reform: To "make America great again" it is imperative to abolish periphrastic circumlocutions and embrace a firm stance against the supposed tyranny of political correctness. Yet this call for semantic transparency and performative effectiveness has been paralleled by the frequent deployment of indirectness and sophisticated forms of discursive manipulation, which I call metapragmatic gaslighting. Drawing on a corpus of statements, interventions, and interviews by President Trump, this article examines the basic principles of the language reform of the New Right and describes how metapragmatic gaslighting preludes to establishing a linguistic state of exception. Characterized by the suspension of shared norms for the use and interpretation of utterances, this emerging regime of pragmatic unaccountability materializes an ultrareactionary and hypercapitalist linguistic order.
Gaslighting and conspiracization mark two convergent crises of interpretation in the digital age. Gaslighting manipulates perception by denying intent; conspiracization overreads intent, recoding critique's idioms as proof of hidden design. The problem is not confined to misinformation but emerges instead where the forms and tones of critique themselves become objects of suspicion. Examining catchphrases like historian Yuval Noah Harari's "hackable animals" and the World Economic Forum's "Great Reset," this article shows how speculative foresight discourse is reframed online as elite confession. Empirical analysis of Amazon's "also bought" metadata networks reveals how conspiracy bestsellers cluster with critical texts, generating ambient legitimacy within digital infrastructures. Conspiracization thus emerges as critique's mimetic double: borrowing its style while stripping its reflexivity. The task is to recalibrate suspicion-distinguishing between practices that illuminate complexity and those that collapse it into plot.
While "Trumpism" usually means the movement Donald Trump has come to lead to great political effect, it also is a term that best describes a metapragmatic discourse Trump and his acolytes have come to use to normalize their extremism. Trumpism as a discourse relies on three primary verbal maneuvers: gaslighting, co-opting, and boomeranging. Gaslighting, the most commonly referred to maneuver, is deflecting criticism by saying that the problem is something other than what the critic alleged. Co-opting is adopting the language of your critics so that you are the one with the just cause and they are the ones deserving of condemnation. Boomeranging is sending criticism directed at you right back at your critics. This article examines, by way of examples, how the effectiveness of gaslighting is enhanced when combined with co-opting and boomeranging to normalize extremism to the point that now it is furthering authoritarian rule under Trump.
Judges sometimes deceive the public as to how they will rule-or how they have ruled-in important cases. To be confirmed to our highest courts, they often hide or downplay their moral and political commitments, despite being nominated specifically for those commitments. To justify their rulings, they couch their reasoning in antiseptic legal terms, even when we have excellent cause to see such reasoning as pretextual. This essay argues that such forms of judicial deceit are disturbingly common, deeply harmful, and appropriately understood as a form of gaslighting.
Victims often describe gaslighting as having a "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" quality. In this essay, I explore victims' descriptions of the two-faced nature of gaslighting, showing how they come to feel caught between two irreconcilable realities in gas-lighting relationships. They describe gaslighting as creating a fracture between themselves and their broader social environments; they describe feeling that their gaslighter was able to identify something true about them and wrap it up in lies; and they describe their sense of self becoming "lost." I argue that these findings should push us to think about how broader systems of power and inequality, like intimate experiences of gaslighting, also have a two-faced nature.
This article proposes that we think of reactionary rhetoric as the art of political gaslighting. Revisiting the thought of eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish statesman, philosopher, and political theorist Edmund Burke, the article extrapolates a conception of conservatism as inherently oriented toward a rhetoric of denialism, demonization, and victimhood. I argue that reactionary rhetoric bears a striking similarity to what trauma psychologists call DARVO: deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. I close with a discussion of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk's remarks on race as a case study in political gaslighting.
This article examines racial gaslighting, whereby racially minoritized people are told that their experiences of White racism are really patterns born of their own making or, at the very least, a combination of factors that are beyond the control of White powerholders. Several examples are discussed, including the deployment of a falsified image of Martin Luther King Jr., the perversion of civil rights language to equate White success with merit, and the use of statistical techniques to erase evidence of racist inequity. A common factor in each example is the significance of the racist status quo, which amplifies, legitimizes, and benefits from the gaslighting.
In the 1990s, some 400 million people across Eastern Europe lived through an economic collapse deeper than the Great Depression. Yet, while families lost jobs, pensions, and even years of life expectancy, Western institutions and commentators insisted things were "getting better." This article calls that denial what it was: collective gaslighting. By massaging statistics, celebrating televisions and cars, and blaming cultural "deficiencies," experts erased the trauma of entire societies. Revisiting the transition through the eyes of those who endured it reveals not a triumphant march to democracy but a politics of memory and denial whose consequences still shape Western society today.
The 1944 film Gaslight, from which contemporary use of the term "gaslighting" originates, provides key insights into the gendered dynamics of gaslighting. A gothic melodrama set in Victorian London, the film depicts a young bride terrorized by her new husband, increasingly unable to trust her own perception and pushed to the brink of psychosis. Watching the film, viewers experience a perceptual uncertainty similar to that endured by the gaslit heroine. Gaslight shows us how patriarchal norms enable gaslighting and how gaslighting is embedded within a broader culture of gendered violence.
Because the term "gaslighting" is in the relatively unusual etymological position of deriving from the title of a specific narrative source text (Gaslight), understanding the nuances of that narrative can help us understand the nuances of contemporary political gaslighting. One component of the Trump administration's gaslighting tactics that has yet to be read through the lens of the Gaslight plot is its manipulative deployment of the language of "protection," "rescue," and "care" to infantilize and actively harm its constituents, especially women. In this essay, I compare this deployment to the analogous protectionist gaslighting that takes place not only in Gaslight but also in the powerful, underexplored subgenre of films that arose in Gaslight's immediate wake: gaslight noir.
Abolition names more than a specific political demand or social movement discourse; it also names a distinctive orientation to politics. Abolition aims at an immediate and absolute end to domination; at the same time, it conjures new forms of life that are free from domination. In these ways, abolition often has theological resonances. This essay first explicates the discourse of contemporary abolitionists, locating it in a particular historical moment, the long 2010s. It theorizes abolition as committed to destruction, and it distinguishes destruction from its alternatives, such as transformation. The essay stages a dialogue between movements for abolition and movements for decolonization.
Nineteenth-century American abolitionists led by William Lloyd Garrison urged their followers to rally around the unpopular motto "No Union with Slaveholders." Beginning two decades before the Civil War, they argued that the only way to end slavery was to dissolve the Union. These "disunionists" were criticized by other reformers at the time for doing nothing to advance the cause, especially in comparison to antislavery politicians who believed slavery could be "denationalized" through electoral politics. Like today's abolitionists, disunionists were often dismissed as impractical idealists. Yet they did have a plan that proved prescient in the end.
Prison abolitionism has gained significant prominence in criminal law scholarship, while artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force across society. Two schools of thought have arisen regarding their intersection. Some scholars contend abolitionists should welcome AI technologies to reduce the carceral state's reach. Critics view these tools skeptically, arguing that they lead to biased surveillance and incarceration practices. Using this debate as an example, this article seeks to illuminate the distinction between reformist and non-reformist reforms. The article argues that abolitionists' criticism of reformists as agents of oppression risks alienating potential allies and discouraging progressive interventions in pivotal, formative policy decisions, including those governing the role of AI in the criminal justice system.
Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century liberal abolitionists thought of emancipation as a process of maintaining planters' landownership and transforming slaves into wage laborers to sustain capitalist plantation production after slavery ended. In contrast, revolutionary abolitionists claimed that abolishing slavery required providing ex-slaves with access to the means of production through commonly held land and collective labor. Attending to the multiple and variegated ways in which abolitionism indexed, reflected, and rejected capitalist social relations, this article analyzes what I call the tensions of abolitionism and racial capitalism. Exploring these tensions, I theorize the entanglements of capitalist extra-economic coercion, racial hierarchization, and abolitionist ideologies and processes.
The idea of family abolition has reappeared among parts of the radical left, following a hiatus of almost 50 years. But- as some have objected-is not capitalism itself "abolishing" familial life (in the colloquial sense of destroying it) in various ways? Indeed, the private nuclear household appears embattled and undermined. In this context, the resurgent debate clarifies why the form of destruction family abolitionists seek is one that realizes familism's false promise. Abolition, here, is the actualization of humanity's universal care-neediness through the communization of lifemaking. Defending this sense of the word "abolish" (i.e., positive supersession) remains worthwhile.
As is true for many other scholars, the authors of this article have spent the last decade exploring abolition in practice. At the University of Rochester in western New York, where both authors teach, they have collaboratively engaged in abolitionist teaching, research, institution building, and organizing, both on and off campus. At this moment of transformation and profound uncertainty, this essay reflects on a decade of wins and losses in search of possible lessons going forward.
Recently, some anti-domestic violence organizations have signaled a turn toward abolition, recognizing the harm created by and racism embedded in the criminal legal system. But their support for the US government's prosecution of Zackey Rahimi illustrates how difficult it has been for the anti-violence movement to put these principles into practice. This article provides a brief history of the anti-violence movement's relationship with the criminal legal system, explores an abolition feminist frame for thinking about how to intervene in the problem of intimate partner firearm violence, and explains why the anti-violence movement, despite its rhetoric, has not embraced abolition.
This essay reads pedophilia and abolitionism together as a popular terrain of struggle in the late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century US. Child sexual abuse (CSA) and incest became sites of struggle, opening up popular negotiations of care work, social reproduction, and collective power before they were first policed as crisis, then dismissed as panic. The pedophile emerged as a dominant resolution to these struggles, a virtually White male figure used to counter abolitionist approaches while absorbing the affective charge associated with earlier CSA and incest mobilizations. These legacies appear in QAnon conspiracies and current abolitionist struggles.
This essay takes the immigrant detention facility "Alligator Alcatraz" in the Florida Everglades as a starting point to examine the place of nature and nonhuman animals in prison abolition. The case reveals that political struggles over human confinement are simultaneously struggles over conceptions of nature and claims to land. I theorize an emergent abolitionist environmental politics that could help us take on the interrelated crises of climate change and carceral state building and advance multispecies flourishing. This emergent politics, I argue, should be understood as a form of coalition politics, and cultivating human enjoyment of nature could help sustain abolitionists in this difficult but necessary work.
Teaching, learning, curriculum, and abolition are deeply entangled. Much of our understanding of abolition emerges from teaching spaces where curriculum becomes a method for liberation. These are sites where literacy is a means of acquiring knowledge for political power and freedom, where curriculum fosters self-determination and world-making, and where speculative fiction opens portals to abolitionist futures. This article explores the abolitionist teaching practices of a high school teacher in New Jersey who cofounded and teaches at a fugitive curricular space that challenges injustice, disrupts traditional schooling, and interrupts the "world-ending" public school system to engage in abolitionist world-making.
