Part 2: When Trust Fractures
The Personal Toll of Gaslighting
This post is Part 2 of a four-part series on truth, trust, and the collapse of shared reality. In Part 1, I explored Aristotle’s vision of truth as describing the world as it is. Here, I turn to a personal experience — one that tested my confidence in my own perceptions and revealed how fragile our social trust has become.
I can’t trust you anymore. You are an unsafe person. Selling out your own.
After a series of comments back and forth on a Facebook post I published, frustrated with the seeming federal dismissal of due process, discussing the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, I left this comment as my final word.
Let me make clear at the outset, this post isn’t about a Facebook spat—it’s about how isolated disagreements reflect systemic collapse of shared reality. I’ll hope to lead us to an appreciation that the cultural and political moment we’re in has led to a crisis of trust. Maybe by diagnosing the issue, we’re in a better position to address the causes.
Honestly, I’ve regretted leaving that comment since hitting the post button, but I want to make this distinction: I don’t regret the assertion; I regret how I stated it. I wish that I had been more thoughtful, more careful with my words, so that I didn’t blame, or judge, or divide.
I am deeply committed to class consciousness and an improved strategy would be to explain my frustration in our digital dialogue and express my feelings of distrust and betrayal in a thoughtful way. Instead, I lashed out, while I wouldn’t say “clouded” by emotion, I was certainly motivated by it. More than anger, I found myself swimming in a soup of anger, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Doubt about my own primitive reaction to what I see happening in real time. And yes, I do mean primitive. Our old ape brains feel before we think, and I was feeling a lot. “All up in my feels,” about the disagreement.
Before saying anything more, let’s pause to clarify a terminological concern: Abrego Garcia was not deported by the generally accepted use of the term, which entails bringing charges, followed by legal proceedings, a presentation of evidence, fair trial, and, if deemed appropriate by a judge, removal of the person to their country of origin.
Without raising the issue that in 2019, Abrego Garcia was extended an order of protection from deportation, where, should he return to his home country, he would be in threat of bodily of harm, let’s observe a more basic fact that deportation orders are not intended to be a death sentence; hence, why he was placed under protection from deportation in the first place! Notwithstanding, incarceration in an El Salvadorian supermax prison is not an appropriate punishment under our legal code. It is a violation of human rights. At the risk of complicating the thesis, a president threatening the expulsion of US citizens to the same Salvadorian prison should be a red line for all Americans.
Back to the task at hand, my anger during the Facebook discourse was rooted in what I perceived as a grave injustice. The details of the case strike at my lifelong sense of justice and fairness. To accept that the treatment of Abrego Garcia was on the legal up-and-up angered me, period. Allowing the government to have such power is a violation of the people’s consent to be governed and the rule of law.
Not that I’m endorsing the Framers as authoritative experts in governance—their design of the Constitution favored wealthy, landholding, white men, Madison (maybe Hamilton) argued, in Federalist No. 51:
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
The current Republican administration seems unable to control itself. These excesses of governance are sinking the administration’s approval ratings (NYT gift article):
Immigration is perhaps the most obvious example [of turning strengths into vulnerabilities]. Voters still support deporting illegal immigrants, 54-42, according to the poll. In a way, this is what Mr. Trump was elected to do, and he’s been doing it. Yet voters nonetheless disapprove of his handling of immigration because the excesses of his policy have managed to alienate many voters who would otherwise be on his side.
But more than my anger about the mistreatment of Abrego Garcia, and here is where we begin to latch onto the key claims of this essay, I experienced anger that anyone would argue with me to defend, what I perceive as blatant mistreatment.
The form of argument offered by my interlocutor mirrored a troubling pattern increasingly visible in American politics: the selective application of law to protect in-groups and punish out-groups—a tactic historically associated with authoritarian governance.
While I want to be careful about drawing explicit lines of connection between authoritarianism and modern American conservatism, more would need to be said to handle the nuance and origin points in such a comparison, I can’t hep but note that this point is similar to an oft-quoted quip, attributed to the wrong man:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Trump has always found loopholes in the law, ways of framing accusations to shirk his personal responsibility, often by leveraging nuances in language and technicality-driven objections. Perhaps there is no better recent example than the $15M settlement ABC News paid to Trump after George Stephanopoulos stated “the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll” (my emphasis).
Trmp sued because the guilty verdict was for sexual assault, not rape, and yet:
The judge in both cases, Lewis Kaplan, has said that the jury's conclusion was that Carroll had failed to prove that Trump raped her "within the narrow, technical meaning of a particular section of the New York Penal Law."
Kaplan noted that the definition of rape was "far narrower" than how rape is defined in common modern parlance, in some dictionaries, in some federal and state criminal statutes and elsewhere.
The judge said the verdict did not mean that Carroll "failed to prove that Mr. Trump 'raped' her as many people commonly understand the word 'rape.' Indeed ... the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that" (my emphasis).
I don’t raise this example to relititigate the case. I don’t really even mean to remark on the Carroll case in particular. The point I intend to make is that close reading is a requisite of fair jurisprudence, but using precise terms and technical definitions ought not be used as a shield against accountability.
My conversation partner hammered me with technicalities about due process, the timeline of events, evidence in support of Abrego Garcia’s purported gang affiliations and so on. Finally, exhausted, I conceded, the system—cruel and inhumane as it may be—is functioning exactly as designed.
By this, I did not mean to concede defeat in the argument. It is my position that Abrego Garcia was wrongfully and unlawfully expelled, but in my exasperation, I sought to acknowledge that systems of deportation are corrupt and unjust; tools to promote the white supremacist notion, mouthed by Steven Miller:
America is for Americans and Americans only.
Whether a legal defense could be cooked up to condone the expulsion, legality does not map onto morality, and it’s shocking to me that any fellow American would defend sending a man, a father of three, married to an American citizen, working in the building trades with union representation to a foreign prison with little recourse to return him. I cannot fully communicate the violation of rights I take the entire case to present.
The ABC News settlement highlights a similar tactic: even when the substance of wrongdoing is clear, legal technicalities can obscure justice, allowing bad actors to evade full accountability.
Abrego Garcia was unjustly and unlawfully expelled (not deported) to El Salvador, and it strikes me as obvious that anyone evaluating in good faith would arive at exactly the conclusion. Hell, the Supreme Court did 9-0! Yet, here come the technicalities again, the Supreme Court said to “faciliate” the release, and not “effectuate” it. Oy vey.
Let me begin to tie a bow around this lengthy introduction and get onto the crisis of trust I aim to describe.
I was angry during this Facebook discourse that the dialogue found me distrusting my own reaction, “Am I in the wrong?”
I could not/cannot bring myself to interpret the details involving Abrego Garcia as anything other than unlawful action by the US government. How could my urgent and passionate reaction not cohere with others?
I was angry that I doubted myself.
I was as angry at their defense of injustice as I was at my own moment of self-doubt.
And so, I was angry that they made me distrust my own intuitive judgment, and I was angrier still that they felt no urgency in the face of injustice.
I wrote a few weeks ago:
Gaslighting is an effort to undermine someone else’s experience. This is no mere lie. To undermine someone’s experience is to violate the tacit extension of trust we grant to others, and the target of the gaslighting distrusts their own experience. It’s a double betrayal. You’ve made yourself less trustworthy while also undermining a person’s trust in themselves. Gaslighting is manipulation, yes, but a deep and insidious manipulation.
This is the double bind of gaslighting, and I do not think this phenomenon is limited to personal discourse as it’s often understood. Indeed, I’d submit that we are living in a general societal state of gaslighting, where the efforts are to systematically undermine our trust in experience and sense of the truth. Gaslighting undermines not just facts, but frameworks for evaluating facts.
In a society built on democratic participation, the slow erosion of shared reality is not a side effect, it is a strategy; a way to disempower the governed by making them doubt their own judgment.
In Part 3, I’ll step back from the personal and examine how gaslighting has become a structural phenomenon in our politics, media, and institutions, including why dismantling shared frameworks of truth poses one of the greatest threats to democratic life.