Letters

“Will the gaslighting end after this midterm election?” — a question I posited in these pages last month. Last week, Merriam-Webster declared “gaslighting” as their Word of the Year, and justifiably so.

For the past three years, the degree of misinformation and what stands as information has been discredited by the elites to suit their own agendas. It’s simple, really: Declare it misinformation, and you’re home free. The media has your back, the government always tells the truth, and Big Pharma would never deceive us. The Department of Justice and the FBI are the folks in the white hats, and if you disagree you may even be declared a domestic terrorist. Just ask any concerned parent who may have been dragged out of a school board meeting for having the temerity to disagree with the district’s handling of their child’s education.

In order to legally fast-track the vaccines, regulations required no available therapeutic alternatives in treating COVID-19 could be available. Well, there were, and still are, therapeutic alternatives, and tens of thousands of doctors have laid their careers on the line to refute the disinformation put out by the Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health.

The policies set forth for the pandemic nearly crippled our economy, put millions out of work, and caused severe financial and psychological harm to tens of thousands of our citizens, simultaneously setting our educational system back a decade before some young students recover from the harm of locking down our schools.

Objectors to these policies are vilified as deniers, castigated and censored, then told they are the problem.

Sweden, to this day, remains a perfect example of what we did wrong. Sweden remained open for business throughout the pandemic, and a 2021 report by the Kaiser Foundation showed zero excess mortality among individuals under age 75. A study found on Statista dated April 22 showed Sweden’s accumulated death rate due to COVID was 0.75 percent, while the USA was 1.23 percent of their respective populations. There is much information to be had, but when it challenges the narrative, it becomes disinformation.

A majority of American voters are concerned about election fraud, yet if you listen to the media, it simply does not exist. “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud,” concluded Jimmy Carter and James Baker when they chaired the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform. The commission noted: “Vote buying and harvesting is far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.” Years later, a New York Times article in 2012: “Error and Fraud At Issue as Absentee Voting Rises.”

Most countries carefully restrict this practice, while requiring identification, but, here, both are considered disenfranchisement.

The gaslighting continues.

John Porta

Westhampton