Gaslight the People, Rule the World: Erdogan, Trump, Putin, Lukashenko, Modi, Orban, Maduro… (the list goes on)

Gaslighting isn’t a glitch in modern politics—it’s the operating system. From Istanbul to Gaza, the script repeats.

You know the trick by now. Call the other guy what you are. Do it loudly, often, and with utter conviction. Then sit back while the press, the public, and the opposition waste their time arguing with the lie—dignifying it by engaging it. That’s how projection works. And projection is a core tactic of gaslighting.

Consider the following.

Trump calls Zelensky a dictator. Not Putin—the man who poisons dissidents and imprisons teenagers for memes—but Zelensky. It’s not irony, it’s strategy. Not confusion, but calibration. Just like when American media outlets report on the war in Gaza as if it's a "conflict" between two sides rather than a colonial siege turned genocide. Just like Turkey’s government obsessively going after Ekrem İmamoğlu’s university diploma, pressuring Istanbul University to annul it, while Erdoğan’s own diploma has never once been seen in the light of day.

Hypocrisy is a failure of moral consistency. This is different. This is political gaslighting. The aim is to destroy …