https://www.salon.com/2018/04/28/what-trump-really-means-when-he-cries-fake-news/
"It’s particularly disconcerting to witness the way conservatives yell “fake news” at every unfavorable news story with an unmitigated glee. They know that cavalierly dismissing obviously factual stories as “fake” really aggravates liberals, and trolling the left is, for right-wingers circa 2018, an activity more pleasurable than sex. Calling obviously true news “fake news” is gaslighting, a form of manipulation where the manipulator tells blatant lies to the victim and, when called out, stands by the lies, often blaming the target’s supposed mental damage if the target insists that the truth is true. Gaslighting people, especially women, by calling them “crazy” for rejecting his lies is a favorite practice of Trump’s. He’s questioned the sanity of Mika Brzezinski, Megyn Kelly, Maureen Dowd and Bernie Sanders, among others, for the high crime of saying things about him that happened to be true. “In authoritarian governments,” Brian Klaas writes in "The Despot’s Apprentice," gaslighting “aims to force citizens to question their own sanity, rather than the government’s narrative. Winston’s experience in '1984' was an example of systematic gaslighting.” Most authoritarian governments go about gaslighting with the utmost seriousness, using the power of the state and social pressure to get citizens to agree, like Winston in "1984," that 2+2=5. The “fake news” gambit, however, is something different and possibly new. Rather than trying to induce insanity by making liberals question reality itself, conservatives are trying to make liberals go crazy by trolling them. All conservatives need to do is keep a straight face while insisting that they believe that 2+2=5, and liberals will exhaust all their mental and emotional reserves trying to explain that no, really, 2+2=4. Eventually, conservatives will point to the frazzled, distraught state of liberals begging people to believe that 2+2=4 and laugh and say, “What a nutjob!” What are conservatives thinking when they call something “fake news”? What is Trump thinking?
