Dakota Beacon

In the 1944 movie Gaslight, a sinister “Gregory Anton” played by Charles Boyer, slowly tortures his pretty wife, “Paula Alquist” played by Ingrid Bergman, with a series of mind tricks to make her think she was going insane.  While she thought she was alone in the house, Anton was up in the attic, turning on the gaslight while he searched for some valuable jewels - the jewels he married Paula to obtain.  When he did this, the gaslight downstairs dimmed.  It only happened, of course, when she thought she was alone in the house.  The necessity turned into a nice bit of a mind trick in itself.  Only the interference by “Brian Cameron” played by Joseph Cotten, saves her life.  Gregory Anton was creating a false world around Paula Alquist which was intended to drive her mad and to doubt her own sanity.  So now, younger readers, you know where we originally got the term “gaslighting”.  It is a way of saying someone is lying to you to make you feel defensive and to doubt what you see and hear.

A long introduction, perhaps, to my topic, but I think more people should watch old movies.  You might learn something from them while being entertained with a good story.  

The past few weeks have been a textbook case of gaslighting the public.  At the moment I am referring to the absurd lies being promulgated by the British Press, handed to them by the Royal Family from their fantasy factory behind the gates of “The Palace”.  For some time - since Christmas Day, December 25, 2023, in fact, no one had seen hide nor hair of Catherine, the Princess of Wales.  The story put out there by the “palace” was that she went into a clinic for “planned abdominal surgery” and would not be out and about before Easter.  A long time.  But it didn’t work with the truth, which was that “someone” was rushed by ambulance and motorcade from the palace to the hospital - at a late night hour on December 28, and the only person missing the next morning was Kate.  Why a late night ambulance for “planned abdominal surgery”?  No explanation for this eminated from "the palace".  Add to this the weird announcement on December 22, that Kate and Prince William were planning an early spring visit to Italy.  Well, we know that “the best laid plans o’ mice and men gang aft agley” and all, but this is really agley.  So people began to show concern.

It’s not at all far from the mark to question the treatment of your average Princess of Wales in our era, given the short shrift accorded one of the most popular ever, Princess Diana.  The stories she shared after her escape and before she was silenced by death (which she eerily prophesied and described accurately in advance), clearing the way for wife number two, would be a sound basis for concern and speculation here.  In the meantime King Charles III made his health announcement, which served short-term as a kind of red herring for the Kate story.  

The royal family of Great Britain has had a rough-and-tumble couple of years - Prince Andrew was revealed to be in the inner circle of Jeffrey Epstein and accused of some pretty foul activities; Prince Phillip, a weird sort who said he would like to come back in the next life as a virus to kill off all of humanity, died and perhaps will carry out his plan; widowed Queen Elizabeth II died; King Charles went about further downsizing the family as his sons began feuding viciously; Prince Harry published a tell-all, basically indicting his brother; rumors are rife that William is carrying on an affair with at least one other woman (and he has not been seen with or visiting Kate but once since she was hospitalized).  Now we have Charles diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer and Kate being kept out of the public view since December 25.  In the meantime, an insider in royal circles, Thomas Kingston, a noted hostage negotiator, was found dead under mysterious circumstances.  Should anyone be surprised that in the context of the royal family we all know,  people would begin asking questions? 

For asking these questions, the public is first scolded for being abusive to poor Kate.  This is “bullying Kate”?  Really?  How so, when people are concerned about her health and well-being and care enough to ask?  This is now abuse of Kate?  Gaslight.  Then, in response to growing concern, the palace puts out a fake photo - a collage, if you will, of old photos and even one from the cover of Vogue Magazine - and told us it was taken on Mothers’ Day by William himself.  Kate never looked better.  Well, she wouldn’t have, right?  It was from a Vogue cover.  So then the public was slapped around for asking “wtf?” and “what’s this and what have you done with the real Kate?”  Instead of apologizing to Kate and the rest of us, the palace blamed Kate for the clumsy “edit” and issued an apology, supposedly from her, taking the gaff and telling the world what a lousy and incompetent photo editor she is, when photography has been one of her passions in life.  Instead of clearing the air, the palace chose to embarrass and humiliate the lady.

The next round was a video of a young woman - obviously not Kate - merrily swinging a shopping bag full of her purchases at a farmers’ market.  The real Kate was too ill to show up for various ceremonies like the St. Patrick’s Day parade, which she normally honors.  Yet five days later she is skipping along the path at a farmers’ market?  Of course this was questioned and the truth came out - that this wasn’t Kate by a country mile, it was someone else.  No explanation of the person with whom she was walking that resembled William or who he was.  Just that it wasn’t Kate, as the press had peddled without benefit of royal instructions to the contrary to the press from the “palace”.  See what they did there?  

When this blew up it increased the amount of smoke in the room.  Now people had reason to think there was a fire somewhere nearby.  Comedians and self-styled pundits on this side of the Atlantic thought it was funny as hell, for some reason.  Influencers like Kim Kardashian or Megyn Kelly made light of it and others openly ridiculed Kate - not so much the rest of the family, though.  So finally we were presented with a video of KATE HERSELF.

The problem with this was that there was a lot of questionable material in this video.  It was shot in front of a static background - a picture such as late night talk shows use of a night skyline of New York, only in this case a field of daffodils (that are not in reality yet in bloom) and trees (which in reality have not leafed out yet) and do not move in the breeze that doesn’t exist, even though it was about 6 mph that day, and too cold for a princess recovering from illness to sit without shivering on a park bench.  Besides which the image did not look much like Kate.  We could catalog the discrepancies in this but it hardly seems worth the time and ink.  Suffice it to say that many are not convinced at all that this was what it was purported to be - a live video of this woman on a park bench in the spring season, daffodils fluttering (not) in the background while she told us that “cancer had been found” and that she is undergoing chemotherapy as a “preventative measure”.  In other words, not that she is suffering from cancer but that she is getting chemo as a prophylactic measure.  

The press then pours it on - even those in the press who had been piling on in criticism of the failure to show us the princess.   “Leave the poor woman alone!  Aren’t you all ashamed of yourselves?  Now we know why she has been out of view.”  Supposedly she had claimed that the public would be upset at her appearance.  Well, I can see that - if she had taken a hit in the appearance department.  She is known as a fashion icon and a beautiful young woman.  No pretty young woman wants to be seen at her worst and ill.  And the video on the park bench would bolster that theory - no makeup, wan, lifeless, sad.  Alone on the bench.  Well, it is difficult to put a real person in a video with a CGI person (and that is the allegation now).  But then the palace - which, by the way was silent about the farmers’ market video - put out pictures of Kate as the vibrant young woman in love with life, living it up on Easter vacation with the man of her dreams - the guy who is on film as humiliating her at a wedding in Jordan (a place special to Kate as she grew up in Jordan).  The guy with the roving eye.  She looked nothing like the poor wraith in the supposedly self-scripted video.  She looked more like the pre-hospitalized Kate we saw at the Eurovision production, playing the piano, like the stylish covergirl we saw with her children on Christmas Day, not the sick-bed Kate.  So, which is it?  

Now everyone who has asked questions or sought information or answers is scolded by the likes of Piers Morgan.  We don’t need to take his view on this as gospel, by the way.  There are a lot of questions.  Art often reflects life.  We wouldn’t have Gaslight otherwise.  Or Notorious.  Take some time to watch these old movies.  They are fiction, but art does reflect life.  Look at real history.  Look at the woman who is now called Queen Camilla.  Look at ex-princess Diana.  We who question have nothing to apologize for or to feel sorry about.  In fact, we should keep asking questions.  We have been gaslighted from the beginning of this story.  It is sensationalism born of palace intrigue and bald-faced deception by the palace with the cooperation of the press.  They asked for it.  They fanned the flames.  Should they now have the right to criticize those who question?  Should their shills in the press?

We, in America, can all be glad that our Founding Fathers saw fit to reject a monarchy and that George Washington, when offered a crown, refused it, opting instead for serving no more than two terms as president.  It was a good decision, obviously.  The royalty are an embarrassment.  In time the people of Britain might twig to this.  Whether they do or not doesn’t matter to Americans for the most part, although we watch them as people once watched Dallas or Peyton Place,  or Downton Abbey, like we read Agatha Christie or Wilkie Collins - with a sort of morbid curiosity.  But don’t think for a second that it is just the British who are the butt of this gaslighting.

We are drifting into gaslight territory right here.  We have people still in prison (where some have died) for “insurrection” - an insurrection which was orchestrated and led by government agencies (“allegedly”) like the FBI.  We have an election which some of us saw subverted in real time as numbers of votes in Virginia went down on the chiron below the video.  How does that happen?  We know that the election was corrupted in several ways.  But say it and you are a “threat to democracy” and punished for it.  You are shut down, shut up.  Gaslighting is the real deal, folks.  England is just one flagrant example, but ours is no less so.  “Don’t believe what you see, even if it is exactly what you want to see.  Don’t believe your lyin’ eyes.”   As we trudge into the 2024 election, keep this all in mind.  Our polls are not verifiable.  Our elections have been subverted in the past.  We could look no further than the story of the assassination of JFK.  Things are not what they seem at all.  If it takes the unfinished saga of Kate Middleton to illustrate this for us, I guess it has been worth the lesson.  

As for the “Palace” - you can’t serve us a plate of spaghetti and tell us that we need to see a ham sandwich with a side of coleslaw there.  Or else.  At least you can’t tell all of us that.

Come to think of it, President Ronald Reagan said it very well:  “Trust . . . but verify.”

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