“It's weird how the name outlives the person, the signifier outlasts the signified, the symbol the symbolized.” This is one of the famous final quotes of Tender Branson in Chuck Palahniuk’s postmodern 1999 novel ‘Survivor.’ A story about an ex-cult member turned terrorist who -upon his final terrorist act- talks into the black box of an airplane he hijacked as it descends into Australia. On its face, this quote highlights the power of propaganda and how it appropriates truth into untruths without you even realizing the “weird” irony at play. It highlights how propaganda is a conspiracy-in-action. But to be aware of it in real time, you must understand irony. Understanding all the dimensions of irony is the most important weapon any critical thinker can have in a post-truth world. It’s like having the power to see through a double-sided mirror that everyone else just perceives as a mirror. In seeing through the veneer, you see the illusion at hand and how it manipulates those that can’t see through it, particularly, by blinding them into a complacency with cognitive dissonance. The word irony is synonymous with opposite. If something is ironic, it’s because an opposite effect is taking place either beknownst or unbeknownst to you. The easiest way to understand irony though is through understanding it in its simplest form, which is sarcasm. What makes sarcasm (and irony) so powerful is that it’s a vehicle for plausible deniability. It allows you to both express views and not express views simultaneously. The broader umbrella that sarcasm falls under is a term called Verbal Irony. Verbal Irony is when you say one thing but mean another. That “another” can be the opposite or an alternative depending on the verbal irony type. For instance, propaganda is a type of verbal irony in that it is a conscious misleading. Thus, any other type of conscious misleading is considered verbal irony like disinformation, manipulation, etc. But one of the newer forms of verbal irony that best encapsulates the propaganda of our post-truth moment is a new type of conscious misleading known as gaslighting. Over the last decade the term has given a voice to a new rhetoric that’s bewilderingly defining our time. And only those who understand irony are able to “see through the mirror” it casts in real time. “Are you sure today is the day your phone says it is? How do you know it’s not a Gregorian-calendar based psy-op?” These questions best exemplify how gaslighting is used. Making you question your sense of what’s real either through interrogation, declaration or command. It has been the means by which the media and politicians alike have utilized a ‘slight of hand’ to misdirect the public’s attention away from what’s true and real for the sake of buying time to manufacture a consent retroactively. Now the difference between disinformation and gaslighting is an important distinction to delineate here. Disinformation is when you knowingly are giving wrong information, but gaslighting is when you knowingly misinform. This is where plausible deniability comes into play because at its core it’s not only what influences irony, but it’s also what divides misinformation from disinformation. If I’m misinforming you I’m not consciously misleading you (hence plausible deniability), but if I disinform then I am consciously misleading you. Gaslighting utilizes the plausible deniability of misinforming in a dramatically ironic way, blurring the lines between fiction and reality like never before. In its traditional function, Dramatic Irony is a narration device used in fiction where the audience is in on a secret that a character(s) is not aware of in the story. Dramatic Irony is like an inside joke between the author and their audience. In our post-truth world, it seems this device has jumped off the pages of fiction and integrated into our zeitgeist. As, thanks to technological innovation, it seems special interest groups now have the power to author their own realities to widespread audiences, all the while unbeknownst to other divergent audiences. Creating dramatic irony silo's that continuously fold in on themselves until massive information gaps quake through society. Because of this, gaslighting has now allowed racist ideologies to seep back into the mainstream fold via successful gaslighting counter-movements like Birtherism and the ‘All lives matter’ counter-mantra of the early '10s. It’s also allowed for cognitive dissonance to be mainstreamed via Hillary Clinton and the DNC's gaslighting Russiagate hoax & 2016 Democratic Presidential Primary "super delegate" debacle against Bernie Sanders, the gaslight sane-washing of the January 6th insurrection and subsequent election denialism, and the Biden administration’s economic recession denialism gaslighting that took place from January 2022 - June 2022 when, according to Statista, we had 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth that were actively suppressed in real time by the media. Some would argue the Covid era also fits into this gaslighting era. Regardless though, it is abundantly clear that gaslighting has eclipsed disinformation as the defining propaganda of the last decade plus. Truth has successfully been appropriated for untruths, and understanding irony is the only way to pre-emptively see the appropriations in real time.