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Ric Winstead's avatar

Thank you Dr. Lee for your courage to continue to warn. I believe the forensic psychiatric understanding of the threat and mechanism of contagion is an important contribution to developing a rational, scientific, and effective treatment needed to save democracy.

I fear our society has become immune to rational, science based warnings about anything. As you and your colleagues so ably prognosticated the Trump Infection continues to spread to completely capture a single political party including newly extremist state governments. The US is progressively becoming a society of Social Murder. The takeover has been promoted for 40 years by wealthy extremist individuals to promote private gain and dismantle government regulation, but it too has been captured by extremists infected by the Trump Infection. The virality of this disordered thinking is epidemic in the US and has infected tens of millions who carry and spread it. And vote.

Alas, the political party in opposition, seems to be in complete denial that what is happening is anything other than politics as usual. Their comfort zone. They seem incapable of understanding the seriousness and dynamics of social infection and building the rational approach to stop it as you have proposed. Instead, it gives license to its spread as political speech rather than dangerous infectious speech that is actively harming individuals and society. So, in that sense, they too are complicit in the tragedies of Social Murder which unfold daily.

As a physician it is painful to watch this preventable ongoing mass social murder unfold without the least attempt to thwart it. Unconscionable, but somehow, so American.

Thank you for your insights and ongoing work.

Ricord B. Winstead, MD Family Medicine (retired)

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Francoise Jaffe's avatar

Having witnessed and attempted to participate in the battle you have been waging to inform the public, I am concerned that this effort will meet with the same limited results--that is not being able to reach the part of the infected population that we need to alert to the uptick in danger. Your message certainly has been blocked from reaching the public, as you described and we experienced, but that is not in my view the only issue. The content is. Our type of communication has not been effective with people who think in slogans that are very appealing and convincing to them, even though their processing would reveal their flaws. But that processing never happens. The slogan seem to be enough. MAGA certainly illustrates this point. What is needed is an antidote that follows the same principles--but the difficulty lies in the issue that nothing we can propose is that simplistic and crude---because reality is complicated. The Tik Tok generation has it right--we need short, simple, highly vivid messages, visual as well as verbal. Evoking fear and bringing hope is what Trump has done (think caravans, immigration and bans, etc...) and that has worked for him. But doing the same by sticking to our values seems to be an impossible task.

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