The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Threat to American Democracy and All Humankind, Chapter Nine (Cont’d)

Addendum, Shared with All

Chapter Nine (Cont’d)

The following is an addendum to Chapter Nine, made available to everyone, and represents the last of the section on “Consequences”. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to read the next important chapters on “Cures”!

Paradoxes of the mind

The mind is a paradox, for the more emergent, menacing, and existentially dangerous a situation is, the less likely it will be to believe that it is so.  Denial may be comforting at first, but later leads to suppressing, threatening, and retaliating against reminders of the truth; doomism and nihilism underlie this approach.  Facing reality early on and rationally solving problems step-by-step is a far more life-affirming option.  If one keeps the hope that there are always solutions—and seldom are there not—a clear-eyed view becomes more possible.  Donald Trump has frequently repeated that there were no wars during his presidency, but this claim will seem bitterly ironic, were he to reenter the White House—for few guardrails will remain to temper his irresistible attraction to violence, war, and powerful weapons.  Not only psychiatrists feared world-ending nuclear Armageddon with him.  Upon his inauguration, two Congress members proposed a new bill that would prohibit a first-use nuclear strike by Trump alone (Alexis-Martin and Davies, 2017), and Commander of U.S.  Strategic Command General John Hyten stated he would disobey any order for a nuclear strike that was “illegal” (Diaz, 2017).  We later learned that White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly had secretly bought our book, studied it like an “owner’s manual,” and may have applied its principles to stop him from using nuclear weapons against North Korea! (Lee, 2023).  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, also, acted to prevent Trump from misusing nuclear weapons against China during the last month of his presidency (Woodward and Costa, 2021)—and Milley was seen holding our book, as recently as the time of this writing!  It is not a coincidence that two wars that could lead to World War III—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s onslaught against Gaza—started in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s presidency.  As we noted earlier how the two-year lag in homicide rates has enabled Republican regimes to blame the Democrats for the rises in violent crime they themselves generated, the same is true at larger-scale, where the vast mobilization of wars have an even longer lag period.

We will review here a few more relevant patterns of mental pathology, in addition to denial, projection, rigidity, and detachment from reality from before.  They include:

1.     Reaction formation

2.     Fragmentation

3.     Self-destructiveness

“Reaction formation” occurs when one unconsciously replaces an unacceptable impulse with the opposite.  Typically, it manifests prosocially, for example, in treating with exceeding kindness a person one has murderous feelings for.  However, at a time when Trump Contagion is spreading toxic masculinity, violence is seen as a “positive” trait that counters one’s “shameful” feelings of weakness, dependence, or needing care.  “Strongmen”, for example, are in truth weak men—or incompetent men—who are dangerous if not contained, because of their reaction formation.  Reaction formation also explains how those claiming to be “pro-life” could be destructive and inhumane toward life more generally, and why those claiming to support “family values” have adulterous affairs and teenage pregnancies in their backgrounds.  “Fragmentation” refers merely to the state of conflict, division, polarization, and strife within an unharmonious mind, whether the “mind” is an individual, a group, or a nation.  When the unit is unified, “whole”, and healthy, conflicts do not become irreconcilable differences and can even be productive, while diversity is a strength; a disordered and fragmented mind, on the other hand, will be paranoid of threats and enemies everywhere, no matter how homogeneous one’s group.  Finally, self-destructiveness is an inevitable feature of mental pathology, no matter how one believes one is benefiting oneself, for pathology by definition leads to destruction and death.  Insistence on policies in the face of self-destruction can therefore serve as a good measure of “insanity” and not health.  This may now afflict all humanity—through what I call our “collective suicidality” (Lee, 2019)—as its rigidity makes it unable to change course from existentially threatening climate catastrophe, nuclear dangers, and a destructive presidential candidate.

Donald Trump, therefore, is a product of our collective suicidality as well as our chief destroyer.  His dysfunctional defenses are magnetically attractive to those who share his symptoms, and Trump Contagion now looks more like a shared psychosis.  Political journalist David Corn lays out in American Psychosis (2022) how the Republican Party, from McCarthyism to the Birchers to segregationists to the religious right to the militia movement to Rush Limbaugh to the tea party and to Donald Trump, has encouraged and exploited right-wing fear, loathing, and conspiracy theories—in other words, pathology—as a method of doing politics.  I would like to credit Corn here for his contributions to the concept of a collective psychosis.  I would also like to recognize him for his privately acknowledging my influence on his work, even as he writes independently and is brilliant himself.  This has been rare in an environment where our suppression has meant our work being taken and plagiarized into whole articles—with a few people literally launching themselves in this arena using the material we gave them.  It is not about the credit or the coauthorship, but these authors rose to positions where, had they properly credited us, could have elevated us with them and brought focus to the value of expertise—in a period before the media normalized the total absence of mental health experts.  Instead, in order not to be threatened in their assumed positions as “experts” (which they are not, and have subsequently misled the public with wrong interpretations), they rather worked to suppress us.  These small acts add up to the current bizarre, Orwellian media atmosphere where the truth is not discussed.  Trump Contagion thus affects not only those who have taken on his symptoms but those who resist, and yet weaken resistance by placing personal ambition over greater causes—of which we would do so much better to be a part of, rather than subsume them into our own agendas.

‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the healers’

Many mistake the Shakespearean phrase, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” to mean that we must get rid of the corrupt and unethical lawyers, but the actual verse came from Dick the Butcher in “Henry VI,” who was a follower of the rebel Jack Cade.  He thought that if they eliminated the lawyers and interrupted law and logical thought, Cade could take over as king.  In the Trump era, mental health experts were the number one threat—the healers capable of exposing his greatest shame: his unfitness.  Hence, the elimination of all healers meant the interruption of the reign of health and reason.  Since authoritarianism’s singular policy is war against the truth (of one’s unfitness), it must neutralize the authentic authority of mental health and replace it with power over the mind.  Journalists and intellectuals are the first to be targeted under such regimes, precisely for their being authorities on truth—in the form of information and knowledge.  I briefly segue here, because my own experience serves as a barometer of the current societal state of health.

The urgency of actual need was the reason I dropped nearly everything and threw myself into public life, through my Yale conference, my first book on Donald Trump, and all my subsequent efforts to try to alert the public, so that we could get ahead of Trump Contagion and protect ourselves.  A Washington analyst warned me early on that my very effectiveness made me a threat and therefore a target for discrediting.  “But I have nothing on me,” I naïvely said.  “If they do not find anything, they will make something up,” was his response.  I simply believed that, since “the Goldwater rule” was such an absurd mirage to start, digging deeper would only reveal that it is not based on substance or the law, as many misconceived it to be, and therefore it would only help our cause.  I was also not under the APA’s jurisdiction as a nonmember, and not even members were disciplined after egregiously breaking the guideline, which I did not do—and so why should I fear?  What they came after was my professorship at Yale, which I had held for seventeen years—and it would not be the existence of a cause that would justify my dismissal, but my dismissal that would give the guise of an existing cause!

I had never dreamed that a university would bow down to a trade association—but under authoritarianism, it is “obedience to authority” that counts.  As the world must adjust to making an unfit leader “fit”, independent reasoning, which might discover the unfitness, must be obliterated.  The brilliant social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who conducted groundbreaking experiments that revealed our society’s obsequiousness to power (Milgram, 1969)—in the basement of Yale’s Linsly-Chittenden Hall, where I taught his work to my own undergraduate students—Yale dismissed, and so did Harvard.  He eventually completed his career at the City University of New York.  Renowned psychologist and contributor to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Philip Zimbardo, after an illustrious and highly contributory career was attacked and severely criticized during the Trump era, citing “ethical” and “scientific” reasons—during a time when we had much to learn from his famous Stanford prison experiment (Zimbardo et al., 1971), which revealed how quickly even college students could be “de-individuated” to become vicious guards.  Social theorist Theodor Adorno (Adorno et al., 1950) is another whose groundbreaking work helped me greatly as I treated violent prisoners, who remained authoritarian, even as the rest of the country had moved away from these tendencies.  Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer is another underappreciated—recently late—scholar whose work I regularly referenced, who defined the “right-wing authoritarian personality” as someone who: (1) is naturally submissive to designated authority figures; (2) acts aggressively in the name of those figures; and (3) is very conformist in thought and behavior (Altemeyer, 2006).  Former White House Counsel John Dean, who coauthored Authoritarian Nightmare with him (Dean and Altemeyer, 2020), opened our emergency interdisciplinary conference, “Donald Trump’s Great Harm to America and the World,” weeks before the 2020 presidential election (World Mental Health Coalition, 2020).

Just months before the 2020 election, when there was still a fear that Donald Trump would win the presidency, I was terminated from my position at Yale.  It had nothing to do with my performance, since my evaluations continued to rank among the highest with the students and the faculty.  Furthermore, I had recently been lauded for elevating my department’s stature both nationally and internationally, for having helped to initiate reforms at Rikers Island, as cited on the front page of the New York Times, and having been honored as a global authority on violence at the University of Cambridge.  All this did not matter, starting forty-eight hours after Trump ally Alan Dershowitz brought great pressures on the University for my speech.  Outside advisors immediately warned me that, regardless of merits, Dershowitz had a track record of derailing academic careers, but I shirked it off at the time.  After all, a little over a year earlier, my department chair affirmed my public speech in public, in a “State of the Department” address, citing Yale’s commitment to free speech and presenting me as an example of a faculty member who spoke responsibly—surely he would not change course without reason!  Rather, I considered turning this into an opportunity to reopen discussions on “the Goldwater rule,” since the APA had closed them off, and therefore I asked for a debate on the issues as well as an investigation.  None of this happened, but in May 2020 I received an oddly circular letter, notifying me of my termination at the end of June 2020, because I had no “teaching role”—but I had no “teaching role” because I was being terminated!  To get clarification, I tried writing to both my chair and my division head—both of whom I had seen weekly in grand rounds or in seminars up to that time and who said nothing about this—and for the first time in seventeen years, they did not answer.  Because of the pandemic lockdowns, I could not walk into their offices to confront them, either.  But why would they not respond unless they were embarrassed, because they were not righteous in their decision?  Dershowitz’s involvement was all but confirmed when another faculty member of the prestigious Yale School of Art, who was making a documentary of me—and who was just honored in a grand ceremony as a national woman pioneer in filmmaking—was dismissed alongside me after twenty years at Yale, immediately after she asked Dershowitz to do an interview in relation to me!  The faculty handbook clearly states that all faculty appointed for more than a year have a right to due process, which neither of us received.

I wrote to Yale President Peter Salovey, who had previously complimented me for my contributions to the University and even invited me to his campus home when he received the head of Doctors Without Borders, for which I was a consultant.  His reaction was truly disappointing; he acted purely as a functionary, seeking only to avoid getting involved and uninterested in the substance of the matter.  Champions my work wrote impassioned letters to him, including Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and one Congressman, and Prof. Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, Prof. Cornel West of Union Theological Seminary, and Prof. Richard Painter of the University of Minnesota all made public statements, denouncing Yale.  At least a hundred Yale alumni, physicians, and academics wrote lengthy letters to him, more than a thousand mental health professionals signed a petition to him, and a citizen unknown to me collected more than ten thousand signatures to state: “Yale unfairly fires Asian American for speaking the truth.  We demand her reinstatement” (Chan, 2021).  However, he remained unmoved until the director of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) charged the University of violating academic freedom, when he instructed my former chair to write a letter explaining the reason for my dismissal.  Immediately, the chair wrote a four-page letter of explanation to me, four months after my dismissal.  It confirmed, as suspected, that “the Goldwater rule” was the reason; what was astonishing, however, was not just his parroting the APA’s rhetoric, which was not in accordance with science or scholarship, but the almost complete absence of original thought.  Because of this oddity, I tried for the next ten months to try to figure out his actual thinking, without success.  Some say that the purpose of a bureaucracy is to validate its own existence, but at times like this, choosing self-preservation over principle could turn one into a deadly enterprise, as the medical establishment under Nazism showed—and he is the son of a Holocaust survivor! (albeit one with ketamine stocks in common with Trump, and therefore a conflict of interest, I later learned).  I also found disappointing that my division head, who held me in high regard, did not defend me but remained exceedingly deferential to power.

A friend and former dean of Yale Law School—who was also dismayed at this “new” method of leadership, including at the Law School—advised that the only way to get a response would be to launch a lawsuit.  Hence, in March 2021 I began the first lawsuit of my life with attorneys who volunteered their time, with the intention not to let my beloved alma mater lose its way.  I was doing it for academic freedom everywhere, so that intellectuals would be able to speak without fear of retribution in a society that makes knowledge freely available.  Many eagerly watched my case, for the discovery process would be very revelatory on how special interests are infiltrating, corrupting, and controlling universities in ways that undermine self-governance more generally—not to mention Dershowitz’s outsized role in controlling speech.

However, oddities only continued: in December 2021, a highly-regarded and genteel senior judge who was ruling in my favor was suddenly replaced without cause or explanation.  Eight months later, the new junior judge with only a magistrate background made an error in argument to dismiss my case, preventing it from going to discovery.  Within less than a month, she was instantly promoted, surpassing even the highly-regarded senior judge with a far more considerable track record (was this coincidence?—the APA was similarly rewarded with a new building immediately after making an erroneous argument to silence us).  I emptied my bank account for an appeal to try to correct the error, but it would be heard in the court of appeals, where the junior judge had been newly promoted.  The following year, a panel of judges upheld their new colleague’s error, even though it required their ignoring the federal question of free speech, in a federal court!  A Trump-appointed judge on the panel gave away some of the thinking: “Yale is a hotbed of support for President Trump—did I miss that?”  Yale also made an astonishing admission, by claiming on the record that academic freedom was important only as a concept, and that Yale’s procedural protection “does not include the freedom to speak out about controversial ideological matters”!  In this manner, even though top legal scholars all agreed that I had an “excellent case” against Yale, it avoided discovery through a willingness to engage in all manner of aberrant legal arguments, which the federal courts allowed.  The entire process had a feeling of power protecting power, without logic, reason, the law, or even civility (on the part of the sardonic judge).  It was, in truth, the most absurdly comical display in a federal court of law that I had ever seen—but in the Trump era, what can surprise us?

My legal case was one of the reasons that led to Yale’s earning the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) “Lifetime Censorship Award.”  Tribe was furious at this outcome and kindly offered to represent me on a certiorari petition to the U.S.  Supreme Court, but just months earlier he had agreed to become “of counsel” with the firm representing E. Jean Carroll, who would go on successfully to sue Donald Trump for defamation and sexual assault, and the firm had a conflict.  This was regretful, but with the extremely regressive Supreme Court, any issue related to freedom of speech could have been dangerous, anyway.  Incidentally, simultaneously with my lawsuit, prominent historian and leader of Yale’s prestigious Grand Strategy Program Beverly Gage resigned, citing donor pressure (Schuessler, 2021).  Yale would go on to lose numerous other faculty, through termination or resignation, such that I became only the first of a string of purges.  Meanwhile, sanctions-violating, sexually-harassing faculty at Yale Law School remained, no matter the student complaints and the national spectacle they became, as they were Yale’s “power brokers” (Carmon, 2021).  The pattern would repeat in universities across the country, creating a chilling effect in almost every domain of academia.  A FIRE survey showed that faculty members were more likely to self-censor today than during the McCarthy era (FIRE, 2023), and Dershowitz would go on to sanction speech in ways that some call it: “McCarthyism revisited” (Yaroshefsky, 2023).Chapter Nine (Cont’d)

The following is an addendum to Chapter Nine, made available to everyone. Chapter Ten will contain the dangerousness risk assessment a panel of renowned, independent experts did of Donald Trump, submitted for consideration in his sentencing, in the context of my discussing interventions. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to read Chapter Ten and the subsequent important chapters on solutions!

Paradoxes of the mind

The mind is a paradox, for the more emergent, menacing, and existentially dangerous a situation is, the less likely it will be to believe that it is so.  Denial may be comforting at first, but later leads to suppressing, threatening, and retaliating against reminders of the truth, if not doomism and nonaction.  Facing reality early on and rationally solving problems step-by-step is a far more life-affirming option.  If one keeps the hope that there are always solutions—and seldom are there not—a clear-eyed view becomes more possible. Donald Trump has frequently repeated that there were no wars during his presidency, but this claim will seem bitterly ironic, were he to reenter the White House—for few will remain to temper his attraction to violence, war, and powerful weapons.  Not only psychiatrists feared world-ending nuclear Armageddon with him; upon his inauguration, two Congress members proposed a new bill that would prohibit a first-use nuclear strike by Trump alone (Alexis-Martin and Davies, 2017), and Commander of U.S. Strategic Command General John Hyten stated he would disobey any order for a nuclear strike that was “illegal” (Diaz, 2017).  We later learned that White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly had secretly bought our book, studied it like an “owner’s manual,” and may have applied its principles to stop the then-president from using nuclear weapons against North Korea! (Lee, 2023). Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, also, acted to prevent Trump from misusing nuclear weapons against China during the last month of his presidency (Woodward and Costa, 2021)—and Milley was seen holding our book, as recently as the time of this writing! It is not a coincidence that two wars that could lead to World War III—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s onslaught against Gaza—started in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s presidency.  As we noted earlier how the two-year lag in homicide rates has enabled Republican regimes to blame the Democrats for the rises in violent crime they themselves generated, the same is true at larger-scale, where the vast mobilization of wars have an even longer lag period.

We will review here a few more patterns of mental pathology, in addition to denial, projection, rigidity, and detachment from reality we went over before. They include:

5.     Reaction formation

6.     Fragmentation

7.     Self-destructiveness

“Reaction formation” occurs when one unconsciously replaces an unacceptable impulse with the opposite. Typically, it manifests prosocially, for example, in treating with exceeding kindness a person one has murderous feelings for.  However, at a time when Trump Contagion is also spreading toxic masculinity, violence is seen as a “positive” trait that counters one’s “shameful” feelings of weakness, dependence, or needing care.  “Strongmen”, for example, are in truth weak men—or incompetent men—who are dangerous if not contained, for their reaction formation. Reaction formation also explains how those claiming to be “pro-life” could be so destructive and inhumane toward life more generally, and why those claiming to be models for “family values” have adulterous affairs and teenage pregnancies in their backgrounds.  “Fragmentation” refers merely to the state of conflict, division, polarization, and strife within an unharmonious mind, whether the “mind” is an individual, a group, or a nation.  When the identified unit is unified, “whole”, and healthy, conflicts are generally readily resolvable and can even be productive, and diversity becomes a strength; a disordered and fragmented mind, on the other hand, will be paranoid of threats and enemies everywhere, no matter how homogeneous one’s group—since what determines this is the level of health, not external reality.  Finally, self-destructiveness is an inevitable feature of mental pathology, no matter how one believes one is benefiting oneself, for pathology by definition leads to destruction and death.  This may now afflict all humanity—through what I call our “collective suicidality” (Lee, 2019)—as it is currently unable to change course from existentially threatening climate catastrophe, nuclear dangers, and a destructive presidential candidate.

Donald Trump, therefore, is a product of our collective suicidality as well as our chief destroyer.  His dysfunctional defenses are magnetically attractive to those who share his symptoms, and Trump Contagion now looks like a shared psychosis.  In American Psychosis, political journalist David Corn (2022) lays out how the Republican Party, from McCarthyism to the Birchers to segregationists to the religious right to the militia movement to Rush Limbaugh to the tea party and to Donald Trump, has encouraged and exploited right-wing fear, loathing, and conspiracy theories—in other words, pathology—as a method of doing politics.  I would like to credit Corn here for his contributions to the concept of a collective psychosis.  I would also like to recognize him for his privately acknowledging my influence on his work, even as he writes independently and is brilliant himself.  This has been rare in an environment where our suppression has meant our work being taken and plagiarized into whole articles—with a few people literally launching themselves in this arena using the material we gave them.  It is not about the credit or the coauthorship, but these authors rose to positions where, had they properly credited us, could have elevated us with them and brought focus to the value of expertise—during a period before the media normalized the total absence of mental health experts.  Instead, in order not to be threatened in their assumed positions as “experts” (which they are not, and have subsequently misled the public with wrong interpretations), they rather worked to suppress us.  These small acts add up to the current bizarre, Orwellian media atmosphere where the truth is not talked about.  Trump Contagion thus affects not only those who have taken on his symptoms but those who resist, and yet weaken resistance by placing personal ambition over greater causes—of which we would do so much better to be a part of, rather than subsume them into our own agendas.

‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the healers’

Many mistake the Shakespearean phrase, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” to mean that we must get rid of the corrupt and unethical lawyers, but the actual verse came from Dick the Butcher in “Henry VI,” who was a follower of the rebel Jack Cade.  He thought that if they eliminated the lawyers and interrupted law and logical thought, Cade could take over as king.  In the Trump era, mental health experts were the first threat—the healers capable of exposing his greatest shame: his unfitness.  Hence, the elimination of all healers meant the interruption of the reign of health and reason.  Since authoritarianism’s singular policy is war against the truth (of one’s unfitness), it must neutralize the authentic authority of mental health and replace it with power over the mind.  Journalists and intellectuals are the first to be targeted under such regimes, precisely for their being authorities on truth—in the form of information and knowledge.  I briefly segue here, because my own experience serves as a barometer of the current societal state of health.

The urgency of actual need was the reason I dropped nearly everything and threw myself into public life, through my Yale conference, my first book on Donald Trump, and all my subsequent efforts to try to alert the public, so that we could get ahead of Trump Contagion and protect ourselves.  A Washington analyst warned me early on that my very effectiveness made me a threat and therefore a target for discrediting.  “But I have nothing on me,” I naïvely said.  “If they do not find anything, they will make something up,” was his response.  I simply believed that, since “the Goldwater rule” was a mirage to start, digging deeper would only reveal that it is not based on substance or the law, as many misconceived it to be, and therefore it would only help our cause.  I was also not under the APA’s jurisdiction as a non-member, and no member was ever disciplined, even after egregiously breaking the guideline, which I did not do—and so why should I fear?  What they came after was my professorship at Yale, which I had held for seventeen years—and it would not be the existence of a cause that would justify my dismissal, but my dismissal that would give the guise of the existence of a cause!

I had never dreamed that a university would bow down to a trade association—but under authoritarianism, it is “obedience to authority” that counts.  As the world must adjust to making an unfit leader “fit”, independent reasoning, which might discover the unfitness, must be obliterated.  The brilliant social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who conducted groundbreaking experiments that revealed our society’s obsequiousness to power (Milgram, 1969)—in the basement of Yale’s Linsly-Chittenden Hall, where I taught his work to my own undergraduate students—Yale dismissed, and so did Harvard.  Renowned psychologist and contributor to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Philip Zimbardo, after an illustrious and highly contributory career was attacked and severely criticized during the Trump era, citing “ethical” and “scientific” reasons, rather than learning from his famous Stanford prison experiment (Zimbardo et al., 1971), which revealed how quickly even college students could be “de-individuated” to become vicious guards.  Social theorist Theodor Adorno (Adorno et al., 1950) is another whose groundbreaking work helped me greatly as I treated violent prisoners, who remained authoritarian, even while the country had moved away from its tendencies through most of my lifetime.  Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer is another underappreciated scholar whose work I regularly referenced, who defined the “right-wing authoritarian personality” as someone who: (1) is naturally submissive to designated authority figures; (2) acts aggressively in the name of those authority figures; and (3) is very conformist in thought and behavior (Altemeyer, 2006).  Former White House Counsel John Dean, who coauthored Authoritarian Nightmare with him (Dean and Altemeyer, 2020), opened our emergency interdisciplinary conference, “Donald Trump’s Great Harm to America and the World,” just weeks before the 2020 presidential election (World Mental Health Coalition, 2020).

Just months before the 2020 election, when there was still a fear that Donald Trump would win the presidency, I was terminated from my position at Yale.  It had nothing to do with my performance, since my evaluations continued to rank among the highest with the students and the faculty.  Furthermore, I had recently been praised for elevating my department’s stature both nationally and internationally, having been cited on the front page of the New York Times for helping to initiate reforms at Rikers Island and having been honored as a global authority on violence at the University of Cambridge.  All this did not matter, starting forty-eight hours after Trump ally Alan Dershowitz brought great pressures on the University for my speech.  Outside advisors immediately warned me that, regardless of merits, Dershowitz had a track record of derailing academic careers, but I shirked it off at the time.  After all, a little over a year earlier, my department chair affirmed my public speech in public, in a “State of the Department” address, citing Yale’s commitment to free speech and presenting me as an example of a faculty member who spoke responsibly—surely he would not change course without reason!  Rather, I considered turning this into an opportunity to reopen discussions on “the Goldwater rule,” since the APA had closed them off, and therefore I asked for a debate on the issues as well as an investigation.  None of this happened, but in May 2020 I received an oddly circular letter, notifying me of my termination at the end of June 2020, because I had no “teaching role”—but I had no “teaching role” because I was being terminated!  To get clarification, I tried writing to both my chair and my division head—both of whom I had seen weekly in grand rounds or in seminars up to that time—and for the first time in seventeen years, they did not answer.  Because of the pandemic lockdowns, I could not walk into their offices to confront them, either.  But why would they not respond unless they were embarrassed, because they were not righteous in their decision?  Dershowitz’s involvement was all but confirmed when another faculty member of the prestigious Yale School of Art, who was doing a documentary of me—and who was just honored in a grand ceremony as a national woman pioneer in filmmaking—was dismissed alongside me after twenty years at Yale, immediately after asking Dershowitz to do an interview in relation to me! The faculty handbook clearly stated that all faculty appointed for more than a year had a right to due process, which neither of us received.

I wrote to Yale President Peter Salovey, who had previously complimented me for my contributions to the University and even invited me to his campus home when he received the head of Doctors Without Borders, with whom I was a consultant.  His reaction was truly disappointing; he acted purely as a functionary, seeking only to avoid getting involved and uninterested in the substance of the matter.  Champions my work wrote impassioned letters to him, including Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and one Congressman, and Prof. Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, Prof. Cornel West of Union Theological Seminary, and Prof. Richard Painter of the University of Minnesota all made public statements, denouncing Yale.  At least a hundred Yale alumni, physicians, and academics wrote lengthy letters to him, more than a thousand mental health professionals signed a petition to him, and a citizen unknown to me collected more than ten thousand signatures to state: “Yale unfairly fires Asian American for speaking the truth.  We demand her reinstatement” (Chan, 2021).  However, he remained unmoved until the director of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) charged the University of violating academic freedom, when he instructed my former chair to write a letter explaining the reason for my dismissal.  Immediately, the chair wrote a four-page letter of explanation to me, four months after my dismissal.  It confirmed, as suspected, that “the Goldwater rule” was the reason; what was astonishing, however, was not just his parroting the APA’s rhetoric, which was not in accordance with science or scholarship, but the almost complete absence of original thought.  Because of this oddity, I tried for the next ten months to try to figure out his actual thinking, without success.  Some say that the purpose of a bureaucracy is to validate its own existence, but at times like this, choosing self-preservation over principle could turn one into a deadly enterprise, as the medical establishment under Nazism showed—and he is the son of a Holocaust survivor! (albeit one with ketamine stocks in common with Trump, and therefore a conflict of interest, I later learned).  I also found disappointing that my division head, who held me in high regard, did not defend me but remained exceedingly deferential to power.  A friend and former dean of Yale Law School—who was also dismayed at this “new” method of leadership, including at the Law School—advised that the only way to get a response would be to launch a lawsuit.  Hence, in March 2021 I began the first lawsuit of my life, with the intention not to let my beloved alma mater lose its way, with attorneys who volunteered their time.  I was doing it for academic freedom everywhere, so that intellectuals would be able to speak without fear of retribution in a society that makes knowledge freely available.  Many eagerly watched my case, for the discovery process would be very revelatory on how special interests are infiltrating, corrupting, and controlling universities in ways that undermine self-governance more generally—not to mention Dershowitz’s outsized control over others’ speech.

However, oddities only continued: in December 2021, a highly-regarded and genteel senior judge who was ruling in my favor was suddenly replaced without cause or explanation.  Eight months later, the new junior judge with only a magistrate background made an error in argument to dismiss my case, preventing it from going to discovery.  Within less than a month, she was instantly promoted, surpassing even the highly-regarded senior judge with a far more considerable track record (was this coincidence?—the APA was similarly rewarded with a new building immediately after making an error in argument to silence us).  I emptied my bank account for an appeal to try to correct the error, but it would be heard in the court of appeals, where the junior judge had been newly promoted.  The following year, a panel of judges upheld their new colleague’s error, even though it required their ignoring the federal question of free speech, in a federal court!  A Trump-appointed judge on the panel gave away some of the thinking: “Yale is a hotbed of support for President Trump—did I miss that?”  Yale also made an astonishing admission, by claiming on the record that academic freedom was important only as a concept, and that Yale’s procedural protection “does not include the freedom to speak out about controversial ideological matters”!  In this manner, even though top legal scholars all agreed that I had an “excellent case” against Yale, it avoided discovery through a willingness to engage in all manner of aberrant legal arguments, which the federal courts allowed.  It had a feeling of power protecting power, without logic, reason, the law, or even civility (on the part of the sardonic judge). It was, in truth, the most comical display in a federal court of law that I had ever seen—but in the Trump era, what can surprise us?

My legal case was one of the reasons that led to Yale’s earning the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) “Lifetime Censorship Award.”  Tribe was furious at this outcome and kindly offered to represent me on a certiorari petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, but just months earlier he had agreed to become “of counsel” with the firm representing E. Jean Carroll, who would go on successfully to sue Donald Trump for defamation and sexual assault, and the firm had a conflict.  This was regretful, but with the extremely regressive Supreme Court, any issue related to freedom of speech could have been dangerous, anyway.  Incidentally, simultaneously with my lawsuit, prominent historian and leader of Yale’s prestigious Grand Strategy Program Beverly Gage resigned, citing donor pressure (Schuessler, 2021).  Yale would go on to lose numerous other faculty, through termination or resignation, such that I became only the first of a string of purges.  Meanwhile, sanctions-violating, sexually-harassing faculty at Yale Law School remained, no matter the student complaints and the national spectacle they became, as they were Yale’s “power brokers” (Carmon, 2021).  The pattern would repeat in universities across the country, creating a chilling effect in almost every domain of academia.  A FIRE survey showed that faculty members were more likely to self-censor today than during the McCarthy era (FIRE, 2023), and Dershowitz would go on to sanction speech in ways that some call it: “McCarthyism revisited” (Yaroshefsky, 2023).