Zoom Link: ‘How to Navigate an Increasingly Dangerous World’

Live Session Today at 12 noon EDT / 9 a.m. PDT

My psychologist colleague and speaker at the National Press Club conference, Dr. Drew Westen recently wrote in a mass email:

Someday, if there are still history books that don't have the picture of the führer on the front, there will probably be a chapter on why the media chose to hide the degree of his mental illness and decline by refusing to put mental health professionals on the air.  When they were dealing with the pandemic, they had in lots of infectious disease specialists.  But when they are dealing with severe mental illness, they think that their folk psychology covers the waterfront.  For whatever reason they did that, they have probably doomed themselves to be taken off the air, if not to prison.

The following week, author and radio host Thom Hartmann wrote:

Dr. Bandy Lee was fired from Yale University for tweeting that Trump was mentally ill.  Schoolteacher Leah Kinyon was fired from her job for saying that “Donald Trump … is a sexual predator.”  Rebekah Jones was fired by Ron DeSantis for telling the truth about his covering up Florida Covid statistics….  Soon companies,… including [the] Washington Post and the LA Times, [decided] to simply “obey in advance.”  This past weekend, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Largo to kiss Trump’s royal ass, probably at the insistence of network executives since Trump has threatened the very existence of MSNBC.

This is why I count as the Origin of where we are today the 2018 New York Times’ denunciation of the mental health experts for trying to inform the public about mental unfitness in the presidency, after a private meeting with the federally-funded American Psychiatric Association (APA).  Inquiries for our public input went from (for me alone) fifteen hours a day by all the major network and cable programs to near-zero within two to three weeks, never to recover in seven years. The Times (NYT) proposed as a solution: “Not the 25th Amendment…. [Not] Impeachment….  The best solution is the simplest: Vote….  In November [this was early January], you can help elect members of Congress who will fight Mr. Trump’s most dangerous behaviors.”  I said back then, if the electorate is blocked from access to expertise, then it will have neither information nor the vote—and that is the literal outcome today.

Imagine what might have been without the APA-NYT intervention.  I was entrenched in meetings with more than fifty Congress members at the time, who depended us to “educate the public medically” so that they could “intervene politically.”  After our unprecedented bestselling book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, we were the number one topic of national conversation, and an intervention, along the lines of the 25th Amendment, seemed very feasible, appropriate, and at hand.  Our abrupt withdrawal from the public eye, however, stopped all talks and confirmed the legislators’ wisdom in that only our public input could help their political intervention.  And imagine if—instead of what the APA-NYT did, which was to use disinformation to gain political advantage and profit—the APA had met its societal responsibility according to our medical consensus, and the NYT publicized us!  There would not be 1.2 million American deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic, a violent insurrection against the government, a Supreme Court overturning the Rule of Law, a second Trump presidency, and possibly the end of American democracy.

And the fragmentation of our society is even more distressing to witness.  Two weeks ago, we saw how a cultified electorate could become incapable of informed, rational decision making when Trump Contagion, facilitated by conditions that are made optimal for spread over years, not only infects a good part of the population but metastasizes to all sectors of government, through other unfit appointments.  Far from being “freer” for the lack of education, it is the very definition of mental slavery (and the enslavement of everything else).  Yet, we have not begun to see the beginnings of what can happen when mental pathology is unleashed without checks, balances, or limits—there is simply no end to the destruction of all order and ultimately life.  This is what pathology does—and why rational human beings work to stop it.

And soon, even this truth will not be able to be told.

Benjamin Franklin’s advice that we have “a republic, if [we] can keep it,” could probably be updated to: “a republic, as long as we can remain fit for it [and elect fit leaders for it].”

Announcement:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee is inviting you to a live session in a series: