Trump supporters resemble child soldiers or gangs

[Blecht]

This article is from April. Since that time Bandy Lee has been pretty much blackballed by the media. America should be hearing what she has to say, but she's been limited to self-publishing blogs and tweets. Any article that does appear has most of her quotes removed by editors.

We're in for some dark times no matter what happens with the election.

(As I type this it's pretty dark for me - no electricity for several hours.)

Here's her thoughtful response to just one question. There is a lot more at the link: https://www.salon.com/2020/04/23/yale-psychiatrist-bandy-lee-lockdown-protesters-resemble-child-soldiers-and-urban-gangs/

Salon: Trump has tried to play it both ways, arguing that his lockdown guidelines saved millions of lives while calling for an end to the lockdowns. How does this cognitive dissonance affect the public during a confusing and scary crisis?


Lee: Having no core but wishing to avoid accountability, he often tries to cover all grounds. But the psychological effect on the public will eventually be the most harmful — not the devastating pandemic, the economic hardship or even the incompetence itself, but how he hypnotized and misled the public to cover up his ineptitude. To lose our collective mind, because an untreated disturbed person in an influential position has infected a third of the population with his distorted worldview, all to buttress his fragile sense of self, will be a great trauma for the nation to emerge from. His supporters will be the most severely traumatized, if they are able to wake up at all.

How will we cope with the fact that a mentally compromised president caused a devastating pandemic by eliminating a global response system only two years earlier, removed CDC experts in China just months earlier, caused an overwhelming majority of deaths by refusing to respond sooner, and worsened suffering and deaths by continuing to push wrong information? How do we recover from the oppression that states and health care workers had to suffer because the leader who was supposed to protect them obstinately withheld lifesaving supplies, watched with glee as those who did not praise him sufficiently suffered most, and created conditions where they had to compete with one another for equipment, when we were all supposed to be in this together? This is without counting the enormous mental health effects from enduring the extreme shelter-in-place measures that became necessary because of his mismanagement, when we are social animals. And this will only have been the medical side.

How will we cope with his economic destruction, which seems to have set in motion something far worse than the Great Depression, because he depleted all economic infrastructure while trying to balloon numbers for his re-election, even before the pandemic? How will we live with ourselves as we increasingly learn of a future that has been destroyed because he chose to bail out big businesses, including his own, while throwing pennies to working people as he asked them to worship him, which is what his name on the checks is about? Most developed nations are supporting worker salaries, to fuel economy and business as well as to help ordinary people — whose entrusted money the government is using. Human-caused injury is ultimately the most traumatizing.

People whom sociopaths have deceived and exploited often come away with a feeling that their soul has been hollowed out. They have witnessed the extremes of which humanity is capable.

Here is Bandy Lee's Twitter feed. Please follow her.

https://twitter.com/BandyXLee1

[2naSalit]

1. K&R

[Blecht]

2. Tweet from Bandy Lee (Today)

Link to tweet

Text:

If Bill Barr believes lockdowns are “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since slavery, then Donald Trump is the worst slave master, since he caused what would have ended in 6 weeks to last a year or more—after setting the world record on deaths, economic misery, etc.

This is without even counting the soon-to-come mental health “tsunami”.

The mental health tsunami she's talking about is going to be disastrous -- even by 2020 standards. It has the potential to kill thousands more.

[Blecht]

3. LA Times today

Dr. Lee was excited that her quotes were not edited from an article.

Link to tweet

Text:

Wow! This is the first major publication in maybe a year that has not deleted out my quotes!

Link to article: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-09-17/trump-bounces-attacks-on-coronavirus-and-more-back-at-his-foes

Her quotes:

Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist at Yale University who edited a book about Trump’s mental health and its impact on the country, calls Trump’s attacks “unconscious confessions” in which he projects his weaknesses onto others.

“This is different from political strategy,” she said. “This is how mental pathology works.”

Lee fears that Trump is harming the ability of Americans to separate fact from fiction by spewing falsehoods and conjuring alternate realities.

“To cover up his incapacity, he will resort to any manner of harm to the public, the nation or the world at large,” she said.

[crickets]

4. K&R for visibility.