The vindication of Bandy Lee. She warned us that Donald Trump would unleash violence.

[Nevilledog]

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The red flags were there all along. The rhetoric GOP leaders and right-wing extremists have unleashed in response to the #MarALago search could be the result of electing a president with few qualms about political violence.

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The psychiatrist who warned us that Donald Trump would unleash violence was absolutely right
The vindication of Bandy Lee.
2:00 PM · Aug 18, 2022

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/08/donald-trump-violence-mental-health-dangerous-jan-6-fbi-mar-a-lago-civil-war-bandy-lee-psychiatry-goldwater-rule/


On the afternoon of February 1, 2016, as Iowa voters prepared for that evening’s caucuses, Bandy Lee sat by the bedside of her mother, who was terminally ill with cancer. An assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Yale, Lee had been too preoccupied with her mother’s condition to pay attention to the nascent presidential race, so she was taken aback when she saw footage of a Donald Trump rally airing on the hospital room’s small TV. What shocked her was the way Trump interacted with the crowd. “He said something about how his supporters should knock the crap out of hecklers,” she recalls, “and that if they did, he would pay their legal bills.”

His belligerent behavior meant more to Lee than it might to a casual viewer. As part of her clinical work in prison settings, she had evaluated and treated hundreds of violent offenders, including leaders of prison gangs. A native New Yorker, she had assumed that Trump “was just a shady businessman,” Lee told me, but “I suddenly realized that he had a lot in common” with those patients. “Trump was engaging in the predatory manipulation of his vulnerable followers.” In some cases, gang leaders might “ask their members to engage in violence and then issue bogus promises of protection. Like Trump, these leaders also often project extreme self-confidence, and that appeals to their followers, who tend to feel a deep emotional need for protection, connection, and identity.”

Fast forward to November 9, 2016, the day after the election. Lee’s friends and colleagues were bombarding her with calls and emails. Would Trump’s victory herald an increase in hate crimes? “You are a violence expert,” one implored. “Can you do something?”

She decided to jump into the fray, organizing an academic conference that took place in New Haven the following April. Titled “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn?” the meeting featured a handful of prominent psychiatrists, including Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors (1986), who addressed Trump’s mental state and the risks they believed it posed to the health and safety of Americans. Their consensus was, as Lifton put it, that psychiatric professionals had a compelling ethical duty to “bring our experience and knowledge to bear on what threatens us and what might renew us.” The event was initially sponsored by Yale’s schools of public health, medicine, and nursing, but Lee ended up running it independently to avoid the perception of “politicization.”

*snip*

[malaise]

1. Here's H2OMan's interview

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213009498

[MerryBlooms]

5. r&k ❤

[malaise]

12. Waterman asked some seriously great questions

😀

[Tanuki]

9. Thank you for linking this! Somehow I never saw it when it was first posted.

[malaise]

11. You're welcome

[H2O Man]

27. I posted links to

the second two in the series nelow, in case you didn't see them. I think that they came out pretty good.

[Tanuki]

28. Very impressive! Excellent interview...both of you! And thanks!

[H2O Man]

29. Thank you!

I think that the effort to silence Dr. Lee was terrible, and it really bugged me that major media blacklisted her. I am encouraged by Dr. Mary Trump, who is often covered these days. She has spoken openly about Donald as a sociopath. And she has mentioned her respect for Bandy, as well.

I have long called Trump as sociopath on this forum. I'm long retired, so I don't feel that stick they use against pthers, preventing them from openly using the word "sociopath." I've even had a few friends from this community say that I'm wrong to do that. (None say that about Mary Trump, though.) I know that I'm right, and to paraphrase Malcolm X, no one either puts words in my mouth, or takes them out.

[H2O Man]

14. Well thank you!

No one today has had more threats than Dr. Lee. She tells the truth. Trump & Rudy made a special target out of her, although the "mainstream" media didn't report on that. In fact, they stopped even having her on.

Thus, I did the three interviews with her in 2020. This was the first one, and we had some fun with those questions. In her position, there were things she couldn't come out and say. But I could. The second was about the type of cult members he was attracting, the third was Bandy and my prediction of the violence that would take place om January 6, 2021.

I'll see if I can find them, as I think all three might be of interest to others here today. The struggle isn't over, not by a long shot. But our side is winning, and in position where we can get this country on track again.

[malaise]

16. You both saw the danger

Post the other interviews bro

[H2O Man]

18. Here is #2 .....

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213364513

[malaise]

19. Thanks

Let me refresh myself

[H2O Man]

21. And #3 .....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trump-authoritarian/

[malaise]

25. Thanks

😀

[H2O Man]

30. Thank you!

This is a great OP/thread!

[malaise]

31. Agree

This needs more media coverage for she sure was vindicated

[dalton99a]

2. Kick

[Maraya1969]

3. Interesting fact about the last 122 years.

“Since 1900, every time a Republican president has taken over, economic inequality has increased and the country has become more violent.”

[Rebl2]

10. Unfortunately

under President Biden the violence has gotten worse I think, but I blame tfg for this. He keeps his cult followers riled up.

[Nevilledog]

15. Could I ask what your source for that is?

[Rebl2]

24. Just what

I read and see on news everyday about trumps cult like people threatening FBI, as well as democrats, his cult threatening civil war, nut case republicans, republican candidates who come off as crazy. Guy trying to shoot up FBI office last week. It’s NOT Biden’s fault. It is crazy trump and the republican members of congress that keep the members of his cult riled up.
I see school PTA and school boards being taken over by trump backers. While they are not always threatening violence-although some of those school board meetings have become rather raucous bordering on violent. I have seen it in my own metro area. Even our public library system, while not violent, is full of right wing people not allowing certain books in our libraries.

[Nevilledog]

26. They are certainly more violent.

[elleng]

4. I HOPE she has actually been vindicated by the 'professional' group she's joined.

*Shortly after the book came out, leaders of the American Psychiatric Association began publicly attacking Lee, arguing she was acting irresponsibly. Her alleged offense was violating the 1973 Goldwater Rule, an APA guideline stating that “it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion” of anyone without conducting a personal examination and getting proper approval.

The rule was the APA’s response to a 1966 lawsuit by Barry Goldwater, the late Arizona senator and presidential candidate. Goldwater had successfully sued Goldwater Fact magazine, which, shortly before the 1964 general election, ran a piece in which dozens of leading psychiatrists offered crude armchair assessments of the state of Goldwater’s psyche. “His impulsive, impetuous behavior…reflects an emotionally immature, unstable personality,” wrote one doctor, who went on to cite Goldwater’s “inability to dissociate himself from vituperative, sick extremists.” (While the archconservative’s fiery campaign speeches were startling to many Americans at the time, they now seem relatively tame compared with Trump’s.) . . .

“Anything a psychiatrist says without examining a patient is likely to be inaccurate, so it can harm the public figure,” says Paul Appelbaum, a Columbia University professor who has served as the APA’s president. Appelbaum is also concerned that diagnosing people from a distance casts the profession in a negative light: “These seemingly cavalier and politically motivated public statements can prevent people from getting the psychiatric care that they need.” . .

None of the arguments in support of Lee’s rationale carried much weight with John Krystal, Yale’s chair of psychiatry, who in May 2020 abruptly fired her from the teaching position she had held for 17 years. Krystal previously had tolerated her public pronouncements, so long as she made it clear she was speaking for herself and not the medical school.

What pushed him over the edge, apparently, was a January 2020 Twitter dustup between Lee and retired law professor and Trump confidant Alan Dershowitz. Lee asserted that Dershowitz had taken on “Trump’s symptoms by contagion,” whereupon he accused her of publicly diagnosing him, and then complained about Lee in an email to Yale administrators. Lee should be disciplined, he wrote, due to “a serious violation” of the APA’s ethics rules. He also asked Yale to keep him posted on its plan of action. Krystal referenced the tweets in Lee’s dismissal letter, which cites her “repeated violations” of the Goldwater Rule and an “inappropriate transfer of the duty to warn from the treatment setting to national politics.”

Lee insists she was addressing patterns of behavior, not offering any formal diagnosis, and she sued Yale six months later for allegedly violating her academic freedom. (The case is pending.) She wants her job back but insists her legal action is about something bigger. “When academics are pressured to give in to power, we have to stand up. We need to make sure that intellectual knowledge and facts are valued,” she says.

Lee’s dismissal, meanwhile, elicited outrage from prominent academics who complain that university administrators have gotten increasingly sensitive to controversies that might rub donors the wrong way. “There is now a lot less tolerance in academia for scholars like Lee who speak the truth bluntly,” says NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of 2020’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, which chronicles the turn of numerous countries—including the United States—toward authoritarianism.

While Lee remains persona non grata in medical school psychiatry departments, she has not abandoned her lifelong academic pursuits. She also earned a master’s degree from the Yale Divinity School during her first few years in New Haven and was recently made a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary, where she will work with Gilligan and sociologist Jim Vrettos to establish a violence prevention institute. She continues to consult on prison reform for state governments and social service agencies.

In June, as Lee watched the first round of public hearings of the January 6 committee—which have exposed Trump as “a clear and present danger to democracy,” to quote testimony by the retired federal judge and Republican icon J. Michael Luttig—she was comforted by a slew of emails thanking her for her lonely crusade to warn the nation about Trump. “I’ve alerted my congressman to read your work,” noted one writer.'>>>

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/08/donald-trump-violence-mental-health-dangerous-jan-6-fbi-mar-a-lago-civil-war-bandy-lee-psychiatry-goldwater-rule/

This HAS been, and continues to be serious, and Dr. Bandy Lee appears to continue to 'suffer' under 'professional' b.s. I hope I am wrong, and that she has in fact been vindicated.

[MerryBlooms]

6. Lee nailed them all. I'm wondering how tight Krystal

Relationship to Dershowitz is? Epstien close? Dershowitz is a walking talking crime scene. To defend that pos, someone might have close ties?

[FelineOverlord]

7. Dr. Lee tweet

Link to tweet

[FakeNoose]

8. Come on guys, Dr. Lee was vindicated long before this

Maybe the crazy ChumpHumpers couldn't admit it, but we all saw this slow-motion train wreck 6 years ago.

[panader0]

13. By coincidence, I got my new Mother Jones in the mail today, and just finished reading about her

when I saw your OP. My buddy gave me a subscription. It's a great, in depth magazine.

[H2O Man]

17. Recommended.

Thank you for this! I have the greatest respect for Dr. Lee!

[Nevilledog]

20. Thought of you when I posted it.

[H2O Man]

22. Thanks!

One of the things that upset me the most when that shithead was in office was the way he and Rudy targeted Dr. Lee. It went way, way beyond the mainstream media blackout of all things Bandy. I remember telling her about my great (X7) grandfather, the poet of the United Irishmen's 1709 uprising. Before that, he was a hedge master -- a number of his works are in the Royal Irish Academy -- and taught behind the hedges along the rural roads. Educating Irish-Catholics was "illegal" at the time.

I proposed holding some classes along the information highway, in some of the "rural" regions. I hope it is okay that malaise and I put the links on this thread.

[TheBeam19]

23. Lots of people have been warning about that for years.

Including Trump himself.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-warns-supporters-may-riot-fears-violence-escalate-n540516

March 16, 2016

Donald Trump warned on Wednesday that his supporters would respond with “riots” if he fails to secure the nomination at July’s convention in Cleveland.

“I think you’d have riots,” Trump told CNN on Wednesday. “I think you’d have riots. I’m representing a tremendous many, many millions of people.”