Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
As a totally unlicensed armchair psychologist, I have come to believe that TDS is a literal psychological affliction, perhaps one of the most pervasive in these United States.
Not figurative but literal.
Not a fun colloquialism for unhinged political beliefs but a diagnosable pathology.
Exhibit A: this lady, psychiatrist Bandy Lee, author of “The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Danger to American Democracy and All Humankind,” who got herself quasi-famous in liberal circles for waging a crusade of what might be called medicalfare against Donald Trump.
Her basic arguments, if you would rather skip the video and save yourself some excruciation, are as follows:
- Something called a “Trump contagion” has infested the mind of the rabble
- It’s her and her comrades’ job to cleanse the contagion and restore sanity
- “Society is my patient”
- Although medical ethics prevent her from diagnosing huge swathes of the population with ailments without ever having examined them, she justifies doing so by citing the Geneva Convention somehow, with vague references to Nazi doctors or something
- The COVID-19 pandemic was literally caused by Trump’s mental illness
- Trump needs to be removed from office via the 25th Amendment if he wins.
For her unethical efforts to diagnose Trump without ever actually examining him, Lee actually got censured by the organization governing her profession, the American Psychiatric Association.
Instead of owning up to her poor form, she chose to blame the “authoritarian” Trump regime for her “silencing” with no citations provided, with no evidence that he even knows who she is.
Via Mother Jones (emphasis added):
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 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.)
Related: You’ll Never Guess to Whom Hillary Clinton Compared Trump (Actually, You Will)
This lady, in my estimation, represents the kind of insidious, feminized evil embodied most perfectly by Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” who adeptly took all of the conventional brutality and face-stomping that historically characterized totalitarian regimes and turned it into a cooing adventure in “healthcare.”
Some men on the ward take a long, long time to get used to the schedule.
—Nurse Ratched
