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    'The greatest risk factor of disease and death is Donald Trump': Forensic psychiatrist

    Bandy X. Lee, DC Report @Raw Story
    March 30, 2020

    Thanks for your support!

    This article was paid for by reader donations to Raw Story Investigates.

    WILKES-BARRE, PA - AUGUST 2, 2018: President Trump on stage reacts as he listens to congressman Lou Barletta speak to the crowd at his campaign rally.

    This article was paid for by Raw Story subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

    Bandy X. Lee, DC Report @Raw Story

    The final death toll from coronavirus will not be the result of viral disease; it will be the result of mental disease.  The greatest risk factor of disease and death is not being considered, and that is Donald Trump.  If he continues in this presidency, he is on course for having three main effects: First, he will make a deadly pandemic much worse.  Second, he will stoke divisions between “believers” and “unbelievers” in his alternative reality.  And third, he will vastly augment suffering, which he will be tempted to direct into widespread violence.


    It is not difficult for scientists to see that the president has already multifold exacerbated the coronavirus pandemic.  The reasons are psychological: he is incapable of doing what is necessary, for that would require him to face reality, which means also his own emptiness and incapacity.  It is unsurprising that he dismantled the infrastructure of one of the top programs for global pandemic preparedness in the world “to save money,” only to pay for it with trillions of dollars, which will still bring back neither the economy nor the millions of lives lost.  However, again, reality will not matter.

    A leader who is truly convinced of his false beliefs will be far more effective at spreading those beliefs among his followers than any rational strategy.  Soon, a leader’s pathology becomes a nation’s pathology.

    Humanity did not avoid another Plague in the modern era because of the lack of a microbe; we avoided it because of the application of science, public health, and prevention practices.  Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was a near-pandemic that was stopped because a global network of professionals rapidly detected it—months before the World Health Organization (WHO) even announced the disease.  When H1N1, or swine flu, was detected in Mexico and then the United States in the same month, the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released medical supplies and drugs within a week, and accurate testing in less than two weeks, which it shared with other countries.

    A Different Story

    Coronavirus has been a very different story.  At any other time, the U.S. would have led efforts and coordinated global fights against epidemics, but the science-averse Trump administration had already axed the CDC expert in China.  Meanwhile, the authoritarian Chinese government reprimanded and silenced the physician who tried to raise alarms about the virus in December 2019; its denial and desire to present orderliness caused the disease to spread freely in the critical early stages.  After five weeks, however, it instituted a vigorous lockdown that broke the spread after two months.

    Our government, by comparison, ignored ominous, classified warnings about the global danger through January and February, declined testing that was already available through the WHO, and actively downplayed the threat by falsely stating, “we have it totally under control,” calling it the Democrats’ “new hoax,” and that “like a miracle, it will disappear.”  Despite causing the need for extreme measures, by allowing the disease to spread freely throughout the U.S. in the critical stages, Donald Trump first touted lifting federal recommendations of isolation by Easter to stimulate the economy.  In the absence of a cure or a vaccine, while still exponentially rising, the U.S. has now surpassed every country of the world at over 140,000 cases and over 2,600 deaths), this would have been a recipe for the disease to spiral out of control.  While he finally backed down under great pressure, it reveals what historians might come to call pure madness.

    'Criminal-Mindedness' and Pathology

    As a forensic psychiatrist, I make distinctions between the criminal-mindedness and mental pathology that might combine to produce this kind of “madness”.  These are separate concepts: most criminal minds are not mentally ill, and most mentally ill minds are not criminal.  Yet they are not mutually exclusive: when criminal-mindedness combines with mental pathology or, more, mobilizes it, atrocities such as genocide (or democide) become possible.  We see this when Donald Trump observes the “effectiveness” of his “gut”; he believes it to be good strategy on his part, when he is enabling the power of pathology that will eventually be destructive to all, including himself.

    The lack of conscience and detachment from reality make critical situations far worse.  This holds equally true for the economy as for the viral pandemic.  Unable to recognize the underlying cause of the economic downturn, he manages neither the public health crisis nor the devastation of people, and the markets respond accordingly.  Just as with his gutting of our pandemic response capabilities, he had squandered our economic response capabilities earlier by threatening the Federal Reserve to inflate an artificial economy for his reelection purposes.  Now, he has pressured it into depleting the rest of its ammunition when the war has barely begun.

    Transmitting Delusions

    Another effect of pathology is that delusions will be more infectious: a leader who is truly convinced of his false beliefs will be far more effective at spreading those beliefs among his followers than any rational strategy.  Soon, a leader’s pathology becomes a nation’s pathology.  Delusions, unlike mere misinformation, transmit through emotional bonds, which in turn make their recipients highly resistant to true information and dangerously defensive when facts catch up with them.  Because deaths, suffering, and ruined livelihoods are real, fury will build.

    As he creates more crises, these become opportunities for the criminal mind to further its hold on power.  Since the growing fury will never be directed at its true source, it becomes a weapon for the source to redirect against his enemies, critics, or whatever target he wishes.  We have already seen what he can do by calling the novel coronavirus “Chinese virus,” simultaneously deflecting blame and creating new targets for attack.  Meanwhile, vast suffering and deaths will solidify his followers in fearful dependence, defensive idealization, and obedience to cultic programming.  He is already using daily press conferences for hypnosis of himself as protector and giver of false reassurances, even as they recklessly harm and kill.

    People have seen how pathology runs deep and is not something a person can “pivot” from to manage a country.  The coronavirus situation is worse than a war, affecting almost every country on earth.  The death toll and hardship he multiplies could lead to actual international conflicts and, thanks to the nuclear arms race he renewed, potential nuclear war.  Those who believe they have seen “the bottom” are unaware that this is actually the tip of the iceberg.  Like all pandemics, the time for prevention is before we see the full effects; for his mental health pandemic, the time for it is now.

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    Do you approve of Biden's presidency so far?

    Trump's failed coup continues: CPAC set to be a celebration of the Capitol insurrection

    Amanda Marcotte, Salon
    February 25, 2021

    The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) kicks off on Thursday, seven weeks and one day after Donald Trump sent a murderous mob to rampage through the Capitol in a final, violence-soaked bid to overturn the presidential election. The annual confab — which has become the central event of the year for Republican politics — not only has no distance from the events of Jan. 6, it is basically shaping up to be a celebration of both the man and the movement that inspired a fascist insurrection.

    This article originally appeared at Salon.

    It's not just that Trump is going to be the headline speaker on Sunday, allowing the same man whose mob tried to kill members of Congress and his own vice president to soak in conservative adulation. It's also that the speaker's list is heavily populated by other major right-wing figures — including Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas — who spent the past few months stoking the Big Lie that led to the insurrection.

    Just as critically, the themes of the conference — that Joe Biden "stole" the election and that conservatives are somehow being "canceled" by shadowy liberal forces that secretly control everything — align with the same themes that drove the insurrection and Trump's defenses of his behavior.

    "The conference, organized and sponsored by the American Conservative Union, will even keep alive Trump's false claims of election fraud with several panels on the topic with names like 'Other Culprits: Why Judges & Media Refused to Look at the Evidence,' 'The Left Pulled the Strings, Covered It Up, and Even Admits It' and 'Failed States (PA, GA, NV, oh my!),'" NPR reports. "One panel will discuss whether tech companies are 'colluding to deprive us of our humanity.' One speech will explore what to do when a social media network 'de-platforms' a conservative by deleting his account," David Weigel of the Washington Post reports. Even the theme of the conference is "America Uncancelled."

    Unsurprisingly, these two major themes — fake "concerns" about election "fraud" and conservatives feeling entitled to platforms provided by private companies — dovetail with the twin obsessions of Trump, who believes that he is owed both the White House and a Twitter account to spread lies and encourage violence.

    Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union who hosts CPAC, has been playing rhetorical games with the press, coming just short of saying the election was stolen and the insurrection was justified by citing the "beliefs" of Republican voters to justify spreading the very lies that led to the violent insurrection.

    "Right now, half the country" is angry about "the media coverage of the election," Schlapp told Weigel, saying CPAC will "cover the facts that most people in the media canceled."

    By "facts," of course, he means the lies that Trump hyped and continues to hype which the media "canceled" on the grounds that they are not true. CPAC's lineup shows how central the whining about "cancel culture" is to justify the insurrection. It's difficult to defend lying to the public to stoke a violent insurrection on its own terms. So conservatives are using bank shot arguments to defend the violence and lies by saying any effort to counteract them — such as taking down Trump's Twitter account because he keeps inciting violence — is somehow an assault on "free speech."

    This is also the circular logic being embraced across the GOP, starting with Hawley's claim that he was justified in challenging Pennsylvania's election results because "many citizens in Missouri have deep concerns about election integrity." Trump and his allies tell lies about the election, Republican voters believe those lies, and Republican leaders use that belief as evidence that the lies need more hyping in order to "represent" views that were instilled by the first round of lies.

    But the widespread nature of the belief that Biden "stole" the election doesn't make it true, nor does it mean that the mainstream media is obligated to present it as "fact" to avoid accusations of "cancel culture." This is all a tapdance to rationalize what is really going on, which is that CPAC is being used to normalize, justify, and mainstream Trump's insurrection within the larger Republican Party.

    That the conservative movement and therefore the Republican party would eventually rally to Trump's side and embrace a defensive stance towards his insurrection was likely inevitable. Initially, a number of GOP congressional members were rattled by having a howling mob banging through the Capitol, demanding their heads. But the gravitational pull of excusing any and everything Trump does, no matter how illegal or evil, has too much power. The writing was also on the wall once Fox News started to lean heavily towards insurrectionist defense. As Media Matters has documented, Tucker Carlson in particular has been aggressive about defending the honor of the people who responded to Trump's incitement by violently shutting down the electoral college certification (though eventually Congress reconvened and finished). Carlson has also repeatedly conflated the insurrectionists with Trump voters in general, encouraging his viewers to believe that being a Republican means being on the side of those who tried to overthrow the government.

    The results of the propaganda campaign have been heartening for the anti-democratic right.

    While most Americans correctly believe that Trump incited the insurrection, the majority of Republican voters — 75% of them, according to a recent poll — continue to support him and want him to play a prominent role in the party going forward. "Republicans are backing Trump not in spite of the insurrection but because of it," David Graham of The Atlantic writes, noting that the reason they voted for him in the first place is because "they saw him as someone who would actually fight for their vision of American culture, doing whatever it took to win."

    "Trump's frantic attempt to overturn the election didn't work, but it was just the sort of furious effort his supporters wanted," he adds.

    CPAC will be awash in rhetorical games meant to put a palatable spin on this pro-insurrectionist sentiment. Fascists will be painted as victims of "cancel culture." Efforts to throw out millions of legal votes will be framed as "concerns" about "fraud." Trump will be given all the time he wants for a self-pitying stemwinder about how he's the real victim here — not the Americans he attempted to disenfranchise, nor the Capitol police who died or were injured as a result of his lies, nor the congressional staff traumatized by his mob. And the Republican Party will continue its march away from democracy and towards blatant authoritarianism.

    Ron DeSantis has no COVID plan -- 100,000 may die

    Jon Skolnik
    February 25, 2021

    At a news conference on Wednesday, Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis defended Florida's failure to publish an official vaccine distribution plan, making it the only state with such an oversight according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

    This article originally appeared at Salon.

    "If you notice, a lot of [states] adopted plans, and then they've already had to change the plans," DeSantis said. "We haven't done that."

    He echoed that defense on Thursday: "I would point out, people say, 'Oh, well these other states have all these plans of when they're going to do it.' A lot of those plans haven't worked out," the governor said. "I mean, they've had to change their criteria from the beginning. They had plans in December, had to shift, most of them have shifted to doing what Florida is doing and so we're gonna continue with seniors first."

    While Florida is one of only two states to have first prioritized all persons over the age of 65, regardless of health or occupational concerns, it has not yet announced when other demographic groups will become eligible for a vaccine. Although the state is currently approaching 2 million seniors vaccinated, its plan has left out healthcare workers and younger residents with underlying medical conditions that may be more vulnerable.

    DeSantis initially suggested that workers in education and law enforcement would be the next to receive a vaccine dose. "We'll start with probably 50 and up," he hinted on Tuesday. But during Wednesday's presser, DeSantis withheld any official plans for the vaccine rollout, emphasizing the need for an open-ended approach. The same day, data science firm Cogitativo released a report that found Florida's lack of a future distribution plan might leave the Sunshine State vulnerable to "complete chaos."

    Even using the CDC's Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), which measures the relative vulnerability between populations in order to assess which ones should be prioritized for vaccines, Cogitativo argues, Florida will suffer excess deaths as a result of COVID because the SVI "does not account for social determinants of health such as air quality or access to fresh food," as the report notes. the study notes.

    According to Cogitativo's projections, Florida's current distribution trajectory would leave 48% of Florida counties in a vaccine deficit, with the top five counties being Palm Beach, Broward, Orange, Hillsborough, Miami-Dade. Florida would have a "combined shortage" of 694,990 vaccine doses. Cogitativo's study found that if Florida implemented a plan with "clinical data provides a clear view of the prevalence of health conditions — such as obesity, diabetes and hypertension — that are major risk factors for negative outcomes with the virus" it could save nearly 100,000 lives and avoid 840,760 hospitalizations.

    Biden calls Saudi king ahead of report on the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi

    AFP
    February 25, 2021

    President Joe Biden held a long-delayed first phone call Thursday with Saudi King Salman ahead of an imminent US intelligence report expected to link the Arab kingdom's powerful crown prince to the killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

    Biden kept the king waiting in his long list of calls to US allies after being sworn in five weeks ago.

    And when he did finally reach out to the Saudis, it was pointedly to the king and not the expected successor Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, commonly known as MBS.

    The telephone diplomacy was all part of what the White House is calling a reset in relations in the wake of Khashoggi's horrific 2018 murder inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

    A US intelligence report on the incident, in which Khashoggi is believed to have been killed and then chopped into pieces, is being made public "soon," the White House says.

    It is expected to state that the crown prince in some capacity was connected to the killing, which involved a whole squad of Saudi agents positioned at the consulate before Khashoggi visited.

    Khashoggi, a Saudi national who wrote for The Washington Post and was a US resident, had been an outspoken critic of the young prince.

    The White House said that Biden and the 85-year-old king emphasized the countries' security ties and "the US commitment to help Saudi Arabia defend its territory as it faces attacks from Iranian-aligned groups."

    However, in a shift from the Donald Trump era, Biden also "affirmed the importance the United States places on universal human rights and the rule of law."

    The Saudi state news agency said in its readout that the king and Biden stressed "the depth of the relationship between the two countries" and discussed Iran's "destabilizing activities and its support for terrorist groups" in the region.

    Human rights emphasis

    Trump paid little attention to Saudi Arabia's human rights violations. His son-in-law and Middle East adviser Jared Kushner became texting friends with 35-year-old Prince Mohammed.

    Biden is likely to have his hands tied to some extent, because the reality is that MBS is lined up to take over Saudi Arabia and is already the de facto ruler. Typically, the United States does not impose sanctions on top-level foreign leaders.

    With its vast oil reserves and rivalry with Iran, Saudi Arabia is also a vital strategic ally. A reminder of shared US and Saudi interests in the region came Thursday when the US military struck at facilities they said were being used by Iran-backed forces in Syria.

    But the intelligence report's publication, which could come as early as Friday, is a sharp departure in tone, reinforcing the administration's policy of calling out Saudi Arabia on rights issues.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday had his own telephone call with Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan.

    They "discussed the importance of Saudi progress on human rights, including through legal and judicial reforms," State Department spokesman Ned Price said.

    Prince Mohammed has said he accepts Saudi Arabia's overall responsibility in Khashoggi's killing but denies a personal link.

    Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World, an advocacy group founded by Khashoggi, said that Biden needed to take more concrete action.

    "President Biden should now fulfill his promise to hold MBS accountable for this murder by, at minimum, imposing the same sanctions on him as those imposed on his underlying culprits and ending the weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia that would be controlled by an unelected, brutal murderer," she said.

    'Whitewash'

    In Saudi Arabia, five people were handed death sentences over the murder. But a Saudi court in September overturned them while giving jail terms of up to 20 years to eight unnamed defendants following secretive legal proceedings.

    Human rights advocates called the judicial process a whitewash aimed at blaming the hit men while not touching the mastermind.

    CNN, quoting documents filed in a Canadian civil lawsuit, reported that two private jets used by the squad that allegedly flew to Istanbul to kill Khashoggi were owned by a company earlier seized by Prince Mohammed.

    A respected veteran journalist and editor, Khashoggi was in self-exile and residing in the United States, writing articles critical of the crown prince when he was assassinated on October 2, 2018.

    The 59-year-old writer had been told by Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States to go to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul if he wanted to obtain documents for his forthcoming marriage.

    There he was killed, and his body dismembered by a team sent from Riyadh under the direction of Prince Mohammed's top security aide, Saud al-Qahtani.

     
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