Saddam Hussein once ordered the death of a cabinet minister who dared to offer unfavorable advice. The minister’s mutilated body was then stuffed into a canvas bag and sent home to his worried wife. Osama bin Laden orchestrated the September 11 terrorist attacks, resulting in the deaths of nearly 3,000 innocent Americans. Josef Stalin personally delivered orders for rampant torture and countless executions in the Soviet Union, all while overseeing the deaths of millions in the Gulag.
Donald John Trump occasionally uttered some profane statements in public and 280 characters at a time on Twitter.
Clearly, these men represent the embodiment of pure evil, a collective of sadists who frequently demonstrated unrestrained violent aggression generally committed in the absence of any observable conscience. And all of these leaders, with their armies of cultish and deplorable minions excitedly fueling every ounce of their apparent omnipotence, have been diagnosed with the same personality disorder by a recently deceased psychiatrist who had been long-adored by, and affiliated with, the United States intelligence community, Dr. Jerrold Post.
[Read part one: “The Narrative, the Coup, and the Bourgeoisie.”]
According to Post, founding director of the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, Hussein, Bin Laden, Stalin, and Trump all meet the criteria for the mental health diagnosis of “malignant narcissism.” Nevermind that malignant narcissism is not an official diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a manual created only through the help of hundreds of researchers working together to develop evidence-based criteria to diagnose mental disorders, typically requiring an average of a decade between the publication of new editions.
Fortunately, Post and dozens of other supposed mental health professionals were willing to sacrifice the ethical standards of their professions to bravely speak out in a career field dominated by liberal elitists who are constantly reminding us how brave they are for speaking out. The Left’s battle to delegitimize and destroy Trump and his supporters, beginning in 2016 and quite obviously continuing for the foreseeable future, primarily owes its successes to the confluence of Marxist ideology and information operations, both weaponized masterfully by a select group of MAGA-despising detractors and aided by a fervent army of useful idiots.
Information Warfare
The information warfare employed against Trump by a conglomerate of Hillary Clinton acolytes and intelligence community renegades involved the production and dissemination of messaging, counter-messaging, and propaganda pertaining to three key narratives that would be endlessly pushed into the mainstream media: 1) Russian collusion 2) Donald Trump is an unstable malignant narcissist who was not psychologically fit to serve in the Oval Office and 3) America is under attack by a massive contingent of white supremacist radicals and Trump is directly responsible for this and a surge of hate crimes.
The first on this list, the myth that Donald Trump had colluded with Russian intelligence services to win in 2016, along with the notion that he was either a Russian intelligence asset or was controlled by the Russian intelligence apparatus via blackmail, has been so thoroughly debunked that a summary is hardly necessary. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, of course, found no evidence that President Trump had colluded with Russia, in spite of the enormous amount of resources utilized over the multi-year course of the investigation. Former Attorney General William Barr, in a letter he sent to the House and Senate Judiciary Committee following his review of the Mueller Report in March 2019, documented the extensive resources involved in the investigation:
In the report, the special counsel noted that, in completing his investigation, he employed 19 lawyers who were assisted by a team of approximately 40 FBI agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants, and other professional staff. The special counsel issued more than 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, obtained more than 230 orders for communication records, issued almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers, made 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence, and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses.
Not only did the Mueller report fail to validate the liberal media’s pervasive narrative of Trump as Moscow’s electoral Manchurian Candidate, personally indebted to Putin and guilty of having colluded with an online Eastern European troll factory of disinformation operatives eager to steal the election, but subsequent releases from the intelligence community would reveal intelligence suggesting that Hillary Clinton had personally approved of a plan to use actual disinformation to foment a scandal involving the creation of a narrative linking Donald Trump to Russian security services. Worse yet, the intelligence community was aware of the Clinton campaign’s alleged role in this operation as far back as July 2016, but obvious political biases within these agencies meant the real scandal was ignored while the artificial scandal would plague President Trump for years. A September 2020 letter provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee by then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI), John Ratcliffe, notes:
In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.
According to his handwritten notes, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including the “alleged approval” by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.
On 07 September 2016, U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok regarding ‘U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private mail server.’
While the Russian collusion narrative dominated headlines and provided talking points for every CNN and MSNBC contributor, another narrative was taking shape in 2016 regarding Trump’s mental health. Hillary Clinton’s claims about Trump being too mentally unstable for the White House began before she had even defeated Bernie Sanders in the primaries. On June 2, 2016, delivering a campaign speech in San Diego, Clinton offered her assessment of Trump’s temperament, stating, “He is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility.” She added, “He should not have the nuclear codes because it’s very easy to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because someone got under his very thin skin. We cannot let him roll the dice with America.”
Obviously, statements like these were a familiar refrain heard throughout the 2016 campaign season, as Donald Trump’s unrefined brashness and showman’s ego naturally meant his candidacy would forever be defined as alarmingly narcissistic to some and incredibly refreshing to others. But if one were ever tasked with identifying all the narcissists in Washington, D.C., they would most certainly expire of old age tallying up all of Foggy Bottom and Capitol Hill before ever setting foot elsewhere in the city.
For all of its mundane predictability, however, one minor comment uttered by Hillary during that San Diego speech would end up proving particularly noteworthy. In remarking on previous statements Trump had made regarding Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, she stated, “I will leave it to the psychiatrists to explain his affection for tyrants . . . If Donald gets his way they’ll be celebrating in the Kremlin. We cannot let that happen.” Indeed, Hillary did leave it to the psychiatrists. And they were more than happy to comply.
Psychological and Diagnostic Warfare
Long-retired from the CIA but never far removed, Jerrold Post was the self-proclaimed “founding father of political personality profiling.” Of the list of numerous psychologists and psychiatrists who sought temporarily to take a break from their usual conferences spent espousing the academic claptrap of white guilt and unconscious biases to instead organize the resistance of mental health professionals against the dangerous and unstable Donald Trump, all while choosing to disregard professional ethics entirely, Post’s name topped that list and rather significantly.
In late summer 2016, sometime just before the first presidential debate between Clinton and Trump, and sometime shortly after the FBI had first learned that Clinton was potentially working to launch a disinformation campaign involving Trump and the Russians, Post proudly informed a colleague in private during a meeting in Washington, D.C. that he had been “offering his services” to the Clinton campaign in the leadup to the first debate. The conversation did not continue beyond this, and the matter was never discussed again. The implication, however, had been that Post was eager to apply his expertise in personality profiling, a craft honed over decades of developing psychological profiles of world leaders for the intelligence community, to efforts aimed at preventing Donald Trump from ever setting foot in the White House. When these efforts failed, Post only became more emboldened, desperate to publicly profile and diagnose the man he claimed was unfit and undeserving of the office.
In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) established the “Goldwater Rule,” a principle prohibiting members from offering psychiatric opinions and making diagnoses on anyone the psychiatrist has not personally evaluated. The rule is named after Senator Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee.
During the election season that year, Fact magazine, founded by an editor suspected of Communist ties at the time, published results of a survey in which they had asked thousands of APA members, all psychiatrists, a single question, “Do you believe Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as president of the United States?”
Many of the psychiatrists responded by not only declaring him unfit but also likening him to the Left’s favorite go-to dictator. Included amongst the replies from psychiatrists published in the magazine were quotes such as, “I find myself increasingly thinking of the early 1930s and the rise of another intemperate, impulsive, counterfeit figure of a masculine mane, namely, Adolf Hitler.” Another psychiatrist remarked, “I believe Goldwater has the same pathological make-up as Hitler, Castro, Stalin and other known schizophrenic leaders.” So self-assured were these supposed mental health professionals in their assessments of a man they had never met, one even commented, “He is a mass-murderer at heart and . . . a dangerous lunatic. . . . Any psychiatrist who does not agree with the above is himself psychologically unfit to be a psychiatrist.”
This special issue of Fact magazine was released just before the election. Barry Goldwater would go on to lose the race to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide. While Goldwater did eventually sue the publication successfully for libel, the errant flippancy of Fact magazine’s psychiatric commentators would cause nearly irreparable damage to the mental health field and greatly exacerbate the reputation of psychiatry and psychology as services catering primarily to liberal elites. Thus, the “Goldwater Rule” was formed, and the APA reaffirmed this decision in 2017 after a new batch of psychiatrists opted to disregard ethical standards and once again diagnose a Republican as a fascist.
On April 20, 2017, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a Yale medical school psychiatrist, organized the “Duty to Warn Conference” at the university. The aim of the conference was to begin coalescing psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals into one national coalition of anti-Trump psychiatric doomsayers. The following month, at the American Psychiatric Association’s Annual Meeting in San Diego, California, another group of psychiatrists formed a symposium to discuss and debate the merits of the Goldwater Rule in the age of Trump. Jerrold Post was one of the speakers, arguing in front of a packed audience that the Goldwater Rule was far too restrictive and needed to be revised.
Also in attendance and arguing against the rule was Nassir Ghaemi, a professor of psychiatry at Tufts Medical Center in Boston and a lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Ghaemi not only disagreed with the notion that publicly diagnosing politicians is unethical, he argued in an essay a year later that the Goldwater Rule could be dispensed with entirely by forcing all political candidates to submit to psychiatric exams. Ghaemi wrote:
A solution could begin as follows: All political leaders would be required to give full financial and medical disclosure during their campaigns. They should reveal their taxes in full and submit to an independent medical board, including psychiatrists, which will review their medical records, examine the candidate, and release a full medical and psychiatric report to the voters.
By the end of 2017, Bandy Lee’s coalition of mental health experts, eager to continue denying the will of the more than 60 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2016, had metastasized into an international movement against President Trump, calling itself the World Mental Health Coalition (WMHC), with Bandy Lee serving as the organization’s president. Billed as a movement with international membership, Lee calls the WMHC “the largest organization of mental health professionals to speak up about the dangerous mental impairments of Donald Trump,” and a group that is the “only professional organization to address the issue of dangerous leadership, intending to step in where we believed the American Psychiatric Association failed in leadership.”
Lee has pinned a December 29, 2020 tweet soliciting donations for the WMHC on her Twitter account. She was sure to include the organization’s agenda for the post-Trump era as well:
Please consider a year-end donation to the World Mental Health Coalition! We are fully tax-deductible. After this presidency, we will establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to study what went wrong, keep out dangerous leaders, and heal society.https://t.co/8xfXSvmbKQ
— Bandy X Lee, MD, MDiv (@BandyXLee1) December 29, 2020
Donald Trump’s first year in office proved to be a rather busy time for the ethics-be-damned Lee and her loyal cohort. Following that initial Yale conference, Lee noted that members of Congress reached out directly to her coalition, leading Lee and other members of the group eventually to meet with “over fifty lawmakers on Capitol Hill.” In Lee’s own words, the members of Congress encouraged the group of psychiatry and psychology experts to continue their public attacks on the alleged state of Trump’s mental health and even acknowledged that the group’s willingness to speak out would help the members of Congress politically. Regarding their interactions with Congress, Lee wrote:
They encouraged us to educate the public medically so that they could act politically. We were initially very successful, raising the issue of the president’s mental health to become the number one topic of national conversation. Many of us were interviewing with the media many hours a day, every day, and the public was listening.
Lee reportedly would brief members of Congress on Trump’s mental health on multiple occasions, never shying away in the process from reminding the world how significant her role was in the spreading of Trump alarmism. The goal of these meetings, in addition to seeking validation for their own apparent sense of grandiosity, was to desperately make the case for removing President Trump under the 25th Amendment, or urging for impeachment at the very least.
So entrenched with Congress was her cohort of useful idiot psychiatrists that, in the midst of the Capitol raid on January 6, 2021, one congresswoman reportedly found the time to text a member of Bandy Lee’s coalition a message simply stating, “You were right.”
Diagnosing Voters, Too
In spite of the multitude of unmitigated psychobabble contained in so many articles featuring, or written directly by, members of Lee’s brigade of Trump-bashing psychoanalytic warriors, their publishing output remained prolific throughout Trump’s tenure. Their works often appeared in the same networks of far-Left online websites, parroting the same talking points about Trump’s mental health and invoking the 25th Amendment, with their obvious disdain for Trump supporters typically being anything but subtle. A small sample of these headlines can be quite revelatory, see for example: “The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists” in Scientific American, “Psychologist explains ‘Trump anxiety disorder’ and why he continues to brainwash his supporters” at RawStory, “Experts: ‘Rageful’ Trump’s ‘inability to distinguish fact from fiction’ make him ‘unsuitable to be in command of the nuclear arsenal,’” in AlterNet, “How Donald Trump uses his pathological impulses to manipulate his rivals, according to psychology” in Salon, “A triumph of collective narcissism”: How Trump unleashed forbidden desires” also in Salon, and “Renowned Psychologist: Like Hitler, Trump suffers from Sadism, Malignant Narcissism & Paranoia” in Hill Reporter.
As the purported leader of this movement, Lee’s media appearances reveal her to be amongst the most radical in the group, unabashedly calling for Trump supporters to be deprogrammed while simultaneously disguising her agenda as a form of empathy for the brainwashed patriotic masses.
In a 2019 interview with far-Left outlet Raw Story, Lee described her vision for weaning these foolish conservatives from their dependency on the sadistic Trump. “The transition will be gradual and painful, but the moment they realize they hold the power and do not have to submit to a strong authority to be safe, they won’t be so easily fooled anymore,” she said. If only the MAGA crowd possessed the intellectual prowess to recognize how deeply this patronizing Yale psychiatrist cared for their own well-being, then surely they would raise less protest in the future as they are ushered onto the busses destined for the reeducation camps.
While these psychiatrists and psychologists seemingly operated beyond the ethics of their chosen professions, Bandy Lee also operated with total impunity from cancel culture as well. In a November 2, 2020 tweet, Lee actually praised Adolf Hitler, writing:
Donald Trump is not an Adolf Hitler. At least Hitler improved the daily life of his followers, had discipline, and required more of himself to gain the respect of his followers. Even with the same pathology, there are varying degrees of competence.
Apparently praising Hitler is acceptable to the Left when it is done in the service of condemning Trump. While Gina Carano is canceled for warning about government-sanctioned cancellations resembling the early stages of Nazism, Bandy Lee can speak positively of Hitler comfortably from her throne at Yale. While she deleted this tweet shortly after posting it, she was quick to spin her own social media gaffe into a message of self-adulation for her professional experience saving the world from white supremacy, adding in a follow-up tweet that read:
It is at least heartening to know there is uniform denouncing of Hitler. Since I specialize in treating violent offenders, I know Neo-Nazis and white supremacists never went away (they have been my patient base for 20 years!). Similar personalities usually attract one another.
— Bandy X Lee, MD, MDiv (@BandyXLee1) November 2, 2020
Lee’s tendency to silence criticism when challenged on her ethics by amplifying her reported professional qualifications also emerged in a 2018 interview when she was asked how she responds to other mental health professionals who might disagree with her public assessments of Trump. In a response that shares a remarkable resemblance to the self-assured armchair psychiatrists who eagerly offered their assessments of Barry Goldwater, Lee replied:
This is a disagreement over ethical rules, not medical assessment. It would be hard to find a single psychiatrist, no matter of what political affiliation, who could confidently say Trump is not dangerous. I am sure there are some who feel unsure, or feel that they don’t have enough information or the expertise, and that is fine, since not everyone has devoted her 20-year career to studying, predicting, and preventing violence like I have. But there has not been a single serious mental health expert who disagrees on the medical side.
The most egregious examples of the Lee coalition’s narrative warfare against President Trump and his supporters can be found in the 2019 New York Times bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, which features a series of chimerical essays offering psychological assessments of the 45th president and his voters, all submitted by 37 supposed mental health experts and edited by Lee. (An earlier edition of the book was published in 2017 which featured 27 experts.) Notable anecdotes from the book include psychologist Jennifer Contarino Panning inventing a new diagnosis for her chapter: “Trump Anxiety Disorder.” Like malignant narcissism, Trump Anxiety Disorder is also not an official psychiatric diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Contarino Panning describes struggling to help her own clients in the aftermath of the elections because she was struggling so much herself. Fortunately for her, she could process her feelings without having to worry about running into one of those evil Trump supporters.
“Working in a very progressive area without one Trump supporter as a client enabled me to be honest with my clients that I was experiencing similar feelings, and that many of these feelings were universal to progressives post-election,” Cantarino Panning writes. God help the Trump supporter who dares to seek help from Jennifer Contarino Panning.
Trauma therapist Betty Teng compares the 2016 election results to the same feelings many Americans experienced after 9/11, including herself, at one point suggesting, “PTSD-like symptoms of insomnia, lack of focus, hypervigilance, irritability, and volatility now afflict not only combat veterans, first responders, and survivors of rape, violent crime, natural disaster, torture, and abuse, but many of the rest of us as well.”
One wonders if perhaps fewer psychologists and psychiatrists had let loose their own righteous indignation and chosen instead to refrain from publicly declaring Trump the reincarnation of Hitler, maybe these reported post-election PTSD symptoms might possibly have been more in line with the normal limits.
Who Are These Government-Sanctioned “Experts”?
For all of her many faults, Bandy Lee does deserve credit for organizing such an interesting group of former CIA employees, including Jerrold Post, along with professors, private practitioners, and proud Marxists. Perhaps this is the sort of model of close collaboration the Biden Administration aims for in its disingenuous calls for “unity.”
Lee co-wrote the prologue to the second edition of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump with psychologist Stephen Soldz. Soldz is a psychoanalyst and professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. On May 24, 2012, and again on April 30, 2013, he was interviewed by Mary Marshall Clark for Columbia University’s Rule of Law Oral History Project. Throughout the interviews, Soldz offered candid details about his life as a “radical,” noting he was a radical ever since childhood. He gleefully discussed his experience getting into some trouble in school for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
As an adolescent, Soldz opposed the Vietnam War, explaining he “just couldn’t understand how the Soviet invasion of Hungary was bad and why the U.S. invasion of Vietnam was acceptable.” He began attending college in 1968 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his primary goal had been to “find a radical group to join.” While he was successful in this endeavor, he failed classes in this first year and eventually dropped out. One of these failed classes was an introductory psychology course, and he always found it “flabbergasting” that he was never asked about failing this fundamental course when he applied to graduate school. When he wasn’t busy failing classes, he published a Marxist magazine with his fellow radicals, noting he was “still kind of proud of it.”
Although Soldz eventually pursued a degree in counseling psychology, he also described having been “faculty in libertarian socialism and the workers’ movement” at the age of 19 for an “alternative school” called the “Cambridge-Goddard Graduate School for Social Change,” where he “gave a master’s degree.” He reports eventually earning an undergraduate degree in “social theory,” adding, “You could just make up a title because it was a University Without Walls program,” where all his courses were completed through independent study.
Much later, Soldz would become involved in WikiLeaks, developing a personal relationship with founder Julian Assange, who had initiated contact with Soldz by emailing him a trove of documents pertaining to the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Soldz has long been an activist against the Guantanamo Bay detention center, as well as the role of psychologists in developing the CIA’s harsh interrogation program. As their relationship developed, Assange eventually asked Soldz to be an editor on the WikiLeaks journal Assange had been planning. Soldz opted for a spot on the editorial board instead. During the course of the interview, Soldz described this experience as him having “some peripheral involvement in WikiLeaks in the early days.” Apparently, this was back when it was still fashionable for leftists to believe Julian Assange is on the right side of history.
As a noted activist and Marxist, some of Soldz’s many publications have reflected a genuine disdain for American soldiers and conservatives. In a 2005 article, “The Sex Lives and Sexual Frustrations of U.S. troops in Iraq,” he spends an entire op-ed bizarrely opining on the sex lives of military members serving in Iraq, wondering why such an important topic has received so little coverage in the media. “Having read perhaps 30,000-50,000 articles on Iraq, I’ve seen at most a couple dozen mentions of anything related to sex, other than the systematic sexual abuse and sometime rape of detainees at Abu Graib and the other U.S. prisons,” he wrote. Soldz went on to speculate that U.S. troops must surely be relying on prostitutes to relieve their sexual frustrations, writing, “Given the large numbers of U.S. troops in Iraq for year-long tours, one would assume that prostitution is fairly common, as has been the case in other U.S. occupations such as those in Japan, Germany, South Korea, or Vietnam, yet data is lacking.” This assumption leads to Soldz expressing concern for these same imaginary prostitutes.
Finally, Soldz concludes by referring to the “situational homosexuality” that he asserts, without evidence, must exist among troops in Iraq, referencing a story in which an American soldier reportedly killed a 17-year-old Iraqi soldier after they had consensual sex. Soldz adds, “Given that U.S. troops come disproportionately from conservative rural America, where the campaign against homosexuality has been a mainstay of churches for a long time, the shame that apparently led to the tragedy, in this case, may also occur in other instances.”
In a separate article Soldz wrote in 2006 for left-wing website ZNet, he opted once again for insult over substance. Discussing the emotional stability of American military members redeploying to Iraq, Soldz wonders:
Does (s)he cower in terror, perhaps shooting at stimuli little more dangerous than his or her shadow, even if those stimuli happen to be Iraqi civilians? Or does (s)he perhaps cultivate an even greater love for combat, shooting at Iraqis as an expression of a game necessary to transform the pervasive fear? Undoubtedly each of these paths is chosen by some.
Lest the political and ideological leanings of Dr. Stephen Soldz remain unclear, we should also consider his position as a member of the Psychologists for Social Responsibility’s (PsySR) advisory board. Included among the many social justice causes that receive support from PsySR are their endorsement of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and their declarations of solidarity for the current government of Venezuela in its “resistance to the relentless imperialist attacks from the United States, the European Union, and other interventionist governments.”
Finally, Soldz has also been a frequent contributor for far-Left online news organization Truthout, a news outlet featuring William “Bill” Ayers on its board of advisers. Ayers was the co-founder and former leader of the Weather Underground, an actual domestic terrorist organization responsible for a series of bombings throughout the 1970s, including the 1971 bombing of the U.S. Capitol building.
While Stephen Soldz could easily be considered the prototype for every Marxist liberal arts professor on American college campuses today, he is also a prominent figure in anti-government activist movements across the nation, as well as one of the most significant members of Bandy Lee’s coalition. This coalition is the same group that represents themselves as the absolute authority on Trump’s mental health. It is the group that maintained enormous influence in convincing members of Congress to consider invoking the 25th Amendment, to impeach, and to do everything possible to remove the duly elected 45th president. It is, moreover, the same group that believes all future presidential candidates should have to submit to a psychiatric review performed by them, with the results then being released publicly.
In short, this is a group so intimately intertwined with the anti-MAGA political class on Capitol Hill that one congresswoman even felt compelled to text a member of this coalition while the so-called “armed insurrection” against the Capitol was ongoing, just to tell them how right that person had been about the psychological assessments of Donald Trump. And yet, even with their mutual hatred of Trump, Stephen Soldz, Bandy Lee, and so many other members of the group all made for rather strange bedfellows with Dr. Jerrold Post.
Who Was Jerrold Post?
Jerrold Post died on November 22, just weeks after the last election. He was 86. Post had been attending weekly dialysis for years due to kidney failure, and he suffered a severe stroke in July. Nevertheless, his cause of death is listed as COVID-19, as he had tested positive one week before dying.
In the days following his death, Bandy Lee wrote a tribute to him on the far-Left website AlterNet. The many revelations contained within Lee’s tribute are profound in their significance. In no uncertain terms, Bandy Lee reveals Jerrold Post to be the one person most directly responsible for so many of her coalition’s actions taken against Trump. She describes Post as a friend and someone she got to know “closely but intensely” in recent years, and then she proceeds to helpfully walk readers through the various roles Post played in facilitating the information operations assault launched by the psychiatric revolutionaries. Lee writes:
We learned from the 2020 election that no factor was trivial in removing the dangers, and Dr. Post’s contribution was considerable.
He called me out of the blue in 2017, after I had held a conference at Yale School of Medicine on whether or not we should speak up about Donald Trump. He, too, was very disturbed about the president’s dangerous psychology . . .
. . . Dr. Post and I became friends, he contributed to the second edition of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, and he titled his own book, Dangerous Charisma, to match it. He helped me to organize a major multidisciplinary conference at the National Press Club in 2019, bringing together thirteen leading experts from the fields of psychiatry, law, history, political science, economics, social psychology, journalism, nuclear science, and climate science, who spoke of how the president was unfit from each of their perspectives.
As a member of the former Carter commission on presidential capacity for the 25th Amendment, he gave advice on how to form an independent, peer-reviewed panel to perform fitness tests, which we used to conduct one on Donald Trump, only to discover that he failed every criterion of capacity. Dr. Post helped lead a petition to Congress just three weeks before the Qassim Soleimani assassination, predicting such dangers. He emphasized the need to focus not just on the psychology of the leader but on that of the followers…Ultimately, he is my inspiration for writingProfile [sic] of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul.
In brief, Dr. Post was a hero . . . He has inspired countless psychiatrists like myself and has set the standards for what a responsible professional is to do in a time of crisis. We will never forget his humility and generosity in helping to bring attention to the dangerous psychology of a leader .
Even setting aside Post’s casual remark in 2016 that he had been communicating with the Hillary Clinton campaign, we must ask ourselves what was a psychiatrist who had honed his skills developing profiles of world leaders for the intelligence community over the course of a 21-year career in the CIA doing leading a group of licensed psychiatrists and psychologists working to actively undermine and subvert the president of the United States?
Post and co-author Stephanie Doucette published Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers in 2019. The book was meant to make Post’s strongest case yet for why President Trump was a dangerous malignant narcissist unfit to lead the nation, while also casting Trump supporters in an equally dangerous light. The material upon which Post and Doucette rely to make their case, however, is poorly researched and dependent on dubious source materials.
Hillary Clinton appears throughout Dangerous Charisma as an innocent victim of Trump’s violent vitriol. When Trump supporters would chant “Lock her up!” at campaign rallies, this was reminiscent of Hitler’s relationship with his followers, the authors say. When Trump would launch verbal attacks against CNN, MSNBC, and the Washington Post, this was clear evidence that he lacked any constraint of conscience, thus lending to a malignant narcissism diagnosis. Further evidence can be found in Trump’s history of demonstrating unconstrained aggression, akin to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s assassination of his own uncle. Examples for Trump included that time he once made fun of Rosie O’Donnell. Trump must be a narcissist because his favorite film is “Citizen Kane,” and because Washington Post fact-checkers have concluded he tells endless lies.
These examples are comical at times, coming from the man claiming to be the “founding father of political personality profiling.” But this assertion is also what makes Post and Doucette’s book so dangerous and effective at propagating the three primary information operations narratives launched against Donald Trump by Hillary Clinton and the Left, with malignant narcissism being the lens through which Russian collusion and Trump’s responsibility for white supremacy are interpreted. Because Post had such a lengthy history of diagnosing legitimately evil dictators as dangerous malignant narcissists, when he publicly diagnosed Trump with the same, his audience was already primed to ignore all evidence to the contrary.
References to the Russian investigation and the Mueller report appear often throughout Dangerous Charisma, typically presented as indisputable and more smoking guns in Post and Doucette’s crackpot case against their evil orange dictator. When Trump would suggest the media was fabricating details regarding the Russian investigation, this was clear evidence of a “paranoid orientation.” Similarly, when Trump attempted to deflect attention from the Russia investigation by discussing Venezuela, this was an indication of underlying insecurities and meant he probably had something to hide. The Steele dossier, named after the man who had been hired by a Democratic opposition research firm, which had itself been hired by the Clinton campaign to launch Hillary’s disinformation war on Trump, receives mention as well, with Post and Doucette casually remarking about speculation that Trump was being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin due to those famous—and ultimately discredited—“golden showers” images in supposedly in Russia’s possession.
This trend of using one false narrative (Russian collusion) as evidence to justify another false narrative (psychologically unfit), is rather fitting at a moment in time when crackdowns on civil liberties will be justified for the sake of preventing “domestic terrorism.” Returning once again to describing Trump’s alleged paranoia, the authors write:
The belief that attempted coups have been made on his administrations [sic] ties into the paranoid idea of the “deep state” working against him, which has included accusations of the Justice Department being a part of the “deep state.” Much of this paranoia has strongly resonated with his followers as well.
Apparently anyone who dared to suspect that various elements within the intelligence community had vested interests in removing Trump from office was merely falling victim to their own paranoid orientations and narcissism, which makes absolute sense, because it’s not like there was some deeply influential psychiatrist affiliated with the CIA actively working to convince members of Congress to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove the duly elected president of the United States. That would simply be paranoia interfering with logic.
Finally, Post and Doucette attempt to make the case that Trump is a racist and anti-Semite responsible for a surge in hate crimes and white supremacy in our nation, which they then attribute, again, to his alleged malignant narcissism. Included amongst the examples they offer to suggest he is an anti-Semite is Trump’s use of the term “globalist.” The authors write, “One example of a hateful trope Trump has continued to use is the anti-Semitic term ‘globalist,’ including in a speech at the United Nations where he said he rejected “the ideology of globalism” in favor of the “ideology of patriotism.” Criticism of George Soros is said to be based on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as well. Of course, suggesting Soros is evil because he is Jewish is a moronic and anti-Semitic statement that deserves condemnation. But suggesting Soros is evil because he is directly responsible for funding some of the most radical activist organizations spreading Marxism and undermining American democracy? Well, there is far too much nuance in those distinctions for the Left to fully comprehend, therefore you must simply be an anti-Semite for questioning the intentions of George Soros.
Inspirer of Hate Crimes
In order to frame Trump as a racist responsible for a surge of hate crimes, which is our third and final key narrative weaponized by the Left in their information operations strategy employed against President Trump, the data from hate crime statistics in America must be selectively interpreted, or rather, woefully misinterpreted.
Typically the first step taken by the Left to link Trump to hate crimes is to examine the FBI hate crime statistics. FBI data on hate crimes is notoriously unreliable however, in part due to lack of uniformity across the nation with who reports them and confusion over vague operational definitions and categories used to classify them. This is one major concern regarding the data that both sides of the political aisle seem to share. While Post and Doucette do acknowledge these issues with the FBI’s data, they still attempt to link an increase in hate crimes reflected in the data in 2017 to Trump’s first year in office, even though this is a glaringly obvious example of correlation not equaling causation.
In the 2017 data, for example, approximately 1,000 more law enforcement agencies participated in the reporting of their hate crime data to the FBI than in previous years. Author Andy Ngo, in his recent book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, provides an excellent overview of the FBI data. Ngo writes:
From 1997 to 2006, the FBI tracked an average of 7,900 hate incidents a year, of which 46 percent were intimidation-related and 31.9 percent were simple assaults. Thousands of reported hate incidents a year may sound like a lot, but the United States has a steadily growing population of more than 320 million people. Calculated as an incident rate, it is less than 2.5 incidents per 100,000 people. Additionally, looking closer at the data reveals nuance. Whites are underrepresented as offenders at less than 60 percent. They make up more than 76 percent of the U.S. population. Blacks are overrepresented as more than 20 percent of offenders, compared to being around 13 percent of the overall population. Further, the number of FBI-tracked hate incidents have declined since 2006, even though more agencies are reporting data.
With Post and Doucette unable to rely solely on the FBI hate crime statistics to provide evidence of Trump’s role in white supremacy and hate crimes, they then turned to hate crime statistics reported by organizations involved with specific minority groups. This included organizations such as the Sikh Coalition, South Asian Americans Leading Together, Human Rights Campaign, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and of course, the Southern Poverty Law Center. What the authors do not mention in their review of this data is that these organizations all receive, or have received, significant funding via grants from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. This does not mean, of course, that the data is inherently flawed or that reported hate crimes never occurred. But there is something remarkably interesting about the fact that the authors suggest criticizing Soros makes one an anti-Semite, but then cite data paid for by Soros, which we are not supposed to question.
Political Bias Is Baked in the Bureaucratic Cake
To fully appreciate the extent to which political bias is intricately woven into this narrative that Donald Trump is responsible for hate crimes and white supremacy, we should consider the example of George Selim, the former director of the Office for Community Partnerships at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This was the role Selim was serving in when Trump was elected, but this particular office within DHS had only been established in 2015, and thus Selim was still quite new to the position. Previously, he had served on the Obama Administration’s National Security Council staff. Selim’s new office at DHS was mandated largely to oversee and implement countering violent extremism (CVE) efforts, primarily focusing on efforts to combat radical online propaganda produced by Islamic terrorist organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaeda.
While Selim did acknowledge that a range of extremism threats exist in our nation, he provided written testimony on September 22, 2016 to the House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency, in a hearing titled “Identifying the Enemy: Radical Islamist Terror,” in which he identified individuals inspired by ISIS and al-Qaeda as representing the most immediate threat to our nation.
The Office for Community Partnerships fought this immediate threat posed by al Qaeda and ISIS largely by overseeing $10 million in state and local grants appropriated by Congress in 2015. These were grants Selim’s office issued to community organizations across the nation in order to empower local communities to combat the spread of radical propaganda and form partnerships with DHS in the process. Unfortunately for Americans genuinely concerned about ISIS-inspired terrorism, Selim’s office bungled their handling of these grants by awarding funds to organizations that appeared to have very little to offer in the battle against online propaganda from ISIS.
Selim already had been facing increased scrutiny from the Trump Administration for cozying up to Islamic organizations that had little interest in actually cooperating with counterterrorism initiatives in the United States. And then on July 27, 2017, he was excoriated during a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on national security, when he found himself facing questioning for his handling of the grants. Notably, then-Representative Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) questioned Selim about $160,000 in taxpayer money that was awarded to a collaborative songwriting organization. DeSantis asked, “In terms of effectiveness, collaborative songwriting—s that an effective approach to warding off terrorism?”
Selim submitted his resignation a week after the hearing. He was an ambitious D.C. careerist who had been embarrassed on the Hill and had found himself growing increasingly frustrated with the Trump Administration for not sharing in his vision of DHS’s role in countering violent extremism. None of this would be particularly remarkable if not for the fact that nearly three weeks after Selim resigned from DHS, an entirely new position was created for him at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), reporting directly to CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.
The ADL is a highly influential organization ostensibly focused on combatting discrimination and hate crimes. They also describe themselves as “one of the leading providers in the U.S. of anti-bias and anti-hate content to schools.” In recent years however, the organization has become increasingly partisan in their messaging and agenda.
Greenblatt has a long history of working with the Clintons, dating back to his work on Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992 and then later serving as an aide to the Clinton White House. Greenblatt served in the Obama Administration as a special assistant to President Obama and director of the Office of Social Innovation as well. In between his years spent loyally serving the Clintons and the Obamas, Greenblatt served as the Director of The Impact Economy Initiative at the Aspen Institute, a prominent liberal think tank that receives significant funding from billionaire leftist foundations, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Given that the ADL partners with the Aspen Institute on various initiatives, it comes as little surprise that the ADL has published numerous articles on their website dismissing criticism against Soros as disinformation and antisemitic conspiracy fodder.
Greenblatt also currently sits on the “Real Facebook Oversight Board,” a group funded by another left-leaning billionaire, Pierre Omidyar, for the purpose of pressuring Facebook to remove anything the group deems misinformation that undermines democracy from its site, which is of course so entirely subjective that this translates primarily to banning Trump and his supporters from Facebook.
Joining Greenblatt on the Real Facebook Oversight Board is Reed Galen, co-founder of The Lincoln Project, which speaks volumes about the group’s actual interest in anything remotely ethical. A September 30, 2020 tweet from the group celebrates their first victory in pressuring Facebook to silence any future attempts to question the legitimacy of the upcoming presidential election.
🚨BREAKING🚨: Facebook announces it will ban ads that seek to delegitimize the US election, a key demand of the @FBoversight board.https://t.co/wdOu8lHZQx
(@JGreenblattADL outlined our demands at today’s press conference)
DAY 1: OUR FIRST VICTORY!! #ZuckMustAct pic.twitter.com/8A3A3CEVtS
— The Real Facebook Oversight Board (@FBoversight) September 30, 2020
In a blog post uploaded to the Aspen Institute’s website on August 28, 2017, the same day George Selim started in his newly created position at the ADL, author Meryl Justin Chertoff discussed the significance of Selim’s new ADL position. Chertoff’s husband, notably, is former secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, who had publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. Meryl Chertoff wrote:
As there is no discernible leadership coming from the White House on this issue, and indeed given that some of the president’s self-contradictory pronouncements in the last days suggest strong affinity for the white nationalists, efforts to combat extremism will need to come from state and local government and the private sector. The announcement of Selim for the number two position at the ADL gives some reason for optimism at last.
In other words, Selim’s new role at the ADL would be to constantly emphasize the threat of white supremacy. But what had changed in the less than one year since Selim had testified before Congress that individuals inspired by ISIS and al Qaeda were the most immediate threat facing our nation? Did the threat posed by lone-wolf terrorists inspired by ISIS miraculously dissipate, while almost unfathomable numbers of white supremacists suddenly materialized? No. All that changed was the name of the person occupying the Oval Office. And that person most definitely was not Hillary Clinton.
The Disinformation Inspired Parallel America
On January 6, a rift occurred in our universe. An alternate reality emerged. One America found itself staring into a near mirror-image of another America, only this parallel nation was slightly skewed. Its borders were distorted. Its beloved children’s authors had a tinge of oppression. Its founders were forgotten because the imperfect merits no entry in the textbooks of elementary students. This other world, existing in the multiverse of disinformation, was always hovering in some distant darkness beyond the moon, gathering particles and gaining mass over a hundred years at an astonishing pace, but still only visible through the telescopic lens of skepticism and critical thinking. But on that chilly January day in Washington, these universes would collide, leaving a jumbled mass in its wake, where fact and narrative became inseparable, and truth fell victim to agenda.
In one reality, Officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by monstrous fire-extinguisher-wielding white supremacists and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) saw her life flash before her eyes as she stared down the Third Reich. In this reality, the opposition revealed itself as a red-eyed, or perhaps red-hatted, army of domestic terrorists, led by a three-headed winged serpent calling itself QAnon.
In this reality, in what is perhaps the most obvious example of gaslighting in history, we are all supposed to believe FBI Director Christopher Wray when he says, with a straight face, that there is no evidence of “anarchist violent extremists or people subscribing to Antifa,” or any fake Trump supporters in general, who had participated in the Capitol riot.
And we are all meant to believe this at the same time we stare at the mugshot of John Earle Sullivan, the violent Left-wing activist and founder of the group Insurgence, USA. Not only was Sullivan inside the Capitol on January 6, he was standing next to Ashli Babbitt when she was shot and killed, filming himself throughout the raid and proudly shouting, “It’s our house, motherfuckers!” as he stood near the front of a group attempting to enter the House chamber. Describing Sullivan’s demeanor, all caught on film thanks to CSPAN cameras and Sullivan’s own footage, journalist Robert Mackey writes:
At other points in the storming of the Capitol, Sullivan even urged on the rioters through the megaphone he had previously used to speak at racial justice protests. ‘Get in that shit! Let’s go! Let’s go! Move! Move! Move! Move! Storm that shit! This shit is ours!’ he shouted through the megaphone early in the crowd’s battle to break through police lines on the west side of the Capitol, beneath the inaugural stage. ‘This is our fucking house!’ he added, as his megaphone briefly entered the frame of his video. A minute later, he used it again to tell the crowd to keep pressing: ‘Hold the line, guys, come on! Hold the line!’
Wray probably also would prefer that we all ignore the fact that Sullivan had been arrested on July 9, 2020, in Utah for his involvement in organizing and leading a violent Antifa protest in Provo on June 29 that resulted in an innocent bystander being shot by one of Sullivan’s fellow protesters. Sullivan was seen throughout this protest blocking traffic, damaging vehicles, threatening to beat a woman in her vehicle, and then talking about witnessing the shooting committed by a man who had been protesting alongside him, bearing a remarkable resemblance to his comments following Babbitt’s shooting death.
On January 15, just over a week after the armed insurrection launched by the so-called dangerous white supremacy army, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi assigned retired Army Lieutenant General Russel Honoré with leading the task force reviewing security at the U.S. Capitol. In Pelosi’s alternate reality, we should pay no attention to the fact that Honoré has long been a leader among radical environmental groups funded by liberal billionaires such as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and, of course, George Soros. As the leader of the environmental activist coalition, The Green Army, General Honoré has actually called for his radical environmentalist minions to engage in civil disobedience when the group’s agenda against the oil industry was met with resistance from the Louisiana Legislature. During a 2013 speech at an environmental activist conference, addressing a crowd about methods to fight the oil industry, Honoré stated:
In order for us to create a proposition like this, we’d have to take it through the legislature of Louisiana. And they’re not going to pass it. So we’ve got a couple choices. We can do what? Create some change. Or we can go down there and make it very miserable for them. And I’m afraid that we’re going to have to do the latter. We’re going to have to make it very miserable for them to be able to operate by continuing to pass the rules the way they are now. This is our time. This is our battle.
To be clear, the man Nancy Pelosi tasked with evaluating security failures in the aftermath of the Capitol raid is a radical environmentalist affiliated with Soros-funded activism, who previously called for civil disobedience in the likely event that his state legislature would fail to meet the demands of his radical environmental coalition. After concluding his security assessment by calling for the perpetual militarization of our nation’s capital, we can only hope General Honoré remained in D.C. long enough to celebrate with Pelosi after President Biden signed the $1.9 trillion “Covid relief bill,” which happens to include at least $50 million for environmental justice grants. Surely the General’s Green Army will be celebrating as well.
The Contradictions Abound
The selection of Honoré and the willful denial of John Sullivan’s existence by the FBI are only two examples in a vast sea of contradictions and peculiarities that abound, although there are some certainties that warrant mentioning.
First, the sequence of events that occurred at the Capitol that day was not the result of an intelligence failure, as if the thousands upon thousands of Trump supporters were merely unexpected guests arriving at a dinner party, with the Capitol Police suddenly realizing they were going to need more wine. The security vulnerabilities at the Capitol Building were the result of something significantly more nefarious.
Second, Donald Trump was silenced that day, and many Americans have been silenced ever since.
And finally, January 6 undoubtedly was an enormous information operations victory for the Left, as it provided the perfect opportunity for Democrats to claim validation in their narrative of Trump as a heartless dictator who would never relinquish power, as well as finally provide the pretext to push forward the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, which Democrats have been attempting to pass for years.
There is a maddening effect, though, to the constant gaslighting and narrative warfare. We are told that protests are peaceful, as we watch buildings burn. We’re told that we are all racists, while we are attacked for our race. We are called science deniers, but then told we’re wrong for believing in biology. We’re told Dr. Seuss has become too dangerous, but we should believe the Left when they say they want unity with millions of people they’ve called dangerous Nazis for years. We’re told we are seditious domestic terrorists for fighting to uphold the integrity of our elections. We witness the unspeakable horrors of war because we volunteer to fight in distant lands in conflicts we’re told are necessary to protect the homeland, only to find that we’re called extremists for ever daring to be patriots.
But we do our best to stay strong in this fight, because the alternative is to live our lives ungrounded from any objective truth and rationality, forever letting the winds of cancel culture direct our fates.
Eventually, the flexible morality of the radical Left may prove to be their undoing. The only question though is what will be left of America by the time they ultimately cancel themselves out of existence?
In the meantime, the Democrats are winning the information war by controlling the narrative, while they simultaneously goad Republicans into believing the time for physical violence has already arrived. That war may arrive someday, and it will unfold very quickly if it does. But first, the Left will use their control of the narrative to justify removing your rights before engaging.
For those who adamantly insist that the only solution is to stand tall, chest puffed, and shout, “Molon Labe!,” many will be praying they have never stood within 500 feet of any buffoon in a Camp Auschwitz shirt when CNN shows up in advance of the SWAT team, searching for reason to justify your swift punishment as an example of the Justice Department’s brave new crackdown on Trump-supporting domestic terrorists.
In the 1930s the Left had the Frankfurt School to pitch naïve Westerners a romanticized version of Cultural Marxism. Before that it was Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Now their arbiters of Marxist ideology are kids with pink hair throwing frozen water bottles at cops and woke Twitter snobs canceling banjo players from Mumford and Sons. Somehow their curricula vitae just don’t seem quite as impressive as those of their forefathers. But they are exponentially more dangerous. Why?
Because they already control the schools, the mainstream media, the tech monopolies, and now the White House and the Pentagon. While Stalin was always pleased to see how often American journalists turned a blind eye to the Ukrainian famine that killed millions, imagine how delighted he would be to see where the people he would have called useful idiots are now.
This population of trust fund gold medalists in the Oppression Olympics make for such successful useful idiots because they are generally the least informed while simultaneously believing themselves to be the most woke. Their decision-making style tends to be dominated primarily by their emotions. Thus, when Jerrold Post, or Bandy Lee, or Chris Cuomo tell them, for example, that Donald Trump called a group of neo-Nazis “very fine people,” many of these useful idiots will believe it forever, without ever bothering to read the transcript that proves Trump actually condemned neo-Nazis and white nationalists. These are the hallmarks of successful disinformation campaigns—plant the seed early, have an authority or expert on the subject draw attention to it, and then rely on an army of useful idiots to spread the message, often unaware of their role in the conspiracy.
Russia, China, Nancy Pelosi—these are all entities that have perfected the art of disinformation and, in the first two cases, over hundreds of years. Now our own government is using this mainstay of Communist control to suppress the rights of American citizens. But perhaps this is where conservatives have an opportunity to prevail.
Disinformation preys upon our emotions. Our anger and fear, driven by a quest for retribution against those who seek to dismantle our Constitution and exploit our love of God and country, will blind us all to the Machiavellianism of our national intelligence apparatus eager to make a domestic terrorist of anyone who still dares to believe that the Constitution is not a living document that must evolve with the times, but rather that our evolution as a nation must always be hampered by the eternal wisdom contained within that document.
Now is the time for strategy—for understanding how the events of today will shape the Left’s narrative for tomorrow. We should be leery of anyone urging physical violence. We should remember that the Left’s hunger to violate our civil liberties may present an opportunity to find allies among those who share similar concerns, particularly libertarians disaffected with the embrace of Marxism in our nation.
We must remember that sometimes George Soros really is the bogeyman. Sometimes the deep state takes the form of an elderly psychiatrist. And sometimes the most dangerous radicals in our nation are the experts we hire to tell us what to think, people who believe we might become far too dangerous if left to think for ourselves. And we must remind those in power that our rational mind, our drive to build, to provide for our families, to live freely, lives within us and can never die.
It can never be controlled, eradicated, displaced. Our spirit, the American spirit, can never be canceled.