SPEAKER_00 0:00

We have reached a new low. I don't know if I brought up my mental health rituals to try to stay sane, even as autocratic despair, the feeling takes away all of my life. I don't always pay attention to the Trump administration unless it's to give consideration as to whether or not we've reached a new low. I think this Todd Blanche confirmation as United States Attorney General marks a new low. Now that is autocratic despair. This is Autocratic Despair, the podcast. Each week on the Autocratic Despair Podcast, I stare into the abyss with my friend, Dr. Craig Johnson, PhD in global fascism, lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of 2025's most important book, How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism. Dr. Craig, on a scale of 1 to 10, where would you rate your autocratic despair this week?

SPEAKER_02 1:07

Well, I think it's a little bit worse than it was last week. I'm gonna go with the five. Frankly, it's just the cease-awing with the Iran fake treaties and fake ceasefires and then attacking again and then all of that shit. Like, it's been happening for so long. The situation is unchanged, actually. And it's not even really like the seesawing and fakeness of the ceasefires that's getting me. It's the fact that the press in the United States and the UK so credulously reports Donald Trump's lies about it every single time. Why? I've seen so few better examples of capture, total capture of the press and the narrative system by this. This is just like such a stupid war and it's fucking everything up. I'm upset. I'm at a five. Halfway.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Dr. Craig, you started rubbing your eyes 30 seconds into this podcast. I know when I'm being bamboozled, you're at a six.

SPEAKER_02 2:10

Yeah, that might be the case. There's other business. I was talking to somebody about the podcast, and they were like, Oh, yeah, maybe I'll take a listen. I was like, Yeah, if you want to listen to me, gradually lose my mind. I'm always like, don't.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

I tell people I have a podcast and I don't see any downloads from Green Bay, and I'm like, why am I even telling people? So I know there's four people in Melbourne. I don't know if I've drop up my mental health ritual and try to stay sane, even as autocratic despair, the feeling takes away all of my life. I don't always pay attention to the Trump administration unless it's to give consideration as to whether or not we've reached a new low. I think this Todd Blanche confirmation as United States Attorney General marks a new low. And it's not just about Todd Blanche, it's about how they managed to pull it off. Yeah. It's been a while for me since the last new low. Confirming Todd Blanche takes the old new low to a new depth. Yeah. The old new low was the $1.776 billion slush fund that Trump was creating to pay the January 6th rioters back. We all got pissed off about that one. But then they threw us a bone and said they'd stop pursuing it until Todd Blanche was confirmed as Attorney General. And we all took that as see, when we fight, we win because we're desperate for anything that looks like a win. Turns out they didn't give up completely. We just thought they did. They said that it wouldn't be pursued until Todd Blanche was confirmed, and he's confirmed today. So they're back in. There were a couple of hardline Republicans, John Cornry from Texas and Tom Tillis of North Carolina, that finally stood up and said, no way, Jose, we're not gonna confirm Todd Blanche as long as he still might do this $1.7 billion slush fund. Not on their watch. Well, on Sunday, they worked a deal out with Todd Blanche, where he pinky promises that he won't do the fund. Yeah. He even wrote it up for him, signed it in ink. No PDF signature for old Tod Blanche. You get it printed and you get it on hard stock paper. That's just how Tod Blanche rolls. When he puts his signature on a non-legally binding document, that's as good as his word, and vice versa. Yeah. So the paper that he signed, he didn't have Donald Trump sign. There's nothing legally enforceable about that as a contract, but made him feel better. And now they got a piece of paper to wave when they're doing TV hits criticizing him for going ahead with the slush fund. They're gonna take that paper and they're gonna throw it in their face. This is a staggering bit of monkey business. It is. Todd Blanche is either walking around knowing he's put something over on the senators, or they're in on it and they just needed something to point to that said that they tried. This morning was the last set of hearings in the Senate confirming Todd Blanche. You can bet your ass there was some speechifying. I watched the tail end of Hory Booker's, and that was pretty good. He was kind of on fire. So I scrubbed back to the beginning. I don't think I've ever seen a guy finish so strong and such a weak opener.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

In the first 50 words, he said, It's hard for me to say this as a plant-based guy, but where's the beef? Where's the beef? This is ridiculous. We got nothing.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

What the hell? Where is the beef, gentlemen? Huh? This guy holds the record for the filibuster, and all he's got is admit to being a vegetarian and then a 40-year-old Wendy's slogan? Okay. I'd have respected him more if he'd implored his colleagues in the Senate to avoid the noid.

SPEAKER_02 5:44

That's actually pretty funny.

unknown 5:49

Dr.

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Craig, I don't know if you're paying attention to what's going on in Wisconsin right now. I never pay attention to anything. You're gonna want to pay attention to this. Francesca Hong is about to become the Democratic nominee for Wisconsin governor. Francesca Hong is deep Democratic Socialist of America. Oh, wow. She's gonna be going up against a congressman named Tom Tiffany. He's not making any commercials explaining who he is. All the commercials already are commercials explaining who she is. Basically, he's accusing her of witchcraft. I haven't actually seen that much of this. This is extremely exciting. Yeah, kinda. A little concerned? I vote absentee, so I already voted for, but I was voting for her more so she would get like 30%. And then whoever did win would have to sort of lean her way to court her voters. All the other candidates that had any juice are just dropping out of the race. And the one guy, his name was Mandela Barnes, went against Ron Johnson in a Senate race and almost won that a few years ago. Yeah. He seemed to be the strongest contender, but then some stuff came out about him and hints and allegations. So he just dropped out rather than let that stuff blow up. Oh wow. So it's Francesca Hahn. Primary's on August 11th. There are other people in the race, but she was polling at 44% of the Democrat vote before Mandela Barnes dropped out. He was polling at 23. Dang, wow. Okay. It's about to get funky in Wisconsin. Yeah, it is. Wow. Wait, and who's her opponent? His name is Tom Tiffany. He's the congressman that they appointed after Sean Duffy left office. Okay. That's his district. Okay, okay. The way that he's explained himself to the public is he was a bridge tender for 38 years. One commercial where he was just looking at us and saying, if you're worried about the direction Wisconsin's going, call in the bridge tender. That was what they were going to go with. He was a bridge tender, and now he can be your government. Strategy has changed to a literal demon running against me.

SPEAKER_02 7:38

Yeah, now the strategy is fear-mongering, probably some terrible misogyny, some awful racism about the fact that this person is East Asian. I'm assuming a lot of terrible business is my guess.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

Yeah, she's not making it hard for him. A tweet surfaced last week where she talked about when she was hospitalized for bipolar depression. That's unfortunately ammunition they're going to use for sure. They won't miss a chance to use plenty of other things too. She's not backing down from being a democratic socialist. Somebody recently asked her on CNN if she supported abolishing Thanksgiving. And she didn't say no. That might not win you a lot of votes in the state of Wisconsin. She's not wrong. It's not a great holiday. We're not celebrating a particularly great accomplishment of America. If we're going to get rid of the holiday, Thanksgiving probably would be one of them that we would do. Yeah. Yeah, we'd probably get rid of that one. I'm glad we got you on tape, Craig, because that is un-American. Hey. You are speaking it out against traditional American values.

SPEAKER_02 8:38

I moved out of America in 2014 when I started grad school. I left. I'm gone. I'm out. I'm a Californian now. I'm just another freak in the freak kingdom, man. That's the kind of shit a far-left terrorist says.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

This past weekend, Hong was with Alan Omar and Hassan Piker in Milwaukee campaigning. They named 43 people left-wing terrorists in this Cuba, the 21st century capital of communism port put out by the State Department. And two of those people are Alan Omar, the congresswoman from Minneapolis, and Hassan Piker, the streamer. Another guy that they named in it was Neville Singham. She's tied to far-left terrorists. Literally, yes.

SPEAKER_02 9:24

Now, I want to make my position on this very clear and extremely public. Illan Omar, awesome. I do not like Hassan Piker. I think that he says creepy stuff. Hassan Piker sucks. I think that he is a creep. That is my official opinion on the man. He has somehow become this like cause celebre on the left in the United States for reasons that I struggle to understand. People just like him because he says mean stuff and he's hot.

SPEAKER_00 9:56

He seems to be the only vaguely masculine guy in that age bracket that's defending democracy or at least attempting to that seems to be the case to me. You know, his uncle is the guy from the Young Turks. Senk.

SPEAKER_02 10:08

Oh, yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

That is his uncle, the family business. If you're trying to figure out what he's up to, we haven't really brought it up a lot on the show, but we did during the show that you and I did for Patreon as we were trying to structure this show together. I believe that there's a controlled opposition in the Democratic Party. And I think it looks a lot like organizations that are doing anything and they're closely aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America. I don't think I agree with you on that.

SPEAKER_02 10:37

It's possible. I've always been skeptical of the young Turks, starting with their name, kind of a confusing historical reference that I don't quite understand. Might be as simple as the fact that the guy's Turkish. I'm sure that there are people on the right and on the center in the United States who say to themselves, let's fund the democratic socialist candidate so that they lose and repudiate those ideas. I'm sure that that's happened. I also happen to think that those ideas are right. Uh and they are in fact popular when you pull for them. Whether or not they can win is a different question, right? Just because something is popular doesn't mean that people are going to vote for it. That's not how a democracy works. Especially not if you tie those ideas to sketchy characters. Exactly. Yes. And like Piker, that's something that I could see happening. Like, you know, I'm I'm a I'm a show me the money conspiracy adjacent person. You know, I I I want receipts generally. Um, but Piker is the sort of person that I could be like, yeah, I would understand. If I were a right-wing person, I could see myself being like, let's fund this guy, let's give him some money, because we know that he's gonna say some terrible heinous stuff, and it will undermine his message. I believe that. He's also like gone to like China and like done weird China apology stuff, and he says anti-Semitic stuff. He actually says real anti-Semitic stuff. I just don't support that.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

I don't support that. In that Cuba, the 21st century's capital of communism, one of the other 43 that they named was a guy named Neville Singham. Neville Singham does have his hand verifiably in a lot of far-left organizations. He's married to the woman who has code pink. Oh, really? He started giving them money about eight years ago, seven years ago. You know when it happened because they stopped talking about the Uyghur genocide in China. Oh. Yeah. There was some reporting in the New York Times, I don't know, a year or two ago. They didn't quite get to Neville Singham as an agent of China, but they got to when Neville Singham gave these groups money, they turned towards Chinese interests and away from things that weren't in their interest. That's documented. That's out there. They haven't quite accused him of funding far-left groups for the purpose of destabilizing democracy. They could. Yeah. They got a lot to go on. Yeah. Francesca Hong can be tied to them. I'm worried about all that stuff because, as you know, the final criteria for entrenched autocracy is for candidates that are enjoying broad popular support to not be allowed to win. Ugh. Francesca Hong, she's a lot to keep an eye on, but she's exciting and she's interesting and she's going to pull people towards her. Yes. But I won't be surprised if she's pulling beyond the margin of error against Tom Tiffany soon enough. Very possible. And I fear that when that happens, they won't rig it at the ballot box. Why would they try to do that when you can just McCarthy style red scare it? Arrest somebody for being a far-left terrorist. Certainly possible.

SPEAKER_02 13:41

Entirely possible. They haven't quite pulled that one yet, but they gotta be looking for a trial balloon somewhere. The only reasons I can imagine that they wouldn't try to do something like that are two. One, they don't think they could get away with it, but they could get away with it. I don't think that that'll be it. The other reason that they wouldn't do it is if they didn't think they needed to. Right? Yeah. If they didn't think it was important enough. This is one of the critiques that people have of more serious left opposition to fascism as opposed to a more centrist opposition to fascism, is that it actually is the sort of thing that fascists do try very hard to stop. They really do, in fact, want to stop democratic socialists from taking power in the United States. They really do. This is the sort of thing that fascism is all about, actually stopping the left from taking power. I think that they do really want to stop the Democratic Socialists from taking states, especially states like Wisconsin or Michigan. We're talking about the election coming up there. These are places that the right wants to take over, that the right wants to be run by the GOP as an expansion of their current control of the Deep South, parts of the plains. These are like those Trump Obama states that voted for Obama and then voted for Trump. These are the states that got Donald Trump the presidency in 2016, right? Like Wisconsin and Michigan, Ohio. Yeah. Those are the battlegrounds. I can totally imagine them being very serious about that.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

I think they have to at some point throw somebody from the left in prison that's a political candidate. Trump was arrested while he was running for president. Yeah. But he believes he's owed. Oh, you're absolutely right. That's another aspect of it, too, is that Trump will just be like, well, they did it to me. I don't think he could get away with doing it to name brand characters. Gavin Newsome or Pete Boudicch, the gubernatorial candidate for Wisconsin, that's a pretty high-profile position, if not a name. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

Yeah, yeah. That is precisely the sort of thing that I could imagine him doing. You're absolutely right that, like, doing it to Newsom or Buddig or Ocasio-Cortes, that would make the news. Whereas the Department of Justice indicts and imprisons or temporarily holds the Democratic nominee for the governor of Wisconsin, that would make the news for two hours. When it would in fact be the most important thing that was happening. That is another toe across another line of sand of the decline of the United States as a representative democracy.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

That would be the next new low.

SPEAKER_02 16:02

It would be the next new low.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

But history tells us what. Political candidates get thrown into prison all the time, especially the ones that are socialists because they're always terrorists, too. That just happens.

SPEAKER_02 16:16

This is the sort of thing, the sort of political behavior that is extremely normal in many, many, many countries. It's extremely normal all over the world for countries to operate like this. The fact that the United States has escaped ever being like this. Not ever, Dr. Craig. Yeah, you're right. Not ever. Eugene Debs. Yeah, Eugene Debs is a perfect example of this. Uh, there are a couple other examples around the Civil War.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

Who was Eugene Debs for the benefit of our audience that doesn't know who Eugene Debs is?

SPEAKER_02 16:45

Eugene Victor Debs, uh, Eugene V. Debs, was the winningest socialist presidential candidate in U.S. history. He ran and also ran under the United States Socialist Party for the presidency of the United States half a dozen times in the early 20th century, so starting in the 1910s and extending onward. He was a perennial candidate. He ran almost all the time. Once he ran from jail as prisoner number so-and-so. That was what he was officially on the ballot, and he got like a million votes. He was in jail during World War I because of supposedly having violated the Sedition Act, a law that's still on the books, was passed during the pseudo-war between the United States and France during the French Revolution under the John Adams administration. It is the law on the books that says that if the United States believes that your speech is a threat to US national security, that you can be put in jail. Debs, like many socialists, was a pacifist when it came to World War I. He was like, this is an imperialist war, and who gives a fuck? Like who fucking cares which imperialist country controls Europe? We don't care. We don't believe in that. We don't like that. The United States has no business getting involved in this war. So he was put in jail. Debs is the high mark of properly socialist organizing in the United States.

SPEAKER_00 18:05

Dr. Craig, have you heard the term sluggish schizophrenia?

SPEAKER_02 18:08

I have not. And I consider myself to be a pretty terminally online person. So I'm kind of embarrassed that I haven't.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

It's a mental illness created by Andrei Sheshnevsky, the most powerful psychiatrist in the USSR in the 1960s because the KGB asked him to. And you don't say no to the direct request from the KGB in 1960s Soviet Union. Yeah. A sluggish schizophrenia diagnosis was a pretty handy tool for the Soviet Union. A patient didn't need to have any psychotic symptoms to be diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia. A patient didn't need any symptoms at all. Dr. Schnezneski made sure to define sluggish schizophrenia as slowly progressive. The symptoms would show up later. Most of the criteria developed for sluggish schizophrenia is the very definition of weak sauce. Here's some of the symptoms. Interest in philosophy, religion, and art, a struggle for truth. A third thing Schneznesky developed called reform delusion. Snevnevsky diagnosed reform delusion in anyone who, quote, drafts an ideal of human happiness or a project for the benefit of mankind, unquote. Oh boy. Wow, okay. People in the Soviet Union who took the time to consider human happiness, people who were engaged in actively trying to benefit mankind, they could be mentally ill. Legally speaking, just doing the mental exercise of considering whether life in another country sounds better than what you've got in front of you who's criminal. Yeah. Well, that's kind of a normal thing to do. But not in Soviet Russia in the 1960s. If you were considering whether life in another country sounds better than what you got going in the Soviet Union, the reform delusion's already taken root. They'd come get you. They've got to come get you. It's only a matter of time before the sluggish schizophrenia fully presents itself. It's gonna make him struggle for truth any minute now. Gotta get that guy off the street before he writes a letter to the editor. Sluggish schizophrenia really was a thing that happened in the Soviet Union from the 1960s until the USSR broke apart. Not so long ago. A desire to improve the world was itself a symptom of disease. There's a certain logic to that. The Soviet Union is a perfect society. A person would have to be insane to believe things could get better than the Soviet Union. How could things get better in a perfect society? That'd be nuts. Criticizing the regime in power was tantamount to saying the Soviet Union wasn't a perfect society. That person must be one of those poor unfortunates. As a perfect society, the Soviet Union would try to help the crazy people. Let us get you the help you need on an inpatient basis. Yeah. Of course, that's not what the diagnosis, sluggish schizophrenia meant. What it meant was that you could snatch anybody you want at any time, put them in cages for an indeterminate period of time until they got better. Any estimates to how long it's gonna take? Don't worry about it, man. It's gonna take as long as it's gonna take. So from the 1960s on, thousands of dissidents were moved to a special psychiatric hospital in an effort to cure them of their sluggish schizophrenia, which could take a long time. It's a pretty good deal for the Soviet government. No need to send dissidents to prison when the USSR can help them get better. No need for a trial. They can just send you to a mental hospital. Then you can leave. Maybe someday when you're better. Shenetsky himself personally signed off on all the insanity findings of people who did not have any mental illness beyond thinking things could get better in the Soviet Union. There's no shortage of people like that in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. So they put a lot of people in mental institutions, prominent people, like Natalia Gorbanskaya, the poet, who was among a handful of people who demonstrated in Red Square in 1968. They were protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, one of the bravest public acts of that era.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

The invasion of Czechoslovakia was a big watershed moment. On the international left, and opposition to it was also a huge one. Prague Spring, people called it. It was one of the big breaking points away from Soviet-style communism as a political ideal in the in the West.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

Natalia Gorbinskaya was protesting it. For that, she got diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia and confined. She was a new mother, and she brought her infant son to that protest in his baby carriage. And she had a toddler too, but she didn't bring him that day. She left a toddler with her mother. Because she was a new mother, the Soviet Union didn't want to put her in prison or a labor camp, so authorities had her examined and declared her of unsound mind. Another case of sluggish schizophrenia. Put her in a special psychiatric hospital where she could get the care she needed. But they let her twist in the wind for a couple years first. She had a baby after all. Don't ever say the Soviet Union was a cruel place. They let her continue to breastfeed and wean her baby before they put her in a mental hospital. It wasn't just poets. Vladimir Bukovsky is another important name. He's the dissident who exposed the whole system to the West. He smuggled 150 pages of documentation on this form of psychiatric abuse out of the USSR in 1971, which is largely how the world found out about sluggish schizophrenia. Bukowski was personally diagnosed by Schneznetsky as well. And after he was diagnosed, he spent years in prison, labor camps, psychiatric hospitals. Eventually, he was swapped out in a prisoner exchange. The list goes on. Piotr Grigorenko, a general in the Soviet Army, they put him away on two separate occasions for sluggish schizophrenia.

SPEAKER_02 23:35

Oh, wait, he got better and then he got worse again? Got a relapse? That can happen.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Leonid Plyush, a mathematician that was well known in the mathematics space. They had him thrown into a psychiatric hospital and drugged for years. These are people with prominent backgrounds, people near the top of their fields, important people, people with a little standing in the pecking order, people that you couldn't just throw in prison for speaking out against the Soviet Union, but people you could make examples out of. And they did. One of the symptoms of sluggish schizophrenia was denying that you had sluggish schizophrenia. So even if you stayed perfectly calm and reasonable, that just proves the illness was hidden or slowly progressing. The more normal you were only served to demonstrate how deeply impaired you were. Being sent to a psychiatric hospital in the USSR around that time was an indefinite sentence. You stayed until you got better. What did someone that had conquered sluggish schizophrenia look like in the USSR? It meant that you weren't going to be any trouble anymore. It meant that you stopped believing things could get better. The release condition wasn't good behavior. The release condition was recant and convince us that you mean it. Convince us that you no longer think what you thought in order to be put away. It's nightmare stuff. That's terrifying, yeah. They launched it as compassion. They couched it like they were getting them the help they needed to integrate back in society, absent of any lingering feelings that things could get better in the Soviet Union or that human beings deserve to be happy. You know, at the time, being institutionalized for a mental health crisis was a much different thing than it is now. Best case scenario, you came out of there an object of pity. Nobody wanted you around now that you've proven your liability. Who knows? You might relapse in their presence. Prominent people lost all their credibility once they were institutionalized, gone forever. No way to get it back. Unfalsifiable accusation, indefinite detention, permanent loss of credibility. Very Russian. Do you think that could happen here, Dr. Craig?

SPEAKER_02 25:28

Yeah. Thinking about the Soviet Union and how it functioned as an autocratic authoritarian place, it's a complicated question. The Soviet Union was a more closed system than the United States is or could be today. The borders are just more porous in the United States, and they are never not gonna be, despite Donald Trump's best efforts. Communication is also easier today than it ever was, and so like that kind of closed loop would be a lot harder to create in the US. The US also has a much longer history of believing in at least certain kinds of freedom of speech. But in the 1960s, the United States also had an extremely oppressive mental health apparatus, and it was primarily targeted towards not necessarily political dissidents, but towards gender dissidents. Back in the 1960s, women were way, way, way, way, way disproportionately institutionalized for mental health reasons. They received shock therapy, they got lobotomies, people were put in solitary confinement situations, people were tortured in these ways. And so we've done stuff like this. If the question is, could the United States develop a system whereby we would sort of medicalize popular dissent or political dissent? I don't know if we would do that. But we are seeing in the US right now, like already, the construction of something that I think would be the equivalent in the US, which would be to re-categorize queer identities and trans identities as mental health problems. That's what they were categorized as in the 20th century. That has gradually and still not fully changed in the United States and in much of the developed world, but the right is clearly pushing for that to be pushed back. So I can totally see a world in which the right wing is saying, like, oh, well, we're going to recategorize, we're going to reclassify feminism, transness, and queerness as mental health problems. And so that would allow removing people from public life who have those identities or who believe those things or who are those things, it would allow them to be removed from public life in exactly the way you're talking about, in a way that appears compassionate. And that doesn't sound like imprisonment or confining.

SPEAKER_00 27:53

You might ask yourself, who decides what is a mental disorder in the United States? There's a book. It's called The DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It's the American Psychiatric Association's official catalog of what counts as a mental illness and what the symptoms are of each type of mental illness. The DSM is a very big book. There's a constant debate about whether something is or is not a mental illness and what the symptoms are. And even then, it has to affect your life negatively to be a mental disorder. My point here is that the DSM is not handed down from on high. It's written, it's debated over, voted on by committees of human beings, full of their own personal prejudices, agendas, hobby horses, all the things that make it difficult to come to consensus on what to eat for lunch, much less what constitutes a mental illness. The DSM is constantly being revised. Things get added, things get removed, symptoms change, aspects of certain mental disorders get spun off into standalone mental disorders, which is a very exciting moment for any mental disorder. Used to be that the homosexual was in there as a diagnosable mental illness. Not anymore. That got revised out of the DSM. Not nearly as long ago as you might think. The process for it being removed started in 1972. Before that, homosexuality was a sickness that could be treated until enough people decided that it was no longer a mental disorder. And the committee voted that it'd be stricken. It took until 1987 until homosexuality fully disappeared from the DSM. When it comes to the DSM, it takes a whole committee and a whole industry to change what is and what isn't a disorder. And it takes time. And the line between who a person is and what is wrong with them is drawn by whoever holds the pen in those committees, which is important to know because guess who's reaching for that pen? God damn it. Now we're getting to the meat of this segment. There are efforts in the United States happening in real time to stifle dissent using psychiatric diagnosis. There's a psychiatrist named Carol Lieberman. She'd like Trump derangement syndrome to become a real diagnosis. And she's doing what she's allowed to do as a member of the American Psychiatric Association to make that happen. Wow. Lieberman says she's built a classification for mild, moderate, or severe Trump derangement syndrome, with eight to ten symptoms each. And she's walking it in to the American Psychiatric Association in an effort to get it put in the DSM. It's crackpot stuff, but the crackpots are running the show now. Carol Lieberman has got the crackpot in her corner. Lieberman's got cabinet level backup in the form of our director of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She's enlisted him to make Trump derangement syndrome a diagnosable mental illness. I knew he was gonna show up sometime. Seems kind of out of reach. She's tilting at windmills a little bit. This is a put on or an engagement bait or something. Maybe. Probably. Maybe, maybe. Had I never heard the term sluggish schizophrenia, I wouldn't be giving this any consideration at all. But Carol Lieberman is nobody to laugh at. And it's not like the American Psychiatric Association hasn't been complicit with Trump this whole time. Absolutely, it has been complicit since day one with Trump. The APA requires that its members not diagnose a patient unless they've actually had the person as a patient. And at the same time, it also requires its members to adhere to a strict doctor-patient confidentiality, professional standards. So the people equipped with some expertise in mental disorders weren't able to go on TV and point out Trump's malignant narcissism. By the standard of the profession, they were in no position to make the diagnosis because they hadn't sat down with Trump. And even if they did, they couldn't make the diagnosis public unless Trump signed off on it, or he's an imminent threat to life. Not that there haven't been plenty of psychiatrists willing to say Trump has malignant narcissism. They just aren't backed up by the American Psychological Association. Dr. John Gardner told the American Psychiatric Association to kick rocks. He actually did a whole podcast called Shrinking Trump, which was a must-listen for me. He shut that down in December because he was worried about blowback from the Trump administration. All respects to John Gardner. He did what he could for as long as he could. Actually, it inspired me a little bit to step up and create autocratic despair for the podcast. The one you're listening to right now. So there's a real effort to make Trump derangement syndrome a diagnosable condition. Here's what they're saying about it themselves. The broadcaster that Carol Lieberman got to hitch her wagon to this nonsense is named Mary Walter. She's got a show with a guy named Todd Stein. Mary Walter says, quote, It's all very scientific. We joke about it, but it's actually really scientific. Unquote. What does that even mean? What does that even mean? I think it means that it might be a joke to everyone else, to everyone that hears what they're up to, but they're serious. And they've gotten science involved. Science, I tell you.

SPEAKER_02 33:01

That's gonna be a tough one for the hashtag resist libs. In this house, we believe in science, but also not that science. This is one of those ones where people's claim that science is apolitical is gonna run afoul of the fact that it transparently is. But that's another podcast.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

That's another show. It might happen. A lot of people out there are suffering from Trump Derangement syndrome. Hey. But they're on Medicare or Medicaid. And since Trump derangement syndrome isn't yet in the DSM, no insurance is going to cover treatment for the condition. Not until it gets in the DSM, at least. So maybe there is a place for it in the DSM. God. If you want to get the leftists in your life the help that they need, Mary Walter muses on her show quite often about filling empty shopping malls instead of insane asylums with people that are infected by the woke mind virus. Her co-host, Todd Starnes, agrees. He says, quote, they need to be in some part of a hospital. In two sentence, they go from diagnosis to institutionalize them in a mall. Put all that vacant real estate to some good use. That's the pipeline. They said it out loud, 2026. The more symptoms of Trump derangement syndrome, according to Carol Lieberman. Men that have low self-esteem and envy of an alpha male. Women who have problems with men. They gotta dial that in a little bit. That's a lot of people. That's maybe most people.

SPEAKER_02 34:15

Maybe that's the point. Literally, their claim would be like the mentally healthiest person in the US, according to them, would be like Andrew Tate.

SPEAKER_00 34:25

Poor Andrew Tate. That's also another show. He's the greatest test case for how we're gonna act towards these fuckers when it's all over. And we're not passing that test. We are not.

unknown 34:35

No.

SPEAKER_00 34:38

Walter says the quiet part out loud. Quote, it doesn't matter what reasons you give for opposing Trump. Whatever executive order, whatever political thing, it's not really about that. Trump derangement syndrome is more of a state of being. Your actual political objections are predefined as symptoms. The reasons don't count. It's the disagreement itself that's the disease, which is what Shznanski said, word for word. Yeah. There's no sane reason to oppose the good leader. So anyone who opposes him must be insane. It's worth remembering that the Trump administration has been floating something like an involuntary commitment to prevent people from living in the streets. They've discussed institutionalizing homeless people and veterans for their own good, because they don't want to leave a bunch of concrete evidence that they're failing us and to clean up the environment. It's banned for property values. This is not out of the realm of possibility, however far-fetched it may seem. There's already a signed executive order from Trump that allows him to round up the mentally ill and get them the help that they need. Cut to July 24th, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14321, Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets. Here's the policy in the order's own words. It's about shifting homeless individuals into, quote, long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through appropriate use of civil commitment in order to restore public order. Sit with that for a second. Humane treatment. Restore public order in the same breath. Let's do the homeless a solid by locking them away. They're mostly mentally ill and they need treatment, and nobody likes looking at them anyway, and nobody's gonna come looking for them once they're locked away, right, guys? How else are you gonna restore public order? This is so awful. It leans on the states with money. It directs the DOJ and the Department of Health and Human Services to steer federal funding to states that adopt their phrase, a maximally flexible civil commitment. Maximally flexible, meaning make it easy as possible to commit someone. And it goes after the guardrails. It directs the attorney general to seek the reversal of the court precedence and the end of consent decrees that currently limit locking people away, including Olmstedt, the landmark Supreme Court case ruling from the Clinton era, where the Supreme Court established that under the Americans with Disabilities Act, people with mental disabilities have the right to receive care in their community rather than being locked away in institutions. When three criteria are met. One, when treatment professionals agree community-based care is appropriate, two, when the person afflicted doesn't oppose it, and three, when it can be reasonably accommodated. Executive Order 14, 321. Ending crime and disorder on America Streets. It sits in opposition to the Olmstead Supreme Court decision. And here's where it stops being theoretical. Dwayne Barry. Not a terribly sympathetic guy. Dwayne Barry left a fake bomb at a bank in 2015. Allegedly, he's not been convicted. He left a suitcase with a note inside a branch of Bank of America in Detroit. The note said that he owns the Bank of America and it has been stolen from him and he wants it back. Or else. Obviously, Dwayne Berry mentally ill, which is why the charges against him were dropped. He wasn't competent to stand trial. That's what they ruled. So they committed him as dangerous. And he's been locked up ever since. Five years beyond the five-year maximum he'd have faced if they had actually convicted him of leaving a fake bomb. That's gotta be really tough. Ugh. Yeah. To be diagnosably mentally ill with paranoid delusions and verifiably illegally imprisoned without conviction due to a government conspiracy? That's Kafka-asque. That is some Kafka shit. God. Yeah, that's a whole other layer of cruelty and confusion. Duane Berry is a unique case. The whole indefinite detention with no conviction for someone that has a mental illness seems pretty close to the exact Soviet structure. Confinement that doesn't need a verdict. Happening here now to Dwayne Berry, a man with no charges pending against him. And notice who this tool reaches for. Civil rights groups will tell you involuntary commitment has always fallen the hardest on the same people. LGBTQ folks, people of color, people with disabilities. The LGBTQ legal groups know something about this specifically because the community has been here before. It wasn't too long ago that they were committed, treated, corrected against their will, because they were suffering from homosexuality, a mental illness that isn't a mental illness anymore. So keep an eye on all the people that tell you that transgender people have a mental illness. Because to them, that means they don't deserve the same rights as the rest of us. Look at what's on the table. One hand is building the diagnosis, a psychiatrist walking a classification into the American Psychiatric Association to make the distress that people are feeling over our country's descent into authoritarianism into a disorder. The other hand's building up the power to commit, a signed order, making confinement maximally flexible, gutting the precedence that limited, already holding a man, Dwayne Barry, who was never convicted. Different people assembling it in different rooms at the same time. Neither hand really looks like tyranny on its own. One looks like medical care, one looks like cleaning up the streets. It's only when they meet that you see what they built. All this hinges on who gets to define the mentally healthy. It's a pretty normal thing to be bothered by authoritarianism. It's a real threat not only to our lives but to our way of life. People tend to obsess about threats to their life. Hard to fault a guy for being preoccupied with the forest fire on the horizon. It's not too fair to tell him he's got fire derangement syndrome just because you think the fire's pretty awesome. And an imperfect vessel sent by God to lead us. In a free country, you're allowed to be wrong. You're allowed to be angry, you're allowed to be obsessive or deranged in your policy. That's the cost of freedom, and it's also the point of it. The moment the state gets to decide which of your beliefs are symptoms of a mental illness, it's given itself the power to cure you of your disagreement. They don't have to convince you you're wrong if they can convince everyone else that you're sick. And I want to be clear about who gets hurt with this. It's not abstract. It's the people with actual mental illnesses whose real struggles get cheapened into a punchline and a political weapon when they're talking about making Trump derangement syndrome a real thing. It's trans people who are fighting to not be called disordered for who they are. And it's anyone who looks at the way things are and says out loud that things could be better, that things should be better. The Soviets had a name for that last one, reformed illusion. And the treatment for reformed illusion was to disabuse you of the childless notion that things could be better or people could be truly happy. Flug of schizophrenia, Trump derangement syndrome, I call it autocratic despair. Dr. Greg, I really do hate the term Trump derangement syndrome. I think of it almost as like a psyop. Oh yeah. The words autocratic and despair existed before I put them together. Generally speaking, when an autocracy takes over, there's no word to describe the feeling of demoralization happening among the population when things get crazy until afterwards, when they see it in retrospect.

SPEAKER_02 41:47

You know, people talk about this with climate change, people talk about it with other stuff, but specifically the experience that happens as democracy and you know, just like the general stability of your society or eroding or falling apart, or you know, you see it like slipping through the cracks. It's something that you know, people occasionally talk about and they say, like, well, remember, you know, like all of that stuff is also happening, and that's maybe why you're depressed or anxious or sad or whatever. But it's hard to keep track of, it's hard to remember. It's important to remind ourselves about what's going on and why we might be feeling the way we're feeling.

SPEAKER_00 42:31

Stare into the abyss with friends, the Autocratic Despair Podcast with Nick Mortensen and Dr. Craig Johnson. And don't forget Dr. Craig's other podcast, 15 minutes of fashion, available wherever you get your podcast.