LInks - 2nd January 2024 (1 - Joe Biden [including Pardon and meeting Hunter's Business Partners])

Possum Reviews on X - "The people who didn't know Joe Biden was senile until a couple months ago because they only consume media that's friendly to Democrats believe themselves to be better informed than you."

Collin Rugg on X - "NEW: AOC has meltdown after she tells Tony Bobulinski to give her a crime Joe Biden committed and then he gives her a crime Joe Biden committed.  After demanding that he tell her what crime Biden committed, AOC refused to let Bobulinski answer.  Bobulinski: "You asked me to answer the question. I answered the question. RICO, you're obviously not familiar with corruption statute."  AOC: "Excuse me sir. Excuse me sir. Excuse me sir."  Video: @mazemoore"

Meme - Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital: "As the Biden/Harris administration comes to an end, reminder that they drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, risking national security for short-term political gain, and will now leave office without ever refilling it…  Lowest level in ~40 years."

Bonchie on X - "Kind of wild that the White House clearly broke the law by illegally editing an official transcript *over* the objection of the Stenography Office, and it's not even a question that no one will be investigated, much less charged."
Exclusive | Ex-White House stenographer on Biden 'garbage' transcript edit: 'Don't recall this happening ever' - "A former White House stenographer told The Post Friday that they can not recall a single instance of the presidential press office altering a transcript to soften inflammatory or embarrassing remarks — as officials have been accused of doing after President Biden called former President Donald Trump’s voters “garbage” Tuesday night... the Associated Press reported that the stenographers’ office had complained of “spoliation of transcript integrity” and a “breach of protocol” by the press office after Biden, 81, said on a campaign call with the Voto Latino group that “the only garbage I see floating out there is his [Trump’s] supporters.”...   “I don’t ever recall the press office changing a transcript at the president’s request,” added McCormick, who now openly supports Trump.  “In fact, I can recall in the Bush years, President Bush being occasionally surprised and disappointed in how the transcripts reflected his words. But he never changed them. Those words are his words, but the transcripts belong to the American people.”...   A stenography supervisor wrote in an email to the press office that the edit was “a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices”"
"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right"

Election 2024: Biden suggests Trump supporters are 'garbage' - "The comments recalled then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton dismissing Trump supporters during a 2016 fundraiser in New York by saying that half would fit into a “ basket of deplorables.”"
Why are Republicans so divisive and hateful?!

Meme - Wall Street Silver @WallStreetSilv: "No need to wonder who Joe Biden voted for anymore 😂"
"PRESIDENT BIDEN ADDRESSES NATION AFTER TRUMP VICTORY *smiling happily*"

"It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right." : r/WayOfTheBern - "Bernie Sanders said 10 DAYS AGO that Biden "has been the most progressive, pro-worker president since FDR."  Now, he claims the Democratic Party has "abandoned the working class.""

Shock Poll: 8 in 10 Think Biden Laptop Cover-Up Changed Election - "A whopping 79 percent of Americans suggest President Donald Trump likely would have won reelection if voters had known the truth about Hunter Biden’s laptop—that it was real and not “Russian disinformation,” as intelligence officials aligned with Joe Biden falsely led the public to believe, a new national poll reveals...  Former National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe recently said there is growing evidence the FBI politically interfered in both the 2016 and 2020 elections while claiming they were worried about Russian interference.  “The names have changed, but the allegations are the same, that these FBI agents were attempting to influence the outcome of the 2020 election by suppressing derogatory information about Hunter Biden and potentially Joe Biden,” Ratclifffe said.  “It is the FBI that is the primary domestic authority for investigating and leading to the prosecution of election influence and election interference. It’s really a problem when the agency that is responsible for investigating those things is engaged in those things.”   Ratcliffe in late October 2020 issued a forceful denial against the prevailing spin about “disinformation” after prominent Democrat leader Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee proclaimed the Hunter Biden laptop story was “a smear on Joe Biden [that] comes from the Kremlin.”  “I very clearly came out and said, ‘Look, Adam Schiff is making this information up. There is no Russian disinformation involved here. It is Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the investigation is real,’ “ he said. “And that has proven to be true.”"
From 2022

Speaker Johnson dangles probe of Dem cover-up on Biden, suggests GOP will challenge efforts to replace him - "GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday he has seen President Biden deteriorate behind the scenes and indicated Republicans have held discussions about investigating Dem efforts to cover it up... Moderator Jake Tapper was taken aback by Johnson’s reference to a “cover-up” and asked whether that’s something that should be “investigated in a serious way by Congress or even law enforcement?” “Well, that’s something we’ve discussed,” Johnson replied without giving specifics. “Top Democrats in Congress and elsewhere were coming onto television regularly and saying Joe Biden is running circles around us. “It was just comical. They all knew that wasn’t true,” Johnson said. “They put up a false pretense about his capabilities. Now the whole country sees it, and they have painted themselves into a corner.”"
From July 2024

Meme - Logan Lancing @LoganLancing: "Your daily reminder that you don't hate the press enough."
The New York Tim... @nytimes: "For years, far-right commentators have floated a conspiracy theory that Democratic Party elites were secretly plotting to replace President Biden on the ticket. Now those conspiracists are using the moment to lend credibility to their work."
The New York Tim... @nytimes: "Many elected Democrats announced their support for Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the Democratic ticket in the hours after President Biden stepped the out of the race on Sunday. See who did."

Bad Hombre on X - "Sources on Capitol Hill say that Nancy Pelosi has confided to Democratic colleagues that she deeply regrets her role in the coup that replaced Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.   She expressed that she should have trusted her political instincts, which told her that Harris was too weak a candidate to face Donald Trump. Pelosi has also confided in her colleagues that she fears she permanently damaged her longtime friendship with the Biden family, who have not spoken to her since July.   Pelosi has also shared with colleagues that a significant factor in her decision to file for re-election in 2026 is her desire to spend at least two more years working to repair the damage done to her reputation and legacy.   The joy is gone."

Meme - John Harwood @JohnJHarwood: "people who insist Biden will pardon Hunter after specifically ruling it out are telling on themselves. they can't imagine someone acting on principle and keeping his word"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "On December 1, 2024, President Joe Biden announced that he had in fact pardoned his son Hunter"

Defiant L’s on X - "Biden’s presidency began with him denying the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop and is now concluding with him giving Hunter a pardon for everything uncovered on it."

President Biden pardons his son Hunter despite previous pledges not to - "President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, sparing the younger Biden a possible prison sentence for federal felony gun and tax convictions and reversing his past promises not to use the extraordinary powers of the presidency for the benefit of his family.  The Democratic president had previously said he would not pardon his son or commute his sentence after convictions in the two cases in Delaware and California...   Biden, who time and again pledged to Americans that he would restore norms and respect for the rule of law after Trump’s first term in office, ultimately used his position to help his son, breaking his public pledge to Americans that he would do no such thing. In a statement released Sunday evening, Biden said, “I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”  The president’s sweeping pardon covers not just the gun and tax offenses against the younger Biden, but also any other “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”  In June, Biden categorically ruled out a pardon or commutation for his son, telling reporters as his son faced trial in the Delaware gun case, “I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him.” As recently as Nov. 8, days after Trump’s victory, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre ruled out a pardon or clemency for the younger Biden, saying, “We’ve been asked that question multiple times. Our answer stands, which is no.”... “The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Biden said in his statement. “No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son.”  “I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision,” Biden added, claiming he made the decision this weekend... Hunter Biden was supposed to be sentenced this month in the two federal cases, which the special counsel brought after a plea deal with prosecutors that likely would have spared him prison time fell apart under scrutiny by a judge. Under the original deal, Hunter was supposed to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses and and would have avoided prosecution in the gun case as long as he stayed out of trouble for two years.  But the plea hearing quickly unraveled last year when the judge raised concerns about unusual aspects of the deal. The younger Biden was subsequently indicted in the two cases.  Hunter Biden’s legal team this weekend released a 52-page white paper titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden,” describing the president’s son as a “surrogate to attack and injure his father, both as a candidate in 2020 and later as president.”  The younger Biden’s lawyers have long argued that prosecutors bowed to political pressure to indict the president’s son amid heavy criticism by Trump and other Republicans of what they called the “sweetheart” plea deal."
Criticising the justice system is only dangerous if it threatens the left wing agenda

Joe Biden on X - "No one is above the law."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "On December 1, 2024, President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, for crimes covering nearly 11 years of “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”"
Ted Cruz on X - "This aged like fine milk."
Torsten Prochnow on X - "Exactly. President Joe Biden is a bloody liar. He blatantly lied when he claimed he would not pardon his son, Hunter Biden—yet he went ahead and did it. He also lied when he declared that nobody is above the law, as both he and his son clearly see themselves as exceptions to that rule"
It's only misusing your office to benefit your relatives if you're not on the left

Eric Abbenante on X - "Joe Biden pardons his son Hunter Biden:
Jessica Dean: "President Biden will pardon his son Hunter Biden."
Joe Biden: 'How dare Trump accuse the justice system of being weaponized against him.'
Also Joe Biden: 'The justice system was weaponized against my son Hunter.'"
Scott Adams on X - "The best part of the Hunter pardon is watching Democrats discover they supported a huge liar whose son is above the law. Lol."

Andy Kaczynski on X - "Esquire wrote an entire piece saying that people should “ shut the fuck up” about Hunter Biden’s pardon claiming that George H.W. Bush pardoned his son Neil. The entire story has now been corrected to note this is not a thing that happened. “ Esquire regrets the error.”"

Bill Ackman on X - "Biden is attempting to make permanent the Deep State before he leaves office by burdening the government with untenable contracts so that @realDonaldTrump⁩ and @DOGE cannot succeed. This needs to stop now. Federal Employees Land Work From Home Deal"

Community Notes & Violations on X - "Chuck Todd turn on Joe Biden for selfishly running for president in 2020 while Hunter was busy turning Beau's widow, Hallie, into a crack addict. Where was this energy in 2020 Chuck?"

Razor on X - "Journalists: "We had no idea Biden sold influence to China."
"We had no idea of Biden's mental health decline."
"We had no idea Hunter would get pardoned."
"We had no idea the laptop was real."
If only there was a group of people who did!"

Feds finally release photos showing then-VP Biden meeting son Hunter's China biz partners — days before he leaves office - "The National Archives has finally released photos showing then-Vice President Biden meeting with two of first son Hunter Biden’s Chinese government-linked business partners — again proving that the president lied about not interacting with his family’s foreign patrons.  The cache of photos, released long after their potential political salience and days before Biden retires on Jan. 20, also show Chinese President Xi Jinping grinning as then-Vice President Biden introduced his son during the same December 2013 trip to Beijing... The newly released photos, which would have been politically explosive if they were released during the now-closed House impeachment inquiry into alleged Biden family corruption, show the elder Biden shaking hands with incoming BHR Partners CEO Jonathan Li and greeting the company’s managing director Ming Xue. Joe Biden later wrote college recommendation letters for both of Li’s children and, according to Archer, greeted Li during a subsequent speaker-phone conversation when Hunter returned to Beijing.  BHR Partners was officially registered as a company 12 days after Air Force Two landed in Beijing with the Biden family for that trip, the Wall Street Journal reported.  The firm played an important role in foreign acquisitions for China, including the 2016 purchase of a Congolese cobalt mine from US and Canadian companies. Cobalt is used for electric car batteries...   The photos were released to the America First Legal Foundation in response to a transparency lawsuit...   “NARA had planned to release these photographs on October 23, 2024 — thirteen days before Election Day. Lawyers and representatives for President Biden and President Obama delayed NARA’s release of these photos — as they did with other critical records — until after Election Day.”... A May 2017 email written by Biden family associate James Gilliar penciled in a 10% cut for the “big guy” in reference to Joe Biden and another former family associate, Tony Bobulinski, said he spoke with Joe Biden the same month about the CEFC venture.  A further $5.1 million flowed directly to entities linked to Hunter and James Biden after Hunter wrote to a CEFC associate in July 2017 that he was “sitting here with my father” and expecting payment...   The fact that Joe Biden met with his son and brother James Biden’s foreign associates throughout his vice presidency and in the years that followed has been established by witness testimony — including Hunter’s own in February — though the president continued to deny it as he sought re-election.  “I did not interact with their partners,” Biden told a Post reporter in March, about five months before mutinous fellow Democrats forced the incumbent to relinquish the party’s presidential nomination in July following a disastrous debate performance. Republicans then ended the impeachment inquiry in August with a report accusing Biden of abusing his power...   Last December, Biden similarly denied interacting with his son and brother’s partners, saying: “I did not. And it’s just a bunch of lies. They’re lies. I did not. They’re lies” — when asked about an Associated Press poll finding that almost 70% of Americans, including 40% of Democrats, believed he acted either illegally or unethically in regards to his family’s business interests...   Joe Biden interacted with an array of other foreign associates of his family members.  As second son, Hunter organized dinners at Washington’s Cafe Milano in 2014 and 2015 featuring his father and his business associates from Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine, he confirmed...   Pozharskyi’s thank-you note to Hunter was the subject of The Post’s first bombshell report from the now-president’s son’s abandoned laptop in October 2020, though his father’s campaign vaguely denied the report, claiming that official calendars showed no such meeting.  Documents from the laptop cast doubt on Joe Biden’s claim he “never” discussed business with his son or brother and the then-Democratic presidential nominee falsely claimed the document cache was a “Russian plant” during the final debate of the 2020 election...   The outgoing president on Dec. 1 issued a sweeping pardon of his son — heading off potential criminal charges for unregistered foreign lobbying, which could have further probed his own role in business dealings, and wiping the slate clean of Hunter’s June conviction on gun charges a September guilty plea to $1.4 million in tax fraud."

Meme - Drew Holden @DrewHolden360: "Might be a good time to update this one, NYT."
"The New York Times. Questions and Answers About the Bidens and a Deal in China. There is no evidence that the former vice president was involved in or profited from a joint venture pursued by his son and brother."
New York Post @nypost: "Feds finally release photos showing Then VP Biden meeting son Hunter's China biz partners - days before he leaves office"

All the times Biden denied meeting with Hunter's biz associates -- as more photos emerge and expose president - "The question of Biden’s degree of involvement in foreign dealings now is largely academic, as he and his family are no longer expected to play a significant role in American foreign policy following his retirement on Jan. 20.   The matter could present future credibility issues for Biden allies, however, such as top Oversight Committee Democrat Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who insisted in February that “there were no meetings with the president.” A review of Biden’s public statements demonstrate a pattern of dishonesty as a mountain of evidence — including photos, emails and witness statements — showed that he did indeed interact with his family’s business partners."

'Good Time to Update This One'! NYT Report on Biden & Son's Business Dealings Just Aged Badly - "Joe Biden will be leaving office the same way he entered: Lying about everything. The same goes for the legacy media.   One of the biggest whoppers Biden served up when he was running for president was a flat denial about any involvement in his son's business dealings. Biden even claimed he'd never even spoken to Hunter about his business. This week photos surfaced that show Biden's claims to have never spoken to Hunter about his business dealings and certainly never talked to his business partners to be the usual BS from Joe... The press not only gave Biden a pass, but many media outlets actively defended him against the evidence Republicans were putting out, and they kept moving the goalposts ("Biden never spoke to his son about it" became "Biden wasn't actively involved" and then "Biden never profited," etc.).   The media's used to running cover for the Bidens. Remember when Leslie Stahl told Donald Trump that stories about Hunter's crimes were "discredited," and the press helped Dems push the "51 former intelligence officials say claims about Biden's son's laptop and its contents are likely part of a Russian misinformation campaign"? All that turned out to be true, but the media won't bother to update their stories.   This story is no different. Ahead of the 2020 election the media either knowingly lied on behalf of Biden or took his denials at face value in order to publish "Republicans are claiming with no evidence"-style reports.   The New York Times did what the media was doing at that time, which was to claim "there's no evidence" while seeming to be disinterested in looking for any evidence themselves... This is from the Times' story in 2020 under the subhead "there is no evidence that the former vice president was involved in or profited from a joint venture pursued by his son and brother." These kinds of defenses of the Bidens were conveniently published shortly before the 2020 election and it was a coordinated media effort at the behest of the Democrats... The Times and other outlets won't be updating any of their "no evidence" takes just like Politico hasn't updated their story about the more than 50 former intel officials signing a "Russian disinformation" letter about Hunter's laptop. Having no shame allows them to be fine with that... It's been a banner few years for "journalism," all while they sit back and wonder why trust in their industry has gone down the drain."
I still see left wingers mocking "conspiracy theories" and "conspiracy theorists"

AG Merrick Garland corrupted the DOJ with political persecutions - "As what’s left of the Biden administration winds down, I’d like to offer an end-of-days reminder: Joe Biden wasn’t just a terrible president.   His Attorney General Merrick Garland was an equally terrible leader of the Department of Justice.  Garland, you may recall, was nominated for the Supreme Court by President Barack Obama to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly a few months before the 2016 election.   Republicans sat on Garland’s nomination, maintaining that the seat should be filled by a new president.  We were told that this was hideously unfair and partisan, especially because, as the Obama administration and its friendly media repeatedly assured us, Garland was a moderate, a nonpartisan straight shooter, a person with a first-rate judicial temperament: honest, just, fair and wise. What a crock that was... Garland went on to spend his entire time as AG demonstrating to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that he is anything but honest, just, fair and wise.  Let me be clear (to use an Obama phrase): Garland has been a dishonest, unfair, partisan hack.  And none too wise, either. As Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told the AG in hearings about the FBI’s war on political opponents, “Thank God you are not on the Supreme Court.”  Those hearings involved Garland’s inexplicable decision to hurl federal law-enforcement resources at parents who spoke against critical race theory and unpopular transgender policies at school-board meetings.  In response to a letter from the left-leaning National School Boards Association, which described those meetings with lurid language but scant evidence of any real threats, Garland ordered the FBI and the Department of Justice into action against these “domestic terror” threats. It turned out the Biden White House was talking to the National School Boards Association about the matter before its letter was even sent, the Washington Free Beacon reported, raising questions of collusion between the administration and outside “activists.”  The FBI also infiltrated traditional Catholic congregations — all while leftist groups were promoting riots and terror in cities across America, unhindered by the feds.   Garland’s Justice Department showed less pity to grandmas praying outside of abortion clinics than to actual domestic terrorists who were inciting riots and trying to burn federal buildings.   Biden’s AG has also presided over the absurd “lawfare” prosecutions of Trump. He approved the FBI SWAT raid on Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago, where agents pawed through Melania’s underwear and left bogus classified-document covers lying around so as to produce photos that gave the false impression that Trump had, well, left classified documents lying around. To add to the outrage, special prosecutor Jack Smith, who Garland sicced on Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents, had to admit to the court that his office had . . . mishandled those very classified documents, mixing them up in ways that disadvantaged Trump’s defense lawyers, then falsely representing that the documents were exactly as they had been received.  Garland prosecuted former Trump official Peter Navarro and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress, sending both to jail for months   But when Garland himself was held in contempt of Congress, he did not, surprisingly, bring charges against himself, or appoint a special prosecutor to objectively investigate.  Garland was charged with ignoring a congressional subpoena regarding its probe of Biden family business dealings.   Hey, ignoring a congressional subpoena is what he jailed Navarro and Bannon for! That doesn’t sound very judicious or fair.  Well, no surprise. Garland just followed the lead of Obama’s attorney general and “wingman,” Eric Holder, who also let himself off the hook when charged with contempt of Congress.   In a bid to polish up Biden’s rusted image, The Washington Post on Sunday reported on the president’s private complaints that Garland should have been faster to prosecute Trump, so that he could have staged a “politically damaging trial before the election.”  Funny, as I recall Trump had a lot of trials before the election — and they all seemed to drive his approval levels up, not down.   In any case, this seems like an admission, as law professor Ann Althouse observed, that “Biden intended to use the Justice Department to destroy his political adversary!” Indeed. That now seems to have been Garland’s role throughout this administration, which — in the name of “protecting democracy” and our institutions — has only undermined our democracy and corrupted our institutions.  That’s Biden’s sorry legacy. And Merrick Garland’s, too."
Clearly it's a Danger to Democracy that Trump has threatened to prosecute his political opponents

Links - 1st January 2025 (2 - Therapy)

Meme - "boys still go over to each others houses to play video games???"
"this is the type of therapy you don't pay for"

Meme - Olivia Reingold: "Me at 20 years old, trapped at a Hawaiian treatment center, heavily medicated on mood stabilizers and antidepressants.   Fast forward to today: I'm now in the process of withdrawing from medications that doctors first prescribed me over 6 years ago."

Abigail Shrier on X - "Today's the Day! BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up My two-year investigation into why the generation that received the most wide-ranging mental health interventions is doing so poorly. And most importantly: How we fix it. Available NOW:"

Bari Weiss on X - "BAD THERAPY by @AbigailShrier is the #1 book on all of Amazon. But didn't make the @nytimes bestseller list. 👀 Buy her book. And listen to our conversation here:"
Rob Henderson on X - "Based on internal sales data Troubled should have debuted at #4 on the @nytimes list but wasn’t listed at all. The list is pro-wrestling for intellectuals; everyone knows it’s make-believe but still fall for it. In the mean time, it’s up to all of us to support bold authors."
Balaji on X - "Like everything else in Sulzberger’s paper, the NYT bestseller list is fake. They were forced to admit in court that it’s not a ranked list. It’s actually “editorial content” and they can exclude books they don’t like."

How Bad Therapy Hijacked Our Nation’s Schools - "American kids are the freest, most privileged kids in all of history. They are also the saddest, most anxious, depressed, and medicated generation on record. Nearly a third of teen girls say they have seriously considered suicide. For boys, that number is an also alarming 14 percent.   What’s even stranger is that all of these worsening mental health outcomes for kids have coincided with a generation of parents hyper-fixated on the mental health and well-being of their children... the advent of therapy culture, the rise of “gentle parenting,” and the spread of “social-emotional learning” in schools is actually causing much of the anxiety and depression faced by today’s youth. In other words, Abigail argues that in our attempt to keep kids safe, we are failing the next generation of American adults... Most American kids today are not in therapy. But the vast majority are in school, where therapists and non-therapists diagnose kids liberally, and offer in-school counseling and mental health and wellness instruction. By 2022, 96 percent of public schools offered mental health services to students. Many of these interventions constitute what I call “bad therapy”: they target the healthy, inadvertently exacerbating kids’ worry, sadness, and feelings of incapacity... Our mandate: “trauma-informed education.” We pledged to treat all kids as if they had experienced some debilitating trauma.  Subsequent interviews with dozens of teachers, school counselors, and parents across the country banished all doubt: therapists weren’t the only ones practicing bad therapy on kids. Often traveling under the name “social-emotional learning,” bad therapy had gone airborne... Forget the Pledge of Allegiance. Today’s teachers are more likely to inaugurate the school day with an “emotions check-in.”... I asked Leif Kennair, a world-renowned expert in the treatment of anxiety, and Michael Linden, a professor of psychiatry at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, what they thought of practice. Both said this unceasing attention to feelings was likely to make kids more dysregulated.  If we want to help kids with emotional regulation, what should we communicate instead?  “I’d say: worry less. Ruminate less,” Kennair told me. “Try to verbalize everything you feel less. Try to self-monitor and be mindful of everything you do—less.” There’s another problem posed by emotions check-ins: they tend to induce a state orientation at school, potentially sabotaging kids’ abilities to complete the tasks in front of them.  Many psychological studies back this up. An individual is more likely to meet a challenge if she focuses on the task ahead, rather than her own emotional state. If she’s thinking about herself, she’s less likely to meet any challenge. “If you want to, let’s say, climb a mountain, if you start asking yourself after two steps, ‘How do I feel?’ you’ll stay at the bottom,” Dr. Linden said... There’s a problem with in-school therapy, an ethical compromise, which arguably corrupts its very heart. In a remarkably underregulated profession, therapists still have a few ethical bright lines. And among the clearest is—or was—the prohibition on “dual relationships.”... school counselors, school psychologists, and social workers enjoy a dual relationship with every kid who comes to see them... As school counselors and psychologists came to see themselves as students’ “advocates,” they slipped into a dual relationship with their students: part therapist; part academic intermediary; part parenting coach... Over the past two years, I have been so inundated with parents’ stories of school counselors encouraging a child to try on a variant gender identity, even changing the child’s name without telling the parents, that I’ve almost wondered if there are any good school counselors. One parent I interviewed told me that her son’s high school counselor had given him the address of a local LGBTQ youth shelter where he might seek asylum and attempt to legally liberate himself from loving parents... In California, Illinois, Washington, Colorado, Florida, and Maryland, minors twelve or thirteen and up are statutorily entitled to access mental health care without parental permission. Schools are not only under no obligation to inform parents that their kids are meeting regularly with a school counselor, they may even be barred from doing so... One day, she cut to the chase: “What is something that is making you really sad right now?”... Within minutes, half of the kids were sobbing. It was time for the math lesson, but no one wanted to do it. It was just so sad, thinking that the boy’s dad hated him. What if their dads hated them, too?  “It just kind of set the tone for the rest of the day,” Laura said. “Everyone just was feeling really sad and down for a really long time. It was hard for them to kind of come out of that.”  A second mom at the school confirmed to me that word spread throughout the school about the AA meeting–style breakdown. Except this AA meeting featured elementary school kids who then ran to tell their friends what everyone else had shared.  Thanks to social-emotional learning, scenes of emotional melee have become increasingly common in American classrooms... “With children especially, whatever you focus on is what will grow,” Laura said. “And I feel like with [social-emotional learning], they’re watering the weeds, instead of watering the flowers.”  Advocates of social-emotional learning claim that nearly all kids today have suffered serious traumatic experiences that leave them unable to learn. They also insist that having an educator host a class-wide trauma swap before lunch will help such kids heal. Neither claim is well-founded. But the predictable result is precisely what Ms. Julie saw: otherwise happy kids are brought low and a child seriously struggling has his private pain publicly exposed by someone in no position to remedy it... Good therapists know that it may be counterproductive to push a kid to share his trauma at school. Good therapists are trained specifically to avoid encouraging rumination, a thought process typified by dwelling on past pain and negative emotions. Rumination is a well-established risk factor for depression. But school staff who play therapist rarely seem aware that they might be encouraging rumination as they stalk a kid at lunch, waiting to see if he’ll open up about his father’s incarceration minutes before a history test. Social-emotional learning enthusiasts happily disrupt math or English or history because, to the true believers, education is merely a vehicle for their social-emotional lessons—the corn chip that carries the guac straight to a kid’s mouth... The only feeling apparently never affirmed in social-emotional learning is mistrust of emotional conversation in place of learning. A decent number of kids actually show up hoping to learn some geometry and not burn their limited instructional time on conversations about their mental health. But from every angle, such children could only be made to feel errant and alone."
"Awareness" about "mental health" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once again, people find what they're looking for

Salty Scallawag on X - "They are told from early on in school that the planet is in grave danger, that their race is either the oppressed or oppressor, recently they were told that they were virus carrying little germ factories that would kill grandma and grandpa, they are being forced into becoming sexual before their brains can comprehend it and to keep secrets from their parents. The department of education has ruined this generation."

Melissa Chen on X - "It’s plain to see that despite society’s increasing focus on “self-care” and therapy, our mental health crisis has only gotten worse. Particularly among our youth.  Therapy can be a huge enabler of learned helplessness and justifier of personal narcissism.   I’m sure there’s “good therapy” out there but but if your “therapy“ somehow always terminates in nothing ever being your fault or your responsibility, the problem is you.   And just like every domain of American life, I am certain that mental health as an enterprise and as an institution has been ideologically corrupted.  I can’t wait to read @AbigailShrier ’s new book. Congrats Abigail!"

Alexander Boldizar on X - "Most therapy is just monetized rumination. And even psychologists agree rumination is bad.  Go exercise, have a drink with friends, walk in the sunshine, climb a mountain, fight a man your own size under an agreed rule set--life is out there, not in your navel or your own head.   (Not "your," obviously.)"

Richard Hanania on X - "96% of public schools now offer mental health services. As mental health awareness increases, kids are having more mental problems than any time on record. To fix this problem, California plans to hire 10,000 more counselors so kids can get even more therapy."

Mankosmash on X - "Therapists don't want to cure you. They want you to like them & keep paying them indefinitely.  Therapists have a perverse incentive to make you feel dependent on them instead of helping you by confronting you or invalidating your mental illness."
The left love picking at conflicts of interest when it helps their agenda

Olivia Reingold on X - "“Gentle parents”—please listen to this before you create another kid like me, whose life was nearly derailed by 15+ years of therapy.
By the time I was four or five, it was clear I had emotional problems. I would sometimes sit at the foot of our stairs, hyperventilating over something as simple as the discomfort of a seam in my sock. When a homeless person stopped my mother and me on the streets of New York City to ask for some change to “buy a cup of soup,” I remember going back to our hotel room to weep, disturbed by the way strangers—including us—walked past him without helping.  By kindergarten, I was in therapy.  By fifth grade, I was on mood stabilizers—perhaps justifiably, since by then I'd developed suicidal ideation.  Therapy did not create my emotional problems. Neither did culture—this was before the rise of social media.  But what therapy did was convince me that my problems were immutable, and perhaps even genetically encoded in my DNA.   By the time I was 16, I was anorexic. When I had to drop out of college as a sophomore, a doctor looked me in the eyes and told me my condition was “like cancer.”  “If you don’t treat this, it will get worse,” she said.  Over the next five years, while I was in and out of treatment centers, various doctors reminded me that eating disorders have one of the highest mortality rates of any psychiatric illness—warnings the medical system now issues about gender dysphoria (although they say that is an immutable issue of identity, not mental health).  Therapy is how I became convinced that I came from a line of eating disordered women. I reflected upon my maternal line and swore that my mother, her mother, and her mother’s mother all were riddled with eating disorders. The truth is that my grandmother was sick with anorexia, but I believe it was simply a culturally sanctioned way to express her distress.  At 20 years old, I was freshly out of treatment—and 100% insufferable.    I saw harms everywhere. We even had a word for them in my support groups—"trigger warnings."  I had a vendetta against Starbuck’s branding of its low calorie beverages as “skinny” lattes, believing it was a slight to the anorexics of the world.  I blistered over in anger when I learned that my cousin, a bar owner, was considering offering “skinny girl margaritas” to customers, convinced he was aiding and abetting eating disorders.  I felt personally offended by gyms that kept scales in their locker rooms.  I told anyone I dated to avoid mention of all “numbers,” that I never wanted to hear how many miles they ran, what pant size they wore, how much they weighed, or how many calories they consumed—not ever.  You know what made me better? Less validation.  It was the fearless parenting style of my beloved aunt Melanie that made me better.  I lived with Melanie in Atlanta for five years.  When I told her I was contemplating throwing up a meal, she told me she’d like to have a word with my eating disorder: "Yeah," she'd say. "Can you tell it to shut the fuck up?"   She told me that yes, it was going to be hard to keep meals down, but that you bet I could do it.  She helped me develop confidence. Slowly, I cultivated an identity beyond being just sick.  The most surprising thing was the realization that I was not as sick I had thought. Yes, I had anxiety about things like picking up the phone, but what do you know—after a few months of practice, I no longer fretted over the phone.  Melanie thought me that I could sit through discomfort—and that in fact, discomfort was my medicine.  I’ll say that again: discomfort was my medicine.  Your kid might be going through something right now, but I want to posit that what they actually need is less validation and these two sentences: 1) yes it is hard 2) you bet you can do it, kiddo.   Thank you to all the parents with the courage to buck the system. Thank you to the non-gentle parents.
TLDR: how therapy broke me but some good old fashioned “rub some dirt in it” parenting from my beloved aunt healed me."

Olivia Reingold on X - "For anyone looking to make a change, here are some classic Melanie-isms:
After a certain age, you can’t blame your parents anymore.
On homework: done is better than perfect.
Assume you will achieve your dreams, because you will (she's a big believer of “The Secret”)."
An external locus of control is associated with negative outcomes

Wilfred Reilly on X - "Therapy is a near-total waste of time, unless it's something like serious training in CBT techniques. ~All studies show this: the bottom 20-30% of therapists make your problems measurably worse, by over-focusing on them and not offering workable solutions.  TLDR: you can "talk to a smart friend" for free."

Eric S. Raymond on X - "The most important thing I've learned about human psychology in the last five years: therapy for depression in men is usually mistargeted and ineffective because therapists think men are like women, who become depressed because they don't feel loved.   This is completely wrong. Men cope with feeling unloved relatively easily. What destroys them is feeling powerless.  So yeah. Swing a sword. Restore a steam engine. Climb a rock. Do something - anything - that asserts your competence and control over your environment.   For men, this is much better therapy than talking about feelings."

Thread by @LisaMarchiano on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - " I’ve just heard another story from an acquaintance about a therapist encouraging someone to cut off contact with her parents. This is such a fraught and complex area, but I have thoughts. Here goes. First, of course, there are times when a parent has been so horribly abusive or is currently so difficult to contain that it makes sense to have no contact. However, I think these cases are unusual. Most of us have parents who tried to be “good enough.” James Hollis has said that life is traumatic, and parents can either mitigate or intensify that trauma.
None of us make it to adulthood without some wounding experiences. Our parents certainly did things that were wounding at some point. This is rarely abuse. Most of the time, it is the more ordinary, inevitable, and perfectly human ruptures in attunement. Weathering these ruptures will mold us, make us resilient, and shape who we become. But they are wounding nonetheless, and we will need to come to terms with them.  We all must separate psychologically from our parents if we are to become the fullest version of ourselves possible. For most of us, this process begins during adolescence but continues throughout our twenties and even thirties. This process takes time. Part of it involves acknowledging parts of our childhood that were wounding. Evaluating these wounds – understanding where our parents let us down or hurt us and how that has affected us – is an important part of gaining self-understanding. The path to psychological growth means acknowledging the ways in which we were wounded. Every therapist has had an adult come into therapy claiming they had a perfect family and everything about their childhood was great. That is a sure sign that the person is defending against something too painful to acknowledge. If exploring our childhood through the lens of our woundedness is a necessary step toward psychological independence, it is not sufficient. We must move beyond grievance to take responsibility for ourselves and our lives. We cannot do this while remaining focused on what our parents did or didn’t do for us. To believe that everything that is wrong is our parents’ fault infantilizes us. It keeps us trapped in a black and white world where all of the “bad” is out there and we can protect ourselves if we just stay away from it. In truth, the world is complex. People are complex. We are complex and so are our parents. In the 2017 film “Lady Bird,” the titular character comes to accept and understand her mother’s fervent love for her even though her mom is flawed and held back by her own limitations.
Monstering our parents prevents growth in other ways as well. We are usually similar to our parents. If we are our parents’ biological child, we may have much in common with them. Making a parent out to be the villain makes it harder for us to accept those parts of ourselves that we have in common with that parent. For this and other reasons, we must move beyond guilt and blame if we are to grow toward wholeness.
Clients often need help from therapists identifying relational patterns in their family of origin that may have been maladaptive. Doing this work can bring up previously cut-off feelings of hurt and anger, and it's important that these feelings have plenty of room and validation. Clients may need help setting good boundaries with parents who are intrusive, demanding, or controlling. But care must be taken that therapist and client don't collude in creating a black and white narrative that paints the parent as “toxic” and irredeemable. All things being equal, being in contact with our families is better for everyone – as long as we maintain good boundaries. If your therapist encourages you to cut off contact with your parents without extremely good reason, consider that this may not be in your best interests.
"But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it... ...The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart.” ~C. G. Jung"

The Kids Are Not Alright on X - "“Therapy is meant to radicalize us…I’ve been radicalized through grassroots movements…No, I will not call the police or recommend psychiatric incarceration.”  -NY LMSW, ze/zir, “somatic pro-liberation & anti-oppressive,” “neurospicy queer” w/ “a splash of chronic disability”"
Alexander on X - "Hot take - the goal of therapy should not be to “radicalize” you. Political radicalization is associated with worse mental health. Having an external locus of control (e.g. holding beliefs that society is oppressing you) is also associated with poorer mental health.
Lahtinen, O. (2024). Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social justice attitudes. Scandinavian journal of psychology."
The left shove their shit everywhere they can

Overuse of the word "Trauma" : r/GenZ - "I'm old. 39 and counting. I work with a lot of young people right out of college though and I've noticed they all use the word "trauma" quite a bit. Especially the girls.  What they call "trauma" I would call pretty standard difficulties/annoyances everyone experiences.  Example: I was talking to a girl I work with and she was telling me she went on a date with a guy and everything was going good until he started vaping and that was hard for her because she had some "trauma" associated with vaping/smoking.  I asked what she meant and she basically said that her mom smoked when she was younger and she hated the smell...  I associate "trauma" with things like violence, death, abuse, etc. I think the way GenZ uses it sort of diminishes real traumatic experiences.  Anybody else ever notice this? Am I the only one?"
"Trauma" is anything someone doesn't like

Understanding Birth Trauma: Emotional and Physical Impact of C-Sections - "For many mums, a C-section was completely unexpected. They spent the majority of their pregnancy speaking to their midwife about a vaginal birth (while C-sections are usually mentioned, they are rarely covered in great detail).  Then, when it occurred, the emergency C-section came as a huge shock...   Alongside the physical pain, which is traumatic in itself, C-sections can also cause intense emotional trauma."

Overuse of the word "Trauma" : r/GenZ - "And "boundaries". Another therapy term that's been misappropriated by folks who want to be controlling without seeming controlling"
"Not just misappropriated, but downright misused. People throw that word around often having no idea what it means or how it works.  Boundary-setting is not a demand on someone else to change behavior. Rather, it simply defines how the boundary-setter will respond under such-and-such circumstance. A person enforces their own boundaries when they consistently do what they said they would do.  People say “boundaries” when they really mean “rules.” Calling it a boundary doesn’t make it so."

Why the Children of Immigrants Tend to Be More Anxious Than Their Parents - "As a first-generation American, Portillo is more likely to develop an anxiety disorder than her parents, according to a new study that states that immigrants have lower rates of anxiety disorders than U.S.-born adults across most racial-ethnic backgrounds. These findings align with the immigrant paradox, a phenomenon experts and researchers have observed about recent immigrants to the U.S. outperforming children of immigrants on health, education, and crime-related outcomes. According to licensed therapist Stephanie Contreras, whose clinical work focuses on immigrant youth, there’s no current answer for the incongruity... Immigration is often traumatic"
Since migration is so "traumatic", it needs to be banned to protect migrants and their children
Of course, this has nothing at all to do with overdiagnosis, therapy culture and identity politics

Dr. Jen Wolkin | ADHD + Trauma Therapist on X - "You are NOT lazy. You are exhausted from the grief and trauma you’ve endured. Also, one very real response to trauma is shutting down - according to polyvagal theory this is called dorsal vagal shut-down. Its when you freeze and maybe even dissociate, have little energy, and feel stuck. Obviously we are accountable for the healing, AND also, please give yourself GRACE. -Dr. Jen"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "No.   You're probably just lazy. None of you are prisoners of war. Almost none of you have PTSD or have endured "trauma" behind the common-if-awful car wreck/DV/uncle-died stuff of life. 46% of young women are not diagnosed with dubious mental illnesses today because life is 11x as hard as it was in 1952.   If you have the energy to argue with me on X, get up and go to the gym."

Meme - "girls thinking their psychiatrist cares abt them is the same as men thinking the stripper actually loves them"

Wilfred Reilly on X - "In the modern USA, "therapy" is the process by which you learn that opposing males changing in your women's locker room is "dysfunctional" and having any expectations whatsoever of your wife or partner is "abuse." Successful men avoid it for a reason."

Lulu Cheng Meservey on X - "> One of New York City’s elite private schools told families on Thursday that “students who feel too emotionally distressed” the day after Election Day will be excused from classes, and that psychologists will be available during the week to provide counseling. Fragility culture."
Wesley Yang on X - "The psychic fragility inculcated by the therapeutic statism endemic to modern educational institutions is permanently wired into the limbic system of a rising generation of elites"
These are the people who go on about "white fragility"

Alexander on X - "Many approaches to therapy revolve around “trauma.” Talk about your trauma. Uncover “hidden” trauma that you didn’t know you had. Get really mad about it! Turns out all of this probably just makes people worse. It’s psychologically - and even physically - damaging. Dwelling on your trauma, negative feelings, and victimhood is one of the worst things you can do.
Seligman’s conclusion:  “Venting your anger is not good for your health. It has no clear relation to cancer, it may increase - rather than decrease - your risk for coronary heart disease, and it can exacerbate depression.”"

Therapy wars: the revenge of Freud - "there’s a very well-known narrative when it comes to therapy and the relief of suffering – and it leaves Pollens and his fellow psychoanalysts decisively on the wrong side of history. For a start, Freud (this story goes) has been debunked. Young boys don’t lust after their mothers, or fear their fathers will castrate them; adolescent girls don’t envy their brothers’ penises. No brain scan has ever located the ego, super-ego or id. The practice of charging clients steep fees to ponder their childhoods for years – while characterising any objections to this process as “resistance”, demanding further psychoanalysis – looks to many like a scam. “Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say” than Sigmund Freud, the philosopher Todd Dufresne declared a few years back, summing up the consensus and echoing the Nobel prize-winning scientist Peter Medawar, who in 1975 called psychoanalysis “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the 20th century”. It was, Medawar went on, “a terminal product as well – something akin to a dinosaur or a zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.” A jumble of therapies emerged in Freud’s wake, as therapists struggled to put their endeavours on a sounder empirical footing. But from all these approaches – including humanistic therapy, interpersonal therapy, transpersonal therapy, transactional analysis and so on – it’s generally agreed that one emerged triumphant. Cognitive behavioural therapy, or CBT, is a down-to-earth technique focused not on the past but the present; not on mysterious inner drives, but on adjusting the unhelpful thought patterns that cause negative emotions. In contrast to the meandering conversations of psychoanalysis, a typical CBT exercise might involve filling out a flowchart to identify the self-critical “automatic thoughts” that occur whenever you face a setback, like being criticised at work, or rejected after a date. CBT has always had its critics, primarily on the left, because its cheapness – and its focus on getting people quickly back to productive work – makes it suspiciously attractive to cost-cutting politicians. But even those opposed to it on ideological grounds have rarely questioned that CBT does the job. Since it first emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, so many studies have stacked up in its favour that, these days, the clinical jargon “empirically supported therapies” is usually just a synonym for CBT: it’s the one that’s based on facts...  experiment after experiment seemed to confirm the superiority of CBT – which helps explain the shocked response to a study, published last May, that seemed to show CBT getting less and less effective, as a treatment for depression, over time... That puzzle was still being digested when researchers at London’s Tavistock clinic published results in October from the first rigorous NHS study of long-term psychoanalysis as a treatment for chronic depression. For the most severely depressed, it concluded, 18 months of analysis worked far better – and with much longer-lasting effects – than “treatment as usual” on the NHS, which included some CBT. Two years after the various treatments ended, 44% of analysis patients no longer met the criteria for major depression, compared to one-tenth of the others. Around the same time, the Swedish press reported a finding from government auditors there: that a multimillion pound scheme to reorient mental healthcare towards CBT had proved completely ineffective in meeting its goals... “Freud was full of horseshit!” the therapist Albert Ellis, arguably the progenitor of CBT, liked to say. It’s hard to deny he had a point. One big part of the problem for psychoanalysis has been the evidence that its founder was something of a charlatan, prone to distorting his findings, or worse. (In one especially eye-popping case, which only came to light in the 1990s, Freud told a patient, the American psychiatrist Horace Frink, that his misery stemmed from an inability to recognise that he was homosexual – and hinted that the solution lay in making a large financial contribution to Freud’s work.) But for those challenging psychoanalysis with alternative approaches to therapy, even more troublesome was the sense that even the most sincere psychoanalyst is always engaged in a guessing-game, always prone to finding “proof” of his or her hunches, whether it’s there or not. The basic premise of psychoanalysis, after all, is that our lives are ruled by unconscious forces, which speak to us only indirectly: through symbols in dreams, “accidental” slips of the tongue, or through what infuriates us about others, which is a clue to what we can’t face in ourselves. But all this makes the whole thing unfalsifiable. Protest to your shrink that, no, you don’t really hate your father, and that just shows how desperate you must be to avoid admitting to yourself that you do... scholars have begun to ask pointed questions about the studies that first fuelled CBT’s ascendancy. In a provocative 2004 paper, the Atlanta-based psychologist Drew Westen and his colleagues showed how researchers – motivated by the desire for an experiment with clearly interpretable results – had often excluded up to two-thirds of potential participants, typically because they had multiple psychological problems. The practice is understandable: when a patient has more than one problem, it’s harder to untangle the lines of cause and effect. But it may mean that the people who do get studied are extremely atypical... Many neuroscience experiments have indicated that the brain processes information much faster than conscious awareness can keep track of it, so that countless mental operations run, in the neuroscientist David Eagleman’s phrase, “under the hood” – unseen by the conscious mind in the driving-seat... This doesn’t mesh well with a basic assumption of CBT – that, with training, we can learn to catch most of our unhelpful mental responses in the act. Rather, it seems to confirm the psychoanalytic intuition that the unconscious is huge, and largely in control... Perhaps the only undeniable truth to emerge from disputes among therapists is that we still don’t have much of a clue how minds work... This may be why many scholars have been drawn to what has become known as the “dodo-bird verdict”: the idea, supported by some studies, that the specific kind of therapy makes little difference... What seems to matter much more is the presence of a compassionate, dedicated therapist, and a patient committed to change"
This is revealing - the left doesn't want cost-effective treatments that work but expensive ones that presumably don't work

Therapy Isn't Fixing America's Mental Health Crisis - "The U.S. has reached peak therapy. Counseling has become fodder for hit books, podcasts, and movies. Professional athletes, celebrities, and politicians routinely go public with their mental health struggles. And everyone is talking—correctly or not—in the language of therapy, peppering conversations with references to gaslighting, toxic people, and boundaries. All this mainstream awareness is reflected in the data too: by the latest federal estimates, about one in eight U.S. adults now takes an antidepressant and one in five has recently received some kind of mental-health care, an increase of almost 15 million people in treatment since 2002. Even in the recent past—from 2019 to 2022—use of mental-health services jumped by almost 40% among millions of U.S. adults with commercial insurance, according to a recent study in JAMA Health Forum. But something isn’t adding up. Even as more people flock to therapy, U.S. mental health is getting worse by multiple metrics. Suicide rates have risen by about 30% since 2000. Almost a third of U.S. adults now report symptoms of either depression or anxiety, roughly three times as many as in 2019, and about one in 25 adults has a serious mental illness like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. As of late 2022, just 31% of U.S. adults considered their mental health “excellent,” down from 43% two decades earlier. Trends are going in the wrong direction, even as more people seek care. “That’s not true for cancer [survival], it’s not true for heart disease [survival], it’s not true for diabetes [diagnosis], or almost any other area of medicine,” says Dr. Thomas Insel, the psychiatrist who ran the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002 to 2015 and author of Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health. “How do you explain that disconnect?”... Some experts, however, believe the issue goes deeper than inadequate access, down to the very foundations of modern psychiatry. As they see it, the issue isn’t only that demand is outpacing supply; it’s that the supply was never very good to begin with, leaning on therapies and medications that only skim the surface of a vast ocean of need. In most medical specialties, doctors use objective data to make their diagnoses and treatment plans. If your blood pressure is high, you’ll get a hypertension drug; if cancerous cells turn up in your biopsy, you might start chemotherapy. Psychiatry doesn’t have such cut-and-dry metrics, though not for lack of trying... research suggests both misdiagnosis and overdiagnosis are common in psychiatry. One 2019 study even concluded that the criteria underlying psychiatric diagnoses are “scientifically meaningless” due to their inconsistent metrics, overlapping symptoms, and limited scope... In a 2019 review article, researchers re-analyzed data used to assess the efficacy of supposedly research-backed mental-health treatments. Some methods—like exposure therapy, through which people with phobias are systematically exposed to their triggers until they’re desensitized to them—came out looking good. But a full half of the therapies did not have credible evidence to back them... Even styles of therapy with solid evidence behind them can vary in efficacy depending on the clinician at the reins. One of the best predictors of success in therapy, research has shown, is the relationship between patient and provider... The APA says about 75% of people who try psychotherapy see some benefit from it—but not everyone does, and a small portion may even experience negative effects, studies suggest. Those who improve may need 20 sessions before they have a breakthrough. Given the significant investment of time, money, and energy that may be required for therapy to succeed, it’s perhaps unsurprising that medication, which is by contrast a quicker fix, is so popular... In the early 2000s, the NIMH ran a large, multi-stage trial meant to compare different antidepressants head-to-head, in hopes of determining whether some worked better than others across the board or in specific groups of patients. Instead, Insel says, “what we came out with was the evidence that, actually, none of them are very good"... “You can put them on medicines and they’ll have some improvement,” in some cases more than others, Higgins says. “But guess what? They’re still anxious and depressed.”... Seemingly non-medical solutions—like improving access to affordable housing, education, and job training; building out community spaces and peer support programs; and increasing the availability of fresh food and green space—can have profound effects on well-being, as can simple tools like mindfulness and movement... Research suggests fewer than 20% of mental-health clinicians measure changes in symptoms over time."
Alternatively, "awareness" is a self-fulfilling prophecy, bad therapy can worsen the problem and victim culture means people want to be labelled as hurt

How therapy has turned generation of Americans into 'victims' and may be CAUSING depression epidemic, according to top experts - "experts are starting to wonder if the widespread use of therapy may be having the opposite effect and actually fueling America's depression crisis. They argue the treatment, however well-intentioned, can instill a 'victim' mentality where people become hyper-focused on their feelings and less engaged with the world around them, making them more depressed... Therapy speak has become so common it has permeated mainstream culture in the US. Clinical words used during counseling like 'gaslighting', 'trauma' and 'microaggressions' have become household terms. Professor Robert Dingwall, a social scientist and adviser to the UK government, told DailyMail.com that looking on at the situation in America, there is a concern among sociologists that people are being referred to therapy at the slightest sign of hardship in their life. 'There is a tendency to medicalize everyday problems in pursuit of commercial interests,' he said, whether it be rejection from a partner or a failed job interview. 'This is something that people have been saying for 50 or 60 years, a concern that's been expressed by both psychiatrists and sociologists.' This fosters a victim mentality, said Shawn Smith, a clinical psychologist based in Colorado. Mr Smith told DailyMail.com therapy may be harming America's youth by 'encouraging kids to spend, frankly, too much time staring at their own belly button, and not being involved in the world and developing meaningful relationships and activities.' 'To whatever extent, therapy contributes to that. It's a problem,' he said. More US adults have received mental health diagnoses than adults in any other high-income countries, according to the Commonwealth Fund, leading people to wonder if Americans are that much sicker or just being over diagnosed. Comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher recently hit out at the rise in Americans with mental illnesses and said: 'PTSD is for people who fought in Iraq, not for people who want to bring their dog on a plane.' 'The way we know people are depressed is, there's this turning inward... and usually, you will see a relentless scrutiny of the self, of one thoughts, and one's feelings and one's presentation,' said Dr Smith. Over-therapizing can contribute to this, he said, 'if we have kids, just pointlessly scrutinizing themselves, then we are setting them up to turn inward and collapse within, collapse in on themselves and become depressed. ' Professor Dingwall said that whether or not therapy does more harm than good is a long-standing discussion in medical sociology. Not only has the number of people in the US getting therapy risen, but the amount of time spent in therapy has also increased. In 2022, 13 percent of Americans visited a mental health professional five or more times within the previous 12 months, compared to six percent in 2004. In the UK in 2014, just three percent of the adults were receiving psychological therapy, according to the Mental Health Foundation. Abigail Shrier, author of Bad Therapy, a book about mental health myths and the medicalization of American kids, said on a podcast that she feels therapy is counterproductive. 'Whenever there's greater treatment in a population, greater accessibility for anything from breast cancer to maternal sepsis with more antibiotics, you want to see the point prevalence rates going down. 'We want to see the incidence of depression or anxiety in teenagers going down, because we know these kids are getting flooded with treatment. Instead it's skyrocketing... so we know at the very least it doesn't seem to be helping.' In 2021, a group of researchers termed this the 'treatment prevalence paradox.'... A record one in three adults in America have had clinical depression at some point in their lives, a Gallup poll in 2023 has found... nearly one in five (18 percent) of US adults are currently depressed, another record high. Professor Dingwall said: 'It's hard to disentangle the extent to which we are seeing a crisis in mental health among young people, or an expansion of definitions of mental health problems, which is generating more business for pharmaceutical companies and therapists. That's the debate that needs to be had more widely.' Dr Smith said that the expansion of definitions of mental health problems may also be a lowering of the bar for some mental illnesses. He said: 'It certainly can become a bad thing when it interferes with somebody who's otherwise doing just fine in life, and then suddenly they start to think of themselves as disordered. 'And then they start to treat themselves as if they're disordered and then they're not doing as well if they were before.' This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy for teenagers, he added... As therapy has become more socially acceptable, Professor Dingwall said, people without mental illnesses may be seeking it out... Dr Paul Minot, who has been a psychiatrist for almost four decades, told TIME he feels his industry is too quick to gloss over the 'ambiguity' of mental health, cementing diagnoses as certain when there is actually a gray area. There is also the risk that people become dependent on their therapist... 'If the experience of therapy becomes overly comforting, a sort of addiction to it and the therapist is certainly possible and we then have what Freud called, an interminable therapy. That is, one that cannot be properly brought to a mutually satisfactory conclusion,' said Australian psychotherapist David White. Depending on the type of therapy, some people may come out of it feeling worse off. 'There's also a debate within the therapeutic community themselves,' Professor Dingwall said. 'There's a group known as brief therapists who are very critical of their colleagues, for exaggerating problems, for perhaps trapping people in therapy for unnecessarily long periods, and turning over their lives in a way that increase rather than diminish distress.' By contrast, brief therapists focus on short-term practical interventions, which are designed to move people on as quickly as possible. 'The brief therapists argue that they focus on solutions, rather than necessarily expecting to go sort of deeply into people's troubles.' Dr Max Pemberton, British psychiatrist and DailyMail.com columnist, said the over diagnosis of mental illness 'limits' young people and that therapy can mean 'they never really move on, [are] stuck in a land of perpetual victimhood, chained to a grief or trauma or difficulty, dragging it around like a weight around their ankle.' He said that while the younger generation have embraced the idea we must constantly examine our feelings, they are not better off for it, and instead people have become 'a bit more self-obsessed and a bit more narcissistic.' 'So many seem to wear their problems like a badge of pride, allowing it to define them,' Mr Pemberton added. Any intervention with the potential to help also has the potential to harm patients, Shrier told UnHerd... She listed known harms of psychotherapy as things like making anxiety worse, making depression worse, feeling of inefficacy like I can't do [things] for myself, a feeling of demoralization as in I'm limited by this diagnosis, and alienation from family members. Shrier said there are two groups of people: one with severe mental illnesses who are undertreated and underserved in America, and one known as the 'worried well.'"

Liev Schreiber and his 'daughter' / Trans girls jerking off in public toilets / The Trans Flag

Joelle Tungus @TungusBusko: "I saw this pic like 6 years ago and Liev Schreiber was like "My son wanted to be Harley Quinn for comic con so that's what we did, why are you being weird about it?" I just found out he's got a daughter now. He seems like a great dad 🥲"

Now he knows why people were being "weird" about it

Doll Delusional @DollDelusional_: "Shout out to trans girls who jerk off in public restrooms. Doing god's work out there y'all"
Michael @Michael61325805: "It's just a good thing that trans girls go trans because of gender dysphoria and not because they're incel perverts and congenital wankers."

If you think there're concerns about letting transwomen into women's bathrooms, you're a transphobic bigot.

Gays Against Groomers @againstgrmrs: "Happy #TransAwarenessWeek!

The *trans* flag was designed by Robert Hogge (Monica Helms), who confessed to stealing women's underwear. He also wrote books about his twisted fantasies involving children.

"Monica" Helms the designer of the flag

THE TRAnS FLAG COLORS ARE BABY BLUE & BABY PInK

THE GOAL HAS BEEN AL WAYS BEEN TO GROOM KIDS

'THIS IS WHAT TRANS LOOKS LIKE'"

Links - 1st January 2025 (1 - General Wokeness [including Bluesky])

Bill 🇦🇺 on X - "People aren't leaving X because their freedom of speech is limited. They're leaving because ours isn't It looks as though they've found a perfect home at BS. In my view, they're welcome to that echo chamber and I have no intention of burdening them with my opinions there"

Sam Barber on X - "A reminder that folks who are leaving Twitter are doing so not because they were not permitted to express their opinion, but because you *are* permitted to express yours."

Meme - LibsofBluesky: "Bluesky is drowning under the weight of the leftists reporting everything. 3000 reports per hour!"

Meme - Rob Reiner @robreiner.bsky.social: "Thank you all for the positive and warm welcome.
It has been a difficult past week. I will not let him bring me down.
I have decided to move here for a less hateful experience." - 7 days ago
"This platform is vile, racist and evil, It did not take long for MAGA scum to come spread their lies.
I have made the decision to take the next few days to check into a facility for peace and relaxation. No phones, social media no trolls, just calmness to heal my pain." - 9-10 hours ago

Experts Predict Every Liberal Will Soon Be On Own Individual Social Media Platform To Prevent Encountering Wrong Opinions | Babylon Bee

Meme - Courtney @crystalandqueue: "Lefties getting banned from their new social media site for claiming the election was rigged is my favorite karmic twist I’ve witnessed in four years.  Welcome to the club."
Vicki S @Blondie6312: "Are you on Bluesky yet?"
Michelle Baker @Michell33650674: "Nobody seems to be seeing my posts stating that Bluesky PERMANENTLY BANNED ME for stating that the election was rigged."

Meme - Coddled affluent professional @feelsdesperate: "The ultimate way of owning the libs is herding them into a tiny space where they inflect maximum damage upon each other and don’t have any mechanism to balance things out."
Bluesky Safety @safety.bsky.app: "In the past 24 hours, we have received more than 42,000 reports (an all-time high for one day). We're receiving about 3,000 reports/hour. To put that into context, in all of 2023, we received 360k reports. We're triaging this large queue so the most harmful content such as CSAM is removed quickly."

Meme - "Lavader
>Leftists finally have enough of Elon's Twitter
>Mass Exodus is announced to a Twitter clone called Bluesky
>Platform and Admins have a heavy Left-Wing bias
>Big figures like Stephen King also leave for Bluesky, as well as many journalists
>App explodes in downloads and popularity, calling it the Twitter killer
>Entire thing turns into a massive Left-wing echo chamber
>Instantly devolves into infighting
>Bluesky team received 42k reports in a single day, 3k every hour
>Admins and moderation completely overwhelmed
>Everyone was reporting each other speech crime
>Sudden influx of Pedophiles openly bragging about being MAP
>lllegal artworks of children flood the app
>Moderation announced it will focus on those posts first and foremost
Amazing... Absolutely Amazing."
Proof that right wingers are obsessed with pedophilia and that they're projecting

Meme - *Bluesky post*
Alex Bloodfire @alexbloodfire.bsky.so...: "Intolerance"
"The founder of #PridelnSurrey, Stephen Ireland, has been arrested on 37 charges linked to the rape, kidnap and sexual abuse of children under the age of 13."
Reporting on anything bad done by a "minority" is bigotry

Thread by @bendreyfuss on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "I just spent a zillion hours arguing with trans leftists who were calling me a monster and eventually they were like “there is housing discrimination because some women won’t have roommates who aren’t female at birth” and that is the one that finally got me to tap out. No shit.  Look, I don’t know what to tell ya, sugar tits, that doesn’t sound like a civil rights violation. They also don’t want me as a roommate. I don’t think this is a Trans Problem. I think this is a Leftist Problem that is similar across lots of issues, but more pronounced in tithe trans debate because there are so few trans people.  A lot of online leftists live on fucking mars. I find Bluesky incredibly depressing because it is just filled with so many people that I think are The Exact Problem Democrats Have To Solve. All I wanted to do was go say hi to some people who I used to tweet with all the time who had left and moved there and after a day of this I’m like “I’m a fascist now” haha
Why I Am Leaving BlueSky After Two Days: I Don’t Want To Become A Republican But I’m Going To Be Backlashed Into It If I Stay
By Ben Dreyfuss"

Meme - Edward Allen: "If Bluesky had banned Jesse at the first sign that he was here to harass and abuse trans kids, he would not have had to endure the community wrath. Bluesky has a death threat problem, it's true, it's that we have to use death threats to get rid of Jesse."
"See, the whole Jesse Singal situation on Bluesky runs like this: a guy takes a baseball bat to a trans woman's head on the sidewalk outside the bar, then comes inside. The other patrons ask the bartender to call the police, but the bartender just shrugs and says, "Well, he didn't hit anybody in here." Is it really surprising that people started taking things into their own hands, doing to him what he's done to so many other people?"
Usual left wing logic. Speech they hate is violence but violence they support is speech

Colin Wright on X - "ME: "BleuSky is the most pro-violence social media platform in the world, beating out Gab and 4Chan."
BleuSky User: "It is absolutely not worse than Gab and 4Chan lmfao"
Other BleuSky Users: "you're next," "🥳," "Great job team," This is so awesome," That's badass," "good,"..."

Meme - "Bluesky is the most pro-volence social media platform in the world, beating out Gab and 4Chan"
"Average Justification Score for the Murder of the UHC CEO Among Users of Different Platforms"
"you're next"
"Bluesky W"
"Thats badass"
"I'm doing my part."
"l already love it here, you don't need to keep selling"
"Great Job team, keep up the good work!"
"And this is a bad thing because? Please do the rest of your job so called Dr"
"This is so awesome"
"Thats badass"
"good."
"Hell yeah"
"*pro justice. incel retard"
"LETS GO WE CAN PUMP THOSE NUMBER"

Meme - "Tell me the truth for once!"
"Not all "victim stories" are true. People lie on the internet. Especially when being a victim gets more reacts and attention on their posts. #BelieveEvidence"

Meme - Klaus Arminius @Klaus_Arminius: "These antiwhites truly hate us. Our existence triggers them. Make more White children."
@sineater @The_Sineater: "When I see huge homogenous white families like this all I can think about is the damage they are going to do to their communities. This is a family of future fascists and bigots. Christianity is a fucking disease and these are the tumors."
Mitt Romney @MittRomney: ""Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." From my family to yours, Merry Christmas! *lots of white people*"
We're still told that wokeness is not about hating white people and Christians

Meme - "PROTESTING "WHITE SUPREMACY" BY BECOMING SKINHEADS *Bald women*"

Thread by @sebjenseb on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Why does academia lean left now? A long 🧵
The first, obvious thing to check is whether this is due to changes in the number of conservatives and liberals over time. It's not. Image The second thing to check is if this is due to right wing views becoming increasingly correlated with low intelligence or "human capital". There are several reasons not to think this is the case... First, the association between IQ and political views is fairly weak to begin with. The time lag is also off -- White left wingers became more intelligent than White right wingers around the mid 00s. This trend in academia started before that. Second, if White left wingers are more educated than right wingers (this has been true for longer), then you would expect some of the advantages in left wing IQ scores to be hollow for g, since education gains are hollow for g.  Human capital/competence also goes far beyond IQ. Conservatives are more extraverted, hardworking, and emotionally stable than liberals. The only non-cognitive trait where leftists have a decisive advantage in openness. Image The openness explanation could explain some of the initial difference (the ratio for D to R professors was 2 to 1 in the 60s), but it doesn't explain the change in the relationship very well, especially when conservatives have become increasingly open-minded people. Image Perhaps it has to do with the environment: universities indoctrinate students with left wing propaganda. This also fails as an explanation. While students in the 60s became more left wing in longitudinal samples, the opposite held for students in later cohorts.   The evidence traditionally has supported the idea that it is peers, not professors, that contribute to the political views of students. Which makes sense -- they are the people who they spend the most time around. Image Perhaps it's self-selection: the kind of people who want to become professors or academics tend to be left wing. Not a satisfactory explanation either. Being right wing did not predict wanting to participate in academia within a large online sample on prolific academia (n = 843) They were, however, much more likely to say that their political views would not fit into academia. Which threads nicely into the next section on the explanation with the most evidence for it: that academia is hostile to right wingers.
There are several lines of evidence for this. First, right wingers are more likely to be represented in harder, more rigorous fields that are less political. This is the opposite of what would be expected if the issue was human capital, by the way. Image The left wing skew of academia is also less strong if data is sourced from anonymous surveys, indicating that right wing academics are more likely to conceal their political views.   Right wingers rarely want professors to be reported for anything, regardless of what they said. Left wingers tend to want professors to be reported for things they disagree with them on. Image It might even get worse. Younger academics are much more pro-discrimination than older ones. Image Leftist academics are also much more likely to support discrimination against populist right wingers when their opinions are concealed"

Beyond Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness: Testing links between lower‐level personality traits and American political orientation - "Across both personality measures, liberal political orientation showed distinct positive associations with the lower-level traits Openness/Aesthetic Sensitivity, Intellect/Intellectual Curiosity, Compassion, and Withdrawal/Depression, as well as distinct negative associations with Orderliness/Organization, Politeness, and Assertiveness."
More evidence that left wingers are rude

Man charged with Seattle mass stabbing is 'fully delusional,' defense attorney says - "A King County judge has ordered a mental health evaluation for the man charged with stabbing multiple people earlier this month in Seattle's Chinatown-International District.  Roland Lee, 37, appeared in court Wednesday morning where he made an outburst declaring, “I stand with Israel united in Christ.”  His defense attorney, Kimberly Exe, said Lee is experiencing delusions and does not understand what he's accused of... A total of 10 people were stabbed in the neighborhood between Nov. 7-8. While Lee is only charged with the five stabbings at 12th and Jackson, police have said he is a suspect in the previous attacks... An arrest report notes the five victims who were stabbed on Nov. 8 were all white, and Lee was heard saying “Black power” during a recorded interview... "There is insufficient evidence at this point to prove Lee selected the victims because of their race." Lee's criminal history includes nine felony convictions for robbery, burglary, theft of a motor vehicle, and possession of stolen property. He also has 30 misdemeanor convictions, according to court records."
He must be white, because left wingers tell us that whenever white people commit violent crimes, it's supposedly due to mental illness and minorities who commit crimes are branded as thugs
Good luck to white people who attack black people while chanting a white power slogan
Of course on r/aznidentity people got upset when it was pointed out that the victims were white and there was no evience they were all homeless

Audubon Naturalist Society Seeking to Distance Itself From, You Guessed It, Audubon - "The Audubon Naturalist Society based out of DC has decided to rebrand itself and drop the name Audubon altogether because of the famed naturalist's slaveholding practice.  Yep, you read that right. The Audubon Naturalist Society is canceling its namesake... It's important to note that Audubon wasn't exactly an outlier in his time. He was a man that lived in the 1800s and believed things that most everyone in the 1800s believed.  He was not a Confederate general, or anything similar either. He is almost exclusively known for drawing birds. That's it. But according to the ANS executive director, it will be impossible to become satisfactorily diverse if they don't change the name.  I wonder if they've considered that the reason they're having trouble achieving diversity isn't that minorities see the name Audubon, research it, and decide to not join because they think it's a pro-slavery group.  Maybe people just know bird watching is an activity reserved for bored, retired, old people... They want to acknowledge their part in an exclusionary past?  Has the program ever been actually exclusionary?  Of course not. At least not in recent history. They just haven't been woke."
First, they came for the Confederate Generals...

Andrew Sullivan: Questions About Youth Gender Transitions - "Take the biggest actual social change, hailed by liberals, of the last couple of decades: marriage equality. We did not spend our time calling out homophobia, attacking the churches, or describing our opponents as “deplorable.” We made our case carefully; we engaged the other side respectfully; we lobbied state legislatures; more and more gay people told their stories; brilliant lawyers fought various cases, beginning with failure until achieving success at the Supreme Court. I can’t tell you how many times I debated religious fundamentalists, while never disparaging them. I produced an anthology of the best arguments on both sides. You do this kind of hard work for a couple of decades, with civility, and you’ll be surprised how many people you can persuade to change their minds. It seems to me that if your argument is better and you make it relentlessly, you’ll win. But if you avoid actual argument and resort to slurs, cancel culture, and ever more polarizing rhetoric, you’ll lose.  Yes, it’s harder with the internet which rewards the opposite of respectful debate. You can feel less of a need to talk to your opponents face-to-face. You can too easily dehumanize the other side. But Obama is right about the complexity of people. Attack people for their “whiteness,” accuse people of sexual crimes without any proof or certainty, disparage all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, cast every point against gay marriage as bigotry — and you’ll definitely make waves, and be cheered on by your own tribe. But bringing about change? Sometimes I think this kind of activism — damning them while not talking to them — actually prevents change.  One little example of human complexity: Pat Buchanan was  (and still is) one of the most virulently anti-gay voices in America. I debated him a few times. And I appealed to him to see the humanity of gay people, rather than what he believed was the iniquity of gay sex. I kept communications open. I couldn’t help but like him as a person. He is, in fact, kind. And when I came out as HIV-positive, one of the very few Washingtonians who wrote me a hand-written letter was Buchanan. He said how sorry he was about the news, but he was sure we’d still have many years in which to fight and argue and debate. It really bucked me up at the time.  People are complicated. The key to persuading them is to embrace all of them good and bad, while making your case. We did that in the marriage-equality movement, which is why that big change happened, and just as important, why it has lasted."

Obama on Call-Out Culture: ‘That’s Not Activism’ - The New York Times - "“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff,” Mr. Obama said. “You should get over that quickly.”  “The world is messy; there are ambiguities,” he continued. “People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.” Mr. Obama spoke repeatedly of the role of social media in activism specifically, including the idea of what’s become known as “cancel culture”... “I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people,’” he said, “and that’s enough.” “Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb,” he said, “then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’”  Then he pretended to sit back and press the remote to turn on a television.  “That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change,” he said. “If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”  The audience erupted in applause, which was echoed by conservative pundits like Ann Coulter... Tomi Lahren, a conservative political commentator, said on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday that Mr. Obama’s comments made him look like “the voice of reason” and that “that’s when you know the Democratic Party has gotten this bad.”  “What’s really nice to hear is Barack Obama standing up for our rights and our values of the First Amendment,” Ms. Lahren said. “Just remember that we used to think Barack Obama was bad.”  Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic presidential candidate and a congresswoman from Mr. Obama’s home state of Hawaii, seized on his words as a campaign message for her supporters... Others called out the 44th president for being “paternalistic.”  Michael Arceneaux, the author of “I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put My Faith in Beyoncé,” said he didn’t “need lessons about ‘being woke’ and ‘cancel culture’” in an op-ed for The Independent.  “I am never quite sure if Obama really thinks this naïvely or if he’s trying to convince certain sects of the population — notably young black folks, whom he just loves to lecture — that it’s better to coddle white people about their prejudices with the hopes of growth rather than speak our minds as we see fit,” he said."
From 2019. Damn white supremacist!

Meme - "Hearing about a violent double-homicide in my area *shocked figure*
Finding out the "Victims" were a straight couple *happy figure*"
Alexis Never Broke Again @Alextrocity: "Change straight couple for white couple"
Alex @DarkSpring793: "*straight white couple"
Heterophobia and anti-white racism are far right myths

Nicole Solas, Sued by the Teachers Union on X - "The University of Rhode Island illegally withholds coursework as "intellectual property" of professors. Coursework at public universities is a PUBLIC record so I filed a complaint. Taxpayers have a right to see the woke course materials they fund at public universities."

Wilfred Reilly on X - "Left-wing lies are not "smaller" or "rarer" than right-wing lies. Some are a bit lower IQ, but the very primary difference is that, since the political left controls 93% of academia and the media, LW bull-shite often simply passes into the zeitgeist and is no longer even processed as dishonest.   Some major examples...
1.) There is a large M/F gap in pay, across similar jobs
2.) The police kill hundreds or thousands of unarmed Black men annually
3.) The rich pay lower tax rates than the poor, and still owe "their fair share"
4.) Predictions about global climate change tend to be accurate, in that empirical claims made by Gore (2000) or the response papers to Lomborg (2010-20) have come to pass
5.) Donald Trump was/is "somehow" a Russian agent or asset
6.) Evidence of Democratic corruption, such as the Hunter Biden laptop, is foreign dis-info. "The Big Guy," with his set rate of pay, was a random non-entity
7.) Inter-racial crime is constant, and majority white-on-POC (as vs 3% of Index crime, 80% B-on-W)
8.) The affirmative action-era, #MeToo era USA is "a white supremacist patriarchy." Blacks are disadvantaged vs whites, and women vs men, in the collegiate and executive-job application process.
9.) Some women have 9" penises (shout to Gad Saad's "The Parasitic Mind")
10.) Biological sex occurs on a spectrum, even for placental mammal predators, and humans can ~change it.
Etc. I really could go on all day."

Marc Rich | Facebook - "How about we normalize not asking for everything to be normalized? Instead, if there's some way that you prefer to live, just do it. You don't need everyone else to play along."
Bigot!

Meme - "Gay People I Respect
- Acts Like A Normal Human Being
- Has A Personality
- Doesn't Force Upon You The Fact That They're Gay
- Literally Is A Normal Person That You Can Be Friends With
Gay Peopie I Do Not Respect
- Sexuality ls The Focal Point Of Their Existence
- Rainbow Flag Everything And Everywhere Including But Not Limited To Profile Picture, Clothing, And Jewelry.
- Complains About Straight People Consistently
-Dresses Like A Clown To Show The World How Gay They Are."

Meme - Tim Skellett @Gurdur: "Huh. A favorite looney, Saira Rao, has deactivated her account @sairasameerarao. A reaction to the exposure of Robin DiAngelo? Saira has a new account, @Race2Dinner , and yet another account, @Race2D_ , both as lunatic as her original account."
Race2Dinner @Race2D_: "Okay lets give white couples stipends.. for euthanasia of the white babies. Less future oppressors/racist/colonizers."
Tim Skellett @Gurdur: "Looney. Worse than before; Saira's decompensating."
Race2Dinner @Race2D_: "Race2Dinner facilitates painfully honest conversations between pig-skinned neanderthals (so-called white ppl) and BIPOC."
On the "Am I Racist?" fallout

Meme - sairasameerarao @Race2Dinner: "I think it's critical that universities that claim to care about equity, actually start by removing financial aid for white students and redistribute all of these resources towards students of color."
Race2Dinner: "Nothing is more dangerous than a pink man/pigskin that hasnt been castrated
Only White Men Rape. The pink skinned barbarian rapes uncontrollably due to non HUE-man dna from the neanderthal. #cancelpigskins #racializepigskins #pinkskin"

Meme - "Please note this is a POC-only space. Pigskins are permitted to listen in, but must have their microphones off. 605 807"
"Theres nothing more pathetic than a white pigskin who despite having more privilege than I could ever dream of, ends up homeless or working a minimum wage job."
Because left wingers beg the question, instead of realising that the many white people who are poor shows that claiming that all white people are privileged and all non-white people are not, they just mock white people for failing despite 'privilege'. I used to know a feminist who had the same sentiments about men

Meme - 1969. Star Trek: "Racism is pointless; we have more in common than differences."
1994. Star Trek The Next Generation: "Seeking mutual understanding leads to peace and prosperity."
2024. Star Trek Picard: "ICE IS RACIST!TM ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ARE FUTURE DOCTORS AND LAWYERS!TM MAGA BAD!TM"
This won't stop left wingers pretending that Star Trek was always woke, and that those who criticise modern Star Trek are idiots who never understood it

Meme - "TOS fans"
"Looks pretty dated and a lot of the acting is over the top. The sets look like they were made by 5th graders."
"Yes."
"90's Trek and Enterprise fans"
"The writing and acting is hoaky bordering on cheesy. Too many of the plot lines rely on the Borg. Another Prequel series? Really?"
"We know."
"Discovery and Picard fans"
"It kinda ruins continuity on weekly basis. It's poorly written an acted. How many times do they save the universe? It doesnt have the positive tone of the old shows; seeming disconnected from old Trek."
Soyjak: "NOOOOOOOOO!!! Your racist and sexist! Star Trek has to move forward. It was always woke! ST doesn't need its old fans. It wasn't made for you! Who cares? It's a show for children"

Thread by @wanyeburkett on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "“I am much more empathetic than average” and “I have trouble understanding the motivations of 50% of the country” are not compatible positions
You could write a million words on what progressives mean when they say they’re empathetic. It seems to be something like “I feel really strongly that my policy preferences are best.” Because they readily admit that they aren’t actually that good at understanding the people around them or modeling their motivations."
When left wingers keep claiming being woke is about "empathy", they mean that they feel for "minorities" and keep pushing their supposed interests

Nation's White Liberals Wish Each Other Happy Kwanzaa | Babylon Bee - "White progressives young and old gathered for a time of honoring the celebration of African-American culture, though sources confirmed they were having a tough time finding any actual African-Americans celebrating the holiday, "which is probably Trump's fault," as one white college student put it."