Staying Sane in the Land of Lunatics

Manufactured madness or rule by insanity

When I was a young rebellious lad, I discovered the works of Dr. Thomas Szasz. I devoured his books The Manufacture of Madness and The Myth of Mental Illness. While working at the hospital, I would quote from them to the more interesting patients on the psych ward. This usually just happened to be the more attractive female patients.

As Dr. Szasz noted, any of us can look “crazy” under a microscope. If you’re early for an appointment, the psychiatrist will label you “anxious.” If you’re on time, you’re too “anal.” If you’re late, you’re “rebellious.” I’ve met people whom I considered perfectly normal, but when they told me they’d spent time in a mental hospital, I instantly looked at them differently. It’s like being accused of child abuse. You may be perfectly innocent, but the allegation will always hang over your head. Once you’ve been labeled “mentally ill,” it’s hard to “prove” you’re not. Try to act “sane.” It isn’t easy. And, of course, as “conspiracy theorists,” all of us in the alternative media world are easily dismissed as “wackos.”

I firmly believed that mental institutions, like prisons, served no practical purpose. Just as prisons didn’t seem to rehabilitate anyone, mental hospitals seemed to serve only to drug and pacify people that society labeled too eccentric or unusual. I loved One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and many people I worked with said that I reminded them of Jack Nicholson’s character Randall McMurphy. I did have a penchant for trying to communicate with the odd and scorned, whom others had abandoned. In my naive idealism, I thought these poor souls were just misunderstood, and needed only a tolerant reformer like me to set them free. To paraphrase Father Flanagan of Boys Town fame, I thought there were no bad people. Later, I would find out Boys Town was connected to the Franklin Credit child sex scandal. Nurture over nature.

When Ronald Reagan emptied the mental institutions in the 1980s, I cheered him on. I thought it was one of the few good things he actually did. For more on the Gipper’s real record, read my upcoming book American Memory Hole. Unfortunately, it turned out that many of those in these facilities, whom I had considered veritable prisoners, were actually crazy. Nuts. Mentally ill. The ones who weren’t dangerous were incapable of taking care of themselves. Thus, the exploding homeless situation. The most well-known advocate for the homeless, Mitch Snyder, became so disillusioned that he took his own life. Snyder walked the walk; he slept on heating grates with the homeless. I became disillusioned, too. Actually, I’ve become disillusioned regularly over the years. Call me a habitual disillusionist. Although I don’t think that’s a word.

Having watched not only Cuckoo’s Nest multiple times, but old films like Bedlam and The Snake Pit, which focused on the horrors of what were once indelicately referred to as lunatic asylums, I felt great empathy for all mental patients. How many were ever helped by barbaric “treatments” like electro shock therapy? For decades after JFK’s sister Rosemary became the first known victim of frontal lobotomy butchery, the procedure was still being done. Was it ever successful? Modern psychiatry, if it ever was anything else, has become yet another de facto drug dealer for Big Pharma. You have to go to a therapist to talk, and ideally get some meaningful feedback. You will get nothing but a prescription from a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists have long had the highest suicide rates of any profession. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

I went to numerous psychiatrists and therapists with my brother. I always sat in on the sessions, because he wanted me to, and because he would never open up about anything important on his own. Left to his own devices, he would have spent the hour talking about the weather. Some of his therapists were decent. But like most people that go to therapy, he really never listened to them. I still remember the psychiatrist I took him too, who started screaming at him about five minutes into the session. I looked at her and calmly said, “So you understand what I’m dealing with?” She was embarrassed, of course, but that illustrated how Ricky’s very unique issues could fluster even a normally unflappable professional.

I visited plenty of therapists myself. I have self-diagnosed myself as a neurotic Jew, even though I’m not even partially Jewish. That’s probably why I relate so well to Woody Allen’s films. I too view the world through how it interacts with me. I regularly wonder “Now why did she do or say that,” or question some insignificance that few others would notice. As every therapist I ever had used to say, “They’re really not thinking of you.” Yeah, well tell that to my persecution complex. At any rate, if I had Woody’s money, I too would go to therapy daily. Probably like him, I would ignore everything the therapist had to say, and analyze their own signs of lunacy (most therapists I’ve encountered have real issues of their own). But some of us need that sounding board. I don’t know if Woody talks to himself, but I do.

More than one of my therapists told me, “You are the most sane person I’ve ever met.” Many who’ve known me would disagree with this assessment, but who am I to argue with professionals? When my brother Ricky died, I received free grief counseling. The woman who saw me was wonderful. She convinced me that I had been a great brother, which wasn’t an easy thing to do, given my intense guilt. But I ran out of free sessions, and unlike Woody Allen, I can’t afford to pay for regular therapy. I met a woman who claimed to have been Woody’s therapist when he was in Paris, by the way. It was at a really Jewish party, which for some reason I was invited to. They actually served bagels and lox. First time I ever ate them. I felt more Jewy as the party wore on, schmoozing and joking. And then I had to go back to the boring Gentile world.

Because of both my brother and my niece being in the mental health system to varying degrees over the years, I became all too familiar with it. The endless bureaucratic agencies that, like the rest of government, simply shuffle you off to some other unknowing and uncaring representative. Because he was in a special housing program, my brother had a series of roommates who had challenges of their own. A few threatened to kill him. And, naturally, the law protected them more than my brother. We see the same thing with school bullying, as I detailed in Bullyocracy. One tried to assault Ricky, and we had to get a restraining order on him. The system, as corrupt as all others, made my brother- the victim- move, not the victimizer.

Fortunately, none of the many people I met who were ensnared in the mental health system were the least bit violent. Some of their delusions were intriguing. One guy, who I invited over to a cookout at my brother’s request, had imagined a complex conspiracy by some people at ABC News to kill his girlfriend. I listened patiently, as I invariably do to such stories. Being far down the rabbit hole myself, I find few things “far out” enough for me to immediately discount them. But most of these confused souls had someone, usually a family member, to advocate for them. I haven’t met the discards of the mental health industry, the homeless living in tents, perhaps defecating on the streets. Those pathetic creatures clearly have no one, and have been written off by whatever families they have.

But with the emergence of America 2.0, to crush our memories of a different, better run country, there is little evidence of sanity anywhere across this land. Not all of the mentally ill are shitting in the street. Some are running police departments. And big cities. Some are nationally known politicians. Some are celebrities worth many millions of dollars. Joe Biden has set a new template for us all. Perhaps this is why he was installed as our fearless leader. Someone who’d be right at home in one of those long closed mental hospitals. He’d probably have been a prime candidate for electro shock therapy. Of course, there is a fine line between mental institutions and nursing homes. Few oldsters have ever looked more like nursing home patients than Biden. He is the perfect face for a society as insane as ours.

When the Pussy Hats first appeared in the streets after Trumpenstein became president, we saw sheer lunacy on display. We’ve all seen the meme of the enraged woman screaming something, which has been shared all over the internet to represent the “Woke” madness. Back when Infowars used to send Owen Shroyer and others out regularly to confront these kinds of protesters, they would either turn their back, refuse to speak at all, or start screeching like banshees. Few of them would even deign to explain what they were protesting about. Most of the psych patients I would make an effort to converse with back in the late 1970s seemed far more sane than any of the Antifa/BLM activists I’ve seen. I felt they should have been released. Now I feel like the “Woke” protesters should be institutionalized.

But it wasn’t until the transgender craze became front and center, conveniently in the midst of the giant, worldwide COVID psyop, that we saw full-fledged lunacy everywhere. The few counter protesters who’ve confronted these mad transgenders are met with violent, in your face, profane super gayness. These are not your grandparents’ queers, hunted down by Marines who were probably struggling with their own sexual identities. I knew people who liked to “roll queers.” Rob them. Beat them up. Perhaps force them on their knees to show you how gay they are. I felt so sorry for them, and I never liked Marines. Well, except maybe Gomer Pyle. But my how things have changed. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the transgenders are “rolling straights” now. Dirty, worthless “breeders.”

Really, the entire transgender movement is certifiably insane by any definition. Seriously thinking you can alter your gender? Maintaining, with a figurative Molotov cocktail in hand, that men can give birth? That’s not the purple haired, half-naked obese activists we’re talking about. It’s the doctors who violate the Hippocratic Oath by surgically mutilating healthy young boys and girls. It’s the supposedly loving mothers that take their little boys to a drag strip show and tuck money into the g-strings. The mothers who virtue signal other motherly virtue signalers with “coming out” parties, where they all enable each other’s madness. It’s the corporations and government agencies that ask for your “pronouns,” and are “inclusive” enough to hire people who would have been in padded rooms fifty years ago to prominent positions.

Look at “Rachel” Levine, the overweight man pretending to be a woman who is somehow the assistant secretary for health in our misguided land. Then there was Joe Biden’s undersecretary of nuclear waste Sam Brinton. Memorable for his shaved head, mustache, and bright red dresses, this responsible public authority was caught stealing women’s luggage at an airport. Twice. Well, to be fair, no self-respecting nonbinary is going to be interested in stealing any nasty male luggage. Maybe gender fluid luggage. Not sure what happened to Brinton legally, but we can bet he’ll be treated a lot more leniently than a January 6 grandmother taking selfies. There are other transgenders in the Biden administration, all of whom should thank Ronald Reagan daily for closing those mental health facilities.

Bruce Jenner, once the world’s greatest athlete and a damn fine looking man if I do say so my own damn heterosexual self, became Caitlin Jenner a few years ago. This really seemed to kick off the transgender craze (and that is the most appropriate way to describe it), and now Caitlin has been accepted by Sean Hannity and Fox News as a “conservative” voice to be reckoned with. Exactly how can a transgender be a “conservative?” Although I have to admit, even as Bruce/Caitlin, he/she still looks better than many of the new breed of overweight Victoria’s Secret models. Maybe Michelle Obama will “come out” as Big Mike (not saying that this rumor is true, of course), and they can run together on the first all transgender ticket. The first female president and vice-president to not be born female. USA! USA! USA!

I used to like cute little Ellen Page, and her quirky acting style. Now she/he is Elliott Page, and you better not remember she once wasn’t. Imdb, Rotten Tomatoes, and every other organ from the Ministry of Truth has flushed Ellen down the memory hole. Her screen credits now are all attributed to Elliott Page. Ellen/Elliott was the first person I saw posing proudly with her Frankenstein chest scars, paving the way for countless other little girls, posing next to their proud mothers and doctors. And now Kristen Stewart, the very pretty but perpetually resting bitch face actress seems half-transitioned herself. She posed for Rolling Stone in men’s underwear, and I have to say she did a great job of murdering whatever female sexuality she had left.

WNBA player Brittney Griner proudly posed topless recently with her wife. Her chest sure looked like a man’s, and there were no Frankenstein scars. But to intimate that he/she’s a man is to encounter more lunacy from the Transgender Thought Police. Lia Thomas, meanwhile, had his lifelong dream of being a pretend woman swimmer in the Olympics shattered. But he can console himself with breaking more female records, as he remains 100 percent biologically male. If he’s heterosexual, then this is an especially sweet deal. Lesser competition, and seeing all the hot real female swimmers naked in the locker room. I can’t imagine any males taking advantage of that kind of insanity. No hormones, keep your penis. But you’re a woman as long as you “identify” as one.

You know things are bad when Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, renowned for her “Woke” views and Trump Derangement Syndrome, is now the voice of reason. I give her credit; she really has shined in taking on the transgender insanity. That’s because she’s a real feminist, and as I’ve noted, feminism is incompatible with transgenderism. What do “women’s rights” mean when anyone with a penis can “identify” as a woman? Transgenderism alone is responsible for outing thousands of mentally disturbed individuals who desperately need psychiatric help. Even Randall McMurphy couldn’t work with these people. Plus, they’re prone to violence. Who wants to be attacked by large, pretend women or angry male lesbians? I’m attracted to eccentrics. But I have never had the least bit of patience with violent people.

I have come full circle. From believing that there was no such thing as mental illness, that it was just another invention of the Medical Industrial Complex, to now thinking that perhaps there is no such thing as sanity. I guess it’s kind of the same thing to say there are no lunatics, and that everyone is a lunatic. If we are all crazy, then no one is crazy, to paraphrase Rod Serling. Whether or not we’re all lunatics, it is undeniable that genuine lunatics have taken over the asylum that was once America 1.0, the hope of the world. I guess there are a few token sane officials out there, but they are so outnumbered that they dare not speak out. And even if they are sane, they are almost certainly corrupt, or they wouldn’t have risen to that level. Is someone sane and corrupt that much better than someone insane and corrupt?

So, I am forced to admit that I was wrong. There is a need for mental hospitals. Some people need to be institutionalized. Yes, there were abuses. And in today’s wildly corrupt world, the risk of abuse would be much greater. Looking at our public officials, and any large “Woke” protest march, I would say that perhaps 25 percent of the American population belongs in a mental health facility. Certainly, over half of all the most notable “movers and shakers” do. That might make for a good start. Shakespeare said the first thing we should do is arrest all the lawyers. Today, the first thing we should do is institutionalize all the public figures who’ve sworn allegiance to Ukraine, Israel, or Satan. For once, put the sane in charge. Warren G. Harding campaigned on a “return to normalcy.” Let’s try a return to sanity.