JEWISH KING JESUS IS COMING AT THE RAPTURE FOR US IN THE CLOUDS-DON'T MISS IT FOR THE WORLD.THE BIBLE TAKEN LITERALLY- WHEN THE PLAIN SENSE MAKES GOOD SENSE-SEEK NO OTHER SENSE-LEST YOU END UP IN NONSENSE.GET SAVED NOW- CALL ON JESUS TODAY.THE ONLY SAVIOR OF THE WHOLE EARTH - NO OTHER. 1 COR 15:23-JESUS THE FIRST FRUITS-CHRISTIANS RAPTURED TO JESUS-FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT-23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.ROMANS 8:23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.(THE PRE-TRIB RAPTURE)
SINS OF OCCULT WORSHIP
DEUTORONOMY 18:10-12
10
There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his
daughter to pass through the fire,(OCCULT SACRIFICES) or that useth
divination,(NEW AGER AND CRYSTALS ETC) divination n. The art or act of
foretelling future events or revealing occult knowledge by means of
augury or an alleged supernatural agency.) or an observer of
times,(Meaning of observer. ... for sketching it. horoscope - Comes from
Greek hora, hour, time, and skopos, observer.) or an enchanter,(The
word enchant is derived from the Latin word incantare which refers to
uttering an incantation or casting a spell). or a witch,(WITCH.
Definition: [noun] a female sorcerer (SORCERY IN THE BIBLE IS DRUGS OR
OCCULT ACTIVITY) or magician.)
11 Or a charmer,(charmer means a
dealer in spells, especially one who, by binding certain knots, was
supposed thereby to bind a curse or a blessing on its object.) or a
consulter with familiar spirits,(function as mediums or psychics) or a
wizard,(MALE WITCH-influence; a magical spell WITH WANDS) or a
necromancer.(one seeking unto the dead.)
12 For all that do these
things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these
abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.
ISAIAH 8:19-22
19
And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar
spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a
people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead?
20 To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.
21
And they shall pass through it, hardly bestead and hungry: and it shall
come to pass, that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret
themselves, and curse their king and their God, and look upward.
22
And they shall look unto the earth; and behold trouble and darkness,
dimness of anguish; and they shall be driven to darkness.
REVELATION 9:20-21
20
And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet
repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship
devils,(OCCULT) and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and
of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:
21 Neither
repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries,(DRUG ADDICTIONS
OR SELLING DRUGS) nor of their fornication,(SEX OUTSIDE OF
MARRIAGE)(PROSTITUTION FOR MONEY) nor of their thefts.(STEALING)
SINS OF PEOPLE
ISAIAH 5:20-25
20
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for
light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for
bitter!
21 Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!
22 Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink:
23 Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him!
24
Therefore as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth
the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall
go up as dust: because they have cast away the law of the LORD of
hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.
25 Therefore
is the anger of the LORD kindled against his people, and he hath
stretched forth his hand against them, and hath smitten them: and the
hills did tremble, and their carcases were torn in the midst of the
streets. For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is
stretched out still.
2 TIMOTHY 3:1-5
1 This know also, that in the last days perilous (DANGEROUS) times shall come.
2
For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud,
blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
6 For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts,
7 Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
1 TIMOTHY 1:9
9
Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the
lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy
and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for
manslayers,
10 For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with
mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there
be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine;
ROMANS 3:13-18
13 Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips:
14 Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness:
15 Their feet are swift to shed blood:
16 Destruction and misery are in their ways:
17 And the way of peace have they not known:
18 There is no fear of God before their eyes.
2 TIMOTHY 4:3-4
3
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but
after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having
itching ears;
4 And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
DECIEVERS WAXING WORSE AND WORSE.
2 TIMOTHY 3:13
13 But evil men and seducers (RAPERS AND SEX SIN DOERS) shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.
MORE SIN SIGNS
EPHESIANS 5:5-8
5
For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous
man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ
and of God.
6 Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience.
7 Be not ye therefore partakers with them.
8 For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light:
1 CORINTHIANS 6:9-10
9
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?
Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers,(sex
while married) nor effeminate,(HARDENED SODOMITES) nor abusers of
themselves with mankind,
10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards,(ALCOHOLICS) nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
JEREMIAH 17:9
9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
LUKE 6:43-45
43 For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
44 For every tree is known by his own fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes.
45
A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that
which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart
bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his
mouth speaketh.
MATTHEW 15:17-20
17 Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught?
18 But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man.
19 For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies:
MARK 7:21-23
21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders,
22 Thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness:
23 All these evil things come from within, and defile the man.
GALATIONS 5:19-21
19 Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,
20 Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies,
21
Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which
I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they
which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.
REV 22:15
15
For without are dogs, and sorcerers,(DRUG ADDICTS-PUSHERS) and
whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and
maketh a lie.
ALCOHOL
ISAIAH 5:21-22
21 Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!
22 Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink:(HARD ALCOHOL)
PROVERBS 4:17
17 For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence.
PROVERBS 20:1
1
Wine is a mocker,(THIS TELLS ME WINE ADDICTS MOCK GOD THE WORST) strong
drink (HARD ALCOHOL) is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is
not wise.
WELL WE SEE IN
2016 THE LIBERALS ADDED DOG THERAPY WITH DOGGY JACKETS ON. TO EASE THEIR
PAIN OF TRUMP WINNING.WHAT NEW THERAPY WILL THE LIBERALS NEED ON
NOVEMBER TUE 3RD. AFTER DONALD J TRUMP HANDS THEM ANOTHER 4 YEARS TO CRY
AND FLOOD THE LIBERAL MEDIA WITH TRUMP HATE AND ACCUSATIONS.ALL FALSE
OF COURSE JUST LIKE THE LAST 4 YEARS. AND THE LOLINUTPOP LIBERAL MEDIA
LEAD BY CNN AND MSNBC AND THE REST.YOU CAN BE ASSURED WILL TRY TO
FALSELY IMPREACH HIM FOR THE 100TH TIME OF NO SUCCESS.ISN'T MENTAL
ILLNESS DOING THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER. TO MAKE LIBERALS FEEL GOOD.
BUTB END UP IN THEIR CRY ROOMS EVERY TIME. SO WE SHALL SEE WHAT NEW
THERAPIES THE LIBERALS COME UP WITH AFTER NOVEMBER 3RD. TO EASE ANOTHER
LOSS TO TRUMP AND TO MAKE THEM FEEL LIKE THEY CAN MAKE IT THREW THE NEXT
4 YEARS. BUT IF THE LIBERALS WOULD WIN.THAT WOULD FULFILL PROPHECY ALL
RIGHT. BY THE 4TH YEAR. THE LIBERALS WOULD HAVE ALL AMERICA SOCIALISED.
GAYS WOULD BE LEGALLY NAKED IN THE STREETS. ABORTION MURDERERS WOULD
HAVE ABOORTION CLINICS ON EVERY BLOCK. RIGHT BESIDE A STRIP JOINT AND A
MUSLIM MOSQUE. SO THE MUSLIMS COULD BEHEAD IN THE NAME OF THEIR FAKE
MOON GOD ALLAH. AND THEIR SEX FOR MURDER PEDOPHILE PROPHET MOHAMMAD.
Distraught
students get therapy dogs to cope with Trump’s win-By Emily
Smith-November 15, 2016 | 4:02am | Elite schools offering coddled kids
disaster counseling after Trump win.
New York City schoolchildren
still unable to process Donald Trump’s victory are getting more help —
from therapy dogs.The Post revealed last week that coddled kids at elite
schools were being offered disaster counseling to deal with
President-elect Trump and their depressed liberal parents.Now we’re told
that “pettable” pooches were brought to private school Avenues, which
said in a letter that its faculty had backed Hillary Clinton, and “our
students brought a great deal of emotion, anxiety and strong feelings”
after Trump won.One source said, “On Friday, there were dogs in little
‘therapy’ jackets to help the kids, which was sweet, but highly amusing
to parents who support Trump.”
Coddling campus crybabies: Students take up toddler therapy after Trump win-By Brooke Singman, | Fox News
Tucker
to prof: Shouldn't students toughen up over election? Tucker Carlson
tries to get professor to explain her approach to students hysterical
over Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump in the election, define 'safe
spaces' and the lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses-Teddy
bears, Play-Doh and coloring books are staples of nursery schools, but
now they are showing up on college campuses to help distraught students
cope with the election of a president they don’t like.Around the nation,
students are turning to the tools of toddlers as a bizarre form of
therapy in the wake of Donald Trump's election last week. Colleges and
universities are encouraging students to cry, cuddle with puppies and
sip hot chocolate to soothe their fragile psyches, an approach some
critics say would be funny if it weren't so alarming.“This is an extreme
reaction from millennials who are being forced to come to terms with
the fact that we have a president that they don’t like –this is what
losing feels like,” Kristin Tate, the 24-year-old author of "Government
Gone Wild," told FoxNews.com. “We are grooming our students to be
sensitive crybabies when we need to be showing students how to deal with
world situations and how to be adults –there are no ‘safe spaces’ in
the real world.”HARVARD STUDENT PENS LETTER TO 'DELICATE' IVY
LEAGUERS-Among the top-notch schools sending devastated students back to
their early childhood:Cornell University recently hosted a “cry-in,”
complete with hot chocolate and tissues for disappointed Hillary Clinton
supporters.University of Pennsylvania brought in a puppy and a kitten
for therapeutic cuddling.Tufts University held arts and crafts sessions
for students.University of Michigan Law School scheduled an event for
this Friday called “Post-Election Self-Care With Food and Play” with
“stress-busting self-care activities” including coloring, blowing
bubbles, sculpting with Play-Doh and “positive card making.”University
of Michigan spokesperson Kim Broekhuizen told FoxNews.com the law school
was providing these programs based on requests from the students on
campus. But on Thursday, following media scrutiny, the event was
scrubbed from the school’s website and replaced with a more
age-appropriate discussion of the “limitations of executive power.”In an
email, Broekhuizen declined to say why the original event was scrapped,
and said the Ann Arbor school often faciilitates similar
stress-battling activities.“These kinds of events are scheduled
throughout the year including during high-stress times such as finals,
mid-terms and presidential elections,” Broekhuizen wrote. “The event was
scheduled before the outcome of the presidential election was known.”At
University of Michigan-Flint, students are able to visit “safe spaces”
and receive counseling for their post-election needs, a program that
Business Professor Mark Perry called “disturbing.”“Institutions of
higher learning have gone from being places that might be described as
‘intellectual boot-camps,’ where [students] are challenged with a
diversity of new ideas, to being places that might now be, more
accurately, described as ‘kindergartens’ for adults where they are no
longer challenged, but instead treated as fragile, intellectual children
and coddled with a ‘safe place’ response to anything challenging or
unsettling,” Perry, who also is a scholar at The American Enterprise
Institute, told FoxNews.com.Boston University skipped the hot chocolate
and therapy animals, but scheduled a set of post-election discussions
aimed at helping students process a democratic election that didn't go
their way.“Because the results of this election differed so dramatically
from pre-election polls and the expectations gleaned from national
media coverage, many people had difficulty comprehending how it came
about,” Boston University spokesman Colin Riley told FoxNews.com. “These
programs are helping students and others to sort through the results
–it is more than how to deal with one’s feelings.”Discussion and debate
is certainly more in keeping with academic tradition than coloring
books. But one BU student told FoxNews.com that a Nov. 9 email from the
University, titled “Tips for engaging in self-care,” sent the wrong
message.“It is crazy that the school is handling the outcome of an
election more than a serious terror attack,” the student told
FoxNews.com. “We didn’t get a ‘self-care’ guide during any of them –not
even after Paris last November while I was studying abroad.”Cornell
Psychology Professor Katherine Kinzler said not all students at the
Ithaca, N.Y., Ivy League school are handling the prospect of President
Trump like babies.“My students tell me they are having conversations
about their role as young adults in driving civic engagement, and the
implications of the election for their nation and for their futures,”
Kinzler wrote in an email to FoxNews.com. “Students thinking through the
issues and coming together can help us create productive solutions for
the many critical problems of our times.”Brooke Singman is a Politics
Reporter for Fox News. Follow her on Twitter at @BrookeSingman.
Identity
politics isn’t hurting liberalism. It’s saving it.Modern liberalism is
weak and under siege. Its path to revival is clear — if liberals are
willing to take it.By Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Feb 20,
2020, 8:20am EST
American liberalism is in desperate need of
renewal. Its ideas too often feel stale, its nostrums unsuited to
beating back the authoritarian populist tide.Yet there is an opportunity
for revival — if liberals are willing to more forthrightly embrace the
politics of identity.To many liberals, such a suggestion will sound like
blasphemy. Since mere days after Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, an
unending stream of op-eds and books have accused “identity politics” —
defined loosely as a left-wing political style that centers the
interests and concerns of oppressed groups — of driving the country off a
moral and political cliff.These critics accuse identity politics of
being a cancer on the very idea of liberalism, pulling the mainstream
American left away from a politics of equal citizenship and shared civic
responsibility. It is, moreover, political suicide, a woke purism that
makes it impossible to form winning political coalitions — evidenced, in
critics’ minds, by the backlash to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s embrace of the
popular podcast host Joe Rogan.The idea that identity politics is at
odds with liberalism has become conventional wisdom in parts of the
American political and intellectual elite. Harvard psychologist Steven
Pinker has condemned contemporary identity politics as “an enemy of
reason and Enlightenment values.” New York Times columnist Bari Weiss
argues that the “corrupt identity politics of the left” amounts to a
dangerously intolerant worldview. And New York magazine’s Andrew
Sullivan claims the “woke left” seems “not to genuinely believe in
liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion.” This line of thinking is
practically the founding credo of the school of internet thought known
as the Intellectual Dark Web.It is also deeply, profoundly wrong.What
these critics lambaste as an attack on liberalism is actually its best
form: the logical extension of liberalism’s core commitment to social
equality and democracy, adapted to address modern sources of inequality.
A liberalism that rejects identity politics is a liberalism for the
powerful, one that relegates the interests of marginalized groups to
second-class status.Manique Beckman wears a sash that reads “The Future
is Feminine” as she walks to the Women’s March in Washington on January
21, 2017. Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images-But
identity politics is not only important as a matter of liberal
principle. In the face of an existential threat from right-wing
populists in Europe and the United States, liberals need to harness new
sources of political energy to fight back. This is not a matter of
short-term politics, of whether being “too woke” will help or hurt
Democrats in 2020, but a deeper and more fundamental question: what
types of organizations and activist movements are required to make
liberalism sustainable in the 21st century. And there is good reason to
believe the passions stirred by identity politics can renew a liberalism
gone haggard.To say that liberalism and identity politics are at odds
is to misunderstand our political situation. Identity politics isn’t
merely compatible with liberalism; it is, in fact, liberalism’s truest
face. If liberalism wishes to succeed in 21st-century America, it
shouldn’t reject identity politics — it should embrace it.What is
identity politics? All politics is, in a certain sense, identity
politics. Every kind of political approach appeals to particular aspects
of voters’ identities; some are just more explicit than others.But
critics of identity politics have a very particular politics in mind — a
mode of rhetoric and organizing that prioritizes the concerns and
experiences of historically marginalized groups, emphasizing the group’s
particularity.To understand why this kind of identity politics is so
controversial — and what its critics often get wrong about it — we need
to turn to the work of the late University of Chicago philosopher Iris
Marion Young.In 1990, Young published a classic book titled Justice and
the Politics of Difference. At the time, political philosophy was
dominated by internal debates among liberals who focused heavily on the
question of wealth distribution. Young, both a philosopher and a left
activist, found this narrow discourse unsatisfying.In her view,
mainstream American liberalism had assumed a particular account of what
social equality means: “that equal social status for all persons
requires treating everyone according to the same principles, rules, and
standards.” Securing “equality” on this view means things like
desegregation and passing nondiscrimination laws, efforts to end overt
discrimination against marginalized groups.This is an important start,
Young argues, but not nearly enough. The push for formally equal
treatment can’t eliminate all sources of structural inequality; in fact,
it can serve to mask and even deepen them. Judging a poor black kid and
a rich white one by the same allegedly meritocratic college admissions
standards, for example, will likely lead to the rich white one’s
admission — perpetuating a punishing form of inequality that started at
birth.Young sees an antidote in a political vision she developed out of
experiences in social movements, which she calls “the politics of
difference.” Sometimes, Young argues, achieving true equality demands
treating groups differently rather than the same. “The specificity of
each group requires a specific set of rights for each, and for some a
more comprehensive system than for others,” Young writes. The goal is
identity consciousness rather than identity blindness: “Black Lives
Matter” over “All Lives Matter.”She did not like using the term
“identity politics” for this approach, arguing in her 2000 book
Inclusion and Democracy that it was misleadingly narrow. But two decades
later, what she sketched out is what we understand “identity politics”
to mean.People hold hands during a rally lead by faith leaders in front
of City Hall in Baltimore, Maryland, in response to the death of Freddie
Gray on May 3, 2015. Andrew Burton/Getty Images-Young’s philosophical
precision allows us to understand what’s distinctive about contemporary
identity politics. It also helps us understand why critics see it as
such a threat.Identity politics’ dissatisfaction with formal equal
treatment is, in their view, fundamentally illiberal. Its emphasis on
correcting structural discrimination can morph into a kind of
authoritarianism, an obsession with the policing of speech and behaviors
(especially from white, straight, cisgender men) at odds with
liberalism’s core commitments to individual rights, so the critics fret.
They see college students disinviting conservative speakers for being
“problematic,” or “canceling” celebrities who violate the rules of
acceptable discourse on race or gender identity, as evidence that
identity politics’ fundamental aim is overturning liberalism in the name
of equality.This approach is not only illiberal, the critics argue, but
self-defeating. The more emphasis that is placed on the separateness of
American social groups, the less space there is for a politically
effective and wide-ranging liberalism.“The only way to [win power] is to
have a message that appeals to as many people as possible and pulls
them together,” Columbia professor Mark Lilla writes in his recent book
The Once and Future Liberal. “Identity liberalism does just the
opposite.”Many of these critics see themselves as coming from a
relatively progressive and firmly liberal starting point. They tend to
profess support for the ideals of racial or gender equality. What they
can’t abide is a political approach that emphasizes difference, shaping
its policy proposals around specific oppressions rather than universal
ideals.It is a philosophical argument with political implications: a
claim that the essence of identity politics is illiberal, and for that
reason its continued influence on the American left augurs both moral
and electoral doom.Why liberalism needs identity politics-It’s hardly
absurd for someone like Lilla to see tension between liberalism and
identity politics. Young herself described the politics of difference as
not a species of liberalism but a challenge to it.But her stance
notwithstanding, political philosophers have come to see the politics of
identity as part of a vibrant liberalism. In 1998, Canadian scholar
Will Kymlicka identified an “emerging consensus” among political
philosophers on what he calls “liberal multiculturalism,” the idea that
“groups have a valid claim, not only to tolerance and
non-discrimination, but also to explicit accommodation, recognition and
representation within the institutions of the larger society.”If we
examine liberalism’s core moral commitments, Kymlicka’s consensus
shouldn’t be a surprise.The quintessential liberal value is freedom.
Liberalism’s core political ambition is to create a society where
citizens are free to participate as equals, cooperating on mutually
agreeable terms in political life and pursuing whatever vision of
private life they find meaningful and fulfilling. Freedom in this sense
cannot be achieved in political systems defined by identity-based
oppression. When members of some social groups face barriers to living
the life they choose, purely as a result of their membership in that
group, then the society they live in is failing on liberal
terms.Identity politics seeks to draw attention to and combat such
sources of unfreedom. Consider the following facts about American
life:The median black family’s wealth is one-tenth that of the median
white family.The average American woman spends over 11 more hours per
week doing unpaid home labor than the average man.LGBTQ youth are about
five times more likely to attempt suicide than (respectively) straight
and cisgender peers.There is no law saying black people can’t own
houses, that women married to men must do the cooking and cleaning, or
that LGBTQ teens must harm themselves. These problems have more subtle
causes, including legacies of historical discrimination, deeply embedded
social norms, and inadequate legislative attention to the particular
circumstances of marginalized groups.Identity politics’ focus on the
need to go beyond anti-discrimination works to open new avenues for
dealing with the insidious nature of modern group-based inequality. Once
you understand that this is the actual aim of identity politics, it
becomes clear that critiques of its alleged authoritarianism miss the
forest for the trees.Two women watch demonstrators marching during the
fourth annual Women’s March on January 18, 2020, in Washington, DC.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images-It is of course true that
one can point to illiberal behavior by activists in the name of
identity politics: Think of the student group at the City University of
New York that attempted to shout down a relatively mainstream
conservative legal scholar’s lecture out of hostility to his views on
immigration law. But instances of campus intolerance are actually quite
uncommon, despite their omnipresence in the media, and the idea that a
handful of student excesses represent the core of “identity politics” is
a mistake.One can say the same thing for social media outrages. It’s
certainly true that many practitioners of identity politics send
over-the-top tweets or pen Facebook posts calling for people to be fired
without good cause. It’s also true that some practitioners of every
kind of politics do these things. Holding up an outrageous-sounding
tweet as representative of the allegedly authoritarian heart of identity
politics is a basic analytical error: confusing a platform problem, the
way social media highlights the most extreme versions of all
ideologies, with a doctrinal defect in identity politics.Merely because a
liberal movement contains some illiberal components doesn’t make it
fundamentally illiberal; if it did, then slave-owning American founders
and bigoted Enlightenment philosophers would have to be booted out of
the liberal canon.The key question is whether the agenda and aims of
identity politics’ adherents advance liberal freedom compared to the
status quo. On this point, it’s clear that the practitioners of
“identity politics” are on the liberal side.In recent years, we have
seen champions of identity politics rack up impressive accomplishments —
victories like defeating prosecutors with troubling records on race at
the ballot box, getting sexual assault allegations taken seriously in
the workplace, and securing health care coverage for transition-related
medical care.These are hardly examples of woke Stalinism. They are
instead victories of liberal reform and democratic activism, incremental
changes aimed at addressing deep-rooted sources of unfreedom.Time and
again throughout American history, from abolitionism to the movement for
same-sex marriage, members of marginalized groups have refused to
abandon liberalism’s promises. They put their lives on the line, risking
death on Civil War battlefields and in the streets of Birmingham, in
defense of liberal ideals. When they demanded change, they won it
through the push-and-pull of democratic politics and political activism
that constitute the heart of liberal praxis. In essayist Adam Serwer’s
evocative phrasing: “The American creed has no more devoted adherents
than those who have been historically denied its promises.”A
collage-based illustration displaying elements of protest images and the
Statue of Liberty.Christina Animashaun/Vox-Today’s practitioners of
identity politics are the proper heirs to this tradition. Former Georgia
gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, one of the most prominent
defenders of “identity politics” in American public life, has devoted
her post-election career to an unimpeachably liberal cause — fighting
restrictions on the franchise, particularly those that
disproportionately affect black voters.In a recent Foreign Affairs
essay, Abrams made the case that one of the central aims of identity
politics is bolstering liberalism — that it is “activism that will
strengthen democratic rule, not threaten it.” In Abrams’s view, the
persistence of structural oppression, and in particular the Trump-era
backlash to social progress, requires careful attention to identity, and
in particular what marginalized groups want from their political
elites.“By embracing identity and its prickly, uncomfortable contours,”
Abrams wrote, “Americans will become more likely to grow as one.”Why
identity politics is good politics-The critics of identity politics have
another complaint: that its hold on the Democratic Party can only lead
to electoral perdition. Abrams, as inspirational as many find her, did
lose the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race. Maybe identity politics can be
defended theoretically but in practice alienates too many people to be
put in practice.It’s possible to challenge the specifics of these
arguments. Abrams didn’t win, but it was a very tight loss in a
historically red state (in fact, 2018 was the closest Georgia
gubernatorial election in the state in more than 50 years). And you can
point to many examples that go in the other direction — at the local,
state, and national levels.But it would be myopic to tie ourselves up in
these near-term (and frankly inconclusive) tactical arguments. We have a
broader crisis to worry about.Debating the interests of the Democratic
Party confines the imagination; rising illiberalism in the United States
is a deeper problem than the Trump presidency. To reckon with it, we
need to take a longer view, looking at the beliefs and sources of
activist energy that define the contours of what’s possible in American
electoral politics.Since World War II, liberalism and its core beliefs
about rights and freedom have served as something like the operating
system for democratic politics. But in recent years, this consensus has
come under severe stress. Elite failures and global catastrophes —
particularly the one-two punch of the financial and refugee crises —
have caused Western publics to lose faith in the liberal order’s
guardians. Illiberal right-wing populism has emerged as a potent
alternative model. The West’s fundamental commitment to liberalism is
coming into question.Liberals are in the midst of war — and in it,
giving up identity politics amounts to a kind of unilateral disarmament.
Today’s political contests, in both the United States and Europe, are
increasingly defined by conflict surrounding demographic change and the
erosion of traditional social hierarchies. These are the central issues
in our politics, the ones that most powerfully motivate people to vote
and join political organizations.A mural featuring former Georgia
gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams seen in Atlanta, Georgia, on April
25, 2019. Elijah Nouvelage for The Washington Post via Getty ImagesThe
anti-liberal side has pegged its vision almost entirely to backlash
politics, to rolling back the gains made by ethnic and racial
minorities, women, and the LGBTQ community. The challenge for liberals
is not primarily winning over voters who find that regressive vision
appealing; no modern liberal party can be as authentically bigoted as a
far-right one. At the same time, liberals should not write off entire
heterogeneous demographic blocs like “the white working class” as
unpersuadable. Instead, the main task of liberal politics should be
mobilizing those from all backgrounds who oppose the far-right’s vision —
knitting together in common cause a staggeringly diverse array of
people with very different experiences.The 2017 Women’s March is a
concrete example of how identity politics can help in this struggle.The
march was billed, at the time, as both an expression of feminist rage
and the major anti-Trump action the weekend of the inauguration. Some
liberal identity skeptics fretted that these goals were antithetical;
that the particularism of the event’s feminist rhetoric would end up
dividing the anti-Trump coalition.“I think many men assume the ‘Women’s
March’ is supposed to be women-only, which is why it was a bad name for
the main anti-Trump march,” New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote.
“There are many grounds on which to object to Trump. Feminism is one. I
think [the] goal should be to get all of them together.”Chait’s concerns
were clearly unfounded. The 2017 Women’s March was by some estimates
the largest single day of protest in US history, with somewhere in the
range of 3 million to 5 million people attending the various marches
nationwide. Feminism, far from being a divisive theme, served to
mobilize large numbers of people to get out and demonstrate against
America’s illiberal turn.But what happened next is particularly
interesting: The experience of attending Women’s Marches seems to have
galvanized a significant number of people — overwhelmingly women — to
engage in sustained activism for both gender equality and the defense of
liberalism more broadly.In the years following the 2017 demonstrations,
Harvard researchers Leah Gose and Theda Skocpol conducted extensive
fieldwork among anti-Trump activists. They found that the march helped
mobilize many new activists — the bulk of whom were middle-class,
educated white women in their 50s or older. “Following the marches,”
they found, “clusters of women in thousands of communities across
America carried on with forming local groups to sustain anti-Trump
activism.”The Women’s March seems to have played a crucial role in
turning these women into activists who not only opposed Trump but aimed
to defend liberalism’s promise of equal freedom. Activists interviewed
by Gose and Skocpol frequently cited a concern for the health of
American democracy as a reason for their engagement. Despite being
heavily white, they also worked on issues that are of particular concern
to racial minorities — organizing against (for example) the white
nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and child separation.“As
before throughout American history,” Gose and Skocpol write, “women’s
civic activism may revitalize democratic engagement and promote a new
birth of responsive government in communities across the land.”In a
recent working paper, political scientist Jonathan Pinckney took a close
look at the impact of the Women’s March on three metrics: increase of
size in Democratic-aligned activist groups, ideology of Democratic
members of Congress, and the share of the Democratic vote in 2018. He
found that areas with larger attendance at the 2017 marches later saw
“significantly increased movement activity, left-ward shifts in
congressional voting scores, and a greater swing to the Democrats in the
2018 midterm elections.”The Women’s March itself seems to have largely
petered out, succumbing to fatigue and leadership infighting. But its
true legacy will be the activist networks it helped create, ones that
contributed to sustained and impactful challenges to an illiberal
presidency.This kind of thing is what, in the long run, liberalism
needs: a way to make its defense fresh and exciting, mobilizing specific
groups toward the collective task of defeating the far right. Doing so
will require meeting people where they are, engaging them on the
identity issues that matter deeply and profoundly. Knitting this latent
energy into a durable and electorally viable coalition will be the work
of a generation, but it’s hard to see how American liberalism can get
off its heels without trying.Indigenous women participants walk walk
during the 2019 Women’s March in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on January 19,
2019. Robert Alexander/Getty Images-It’s true, of course, that the
interests of members of marginalized groups are not always aligned, and
that such groups also contain a lot of internal disagreements and
diversity. There are always hard questions regarding building
coalitions. Should Sanders have denounced Joe Rogan’s endorsement? Is
former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s dubious record on
race and policing disqualifying? These are important questions, and
there will be more like them. They will lead to more fights among
liberals and the broader left.But political factions of all ideologies
have to make tough judgment calls when it comes time to engage in
electoral politics, and there’s nothing about identity politics that
makes it uniquely poorly suited to the task.While the politics of
difference is attuned to the specific experiences of social groups, it
also contains a universalizing impulse: a sense that all structural
injustices — stemming from racism, sexism, class structure, or whatever —
are to be opposed. There’s a core commitment to solidarity, to not only
listening to the members of other groups but seeing their struggle as
linked to your own.“Having to be accountable to people from diverse
social positions with different needs, interests, and experience helps
transform discourse from self-regard to appeals to justice,” Young
writes in Inclusion and Democracy.An anti-oppression framework gives
people a moral language for articulating their disagreements and
perspectives, for constructing a sense of unity and shared purpose out
of difference. That we’re having these conversations at all, and are
agonizing over what exactly our liberalism should look like, is all to
the good — because rebuilding liberalism around anti-oppression values,
no matter how difficult it might seem in the moment, is its best hope
for an enduring revival.Toward a liberal radicalism-If all of this is
right, and liberalism needs identity politics not just to survive but to
succeed, then an obvious question looms: How can it be adapted to take
issues of identity more seriously? What might the ideals and aspirations
of an identity-focused liberalism be, and how might it imagine making
them possible? One good place to start is the work of CUNY philosopher
Charles Mills. Mills’s most famous book, The Racial Contract (1997), is a
fundamental critique of the Enlightenment political tradition, arguing
that racist attitudes expressed by philosophical giants like Immanuel
Kant are not some alien parasite on their theories, but vital to their
intellectual enterprises.It’s the kind of thoroughgoing dissection you
might expect from a socialist or black nationalist, someone willing to
scrap liberalism altogether. Yet at the end of his most recent book,
Black Rights/White Wrongs, Mills explains that his project is not aimed
at supplanting liberalism but rather rescuing it — by developing what he
calls “black radical liberalism.”Central to black radical liberalism is
the idea of “corrective justice”: the notion that liberalism as it has
been practiced historically has fallen badly short of its highest ideals
of guaranteeing equal freedom, and that the task of modern liberalism
ought to be rectifying the racial inequalities of its past
incarnations.Mills’s approach is refreshing because it moves beyond the
strange conservatism in so much liberal writing today. His work is not
an uncritical valorization of the Enlightenment nor a paean to dead
white thinkers; it does not aim to Make Liberalism Great Again. It is
instead a harshly critical account of liberalism’s history that
nonetheless aims to advance liberalism’s core values and secure its
greatest accomplishments.The animating force of identity politics, what
gives it such extraordinary power to mobilize, is deep wells of outrage
at structural injustice. Millions of people see the cruelties of the
Trump administration — its detention of migrant children in camps, the
Muslim ban, the plan to define transgender people out of existence by
executive fiat, the president’s description of Charlottesville neo-Nazis
as “very fine people”— and want to do something.Today’s liberals often
focus their arguments on bloodless abstractions like “democratic norms”
and the “liberal international order.” I don’t deny that these things
are important; I’ve written in their defense myself.But people aren’t
angry about norm erosion in the way they are about, say,
state-sanctioned mistreatment of migrant kids. By making identity
politics something not outside of liberalism but at the center of it,
liberals can enlist the energies of identity to the defense of
liberalism itself.Doing that successfully requires a level of Millsian
radicalism. While this sort of identity liberalism would not reject the
accomplishments of the past, it requires admitting their insufficiency.
It means accepting that liberalism is a doctrine that has failed in key
ways, and that repairing its errors requires centering the interests of
the groups that have been most wronged. It means appealing to the
specificity of group experiences, while also emphasizing their shared
interests in the twinned fights against oppression and for liberal
democracy.This approach will require compromises from some mainstream
liberals, who will need to start welcoming in people and ideas they
might not like. They’ll need to get over squeamishness about student
activists and their pain regarding political correctness, to recognize
that their vision of balancing competing political interests won’t
always win out. That’s not to say they can’t argue for their ideas; this
type of liberal can and should be entitled to make the case for more
cautious political approaches. But liberals need to stop trying to play
gatekeeper, to banish ideas like intersectionality to the illiberal
wilds.Because the practitioners of identity politics are not illiberal.
They are, in fact, some of the best friends liberalism has today. The
sooner liberals acknowledge that, the closer we will be to a liberal
revival.
America’s Therapists Are Worried About Trump’s Effect
On Your Mental Health-His candidacy is sowing fear, distress and anger
across the country, they say. Here’s what one psychologist is doing to
try to stop it.By GAIL SHEEHY-October 10, 2016
Gail Sheehy is the
author of 17 books, including a biography of Hillary Clinton, Hillary’s
Choice, and a current memoir, DARING: My Passages.What is Donald Trump
doing to Americans’ mental health? It came up in the debate Sunday
night, when Hillary Clinton pointed to a “Trump effect,” an uptick in
bullying and distress that teachers are noticing in classrooms as their
students are exposed to a candidate who regularly attacks his opponents
in bombastic, even threatening terms. The new revelation of Trump’s
crude boasts in 2005 about being able to kiss and grope women and “move
on” a married woman “like a bitch” gave new fuel to the charge that his
candidacy might be normalizing aggressive, disparaging talk and
behavior.This all might be another political attack, just stacked up on
top of the familiar charges that Trump is a danger to national security,
an impulsive and erratic personality, and indifferent to the
Constitution. But thousands of therapists are worried that it’s
something more—and they’ve been saying so for months.Over the summer,
some 3,000 therapists signed a self-described manifesto declaring
Trump’s proclivity for scapegoating, intolerance and blatant sexism a
“threat to the well-being of the people we care for” and urging others
in the profession to speak out against him. Written and circulated
online by University of Minnesota psychologist William J. Doherty, the
manifesto enumerated a variety of effects therapists report seeing in
their patients: that Trump’s combative and chaotic campaign has stoked
feelings of anxiety, fear, shame and helplessness, especially in women,
gay people, minority groups and nonwhite immigrants, who feel not just
alienated but personally targeted by the candidate’s message.The
manifesto also made a subtler point: that all the attention heaped on
Trump is actually making it harder for therapists to do their jobs.
Trump’s campaign is legitimizing, even celebrating, a set of personal
behaviors that psychotherapists work to reverse every day in their
offices: “The tendency to blame ‘others’ in our lives for our personal
fears and insecurities, and then battle these ‘others,’ instead of
taking the healthier, more difficult path, of self-awareness and
self-responsibility,” as Doherty wrote. Trump also “normalizes a kind of
hyper-masculinity that is antithetical to the healthy relationships
that psychotherapy helps people achieve.” Not to mention that his
comments in the 2005 tape, Doherty says, are consistent with the
behavior of a “sexual predator.”To some, the therapists’ campaign might
sound a little touchy-feely, a worried cry from a group whose job is to
be sensitive. But their effort is also an attempt to understand
something bigger about what's happening to the country. There’s good
reason to believe that demagogic, authoritarian leadership has a
profound effect on citizens’ mental health—yet we know very little about
what that effect is, Doherty says, because such repressive regimes tend
to punish those who would dare to publicize findings of psychological
damage. Doherty sees this moment in American politics as an important
test case.In fact, it was a recent trip to Austria, where a neo--fascist
is leading in the presidential election, that inspired Doherty’s
interest in Trump. He first thought to study what psychiatrists had done
in 1930s Austria and Germany—some had collaborated with the Nazis,
others remained silent—and then turned his attention to the present-day
United States. Doherty sees in Trump echoes of the cults of personality
wielded by strongmen throughout history—and amplified by Trump’s use of
social media for self-propagandizing: appeals to fear and anger, blaming
people seen as “other,” humiliating opponents, fomenting distrust of
the media and the political system, projecting an image of exaggerated
masculinity, and ridiculing women while claiming to idealize them. For
that reason, Doherty sees Trump as a threat not just to the American
people but to the democratic tradition, which he believes fosters the
kind of openness that is essential to the work that therapists do.Last
month, to put some research heft behind his concerns, Doherty
commissioned a national poll of 1,000 voting-age Americans and found
that 43 percent of the respondents—not limited to people in
therapy—reported experiencing emotional distress related to Trump and
his campaign. Twenty-eight percent reported experiencing emotional
distress related to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Ninety percent of those
feeling emotional distress say it’s worse compared with any previous
election. But Trump has drawn the bulk of Doherty’s attention, both
because of the GOP nominee’s overt aggression and because his name comes
up more often in therapy sessions, Doherty says.Trump’s bombastic
approach, of course, has been intoxicating and persuasive to a
significant portion of the electorate. He has a kind of roguish charm,
and plenty of downtrodden Americans feel energized by his message that
the country needs to be made “great” and “safe” again. And certainly,
not all therapists attribute their clients’ anxiety to Trump or the
election. In the conservative bastion of Newport Beach, California, for
instance, psychologist Michelle Matusoff, a Republican whose practice
focuses on children, teens and parenting, told me she was aware of the
pervasive discussion on social media about misogyny, xenophobia and
racism in the presidential election. She’s not a fan of Trump
(especially after the release of the 2005 tape). But she criticizes him
gingerly—“He doesn’t censor himself well,” she recently told me, meaning
he says what he really believes but he doesn’t disguise it in coded
language—and she calls analyses like Doherty’s letter “subjective.”
“There’s a lot of disapproving and eye-rolling among my colleagues
[about Trump], but we don’t notice a significant mental health impact on
our clients,” she says.But Doherty is deadly serious about trying to
make psychotherapists across the country aware of the psychological
threat of what he calls “Trumpism,” and to equip them to counter it in
their practice. In his online manifesto, he urged American
psychotherapists to become “citizen therapists” by actively discussing
Trump with their clients and communities. I spoke to seven of those
therapists, who described the effects of Trumpism they are seeing in
their clients—from fear of being ostracized or stripped of legal
protections they now enjoy, to suffering the terror of a childhood
trauma reawakened by a candidate whose father trained him to think of
himself as a “killer” and a “king.” They also spoke about how Trump—with
his evident lack of self-reflection and frequent scapegoating—is making
it harder for them to do their jobs.Although it’s fair to assume that
most of Doherty’s therapists skew liberal, not all of them do. Carrie
Hanson-Bradley, a therapist in Lincoln, Nebraska, says she has voted for
Republican presidential candidates her whole life. These days, she
says, when her clients report increased anxiety and insecurity, they
often point not just to personal troubles but to things they hear about
in the news, including the Islamic State and the presidential election.
Most of those clients, white males who skew low- to middle-income, don’t
want to talk specifically about whom they’re voting for. But they do
express concern about “not having a candidate that represents them and
their problems,” explains Hanson-Bradley, who says she will not be
voting for Trump. “It’s really hard when your conservative values lean
one way, and the candidate”—Trump—“doesn’t represent that.”Some
therapists say their clients are pinning their worries much more
squarely on Trump himself. Fran Davis, a Boston psychologist with 30
years of experience, told me that the day after Trump’s stunning primary
victory on Super Tuesday, six of her seven regular clients said they
felt acute anxiety just imagining that Trump could be president. Parents
talked about their distress over eruptions of hateful talk and taunting
in schoolyards. A legal immigrant parent reported her child asking, “Do
we have to get out of the country?” Others had uglier worries. One of
Davis’ patients, David Heimann, told me in an interview that Trump’s
racist threats against Mexicans and Muslims triggered for him fears of
persecution reminiscent of his family’s experience in the
Holocaust.Women have been a repeated target of Trump’s, particularly of
late, with his crude hot mic comments, his revived body-shaming attacks
against former Miss Universe Alicia Machado and his not-so-veiled
threats on Hillary Clinton’s life—suggesting that Second Amendment
supporters could take up arms against her, or that Clinton’s bodyguards
should disarm to “see what happens to her.” Those comments have touched a
nerve in many women, sometimes even more alarmingly among those dealing
with the post-traumatic effects of physical or sexual abuse by
husbands, boyfriends or fathers. Michelle Shauf, who works in the
male-dominated high-tech and financial sectors in Atlanta, grew up with
an abusive father and has recently sought therapeutic counseling. Shauf
told me it depresses her to see Clinton’s experience and qualifications
wielded as negatives to keep her from taking on a job held only by men.
Plus, Shauf, who has a 9-year-old daughter, fears that Trump’s shaming
of women for being “fat” or “flat-chested” can be primal injuries to
adolescent girls’ self-esteem.Trump’s suggestions that he could roll
back civil rights gains for gay people—by appointing Supreme Court
justices who would overturn same-sex marriage, for instance, and backing
North Carolina’s controversial bathroom law (HB2)—are similarly
triggering fears in some LGBT therapy patients. Susan Blank, Shauf’s
therapist in Atlanta, told me about one gay male client who was married
in Vermont when same-sex marriage was first legalized there and moved
back to Atlanta when Georgia recognized it. He told Blank it was similar
to the movie Jaws: “Just when I thought it was safe to go back in the
water, Trump was nominated.” Margaret Howard, a licensed clinical social
worker in St. Louis, said one of her lesbian clients was unnerved while
traveling for work through what she described as “Trumpish areas” of
the South with her same-sex partner. To register in a hotel, they hid
their relationship and pretended to be roommates. “Having to go back in
the closet has come as a real shock to my younger clients,” Howard told
me. “They are used to acceptance.”Patrick Dougherty, a trauma therapist
in the Twin Cities who is a longtime colleague of Doherty’s (no
relation), has found that even his mostly white heterosexual male
patients—Trump’s demographic sweet spot—are experiencing anger and fear
as a result of Trump’s campaign. Partly it’s that many of the men
Dougherty treats grew up in dysfunctional families—a violent or
alcoholic parent, or one who was depressed or negligent. Trump’s
aggressiveness is triggering for them personal childhood traumas, says
Dougherty, himself a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War. For others,
Trump is contributing to a sense of “collective trauma,” a blow that
tears at the basic tissue of social life. The videotaped police killing
of Philando Castile in Minneapolis this summer and the recent stabbing
at a mall in St. Cloud already have parts of Minnesota on edge; Trump’s
antagonism toward minorities and others is only making matters worse,
Dougherty says: “Even here in the upper Midwest, our sense of community
is disappearing.” One client told Dougherty: “I work with Muslims—what’s
going to happen to those people?” The client added, “I’m afraid some
white motherfucker is gonna go down to the West Bank”—a part of
Minneapolis that has a large population of Somali, mostly Muslim
immigrants—“and shoot people up.”Therapists, of course, must tread
lightly when it comes to discussing politics, and for some particularly
vulnerable patients, the fear that Trump incites can be attractive. Mary
Kelleher, a marriage and family therapist in Seattle and another
signatory of Doherty’s manifesto, experienced panic attacks herself just
thinking about how her patients—most of whom are legal immigrants of
Latin American, African or Caribbean descent—might respond to Trump’s
branding of immigrants as a danger. But she was shocked to hear some of
her immigrant clients say they were drawn to Trump. On reflection, she
concluded, “His strongman persona represents safety to them, even if his
policies could be personally destructive.” Still, Kelleher is careful
not to engage in a political argument with her patients. “Their
traumatization could go back decades, and that’s where I would focus,”
rather than going directly to the subject of Trump, she explains. “Their
alignment with Trump is a symptom of their trauma.”Trump’s emergence in
therapy sessions presents a powerful conflict for some therapists
between their professional norms—which include not imposing their
political beliefs on their clients—and what some describe as a strong,
even historic sense of moral obligation to keep this candidate out of
the White House. Kirsten Lind Seal, a therapist who teaches ethics at
Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota and signed Doherty’s manifesto,
assured me, “I am not going to diagnose Trump from afar, but I have an
ethical obligation to make my voice heard [outside of the consulting
room] about how bigotry, xenophobia, racist and sexist speech is ripping
apart the fabric of our social and political life.”That’s where Doherty
sees his work coming in. The thousands of signatories to his open
letter have become an online community that shares ideas about how to
counter “Trumpism.” And in August, he invited 14 of his most committed
followers to brainstorm steps they can recommend to therapists in the
trenches. They discussed ideas like easing into a conversation by first
asking what the Trump campaign means to the client, if the client
doesn’t bring up Trump on his or her own. If the answer suggests acute
anxiety, then the therapist can suggest action steps, like disengaging
with non-stop TV coverage of the campaign and engaging instead with
friends and community. Doherty’s working group also discussed how
patients who feel threatened by Trump can take action as citizens rather
than feeling helpless—for instance, by registering new voters—rather
than turning to passive coping mechanisms, like having another glass (or
bottle) of wine.The Marine veteran therapist Dougherty, for one, is
experimenting with raising the question of political stress more
directly among his regular clients. “I wrote a letter about the
prevalence of hate speech in the campaign, about terrorism and mass
shootings, and left it in my waiting room. I closed by saying, ‘If these
things are troubling you, I want to invite you to bring it into your
therapy session.’” Out of 30 patients, 20 raised those concerns, and
Dougherty is working to help address them.It isn’t enough to defeat
Trump the candidate, some signers of Doherty’s manifesto say, and that’s
not really the point. They believe they have to fight Trumpism—the
emotional pain they say he has already caused. “There is a real and
present danger for a national mental health crisis,” Doherty says. “And
regardless of the outcome of the election, it will continue to need our
attention.”
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