Okay, so who wants to jump in on this whopper first and point out some of the tropes that we often see that the Trump ran through there?

Well, first, throwing it back on the community and saying, like, Oh, communities didn't want this. And also, he's he's referencing like, Oh, you know, communities didn't want certain institutions in New York. And it's like clearly, not understanding or very much knowing of institutions like the Willowbrook State School and the horrible conditions in which disabled people were were basically tortured. And you know, it's, this is another piece of I find from a political perspective, taking advantage of generations, not actually knowing the horrors of these asylums and these institutions. And I think to Leia's point and Leont's point earlier, that's the dangerousness really of this of this modernization, if you will, of the asylum.

So, you know, not to make light of the situation, but I do think this is so, so repetitive and predictable that it is, you know, slightly comical at least. But equally dangerous. So one of the things we should think through together collectively is what do we call dangerous? So that word, I'm sure, will repeat in many of the either the clips or the things people read about the issue of kind of bringing it back to the asylum. And it really comes back to the construction of what danger is. So I'm just going to go back to what I said earlier. I mean, danger is racialized, it's gendered. And it's very related to sanism. It's very related to carceral sanism, you know, meaning the way that we basically operationalize who we think is quote unquote mentally ill or not sane or not rational. And what we do about it. So the use of pathologization to justify carceral expansion, basically. And so dangerousness underpins a lot of that. And we can't just take that word and kind of leave it hanging, right? And then the what Trump does with that and quite frankly, Obama did with that as well, create an infrastructure of preventive detention. So of course, Obama did that in regards to Guantanamo. And other places that we don't like to connect with the kind of struggles for full liberation that certain kind of rights movements kind of try to shy away. But I want to say that those are connected struggles. And the whole idea of preventive detention again comes from eugenics, right? It's the idea that people are born criminals as Nicole Rafter, the late Nicole Rafter, her book is called board criminals. And so it's, it's a again, a discourse that comes from from eugenics and is connected to race and colonialism and also Islamophobia, anti semitism. The last thing I would say and I'm not going to go into is the city of living on the streets, right? Like the institutions closed, they left people to be living on the streets. So in addition to being dangerous now, they're also unhoused. So we have to open the asylum because that is where people should go as if an asylum is somebody's home.

Sashka points, I will revisit a couple of those tropes and in future clips and also the asylum is home. And as a

place of refuge features really heavily in the framing of the Wall Street Journal piece. Leah,

I want to leave it open for you next.

Yeah, you know, Trump has a real romance slash love affair with institutions. I remember some other remarks that he gave. Maybe they were also the same remarks, but you know, he talks about he waxes nostalgic for, you know, growing up in Queens and and all of the mental institutions that he would see in childhood. And then he says, all of a sudden you go and you don't see them anymore. What happened to all of those beds, right? And and it's also right. There's this nostalgia for the institution and and also the context that there's there's so many reasons why politicians will call for rebuilding the asylum. But yeah, it does get back to these kinds of tropes either around dangerousness or helpless ness, right? And it's again, like Leah was saying, this idea of almost like a preventative minority report kind of thing. Like if we had these institutions, you know, these mass shootings, what didn't happen, people wouldn't be on the streets, right? That it's kind of like this catch all for for literally every every problem in our in our society. Yeah, and and he always kind of talks about different reasons why the asylum's were, were closed, you know, he'll say in one case, the communities didn't want them. And the other case, he'll say it was budgetary reasons and pretty much talk about every potential reason, except for what Vesper mentioned, right? That places are horrific sites of violence, abuse, torture and neglect. And that's the piece that I think rarely gets air play from any of these politicians from the left to

the right. Absolutely. All such great points. I mean, Vesper, I really appreciate you bringing in Willow Brook. The fourth and final clip we'll go through will specifically address Willow Brook. And I know folks who are, you know, big death panel listeners may have recently heard our episode with Dr. Bill Braunston, who is one of the doctors who helped organize the movement that resulted in the closure of Willow Brook. And he briefly at the beginning of our conversation, you know, gets into some of his experiences there. So, you know, for folks who are like, is that name familiar? Like, yes, absolutely, you heard about it recently. And it's horrific. But again, like these kinds of things are treated as like individual moments or Vesper, as you pointed out, you know, Trump is saying here, like, well, the closures happened, you know, because people didn't want them, right? This is all about like this population not being desirable and what the desires of that dominant group are and how we meet those desires, right? And not about, you know, care, right? Like care here, as the kind of ideology where idea was like being given to the audience, which was being assumed to be other sane quote unquote people who also, you know, reasonably quote unquote want the removal of all these quote unquote crazy people from their community that they don't want them locked up, but they don't want them on the streets. So Trump sort of presents this is like the less bad of two options, right? As if we made a mistake, we've learned from it, and now we can return to that humane practice. And Leata, really appreciate also the way that you connected this to the war on terror, the idea of sort of preemptive sorting eugenics and things like that. And and Liz, you're saying, you know, this is, this is also being proposed as a solution to to mass shootings as an alternative to, you know, having a discussion about anything else related to guns, right? It's it it locates the problem of mass shootings again, in quote unquote mentally ill individuals making individual choices in a vacuum, right? And that could be a very kind of compelling. And I think is often repeated kind of without a lot of questioning this this frame is something we

see quite often. So the

next is is a quite recent one we have tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswami, who is a Republican presidential candidate. And this is from the first Republican presidential debate earlier this summer that happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

And we also have a mental health epidemic in this country. Just over the same period that we have closed mental health institutions, we have seen a spike in violent crime. Do we have the spine to bring him back? I think we should as president, I will.

Okay, so that that one's short and sweet 13 seconds of pure fucking nonsense. Leata, since your book really deals with this particular trope, I wondered if you wanted to jump in on this one first, which trope though, well, I know I was gonna say there's so much in 13 seconds, right? I was thinking specifically of the the framing that this was a simultaneous sort of switch, right, that we closed institutions and that proportionally directly correlated to, you know, an exploding crisis of, you know, criminality.

Yeah, yeah, thanks for narrowing it down because it is a lot. And I know it's like, no, no, no, I don't apologize. It's not, you know, you didn't say those things. But, you know, just to briefly, briefly touch on that. One thing to really remember is that the de-installization movement, first of all, that there was two of them, because I know you're gonna give a clip about Willowbrook. So there was the closure of psychiatric institutions, which I think is what most of us think about when we think about the institutionalization. And that historically has happened, you know, the largest population in psychiatric institutions was in 1955. So pretty much every day afterwards was less. And particularly in terms of policy, we're talking about the 60s, beginning of 70s as the kind of heyday of de-installization and mental health. Now, there was also de-installization in intellectual and developmental disabilities. And so that's really important to note, because that was in a different time period. So that didn't really begin nationally. Of course, there's variations in the maybe mid 70s and 80s, where we kind of see the heyday of that. So I think that is really important. The reason why it's important is because when do we start to see like homelessness on mass, like happening in the US? That is not in the 60s. It's not in the 70s. It's in fact more in the 80s. It's the beginning of neoliberalism as a policy that was imported by Reagan from Thatcher. And we see at the same time austerity measures in regards to mental health that resulted in things like the closure of psychiatric hospitals. Although that's not the only reason why these institutions closed. They closed also because of the resistance of movements, including people who were institutionalized within them and their allies and their family members and so on and activist lawyers. But also because of these austerity measures in which Reagan famously said that he's going to close down all the psychiatric institutions in California. And at the end of the day, he didn't close all of them, but he came like really close. This is what when he was governor, when he became a president, he did that on kind of like a more national scale. And the money, of course, never went to community mental health, which, you know, the thing that Vesper was just talking about what the community wants or what the community gets. And at the same time, that every public kind of welfare institution would either abolished or diminished, including education and housing, housing, I mean, affordable, accessible, but also general housing assistance that existed since, you know, the 40s, since the New Deal, that vanished or diminished during the neoliberal era up until today. And at the same time, we see a boom in corrections, the money goes to it doesn't go away. It goes to the buildup of policing and the infrastructure for incarceration, what we today called the prison industrial complex. And so we see those things happening at the same time. And just because, you know, we say in social science, correlation is not causation. Just because two things happened at the same time doesn't mean that one led to the other, meaning, yes, the closure of psychiatric institutions happened at the same time as the rise in incarceration. But it happened because of a third factor, which is neoliberalism and racism, which are, of course, completely related. And so I think that's really the point that we should think about.

Absolutely. Thank you, Leont. I mean, and also a flustering response to, you know, learn more about that history. Leont's book is fantastic. And we've also done two interviews just about the book in the last three years, one when it came out in 2020, and then one in the fall around one health communism came out because obviously, you know, Leont, your work has been deeply inspiring to to already and I so we wanted to make sure to sort of revisit it. But I want to leave it open for Leah and Vespur, if either of you want to jump in next, as we were joking, obviously, in this 13 second clip, there is so fucking much. So I can also replay the clip if that would be helpful, because it was so short.

Who are yeah, I'd love to hear it again. All right, let's do

it again. I'll figure it again. We'll never get these 13 seconds back. But as long as we get one laugh out of it, then it'll be worth it. All right, here we go.

And we also have a mental health epidemic in this country. Just over the same period that we have closed mental health institutions, we have seen a spike in violent crime. Do we have the spine to bring them back? I think we should as president, I will.

I think what's most striking why you're this first is like, do we have the spine to bring them back that that emphasis? If that doesn't scream, carsarality to you, I don't know what will. But but aside from that, what I want to focus on is really, and I think this is the emphasis of a lot of Leont's work and a lot of the writings, is this is the intersection of being viewed and treated as dangerous and disposable simultaneously in society and a misinformation campaign of dangerousness and disposability to be able to exert political control over populations of people. And what I mean about that is that when we talk about the asylum, we see Angela Davis refers to this wonderfully with prisons, we see an effort to disappear people historically, currently, what is being focused on here. And and when I hear what it's like, it's like, are we ready to bring them back to to kind of solve this problem, right? I think people have such a disconnection because of carceral sayingism that there is this piece of like, okay, we're not viewing them as people, we're viewing them as a problem. And there's such an impact when we look at public and private policy that that relates to this, in the way of of okay, we are always viewing these people as a liability, we are always viewing them as disposable, and as people who shouldn't be seen or perceived in the public. And a lot of that also comes from a fear of, I don't want this to happen to myself, I don't want this to happen to my family. But again, it is political strategy, it is fear mongering, it is a lot of things. And when we look at care court, which doesn't actually mean the word care, it is a community assistance recovery and empowerment and care court doesn't mean any of that honestly, if you were to ask me, we see this connection of basically getting unhoused, mad disabled people off of the streets, removing them in mass, trying to bring them into these institutions, labeling them as gravely disabled, and that gravely disabled meaning if you're actively using or whatever, again, that criminality, that disposability. And then once you're deemed gravely disabled, making it easier to put you into a conservatorship. So when we look at all of those pieces, right? Again, it is a continuing prevailing surveillance capitalism, and a carcerality in our society that I don't think we fully recognize or that the public is fully ready to recognize. I

think it also, you know, the kind of framing of like, I'm brave enough to be the one that calls for this is often the flip side of the compassion coin, you know, you have some people saying this is this is a moral mandate that we have to scoop people up off the streets and give them treatment, whether they wanted or not, whether they know they needed or not, you also see that sort of flip

side

of like, I'm the only one who's like got the balls to be not politically correct and talk about the fact that like, we need to be brave and call for this thing again. And it's kind of like,

I think

really, you know, a sort of softer lighter version of that attitude is quite common and very common on the left. You often see people say like, Oh, ADHD, mental health diagnoses, depression, bipolar disorder, BPD, all these like people putting labels in their bio, like mental illness is so trendy. Maybe we've destigmatized mental illness too much. And now we're just surrounded by all these people who have made their pathology, their personality. And you know, there's a kind of like, grift from psychiatrists who make that their brand, the kind of over treatment, folks who focus on sort of demonizing people seeking treatment as the problem. But then there's also the more like casual cultural idea that just like, it is brave to say bad things about mad people because, you know, there's there's this kind of framing that I think often is the same misunderstanding about disability and culture, which is like, that having this identity, having these labels gets you a kind of what disability theorist Ellen Samuel calls like a currency and kind, the idea that like benefits, whether it's SSDI or SSI or Medicaid, even though these come with, you know, forced poverty and tremendous suffering and surveillance, and all of these administrative burdens that that is an advantage that people are being given the equivalent of currency, the equivalent of an advantage over quote unquote, normal people. And so part of this is also that all of these ideas, like, you know, Vespers, you're saying this ties up into like a broader austerity mindset about kind of like, who society is even fucking for.

Yeah, like I kind of view comments like Rama Swami's as like, this yeah, just to echo what other folks are saying, like this carceral compassion or this like, compassion cop kind of mentality. And it's often juxtaposed as y'all were saying to us as the quote, civil libertarians or, you know, rights based people who don't give a damn if people are languishing in jail or unhoused in suffering, like we think that's part of a quote alternative lifestyle, which we will, I think get back to you. But yeah, that it's just like there's this, basically almost like a projection that, that, you know, we are the people like mad disabled activists or disability rights activists are the people who don't care and don't have the courage, the moral courage to do what must be done. Right. So it's like this, this way to really discredit and silence people who are continuing to like say, can we please, you know, have these few and very tenuous rights that we achieved, you know, 50 years ago, can we please like hang on to these and not erode these. Yeah, and it's it's the other thing about the sort of mental illness equals violence equals dangerous equation is that you know, this has been reinforced in the public imagination for half a decade, probably much, much longer, but it, you know, in the in more recent decades, it's been reinforced and reinforced and reinforced. And so when people say, Hey, you know, people with these diagnoses are actually far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators, it's kind of like crickets, right? And the persistence of this drumbeat, again, of mental illness equals violence equals dangerous. We have to get them off the streets. It's really working. I remember there was a study in health affairs, maybe five years ago, saying that the American public has increasingly come to associate specifically the diagnosis of schizophrenia with dangerousness. And that's what so many of these laws are really targeting as people with these diagnoses. And that this leads to, you know, public opinion that's in favor of expanding forced treatment law. So the kind of compassion cop mentality is really, really taking root in the public beyond just the politicians rhetoric.

Absolutely. And I think when you contrast that actually with like the kind of things that you see, like the very neoliberal, like public health mental health awareness campaigns and things like, you know, calls to destigmatize mental illness as itself a like a solution, right, to just talk about the stigma, get makes it go away. Often, like, I think portrays this kind of spectrum of mental illness, right, where it's it's up to the individual person, basically, we're like deputizing people to turn themselves into mental health cops, right, where we're really saying to people, you can see, you can evaluate, you know, like, I know, you know, these politicians are saying, not me is saying God, these people are so horrible. I hate reading this stuff out loud and stuff like that. Like, what if someone quotes me out of context? And I'm reading one of these assholes, but it's like, when they say like, you

know, oh, you know,

you citizen, you can tell when someone's mentally ill, like, I am it's also deputizing people and literally sort of wrapping up membership in the body politic with the idea that it is like, you know, your responsibility as a citizen to seek out identify and notify the state for the purposes of removal, the people who you think are not supposed to be part of your community. And I appreciate the way, like, you brought in the sort of specificity also schizophrenia, you know, as we've been talking about also, this is like hugely tied up into the the very sort of root of psychiatry and of the determination between saying and not saying sound and unsound. These kinds of frameworks have explicit explicit roots. And there are sort of original context is in the transatlantic slave trade in the kinds of anti black determinations that render people property based on eugenic ideology, where you have sort of this history of naturalizing class position as earned or biological truth, right? That gets played out again in the ways that also this is talked about, right? Like the idea that it is just like the kind of destiny of society to be made available only for the same, right? The the commandment that we must be saying is also sort of implied in this, right? Like all of these these statements that we've been going through, not only say something about what we should do to people with these labels, but they say something to the people with these labels, which is more indirect, which is that, you know, you're not welcome here, society's not for you. And they, you know, in the same ways that administrative burdens make people feel like fucking shit. These kinds of frameworks, like they aren't just like rhetorically bad, they have emotional weight, they

do damage and they do harm

in so many different ways.