Like a strange melody that keeps playing in my ear are four letters, PTSD, which seem increasingly to afflict American criminals. I suppose some shrink invented post-traumatic stress disorder; then ambulance-chasing lawyers picked it up, and finally the criminals themselves have discovered it. It is the quickest get-out-of-jail scheme since habeas corpus.
We are in soft-on-crime time, when district attorneys like Alvin Bragg of New York City, Kim Foxx of Chicago, George Gascón of Los Angeles, and most infamous of all, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, have all decided to be nice to the bad guys. Meanwhile, crime has gone through the roof in American cities, with murder rates in many neighborhoods doubling and criminals brazenly looting stores across major metro areas. The media attribute this rise in crime to so-called white supremacy, which is really just an attempt to blame one set of victims: law-abiding whites.
The lashing out of oppressed, psychologically vulnerable people, as most crime is excused nowadays, is chronicled daily by lefty propaganda broadsheets such as The New York Times. In New York in January alone, three horrific murders were each explained as a consequence of mental illness.
In New York City, a black career criminal murdered two police officers, shooting them to death after they responded to the 911 call his mother made following a heated argument over his vegan diet. The mother said her now-deceased son suffered from mental illness. Another career criminal allegedly shot and killed a 19-year-old woman working the midnight shift at an East Harlem Burger King as she struggled to open the cash register. NYPD Department Chief Kenneth Corey speculated that the suspect may suffer from mental illness. Still a third career criminal allegedly killed an Asian woman by pushing her in front of a subway train for no apparent reason. The homeless suspect confessed, the New York Post reported, saying “Yes I did. I’m God, I can do it.”
Those are three cold-blooded Big Apple murders in one month alleged to have been committed by… er… “unstable men.”
PTSD used to be called shell shock, and it was a real consequence soldiers suffered after engaging in ferocious combat. It emerged after trench warfare in World War I and hit its peak among the American military during the Vietnam conflict. General George Patton famously slapped two soldiers who claimed to suffer trauma during World War II and lost his command as a result.
My grandfather, a cavalry officer, was on the front lines of the Balkan Wars for two years, and my uncle spent six months without a day off on the front line against the Italians in 1940. Yet for some strange reason, the only psychological trauma they remembered was being irritated at the inability to change their underclothes.
An experience that overwhelms the mind and elicits repetitive behavior is typical of PTSD, so it isn’t surprising that so many career criminals use it as a legal defense. The diagnosis, of course, is correct in cases of rape and sexual abuse, not to mention violent beatings. But now PTSD is being considered a “comorbidity” for those suffering “gender dysphoria.” I suppose it helps the trans community get insurance funding for gender reassignment surgery.
Never mind! The world today is increasingly defined by an ideology of mental illness that bears absolutely no relation to the psychic reality of human beings. “They must be mad because no one’s that bad,” this type of thinking goes. Except that criminals are bad, very seldom mad, and no one knows this better than the embattled police, who seem to be affected by an advanced form of indifference and fatalism. I understand their point of view. To be compared to Gestapo thugs by Hollywood and media types, not to mention black leaders, cannot be life-enhancing. If anyone should qualify for PTSD treatment, it would be today’s police officers.
The whole psychopathological excuse for crime really comes from the root of all evil: money. Big Pharma, the psychiatric profession, and insurance companies play this lucrative three-card monte together. The evil man who created this devious cooperative ruse was of course that arch pseudo-doctor Sigmund Freud, now lying in one of Dante’s deadly circles for bringing such misery to the world.
I once broke a pair of rackets after losing a close tennis match in a French tournament, and a man I didn’t know offered me some pills to calm down. I told him to get lost. I later learned his name, Mortimer Sackler, and that his company, Purdue Pharma, went on to market his pill, OxyContin. Along with other opoids, it has killed 500,000 Americans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
So, there you have it. Mental health is used as an excuse for the criminal behavior of our ethnic minorities, Hollywood types, and all sorts of freaks, drug addicts, and lowlifes, while the shrinks, the insurance companies, and Big Pharma rake it in.
New York City patrol car. (Pxhere)
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