RUTHFULLY YOURS

Let’s get this straight. Calling Hillary Clinton a “bigot” has reporters asking every Republican in sight if Donald Trump has gone too far. But the Clinton campaign releases a video saying Mr. Trump is the candidate of the Ku Klux Klan and it’s all okey-dokey?

Then again, Mr. Trump has already been likened to Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. Small wonder there’s a collective ho-hum when Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine says Mr. Trump is peddling “KKK values.”

This is what Democrats do.

It didn’t start with Mr. Trump, either. For years Democrats have portrayed the GOP as one giant hate group. Each presidential election, the drill goes like this: After Republicans nominate someone, he immediately finds himself having to prove he’s not a hater—of African-Americans, of women, of gays, etc.

This year Democrats added a twist. Mr. Trump, they claim, represents a break with all those decent and lovable Republicans such as Mitt Romney, John McCain and George W. Bush. Of course, this isn’t what they were saying back when these men were running for president.

• In 2000, for example, an NAACP ad recreated the gruesome murder of James Byrd to imply that then-Gov. Bush was sympathetic to lynching black men. Over footage of a chain being dragged by a pickup truck, Mr. Byrd’s daughter says, “So when Gov. George W. Bush refused to support hate-crimes legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.”

• When John McCain ran in 2008, Barack Obama warned that Republicans would scare people by saying, “You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.” The McCain campaign fired back, accusing Mr. Obama of playing the race card from the “bottom of the deck.” Funny thing: All those reporters always hearing “dog whistles” from Republicans somehow didn’t hear this one.

• In 2012, when Mitt Romney went to the NAACP and told them face-to-face about his opposition to ObamaCare, the stories were all about how he was really just trolling for the racist vote. Vice President Joe Biden put it more explicitly, telling a largely African-American audience that if Mr. Romney were to win, he’d “put ya’ll back in chains.”

The only difference today is that Republicans now have a nominee giving as good as he gets. It’s often clumsy; it comes late in the day; and his case hasn’t been helped by, say, his belabored moaning that a federal judge’s Mexican heritage meant he couldn’t be unbiased in litigation involving Trump University. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton tried to tar Donald Trump as a racist last week by associating him with the “alt-right.” Yet it is Mr. Trump who has decried the loss of black life to violent crime—and has promptly been declared biased for doing so. Whether intentionally or not, Mr. Trump has exposed the hypocrisy of the Black Lives Matter movement and its allies.

Speaking in West Bend, Wis., on Aug. 16, only days after the recent riots in Milwaukee, Mr. Trump observed that during “the last 72 hours . . . another nine were killed in Chicago and another 46 were wounded.” The victims, as in other cities with rising crime, were overwhelmingly black.

Bringing safety to inner-city residents should be a top presidential priority, Mr. Trump said: “Our job is to make life more comfortable for the African-American parent who wants their kids to be able to safely walk the streets and walk to school. Or the senior citizen waiting for a bus. Or the young child walking home from school.” Mr. Trump promised to restore law and order “for the sake of all, but most especially for the sake of those living in the affected communities.”

The reaction was swift. The progressive website Crooks and Liars deemed Mr. Trump’s speech a “mashup of Hitler and George Wallace.”On CNN the activist and former Obama adviser Van Jones called it “despicable” and “shocking in its divisiveness.” Historian Josh Zeitz told USA Today that “the term law and order in modern American politics is, ipso facto, a racially tinged term.”

Mr. Trump’s acceptance speech in July at the Republican National Convention provoked similar dismay. “Young Americans in Baltimore, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Ferguson,” he said, have “the same right to live out their dreams as any other child in America.”

This defense of black children was too much for Alicia Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. “The terrifying vision that Donald J. Trump is putting forward casts him alongside some of the worst fascists in history,” Ms. Garza said. The executive director of the Advancement Project, Judith Browne Dianis, complained that “the speech lends itself to be interpreted as isolating and scapegoating of communities of color.” Political commentator Sally Kohn wrote in Time that Mr. Trump “has basically recycled Richard Nixon’s version of dog whistle racism by insisting he is the ‘law and order candidate’—implicitly protecting White America.”

Why this frenzied effort to demonize Mr. Trump for addressing the heightened violence in inner cities? Because the Republican nominee has also correctly identified its cause: the false “narrative of cops as a racist force in our society,” as he put it in Wisconsin.

DJ Jaffe is Executive Director of Mental Illness Policy Org., and the author of Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill (Prometheus Books, April 2017, 340pp.)

There are two problems with Hillary Clinton’s mental health plan: What’s in it and what’s not. The plan mainly continues the practice of moving mental health funds away from helping the most seriously mentally ill, and instead allocates the funds to helping people without serious mental illness and programs that lack any independent evidence they work.
We need an all-hands-on-deck approach aimed at helping reduce homelessness, arrest, incarceration, suicide and violence among the seriously mentally ill. While there are bills in Congress that do that, this plan doesn’t. It focuses on where serious mental illness isn’t, rather than where it is.
What’s in the Hillary Clinton mental health plan.

The plan for early diagnosis and intervention, focuses spending on kids younger than eighteen in spite of the fact that serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder begin in late teens and early twenties, not grade school. While some serious mental illness strikes early, most of the illness that affects kids, like ADHD, is mild and transient.
The plan diverts resources to fund programs that are proven not to work including Positive Parenting and Mental Health First Aid.
The national initiative for suicide prevention, will focus on spending dollars on high-school and college students the two groups least likely to commit suicide. In 2014, there were 43,000 completed suicides of which 5,500 involved people under the age of twenty-four. Congressional mandates already target $54 million in suicide prevention funds to that age group and only $2 million to address the 37,500 completed suicides by people over twenty-four. The plan proposes to make the disparity worse.
The plan focuses on requiring private insurers to provide parity coverage for mental illness, but is silent on the federal government’s own discrimination within Medicaid (IMD Exclusion) that prevents the most seriously ill from getting treatment.
The plan does nothing to increase hospital beds and instead trains police on how to handle those who will become their responsibility as a result of the lack of beds.
The initiative funds peer support, in spite of the fact there is no independent evidence it works and plenty that it doesn’t.
It provides additional funding to the Protection and Advocacy Program. These are federally funded lawyers who go to court to oppose parents who want to help seriously ill children get care, oppose states that want to provide hospital care, and oppose localities that want to fund Assisted Outpatient Treatment as an alternative to incarceration or involuntary commitment.