RUTHFULLY YOURS

Earlier this month, mentally ill Kyle Odom shot pastor Tim Remington in Idaho because he “knew” the pastor was a Martian. In his untreated delusional state, Kyle then flew to the White House and started throwing his possessions over the fence to get the president’s attention so he could inform him about all the other Martians in government, including Senators Mitch McConnell, Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Roger Wicker, and Patty Murray.

Congress should learn from episodes like that. Yet at the same time Kyle went on his mission, Senators Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D., Wash.) went on theirs. They revealed a discussion draft of their Mental Health Reform [sic] Act of 2016, which is perhaps the worst mental-health bill ever conceived. It is a rudderless hodgepodge of studies, reports, commissions, and added bureaucracy that would do nothing to help people like Kyle.

John Snook, of the Treatment Advocacy Center, an organization focused on improving care for the seriously mentally ill, told Modern Healthcare, “If this were to pass as is, it would be of no benefit to [people with] severe mental illness.” Mental-illness-policy advocate, blogger, and former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley wrote, “The Senate has now set a low standard.”

Alexander and Murray should know better. There are plenty of bills floating around that include useful provisions they chose to ignore. Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas) introduced the Mental Health and Safe Community Act of 2015 (S2002) specifically to reduce violence by the most seriously mentally ill. It encourages states to use assisted outpatient treatment (AOT). Assisted outpatient treatment is only for a tiny group of the most seriously ill who have already accumulated multiple episodes of violence, arrest, homelessness, incarceration, or hospitalization because they refused to stay in treatment. It allows judges to order them into six months of mandated and monitored treatment while they continue to live in the community. It is less expensive to taxpayers and less restrictive and more humane to patients than the alternatives, incarceration and inpatient commitment. It is the only program with independent research showing it reduces homelessness, arrest, incarceration and violence in the 70 percent range.

Senators Alexander and Murray also ignored provisions in the Mental Health Reform Act of 2015 (S. 1945), proposed by Senators Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) and Bill Cassidy (R., Louisiana). That bill would slightly ameliorate the federal proscription on using Medicaid mental-health funds for those who are so seriously mentally ill they need hospitalization. New York City Police commissioner William Bratton recently described the lack of hospital beds as the top difficulty for officers who are called to assist the seriously mentally ill.

More importantly, Alexander and Murray ignored all the extraordinary work of Representative Tim Murphy (R., Pa.) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D., Texas) in the House. They introduced the bipartisan Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act (H.R. 2646), which would eliminate wasteful, counterproductive federally funded mental “wellness” programs and reallocate the savings to programs that are proven to help the most seriously mentally ill. H.R. 2646 would start by defanging the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), perhaps the most useless bureaucracy in Washington. Its own employees rated it one of the worst federal agencies. SAMHSA funds anti-psychiatrists who lobby Congress, encourages states to use federal mental-illness funds on people who don’t have mental illness, certifies as “evidence-based” programs that don’t help the mentally ill, and wastes money. There is no support for it other than from those who receive funds from it. Alexander and Murray would add more bureaucracy rather than taking a scalpel to it.

Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, the Director of the Miami, Florida-based American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA), is advertising on social media a report claiming that the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s was fabricated. This is just one example of many of how Zakkout has belittled and maligned members of the Jewish community and others with the most grotesque manifestations of bigotry – and that’s just in this past month!

On February 14th, Zakkout took to Facebook to promote a report questioning the validity of the Holocaust, entitled, ‘How the Holocaust was faked.’ The piece, which includes gruesome photos of dead bodies piled upon one another, begins, “The alleged ‘Holocaust’ of ‘6 million Jews’ at the hands of Adolf Hitler and National Socialist Germany during WWII is the biggest lie ever foisted upon humanity.”

The piece was produced by The Realist Report, a white supremacist outfit located on the outskirts of San Diego, California that regularly targets Jews, blacks and homosexuals. On the group’s website, its viewers are commanded to: “Fight White Genocide. Rise up against the destruction of your race!” while an accompanying video’s narrator ominously states, “We are told to accept our inevitable brown future.”

In April 2013, The Realist Report devoted an entire page on its website to offer birthday wishes to Adolf Hitler. The page states, “Happy Birthday, Adolf Hitler. You were and remain the greatest leader in modern Western history, and offer unparalleled inspiration and guidance to us all. God bless you, and may you forever rest in peace. Heil Hitler!”

Set aside for a moment all the controversies over illegal immigration—the wall, deportation, amnesty, Donald J. Trump, “comprehensive immigration reform,” etc. Instead, contemplate what happens in a social, cultural, and economic context when several million immigrants arrive from one of the poorest areas in the world (e.g., Oaxaca) to one of the most affluent (e.g., California). For guidance, think not of Jorge Ramos, but of the premodern/postmodern collision that is occurring in Germany, Austria, and Denmark.

The first casualty is the law. I am not referring to the collapse of federal immigration enforcement, but rather the ripples that must follow from it. When someone ignores a federal statute, then it is naturally easy to flout more. In Los Angeles, half the traffic accidents are hit-and-run collisions. I can attest first-hand that running from an accident or abandoning a wrecked vehicle is certainly a common occurrence in rural California. Last night on a rural road, a driver behind me (intoxicated? Malicious? Crazy?) apparently tried to rear-end me, then turned off his lights, sped up, and at the next stop sign pulled over swearing out the window in Spanish. In this age and in these environs, why would one call a sheriff for a minor everyday occurrence like that? The point is simply that when there is no federal law, no one has any idea how several million arrive in the U.S., much less what exactly they were doing before their illegal arrival. I note the latter consideration, because legal immigration does require some sort of personal history, and at the airport I am always asked by U.S Customs what exactly I was doing in Greece or Germany that prompted my trip.

Out here almost all laws concerning the licensing and vaccination of dogs seem to have simply disappeared. No one can walk or ride a bicycle along these rural roads without being attacked by hounds that are unlicensed and not vaccinated—and that have no ID or indeed owners that step forward to claim ownership once the victim is bleeding. The Bloomberg Rule reigns (i.e., if you can’t keep snow off the street, deplore global warming or cosmic war): we talk of dreamers because we have not a clue how to ensure that hundreds of thousands of pets are registered and given rabies shots. No one suggests that once one breaks the law of his adopted home, and continues to do so through false affidavits, aliases, and fraudulent documents, then the law itself become an abstraction, useful as a shelter, expendable if an inconvenience. Again, one assumes that if a citizen were to do that, he would face a felony indictment.