RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a time of competing narratives and virtually unprecedented levels of polarization, there is one sad truth that Americans can readily agree on: our mental-health system is broken.

Specifically, the U.S. has long faced a critical shortage of inpatient psychiatric-treatment beds, with devastating societal consequences. From its historic peak in 1955 to 2016, the number of state psychiatric-hospital beds in the United States plummeted almost 97 percent, in a trend known as “deinstitutionalization.” There are now fewer beds per capita in the United States than there were in 1850. An analysis of the broader system of both inpatient and other 24-hour residential-treatment beds similarly found a 77.4 percent decrease from 1970 to 2014.

While inpatient treatment beds represent only one aspect of a functioning mental-health system, they are a vital one. Without access to a bed, acutely ill individuals are left to wait for the proper treatment, forcing mental-health professionals to triage the most severely ill in hopes of short-circuiting the next awful, unnecessary massacre. At the same time, families are caught in their own nightmare, watching helplessly as their loved ones deteriorate in the absence of the right care. With nowhere else to turn, those in need end up in the only remaining systems that cannot say no: emergency rooms, homeless shelters and, too often, jails and prisons.

Without treatment beds, the criminal-justice system has become our de facto mental-health system. By 2014, ten times the number of people with serious mental illness were in prisons and jails as in state mental hospitals. Astoundingly, the largest mental-health facilities in the nation are now the Cook County and Los Angeles County jails.

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The ideological strivings of our Founding Fathers were rooted in freedom, liberty, limited government, and the separation of church and state. They sought to create a more perfect union – a society of individuals cooperating by mutual consent. Psychiatrist Lyle Rossiter’s stunning book The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness details America’s extraordinary achievement of ordered liberty, how its infrastructure complements the nature of man, and how the collectivist liberal narrative is pathologically antithetical to ordered liberty.

The ideological moorings of ordered liberty require consensus on what is real. This is no small thing. Language is based on consensus of what is real. Laws are based on consensus of what is real. Without agreement on what is real there is no societal order only chaos.

Senator Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.” Well said. Opinions are based in the subjective reality of feelings, facts are based in the objective reality of actuality. Feelings are not facts.

This is worth repeating – objective reality is defined by facts and subjective reality is defined by feelings. The Leftist Culture War on America is attacking the ideological strivings and ideological moorings of ordered liberty by attacking its most basic requirement – consensus on what is real. The left-wing liberal attack strategy seeks to replace factual objective reality with subjective multiple realities based on feelings. This is how it works.

The much-hyped Obama intelligence report that determined “Vladimir Putin ordered” Hillary Clinton’s campaign emails hacked and leaked “to help Trump’s chances of victory” has been accepted as gospel among DC punditry and given the investigations besieging the Trump presidency their legs. To date, no evidence has publicly emerged to corroborate the report, and the reason may have a lot to do with that sketchy dossier bought and paid for by Clinton.

Suspiciously, Barack Obama’s Intelligence Community Assessment matches the main allegations leveled by the Clinton-paid dossier on Trump, which wormed its way into intelligence channels, in addition to the FBI, Justice Department and State Department, during the 2016 campaign.

In fact, the shady dossier makes exactly the same claim — that Putin personally “ordered” the cyberattacks on the Clinton campaign and leaked embarrassing emails to “bolster Trump,” as part of “an aggressive Trump support operation.” Like Obama’s ICA, Clinton’s dossier provides no concrete evidence to back up the claim.

After learning Obama Justice and FBI officials relied heavily on unsubstantiated rumors in the dossier to wiretap a Trump adviser during the election, congressional leaders now suspect the dossier also informed Obama intelligence officials who compiled the ICA.

The report was released Jan. 6, 2017 — the same day intelligence officials attached a written summary of the dossier to a highly classified Russia briefing they gave Obama about the dossier, and the day after Obama held a secret White House meeting to discuss the dossier with his national security adviser and FBI director.