Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Many blame trauma for rising addiction, homelessness & drug deaths, but child abuse has declined as all three grew worse.

While addicts are disproportionately victims of trauma, many were also “victimized” in being shielded from the consequences of their destructive behavior.

There are two things going on here

There is, on the one hand, the same increase in coddling, overprotective behavior we see in other domains of life, eg parenting, schooling

There is, on the other, a deeply ideological anti-system (eg socialist, anarchist) ideology at work

Proponents of the former turn into the latter with sufficient training, and then turn around and prey on high-empathy individuals who tend toward coddling/overprotection

In a sense, this is the central dynamic of progressivism, of the rad Left bullying milquetoast liberals

I went from just being a very empathic child to a very radical teen with very little in the way of indoctrination. I didn’t read Chomsky, Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, until *after* I had decided the System was evil and had to be overthrown, or radically changed.

I sometimes hear people say cultural Marxism is a conspiracy theory but my dog-eared copy of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, my studies with Marxist professors, and my degree in Peace and Global Studies are proof that it is a very real thing.

The goal of my college program was to create professionals (eg teachers, nonprofit staff, journalists) to work for & take over mainstream institutions in order to radically transform the democratic capitalist System, from within. Gramsci called such people “organic intellectuals”

The transformation of empathic educated people into doctrinaire radicals is an old and familiar one. It has been well-studied by scholars studying the New Left and Weather Underground, the 9/11 terrorists, the Jonestown cult, and many other radical movements. Same basic elements.

People rightly wonder how government-funded docs & social workers can enable addicts to smoke fentanyl & still sleep at night. Don’t they care? They do! In fact, they tend to be highly empathic. They’re just so ideological as to be blinded by their dogma

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/san-francisc…

One of the nonprofits that is enabling fentanyl addiction & death in San Francisco is @GLIDEsf , which receives millions for “harm reduction.” Is it a coincidence that the head of Glide LOVED Jim Jones, who murdered 900+ people? It’s not. Same blind spot. Same empathy. Same dogma

When you watch videos of black & white people singing, hugging, and working together in Jones’s People’s Temple in the 1970s, it’s hard not to be moved by the love. The most difficult thing to accept is that it was, in many ways, a very loving place. It was also run by a sadist.

Much of the radical left is a motivated by a profound hatred of the System and, sad to say, hatred of the people imagined to represent said System.

Such hatred allows previously empathic liberals to use addicts as objects in their war on the System.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/san-francisc…

When I hear progressives talk about the “trauma” of the addicts on the street, and our duty to care for them, I now wonder, “Do you really care for them? Or are they just useful objects for you to manipulate in your war on the System you hate?”

Just look at what progressives have done to our greatest city. They have turned the United Nations Plaza into an open drug scene controlled by a violent foreign drug mafia and, now, a place to enable fentanyl, meth and crack addiction at taxpayer expense

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…

Mayor @LondonBreed sold the “linkage center” as part of her crackdown on drug dealing and open drug use. It was supposed to get addicts into rehab. But, as @EricaJSandberg & @lwoodhouse & I discovered, it’s an addiction-promotion facility.

It is being operated by @UrbanAlchemyUA , a nonprofit service provider I have a lot of respect for. A majority of its employees are ex-cons. They are unfailingly polite, & treated us well. But what the hell’s Breed thinking letting them break federal and state law? That ethical?

The @UrbanAlchemyUA folks talk a lot about being “trauma-informed” when dealing with people on the street. Most @UrbanAlchemyUA are themselves victims of trauma.

But what the hell is the city doing getting them mixed up in ILLEGAL & UNETHICAL addiction promotion?

These are questions I asked @LondonBreed & @UrbanAlchemyUA

They refused to answer

I have heard rumors — just rumors — that Breed is going to shut down the supervised drug site

I hope so. If she doesn’t, both she and her trauma-informed staff must explain it, and soon.

/END