Dr. Bandy Lee is a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine. She makes a compelling argument that the “quarantine protesters” (a/k/a the flu klux klan) are behaving like child soldiers and gang members. They are akin to people trapped in abusive relationships or situations (e.g. Patty Hearst, Stockholm syndrome) and empathizing with their abusers, willing to commit violence on command.
Yale psychiatrist: Lockdown protesters exhibit same psychology as “child soldiers” and “urban gangs”
A Yale psychiatrist has warned that pro-Trump lockdown protesters, who exhibit similar psychology as “child soldiers,” could quickly turn into “armed troops in the streets” if the president loses his re-election bid.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine, said the armed protests were a natural evolution of the loyalty President Trump demands from his supporters. Many of these protests have evidently been organized by deep-pocketed groups allied with the president.
[. . .]
“Subconsciously, it is a loyalty test for the people,” Lee said. “In Africa, where I did some ethnographic work, child soldiers would be recruited and made to kill a family member to demonstrate their allegiance to the government and not to the family. Similarly, in urban gangs in America, one may be challenged to kill a police officer to prove one’s willingness to uphold gang rules over societal rules.
“When Donald Trump suggests that the virus be taken as a ‘hoax’, that people gather in churches or that people protest for their own sacrifice, he is actually testing people’s loyalty to the ‘laws’ of his mind over the laws of nature, or even impulse for survival. The more he abuses them, the greater their devotion grows, since the psychological cost of admitting their mistake is ever higher — and so it becomes easier to dig a well of unreality than to see the obvious truth.
And quite capable of repeating what they just did in Kentucky – but next time, killing anyone who resists. Or just killing people for fun, to exert (white) power.