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Are Liberal Beliefs a Form of Mental Illness?

     Are  Liberal  Beliefs  a  Form  of  Mental  Illness?
      During the recent "occupy" protests I observed many protesters literally "foaming at the mouth"
as they berated various institutions and individuals of which they objected.  In effect, they looked like
madmen.  What series of factors could create such violent reactions?   Dr. Lyle Rossiter, a clinical
psychiatrist with years of experience, wrote a book which might explain such reactions; The Liberal
Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.
      Today many liberals have taken to calling themselves "progressives" instead of liberals.  Why?
The term "liberal" acquired some negative connotations in recent years because some liberal ideas
were literally viewed as "crackpot" in nature.  One example of a liberal idea that most Americans
reject is the legalization of drugs that are currently illegal for use by the general public, such as
marijuana.  Also many liberal beliefs were seen as so left-wing as to be socialist or communist. 
When communism collapsed in the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Communist Party of Great
Britain changed its name to the "Democrat Party" while the goals of the organization remained
unchanged.  The same is true for the name change in the United States from liberal to progressive. 
The name has changed but the goals remain the same.
      The situation is further confused because the word "liberal" has an entirely different meaning
outside the United States.  Except in Great Britain and the United States, liberal means belief in
limited government and less oppressive laws and regulations.  In the United States liberal meant
an advocate for a welfare state where the government controlled people's lives from cradle to
grave.  In a recent interview President Barack Obama claimed to be the fourth greatest president
after Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Abraham Lincoln.  Franklin Roosevelt introduced
many New Deal policies intended to provide relief to people during the Great Depression and
Lyndon Johnson had his Great Society programs intended to provide similar relief.  Obama had
to throw in Abraham Lincoln because he ended slavery in the United States, forgetting that Lincoln
also suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War.
       Now to the question of whether liberal beliefs constitute mental illness as claimed by Dr. Lyle
Rossiter.  The most obvious choice for such a disorder would be that liberals suffer from some form
of delusional disorder in their thinking.  The Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition,
Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) provides the following definition of delusional disorders:
                "Delusional disorder is an illness characterized by the presence of non-bizarre
                 delusions in the absence of other mood or psychotic symptoms."
      It further defines delusions as false beliefs based on incorrect reference about external reality
that persist despite evidence to the contrary and these beliefs are not ordinarily accepted by other
members of the person's culture or subculture.
      Non-bizarre refers to the fact that this type of delusion is about situations that could occur in
real life, such as being followed, being loved, having an infection, and being deceived by one's
      Delusional disorder is on a spectrum between more severe psychosis and overvalued ideas.
Bizarre delusions represent the manifestations of more severe types of psychotic illnesses
(e.g., schizophrenia) and "are clearly implausible, not understandable, and not derived from
ordinary life experiences."
      On the other end of the spectrum, making a distinction between a delusion and an overvalued
idea is important, the latter representing an unreasonable belief that is not firmly held.  Additionally,
personal beliefs should be evaluated with great respect to complexity of cultural and religious
differences: some cultures have widely accepted beliefs that may be considered delusional in other
      Unfortunately, patients with delusional disorder do not have good insight into their
pathological experiences.  Interestingly, despite significant delusions, many other psychosocial
abilities remain intact, as if the delusions are circumscribed.  Indeed, this is one of the key
differences between delusional disorders and other primary psychotic disorders.
      Delusions are subdivided according to their content.  Some of the more common types are:
bizarre; delusional jealousy; grandiose; delusion of reference; persecutory; somatic; thought
broadcasting; thought insertion.
     In common parlance we often hear the expression that someone has "delusions of grandeur,"
meaning that the individual feels that he or she is better than other individuals on some or all
levels.  Liberals do feel that they are more right than their "enemies" to an extreme degree; the
"enemies" of liberals being anyone who does not think exactly as they think.  With liberals one
cannot have a difference of opinion and still be considered a valued member of the human race.
Anyone holding an opinion differing from liberal orthodoxy is often called a Nazi, a racist, or just
plain evil.  This characteristic alone would qualify liberals as delusional in a mental health sense.
      The destructive nature of this liberal sense of superiority was demonstrated earlier in this
website when liberals, in the form of environmentalists and animal "rights" activists, got DDT
banned in order to "save" some worthless birds in the United States.  Their delusional nature
was shown when all the scientific evidence proved that DDT did not kill birds or harm people
or the environment.  When it became apparent that between 37 million and 90 million people
in Third World countries had died from malaria because of the ban on DDT, liberals claimed
that they had not tried to prevent the use of DDT outside of the United States.  In reality liberals
did force other countries to stop using DDT to prevent malaria by getting the U.S. government
to stop foreign economic aid to any country still using DDT.  Denying this obvious fact was
another liberal delusion.
      The expanded definition of delusional disorders above said that patients with delusional
disorders do not have good insight into their pathological experiences.  In other words, liberals
are not aware of what makes them delusional.  From their earliest public school experiences,
liberals are taught to hate the military, the police, businessmen, and the capitalist economic
system.  Liberals are taught that corporations are "evil" and that corporations enslave people
and harm the environment.  The only "good" people, they are taught, are environmentalists,
animal "rights" activists, social workers, and, of course, the teachers who are brainwashing
them.  In this case "brainwashing" means the psychological conditioning that public school
teachers use to promote the liberal agenda.  Unfortunately for the United States and the liberty
and freedom most of us value, this liberal agenda is more and more the promotion of Marxism.
During the recent "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations one clueless protester was asked who
he would vote for in the coming presidential election. The bearded freak replied, "Mao Tse-tung."
Did this moron realize that Mao Tse-tung had been responsible for murdering tens of millions
of his own Chinese people?
      The "Occupy" protesters also claim that the rich one-percent of the population is oppressing
the other ninety-nine percent of the population and that the one-percenters stole their wealth
from the ninety-nine percenters.  The rich one-percent are characterized as "evil" in the typical
liberal delusion.  During the "Cultural Revolution," inspired by Mao Tse-tung in China, anyone
who was uneducated and dirt poor was considered "superior" to those who were educated and
successful.  Anyone with an education was either killed or sent to "reeducation camps."  The
same thing happened in Cambodia when the Communists took over control of that unfortunate
country.  The liberal delusion in the United States is that liberals do not realize that they are
being used to promote destructive Marxism.
      The "Occupy" movement was and is Marxist inspired, yet it is supported by Barack Obama
and liberal Democrats.  At a "People's Assembly" of the "Occupy" movement on August 19, 2012
held in Washington, D.C. the former president of the Amalgamated Transit Union local 698, and
now an "Occupy" supporter, Mike Golash, said the following:
                     "Progressive labor is a revolutionary communist organization...It's objective
                      is to make revolution in the United States, overthrow the capitalist system,
                      and build communism...An organization has to be built which can bring
                      down capitalism...The capitalists - they have their organizations: the FBI,
                      the CIA, the secret police, the military, the Army, etc., etc...They have
                      organizations to maintain their power...It's foolish to think that without a
                      disciplined organization made up os not a few people but millions and
                      millions of people, (we) can bring down capitalism."
      Anyone who believes that communism was a political system which to admire is really
a mental case.  The communists murdered tens of millions of innocent people wherever
they came to power.  Barack Obama sought out communist professors during his college
years and his mentor was the avowed communist Frank Marshall Davis.
      Paul Kengor exposed how liberals/progressives have been used by the enemies of the
United States in his book Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives
for a Century. The book provides documented proof of delusional behavior by progressives/
      As a community organizer Barack Obama taught the strategy of the communist Saul Alinsky
who once said that 20 to 30 million Americans would have to be eliminated to bring about a
Marxist state in America.
                                         Barack Obama Teaching the Strategy of Saul Alinsky
       In 1966 two hippie sociologists from Columbia University, Richard Cloward and his wife
Francis Fox Piven, both members of the Democratic Socialists of America, came up with a
strategy, the Cloward-Piven Strategy, to hasten the fall of capitalism.  This strategy is now
firmly entrenched in the Democrat Party in the United States.  The Cloward-Piven strategy
is to overload the United States with unsustainable demands to provide "relief" to the poor
while demonizing anyone who is not poor, as did Chairman Mao Tse-tung during the Cultural
Revolution in Communist China.  The communist Saul Alinsky provided a handbook of tactics
to be used to collapse the American economy and attack any opponents to this destruction.
Saul Alinsky taught that ridicule was the most powerful weapon of the Left.  That is why you
see liberals with a permanent smirk on their faces when being interviewed in a panel that
contains their conservative opponents.  Saul Alinsky also taught liberals that the end justifies
the means.  The liberal belief is that their ideas are so correct, pure and desirable, that they
can do anything to their critics without regard to the damage such tactics might cause.
      American liberals tend to act more like a cult than a political movement.  Cult members are
not aware of how they are being manipulated.  American liberals do not want a "liberal" approach
to government in the classical sense of that philosophy.  Instead, what American liberals seek is
 a totalitarian dictatorship in which their radical agenda oppresses all Americans.  Sean Penn,
the clueless Hollywood actor, recently said that any American criticizing Hugo Chavez, the Marxist
dictator of Venezuela, should be imprisoned.  When Benito Mussolini became the fascist dictator
of Italy aligned with Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, American "progressives" hailed Mussolini as a great
leader and the answer to the problems of the modern world.  Certainly these two situations
demonstrate, either a lack of intelligence, or submission to a cult-like way of thinking...or both.
      The magazine cover above is an excellent example of how the left-wing media are part of
the Barack Obama reelection apparatus.  So, Sean Penn thinks that any American criticizing
Hugo Chavez should be put in prison and the left-wing media think that anyone criticizing
Barack Obama is "dumb."  Do you see a pattern of delusion here?  Here is a quote from the
magazine article above:
            "It remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right
              and purist left have yet to understand or absorb."
      So it seems that Obama's critics - the unhinged right - are mentally ill as well as dumb
according to the author of this left-wing hit piece.  Liberals can't see their own mental illness,
but they can see mental illness in others - interesting or laughable?  You make the call.
Read the article on this website about psychology and the liberal embrace of psychological
tactics to attack opponents by saying such things as their opponents are "unhinged."
      If you want a real laugh, get a load of this next quote from the Newsweek hit piece:
               "We've already elected the nation's first black president and replaced a tongue-
                tied dauphin (President George Bush) with a man of peerless eloquence."
      Okay...stop laughing and look at some of these examples of Barack Obama's eloquence.
                                                                                               - Barack Obama
                           "I've now been in 57 states.  I think one left to go"
                                                                                                - Barack Obama
                            fallen heroes, and I see many of them in the audience here today."
                                                                                                 - Barack Obama
                           "We're the country that built the intercontinental railroad."
                                                                                                 - Barack Obama
                           "The reforms we seek would bring greater competition, choice and
                             inefficiencies to our health care system."
                                                                                                  - Barack Obama
                           "I bowled a 129.  It's like - it was like the Special Olympics."
                                                                                                  - Barack Obama
                            "Of the many responsibilities granted to a president by our
                             Constitution, few are more serious or more consequential than
                             selecting a Supreme Court justice.  The members of our highest
                             court are granted life tenure, often serving long after the
                             presidents who appointed them.  And they are charged with the
                             task of applying principles put to paper more than 20 centuries
                             ago to some of the most difficult questions of our time"
                                                                                                     - Barack Obama
                            "It was interesting to see that political interaction in Europe is not
                             that different from the United States Senate.  There's a lot of
                             (I don't know what the term is in Austrian), 'wheeling and dealing'."
                                                                                                     - Barack Obama
                             judgments in the future."
                                                                                                     - Barack Obama
                             the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma, they end
                             up taking up a hospital bed, it costs, when, if you, they just gave,
                             you give them treatment early and they got some treatment, and
                             a, a breathalyzer, or inhalator, not a breathalyzer.  I haven't had
                             much sleep in the last 48 hours."
                                                                                                      - Barack Obama
                            "What they'll say is, 'Well it costs too much money,' but you know
                             what? It would cost, about.  It would cost about the same as what
                             we would spend.  It.  Over the course of 10 years it would cost
                             what it would costs us. (nervous laugh)  All right.  Okay.  We're
                             for about...hold on a second.  I can't hear myself. But I'm glad you're
                             fired up, though.  I'm glad."
      Ah...such eloquence.  In listening to Barack Obama we learned that the United States
Constitution was written 2,000 years ago, the people of Austria speak a language called
Austrian instead of German, the United States has 58 states, and we can travel to other
continents on our intercontinental railroad system.  It was so reassuring to learn that 
Barack Obama is not dumb.  
      When Barack Obama gave another speech referring the U.S. Medical Corps, he
pronounced the word corpsmen as "corpsemen."  Now that was eloquent and so unlike
the tongue-tied dauphin referred to in the Newsweek article.
      The newspaper article below provides an example of the "intellectual" level of the Barack
Obama political machine:
      Liberals and their left-wing media propaganda arm consider themselves intellectually
superior to all Republicans and conservatives.  The information provided above should
convince you that liberals and the left-wing media suffer from delusions that border on 
mental illness and cult-like behavior, and Barack Obama is the object of the liberal cult
of personality.   Far from being "brilliant," Barack Obama appears to be rather dumb,
especially about history, as you can see from the Yahoo article below.  Hippie/Marxist liberals
tend to scorn the study of history because they cannot make up lies about history to make
their half-assed social and political theories work.  Well, I take that back.  Hippie/Marxist
liberals will lie about history to make their half-assed social and political theories sound
      Another delusion created by the hippie/Marxist liberals is the global warming hoax, which
can be viewed as a form of mass hysteria.  The global warming hoax is supported by a great
deal of false information that some people are willing to put out in support of liberal beliefs, but
especially the liberal belief that corporations are "evil" entities and that they must be punished
by any means possible.  There is a bit of the Saul Alinsky method here in that so many people
are willing to tell lies and fabricate information to support liberal causes.  Articles in the Wall
Street Journal shown below even propose that belief in the global warming hoax is a religion
and a form of mental illness.  To read more about the global warming hoax and the false
information out there go to: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org
  1. Rossiter, Lyle H., M.D., The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness,
      St. Charles, IL, Free World Books, LLC, 2006.
  2. Savage, Michael, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, Nashville TN, Thomas Nelson, 2005.
  3. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
      (DSM-VI-TR), Washington, D.C., American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc., 2000.
  4. Bloom, Allen, M.D., The Closing of the American Mind, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1987.
  5. Bloom, Allen, M.D., Giants and Dwarfs, Essays, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1991.
  6. Mattera, Jason, Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation,
      New York, Simon & Schuster, 2010.
  7. Alinsky, Saul, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, New York,
      Random House, 1971.
  8. Goldberg, Jonah, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left From Mussolini
      to the Politics of Meaning, New York, Random House, 2007.
  9. Sullivan, Andrew, "Why Are Obama's Critics So Dumb?" Newsweek, January 23, 2012.
10. Kengor, Paul, Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a
      Century, Wilmington, Del., Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2010.
                                       Copyright © 2012 by Paul Roebling