Hillary Clinton Goes With the Pho

Hillary Clinton recently told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that supporters of Donald Trump were “cult extremists” and “at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members.” (See video below.) In its report on the exchange, Fox News recalled Clinton’s statement that Trump supporters were a “basket of deplorables. . . They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” If the deplorables wonder where this caustic brand of abuse comes from, know that Paul Johnson was all over it in Modern Times.

“Freud betrayed signs, in fact, of the twentieth century ideologue at his worst, namely, a persistent tendency to regard those who diverge from him as themselves unstable and in need of treatment,” wrote Johnson, who passed away this year. Freud told Carl Jung that his inclination was “to treat those colleagues who offer resistance exactly as we treat patients in the same situation.” As Johnson noted, “two decades later, the notion of regarding dissent as form of mental illness, suitable for compulsory hospitalization, was to blossom in the Soviet Union into a new form of political repression.”

That is what the former First Lady is preaching, at a time when the FBI regards anyone less than worshipful of Joe Biden as a domestic terrorist, violent extremists and so forth. Hillary Clinton didn’t specify what “formal deprogramming” looks like, but as Mark Hendrickson explains, there are models from recent times.

“One Soviet technique of oppression was to declare that dissidents were insane. They were then incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals where they were tormented and tortured. Some were used as human guinea pigs for dangerous experiments.” For example, Vladimir Bukovsky “spent a dozen years being shuffled between Soviet jails, labor camps, and psychiatric hospitals.”

One of the “therapies” was “putting a cord into Bukovsky’s mouth, threading it from his throat up through his nasal passages, and then drawing it out through one of his nostrils. Alas, this communist ‘treatment’ did not ‘cure’ Bukovsky of his rational (not irrational) abhorrence of tyranny and brutality.”

The type of “formal deprogramming” Clinton seeks could be promoted as public health issue and  imposed under the regime of White Coat Supremacy. That regime remains in place even after the alleged retirement of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the loathsome Lysenko figure who claims to represent science. For her part, Hillary Clinton recalls the 1979 point-counterpoint skit on Saturday Night Live about the Michelle Triola palimony suit against actor Lee Marvin.

“Behind every successful man,” said Jane Curtin, in support of  Triola, “there’s a woman, a loving, giving, caring woman.” But Dan Aykroyd wouldn’t know about that because “there’s no old saying about what’s behind a miserable failure.” After the applause, Dan is ready.

“Jane, you ignorant slut,” he famously said, branding Triola “a screeching, squealing, rapacious swamp sow.” If anybody applied that to Hillary Clinton it would be hard to blame them. What begins as farce could easily be repeated as tragedy, on a massive scale.

It has become fashionable to compare our current situation to a banana republic or Third World dictatorship. With Hillary Clinton calling for “formal deprogramming,” full-on Stalinist is closer to the mark. As inspector Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale) told Madame de Montpellier (Delphine Seyrig) in The Day of the Jackal, “Madame, be in no doubt of the seriousness of your position.”

Hillary Clinton calls for Trump Supporters to be reeducated: "At some point maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members." pic.twitter.com/ao3foysSL4

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) October 6, 2023