“America happens to be my client. Americans are who I care about. I have no fondness for the enemy, and I don’t feel like I need to take care of their mental health needs.” — Bryce Lefever, former U.S. Navy clinical and SERE psychologist, member of the APA’s 2005 Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics …
Tag Archives: psychology
POLITICAL MIND GAMES on the Gary Null Show
It was a pleasure to join Gary Null on his WBAI/Pacifica and Progressive Radio Network show today from New York City. We discussed my new book, POLITICAL MIND GAMES: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible. You can listen to our conversation here:
Authoritarians, Plutocrats, and the Fight for Racial Justice
On the campaign trail, Donald J. Trump routinely lashed out at protesters brazen enough to disrupt his choreographed rallies. In Birmingham, Alabama, he shouted, “Get him out of here. Throw him out!” The next day he added, “Maybe he should have been roughed up.” In Burlington, Vermont, Trump ordered his security personnel to “Throw them …
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The DCCC’s Mind Games and the Ballad of Roy Moore
It’s bad enough that the business-friendly Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and other establishment Democrats are aggressively tipping the scales in favor of their hand-picked “moderate” candidates in primary contests around the country. It’s even worse that they’ve now taken to defending this strategy by comparing unwelcome progressives to the likes of Roy Moore. We …
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The 1%’s Mind Games: Psychology Gone Bad
“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely …
POLITICAL MIND GAMES: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible
Giant corporations are raking in record profits, while millions of Americans remain scarred by the Great Recession and a recovery that has left them behind. Mammoth defense contractors push for more of everything military, while programs for the poor are on life support. Global polluters are blocking effective responses to climate change, while the disenfranchised …
Facing History: My Reply to APA CEO Arthur Evans
In a recent Washington Post commentary, I made four points. First, psychologists played essential roles in the government-authorized torture and abuse of “war on terror” detainees. Second, the American Psychological Association (APA) facilitated this involvement — by secretly accommodating CIA and Defense Department interests; by contesting evidence of wrongdoing with deceptive public statements; and by …
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From Outer Space, Three Guideposts for the Resistance
Later this summer, millions of Americans — from Oregon to South Carolina — will be looking skyward to witness a rare total solar eclipse as the moon briefly blots out the sun. Yet for so many in the United States, dark days aren’t really anything new. And they’re becoming all the more commonplace as Trump, …
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Heart of Darkness: Observations on a Torture Notebook
Just in time for the Trump Administration’s official embrace of brutality, we have another book defending torture: Enhanced Interrogation by psychologist James Mitchell. For those unfamiliar with the author, he’s a central figure in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s scathing 2014 report summary on CIA abuse. And he’s a co-defendant — for having “designed, implemented, and personally administered an experimental …
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How the American Psychological Association Lost Its Way
Written with my colleague Jean Maria Arrigo, this op-ed originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The American Psychological Association is in crisis. It began last December, when a Senate Intelligence Committee report laid bare the extensive involvement of individual psychologists in the CIA’s black-site torture program. Then in early July a devastating independent report by a …
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