This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Generally, do anti-Trumpers think there is such a thing as Trump derangement syndrome, or do they see it as merely a criticism of them?”

Generally, people who refer to other people as “anti-Trumpers” while behaving as if “TDS” is a legitimate diagnosis are struggling to compensate for their slipping grasp on reality.

“TDS,” for example, is a dialectical device for dismissing uncomfortable information about someone’s object of unconditional worship.

It is “BDS” for a new president. It was first concocted as a way to ignore arguments against the Bush administration and their lies to initiate two wars with two different countries under the auspices of getting revenge on a terrorist attack.

None of the people who hurled the nonsense accusation of “BDS” wanted to believe the Bush administration had lied to them. None of them wanted to acknowledge the family feud origins driving two illegal wars while conducting war crimes when confronted by the facts of the Bin Laden and Bush histories.

None of them wanted to acknowledge the hypocrisy of a president who gave up looking for the terrorist responsible for the attack on 9/11.

At every step of the way and with every criticism of a grossly incompetent and abysmally amoral leadership that treated the soldiers who spilled blood on their behalf like disposable garbage, they cried out, “BDS! You’ve got BDS!” Hoping that would be the end of the resistance to their corruption.

They’re doing the same thing again with “TDS” by repurposing a conversation terminator that can allow them to wriggle away from the consequences of their corrupt behaviours.

They’ve also concocted another means by which they can achieve their divisive betrayal of the nation by reducing the conflict to a team sport where the opposing sides are merely cheerleaders for equal and opposite ideologies.

That’s already a betrayal of the social contract and everything decent about a nation that claims to value freedom and democracy.

These people never shut up about freedoms like freedom of speech, yet every one of their behaviours is the antithesis of what they claim to value.

They are worse than traitors to the nation. They are a toxic disease that represents a threat to human civilization.

They are worse than intransigent children because they cannot reason, will not reason, and will lie and accuse their way out of responsibility for the consequences of their destructive actions.

They are worse than cult members because they are not content with remaining in their space and living their lives in peace while allowing the rest of the world to enjoy the same courtesy.

They are a disease, a scourge that will not stop until they rule the whole of humanity.

They have existed for centuries, and now, they are impossible to ignore. They have become impossible to compartmentalize within geographical boundaries. They have become impossible to allow us to lie to ourselves that we are not all touched on some level by centuries of generational CPTSD.

We cannot ignore that these are not people “over there” but are our families, neighbours, and fellow country people. These are people who represent the one-in-five among us who suffer from severe psychological dysfunctionalities.

We cannot ignore how we cannot win this war through aggression but by changing how we live and how we structure our societies.

We can only survive this war by addressing all the elements contributing to this evil’s metastasis.

We can learn from history, pay attention to the same signs screaming for our attention, and stop creating excuses for why some things we value cannot be questioned.

We must be open-minded enough to acknowledge how much of what we take for granted as acceptable should no longer be tolerated.

We can no longer allow unchecked power to corrupt our systems and destroy their fundamental characteristics, ensuring their survival and capacity to meet our needs.

We must restore trust in ourselves as people living together in a civilized society and the systems we live by. However, we can’t do that by allowing the enemies of society to smear everything with a misanthropic haze of false equivalences.

We must draw lines in the sand when determining what is and isn’t acceptable and hold everyone accountable on an equal footing. We can no longer permit two sets of laws and rules for two classes of people.

Liberty, equality, and fraternity must be true for everyone, or we may as well allow ourselves to descend into the grave of barbarism as we write our final writ to the stars that care not whether we live or die.