Whisking people off the streets without their consent is a hallmark of a totalitarian state

People get sick in any number of ways. COVID, the ‘flu, cancer, diabetes, hypertension,

you name it and most people can relate to it. But there is one category of illness that

does not have that immediate connection, and that’s mental health related. While the

stigma surrounding that has been slowly eroding over the last couple of decades, it is

still wildly misunderstood. Which, with one in five Americans having a mental health

issue at some point in their adult life, is truly shocking. Break a leg and hey, guess

what? Everyone can see it and sign the cast.

Let folk know that you are, say, bipolar

and along come the uncomfortable sideways glances and hasty goodbyes

With that amount of stigma still swirling around mental health issues, it highlights the

depravity of NYC Mayor Eric Adams decision to implement the involuntary

hospitalization of anyone with a mental health condition that refuses treatment, even if

they represent no danger to themselves or those around them. As have seen with the

recent assault on Roe v Wade, when you don’t have full control over your own body, in

whatever way, then you cannot be free in any meaningful sense of the word.

And guess what? Adams’ shock-troops, the NYPD, are fully permitted to detain people

under this new regime as they see fit. No matter what Adams and the NYPD may

profess, cops are not, repeat not, mental health professionals. The police are already a

law unto themselves in so many troubling ways and now Adams is affording them the

right to make a determination as to the mental health of someone? More often than not,

with such heavy-handed police interventions, the individual is more likely to end up in

police custody (and then everything that that then entails), rather than in a mental health

facility receiving specialized help.

Of course, with Adams, Biden and the DNC feverishly

looking to keep their private prisons stuffed to the rafters, this is a gift from above. More

apprehensions, under the flimsy pretext of an utterly faux concern for someone’s mental

health, results in more bodies under lock and key, which in turn results in ever-bloated

profit columns.

Adams has described this cruel new policy of his as being akin to navigating

“uncharted waters” and that no politician prior to him had the tenacity to implement

such an undertaking. Where to start with that analogy? So we have as ship’s captain

with no experience, no empathy, no acumen and no morals piloting the ship that is

NYC? Never have political life-boats seemed as attractive as they do now. Adams is

essentially confirming that he has no idea where he is going or where he will end up.

But still, he’s happy to drag NYC along with him for the authoritarian ride.

We already knew that with Eric Adams as mayor of NYC, we were on the slippery with

blood slope toward authoritarianism and ultimately unabashed fascism. State and

federal constitutional obligations clearly detail the limits of what can be done when

apprehending someone with a mental illness. Adams’ brazen display of dictatorial over-

reach obliterates those constitutional restrictions. Why would Adams care? Why would

any dictator care? That’s what they do, it’s in their DNA, and to hell with the rest of us.

More and more, the US continues to have more in common with the Taliban, Iran or

North Korea than it does with the rest of its peers in the Western world. This has been a

slow but steady progression underscored by the fact that every 50 or 60 years, the

Democrats turn themselves into hardline right-wing Republicans so as to keep their

White supremacist backers and financiers firmly in the fascist fold.

As we have been calling for a long time now, Adams needs to go, and needs to go at

once. Literally whisking people off the streets without their consent is a hallmark of a

totalitarian state. If you read about that in Hitler’s Berlin of Putin’s Moscow, you would

be disgusted, but not surprised. But NYC? In twenty-first century NYC? The world’s

city? If you’re not concerned, like deeply concerned, then you’re not paying attention.

We have to remain strong and united under the banner of TIPNation to push back

against the tide of tyranny and protect our kith and kin who we rub shoulders with day to

day in NYC, including, more than ever before, those with mental health conditions – all

of them.