So this afternoon we were talking about positive cultural trends. But all is not sweetness and light in America—there are crazed mass killers on the loose, for example. Who or what is behind this? Tucker offers some food for thought:
And here’s a transcript I lifted from RCP:
TUCKER CARLSON: They're numbed by the endless psychotropic drugs that are handed out in every school in the country by crackpots posing as counselors and of course, they're angry. They know that their lives will not be better than their parents. They'll be worse. That's all but guaranteed. They know that. They're not that stupid and yet, the authorities in their lives, mostly women, never stops lecturing them about their so-called privilege. You're male. You're privileged. Imagine that. Try to imagine an unhealthier, unhappier life than that.
So, a lot of young men in America are going nuts. Are you surprised? And by the way, a shockingly large number of them have been prescribed psychotropic drugs by their doctors, SSRI or antidepressants and that would include quite a few mass shooters and keep in mind, again, these drugs are meant to prevent crazy behavior and yet there seems to be a connection.
Eric Harris, the columbine killer was on Zoloft and Luvox. A year earlier, a 15-year-old called Kip Kinkel shot his parents and dozens of classmates. He was on Prozac. In 2005, a 16-year-old called Jeff Weise killed his grandfather and ten kids in Minnesota. He was on Prozac, too. So was 27-year-old Steven Kazmierczak who murdered six people at Northern Illinois University. In 2012, you may recall when 25-year-old James Holmes walked into a movie theater and shot 82 people. He was on Zoloft.
The list goes on and on and on and on. It includes the shooter at the Washington Navy Yard in 2013. That would be 34-year-old Aaron Alexis. It also includes Dylan Roof. He's the 21-year-old who shot up the church in Charleston. Now, he was apparently a racist, and we've heard a lot about that. Fine, but we've heard next to nothing about the fact that he was taking SSRIs, he and many, many others. You're not supposed to notice, but some have.
The Journal of Political Psychology once assembled a list of dozens more mass killings, all committed by young people, young men on prescription drugs. So, is there a connection? Well, we don't know definitively. We do know there are a whole lot more of these drugs being taken by kids than ever before and by the entire population. Who's not taking some prescription medication at this point? Between 1991 and 2018, total SSRI prescriptions in the United States rose by more than 3,000%. 3,000%!
3,000% of anything is a massive change. You don't see changes like that, but the point of this change was to make Americans calmer, saner, happier. Take these drugs and your problems will go away. Yes, you will become numb. You will lose part of yourself. You no longer experience deep joy. You'll become part robot, but at least you won't want to kill yourself or harm other people. That was the promise.
3,000%. Did it work? Let's see. Over the very same period, the suicide rate in the United States jumped by 35%. Did it work? Well, millions of people got on anti-suicide drugs and we wound up with many more suicides. So, maybe it's not working. Is it possible it's making the problem worse, you think? Well, let's see. Mass shootings also increased dramatically over the very same period. Here's a chart that shows it. Now the halfwits on Twitter always scream the same thing. Correlation is not causation. All right. Whatever that means, but tell us, halfwits. What is going on exactly? What does that chart mean?
We know that SSRIs are dangerous. It says so right on the label. They increase "the risk of anxiety, agitation, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness, impulsivity and mania." Oh, not a big deal. That's not causation. Then what is it? According to one meta study by the FDA, young people who've been prescribed SSRI have an increased rate of suicide. Oh, wait. More suicides? Weren't they supposed to reduce suicide, but we're getting more suicide? Let's stop right there, but we're not stopping. We're accelerating.
Between 2015 and 2019, the use of SSRI drugs by teens in the United States rose by nearly 40%. So, it's not working? Let's do a whole lot more of it.
This seems like a massive and extremely obvious problem, extremely obvious. People aren't themselves. They're taking drugs that appear to be causing the behavior that drugs are designed to prevent. Why don't they talk about this on TV? Oh, let's see. In 2020, the pharmaceutical industry spent more than $4.5 billion advertising on national television in this country. Now, how much is that? Well, to put it in some context, Pfizer spent more on advertising in 2020 than it did on research and development.
But it wasn't a bad decision. It was a great decision. Pfizer's revenue doubled last year to more than $81 billion. Now, how do they do that? Well, the ad campaign paid off. It helped convince politicians to require the entire population take Pfizer products, products that don't work as advertised, that have killed large numbers of people and whose side effects are indemnified against lawsuits by the United States Congress. That's quite a business model. You might think it could be a subject of a media story, but no. No stories on Pfizer. They're paid to be fanboys of Pfizer. Therefore, they are.
Here's a tweet, for example, from CNBC, which is ostensibly a news organization and we're quoting, "Pfizer is uniquely positioned to advance MRNA, which could be a breakthrough for other infectious diseases, genetic diseases and cancer. (Paid post for Pfizer) #ad." It was on their Twitter account, a news organization. They're admitting it's a paid post for Pfizer. But in CNBC's defense, they're not alone. Pretty much all the news coverage you see in the United States is a paid post for Pfizer.
...
Oh, it's all brought to you by Pfizer. Now, why is that? Because TV channels don't prescribe drugs. Doctors do. So, why would Pfizer, a drug company, be advertising on television? Well, we're not sure the answer. Let's put it this way. Don't hold your breath waiting for CNN or Good Morning America to do a hard-hitting investigative piece on the potential connection between prescription drugs and violence. Probably not going to happen since they sponsor those channels. They're going to keep telling you it's all about guns. It's all about guns.
Does anyone really believe it's all about guns? No one thinks that. If you really thought that guns caused violence, you would, for example, demand far harsher prosecution of gun possession in the cities. That's where most of the shooter’s shootings are taking place, but no one's doing that. Why? Because that's where Democratic voters live. So, there's no chance anyone's going to crack down on them. Instead, politicians are using these tragedies to do what they've always wanted to do, which is disarm their political opponents. Here's someone who's kind of dumb enough to say it out loud. This is the governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker.
For the entire 19 minute video—which I can’t embed—go here:
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6309175411112#sp=show-clips
The video clip above begins around the 7 minute mark, so there’s plenty more—all good stuff. No, GREAT stuff!
The problem is not the SSRIs. Just like the problem isn’t guns. It’s the fact that our society is fragmenting and people ( perhaps men more than women) feel they no longer have a place in it. So they become depressed. They act out. Leave a mark. With notoriety comes recognition and perhaps emotional relief for these outsiders.
Allow me, please, to ramble a bit.
There would seem to be no refuting that there is an awful lot of mental illness in the US today, regardless of whether it is exacerbated by anti-depressants and other prescription meds.
Proof of the prevalence of mental illness would seem to be clearly established by the numbers of prescriptions for anti-depressants written in the US. According to one study (written in 2020) I found, 37 million Americans are on anti-depressants. Who knows whether this figure includes all of the other medications for various types of mental illness.
Am I surprised that some of the shooters have been on prescription meds? Not in the slightest. If 37 million Americans feel mentally ill enough every day to take a pill, I'm not surprised that some proportion of those 37 million are very sick. Nor am I surprised that the pill doesn't work for some of them. Whether the pill makes some of them more prone to violence or other irrational acts is an interesting question, but, to me, somewhat beside the point. They were sick in the first place.
The interesting question (to me at least) is: why are so many Americans anxious, depressed, stressed out and otherwise mentally unwell?
Maybe the answer is simply that the circumstances of life can often make us feel unwell. I can accept this explanation. To me, this explains to some extent why humans have used alcohol basically forever to feel better.
But I'm inclined to believe that the circumstances of modern American life can exacerbate the problem. From my own decades-long work experience (which in fact was largely privileged) I came to see the American workplace as a pretty unhealthy, pretty scary, actually, place. In many jobs today there are varying combinations of ridiculous hours (including evenings, nights and weekends), minimal promotion potential, zero job security, and all sorts of subtle and not so subtle abuse. Pay can be barely enough to get by, and in many tech companies, the compensation is overwhelmingly weighted towards incentive-based, on-the-come payouts. As in, 'you'll own nothing, and you'll be happy!'. Not.
Its no stretch for me to believe that a lot of the stress that starts in the American workplace gets exported at the end of the day into the American nuclear family, which we all know is under enormous stress itself and for numerous reasons hardly ideal these days.
One of the reasons I came to support Trump as I did, is that he seemed to grasp the issues faced by normals/deplorables in America and in his own inimical way began to work on them. I think the problems we face as a country and a culture are far worse and far deeper than the recent shootings (as bad as they are) and won't be remotely addressed by 'gun control' or 'trans rights' or 'green energy' or any of the liberal/progressive/socialist nostrums.
I often wonder what conditions motivated our 'forefathers' (all of them) to leave wherever when they did and come to America. Usually without extended family or friends or money. Things had to have been pretty bad to leave Place A and come to Place B (USA). I think we are in one of those times, although the world may have run out of Place Bs. Maybe we just have to stay and try to fix it.
I honestly don't know.