We can talk about indoctrination and conspiracies, we can talk about white supremacy, and we can talk about acts of violence without removing responsibility from perpetrators by suggesting they are "mentally ill."

Mental illness is an AXIS OF INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE. Not a collective ideology, not a historical pattern of violence.

Human beings are absolutely vulnerable to conspiracies, cult thinking, cognitive distortions, the whole deal. That doesn't make us all mentally ill.

Mental illness is describing a type of disability, not a type of violence.

The attempted coup that happened yesterday was NOT the result of disability. It was the result of white supremacist ideology and violence, backed by a system that enables and encourages those behaviors.

Human beings, ALL of us, are vulnerable to thought manipulation and indoctrination, particularly those embedded in this culture. That is a phenomenon that impacts mental health, but it is not a phenomenon itself that emerges from a mental illness.

There is a lot of back-and-forth happening, talking about how the lack of self-insight, the "delusional" thinking, the erratic emotions and behaviors all point to an "illness." But white supremacy isn't a delusion, it's a system and an ideology.

That is all armchair diagnosis that only excuses violence. When you collectively conspire to act on an ideology in violent ways, you are making a deliberate choice. There is accountability that has to happen here.

Much of mental illness is, by definition, "egodystonic," meaning you are acting/feeling/thinking in ways that don't reflect your values in a non-disordered state.

Prove to me that an entire mass of people yesterday weren't aligned with their intrinsic values. Then we'll talk.

And YES, it's scary as fuck that folks can be steeped in this violent ideology in ways that make them seem utterly unreachable. But refusing to be reached with *conviction* is different than being unwell and lacking self-insight you'd ordinarily have.

Everyone wants a shortcut to talk about this. But the shortcut is not to throw people with mental illness under the bus, and to armchair diagnose an entire swath of white supremacists strictly because of their audacity.

That violent audacity is part of our history.

That violent audacity is a legacy of white supremacy that we, white folks, inherited from our ancestors. It is normalized throughout every system and institution we come into contact with. Stop looking for every conceivable excuse to look away from that, please.

Stop looking for how to "cure" white supremacists. Start looking at how to uproot and disrupt white supremacy.

Stop looking for how to "diagnose" white supremacists. Start caring about the mental health of communities of color who are being terrorized daily.