The story of Jeremiah True — the Reed College student who made headlines last month as a self-proclaimed free speech martyr, and who was arrested last week for harassment and sexual abuse — only seems to get stranger the more I look into it.
The latest development: On Friday, True pled not guilty to charges that he groped two young women on a high-school Rugby team who were practicing in a Portland park; he remains in custody.
We now have some more details on what he’s charged with. The Oregonian newspaper has reported that
According to a probable cause affidavit filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court, True walked up to and caressed the hair and arm of a female who was among a team of students practicing at Normandale Park …
True walked off, talking to himself, but returned to the park about 30 minutes later and approached a 17-year-old female and touched her breast with his open hand, and make a remark about her chest, the affidavit said.
Several witnesses restrained True until police arrived.
Portland police Officer E. Lamonte Johnson said True’s pupils were constricted and he was responding irrationally to questions and appeared to be under the influence of a controlled substance… .
This is not the first instance of disturbing behavior from True since his story originally hit the headlines. In late March, he engaged in a bizarre series of protests against Pancho Savery, the Reed College professor who had banned him from class discussion sections for his disruptive behavior. These protests got him booted from campus.
Then last week, he posted a bizarre 114-page manifesto online in which, among other things, he declared himself “the most powerful man in the Free World.”
First, the protests. On March 30th, according to a detailed account in the Reed College Quest,
True sat on the floor at the front of Vollum Lecture Hall during Hum 110 lecture under the chalkboard which read: “Restore Jeremiah True to their Conference” and “Your hypocrisy is showing Dr. Savery.” True remained on the floor wearing earbuds and removed his shoes while Professor of English & Humanities Laura Liebman proceeded to lecture on Virgil’s Aeneid. At the end of the lecture, True yelled out “Cowards!” to the general audience.
Just before 10 a.m. that same day, True stood outside of Professor Savery’s Humanities 110 conference on the third floor of the Performing Arts Building. When Professor Savery and the Humanities students began class, True approached the glass windows of the class, looking at the class and staring into the room. According to Professor Savery, the students were “upset and disrupted” by his presence, and the class proceeded to lower the blinds.
True persisted, walking back and forth along the length of the glass wall, occasionally peering through the cracks in the blinds and into the classroom. Professor Savery says, “I think people [in the conference] made the decision to ignore him, so as to not let him take class away from them because they thought that had happened too many times. We tried to have a normal class and ignore his presence.”
True showed up outside Savery’s next class as well. One student told the paper that
“[True] was stalking back and forth by the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, aping and mimicking Pancho’s [the professor’s] gestures, glaring at Pancho, flapping his arms, and making strange theatrical movements. It was one of the worst conferences we had, and everyone was extremely quiet,” Garriss says, “If he was protesting, I don’t know who his audience was.”
School officials were called to the scene and asked True to leave; he did, only to return five minutes later. The next day, he was banned from campus pending the result of an investigation.
Last Wednesday, a day before his arrest, True posted a bizarre document that he described as “The Senior Thesis of Jeremiah True ‘18.” (True is a Freshman.) In it, he declared, among other things, that “[m]y controversial actions both online and offline have partly been a sociological experiment and partly been performance art.”
He described Prof. Savery as a “Clever Devil” and claimed that
Within this document, I will claim that Pancho ghost-wrote much of what I was saying, and I believe this to be true. While he did not directly aid me in writing any of this document or previous documents, I have adopted his philosophy on life so entirely that I fully consider myself to be the disciple of Pancho Savery and would bow down and worship him if he would let me. After I met Pancho Savery, I became a completely different person, and I don’t know how to explain it. I love Pancho like I love my family. He has put more faith in me than anyone in my life ever has. It has been by his power alone that I learned what it means to be a father, to be a teacher, to be a Reedie, to be a Black man, and to be a Philosopher-King.
After admitting that he had gone “too far with my protest of Pancho’s conferences,” he went on to say that
The actions that I performed outside of Pancho’s classes were, to me, tame. When I was warned that I was being disruptive, I was completely incredulous, as I had not been loud or naked, nor had I attempted to forcefully gain access to the classroom. I did not realize how low the bar was set at Reed for what constitutes disruption, and what constitutes threatening behavior, especially since I have observed White DMABs perform aggressive behavior without consequence.
DMAB stands for “designated male at birth.” I can only assume he is using the term sarcastically.
He claims that his disruptive behavior was a part of a deliberate if indirect plan intended to open a debate about free speech.
Rather than challenge a noteworthy scholar of the First Amendment [ie, Prof. Savery] , I instead chose to play upon the nation’s perception of Black men in order to foster the belief that I was disruptive in class. This was further reinforced by Dr. Savery’s insistence that I was disruptive in class and my numerous instances where I engaged in using profanity.
So far I’ve only read portions of the entire 114-page document, but what I have read veers wildly between lucid arguments and bizarre assertions; his thinking (as has been the case in his previous statements) appears highly disordered and grandiose.
In one of his most grandiose moments, he declares himself
the most powerful man in the Free World. Stop me. …
I am the God of MRA’s, Anti-feminists, Anti-Marxists, Libertarians, and White, heternormative men and women everywhere. I also claim that I am the God of Reed, as I have called forth miracles and created earthquakes in the student body. Kanye has nothing on my ego. Eminem thinks I’M his Rap God. … I am a misogynist and a misandrist, a racist, and a feminist.
Despite the jokes, he seems to take himself very seriously indeed, and to believe a good deal of his own hype.
I may return with more thoughts on his case once I’ve read some more of it.
Sooo AVFM have thrown a bit of a curveball and published a piece that essentially says toxic masculinity is a thing (without using those words though) and that it’s bad.
But then they fall right back into AVFM style and say that the reason it’s bad is because women are using it, via the power of our butts, to control the world. Apparently we’re making the nasty toxic masculine alphas, who are in positions of power because alpha, do our bidding by promising them sex as a reward. Thus the beta and omega men are enslaved and oppressed by the feeeemale controlled alphas. Mwahahaha!
http://www.donotlink.com/erl7
Oh My God is this mental illness derail still going on?
David I suggest you put a comments policy note about this in the sidebar. In bold type. I’m so tired of this redundant discussion and if it’s made PPT leave then a big PSA about it, where everyone can see it, is necessary.
Please don’t go PPT. 🙁
Aaaand I’ve just read the comments on the previous page. Should have done that before I made the last post.
David do what you want to do.
I thought that the promise of sex was what wimmenz used to make NiceGuys and betas et al. wait on us hand and foot? And that alphas (especially if they’re named Chad) got sex just by existing, since they’re a permanent fixture on the cock carousel?
Now it turns out that the alphas are being manipulated by shapely rear ends just like the rest of mankind, and they’re the hired muscle for wicked, wicked feeeemales. Who are evil genius masterminds but still need a dude in order to carry out their nefarious schemes, and who despite their ingenuity have nothing to offer except for hot, hot bodies.
Dudes have continuity problems in their narrative. Either that or in the wake of that shite fundraiser, AVfM is trying to woo back their MGTOW base (since the only logical outcome of that cluster above is to avoid women entirely and thus be free from the woman-dominate alpha oppression).
This thread has gotten a little introspective, so I’m not sure if it’s a bad time to mention, but: amphetamines are popular on college campuses, especially in the form of resold Adderall, as study aids.
I’d expect a freshman, adjusting from the academic expectations of high school, to be most likely to attempt to use Adderall as a performance enhancer, as well as more likely to overdose.
Certainly looks to me like the conversation changed on its own as soon as it became clear that you were going to let it.
Your blog. You’re perfectly in your rights to do as you like. I’m perfectly in my rights to think it’s bullshit and not deal with it at all.
You could equal well say that the anti-ableist critics changed the conversation away from misogyny. Look, saying “I hope that guy gets some help” isn’t an attempt to change the conversation. It’s a reflexive social nicety, a banal platitude, a thing we just say by default when we hear about someone’s disturbed behavior in the news. People don’t say it because they’re trying to start a conversation about mental illness; most probably don’t expect to get any reply at all.
Now, some social formulas are worth challenging, and I would agree that “I hope they get help” is one of them — in some contexts. People sometimes say it about assholes when there is no evidence those people need or would benefit from any kind of professional help. If someone says that about Sage Gerard or Janet Bloomfield or something, then I think it’s fair to call them out. But when there is obvious evidence that someone’s thinking was disordered — even if only temporarily — I don’t see any point in objecting to the “hope they get help” formula. It’s not a statement that psychiatry is the only or most pressing problem, or a stance on the likeliness of drugs vs. brain disorder vs. purely ideological weirdness. It’s just the thing we say when someone is acting in a baffling and troubled way.
Yep, because “Loopier than a bowl of fruit loops” is clearly a comment that I caused, despite coming before anything I, or anyone else who thinks this ableism bullshit is bullshit, said on this thread. That’s definitely my fault, clearly and obviously and without any question, because I changed the conversation entirely through the power of my mind before I even noticed this post.
I’m really interested in where this “WHY CAN’T WE SAY WE WANT HIM TO GET HELP” strawman is coming from. I know I didn’t say “nobody is allowed to hope he gets help” and I don’t see where anyone else said it, either. Where is this idea coming from that I, or anyone else, is trying to prevent people from hoping he gets help?
“Loopier than a bowl of fruit loops” is a flat-out harmful statement, and is the statement I didn’t like. Unless someone wants to stand here and defend the validity and helpfulness and total legitimacy of that statement, maybe back the fuck off with the assertion that language is being policed to an unreasonable extent here.
… Wait, what? “Anti-ableist critics”? Isn’t that a bit like “Anti-racist critics” or “Anti-murder critics,” or do I just need more coffee?
To be fair, David did specifically mention the “loopier than a bowl of fruit loops” comment as something we should not say. I totally agree with that.
@dhag85
Yep, and absolutely nothing in the post itself is objectionable. Honestly I don’t know why David decided to continue his comment and defend speculation about True’s mental state. What David said in his comment was actually not objectionable either, but I knew (I knew) that the fact that he was saying something that looked like “internet diagnosing is A-OK in this situation” if someone wasn’t reading closely was going to open the floodgates to internet diagnosing.
Surprise! It did!
PoM, I’m not standing up for the GI Joel, or even the banana cake, but for whimsicalrogue’s comment and for our David’s. If you don’t mind whimsicalrogue we’re probably on the same page.
M., it’s an awkward phrase, yeah, but I didn’t know how else to say it. “feminist” means anti-exist, but I don’t know a word for “anti-ableist.” I’m not saying that anti-ableist is a bad thing to be in general, it’s just the most salient descriptor for the people I disagree with in this thread.
I think it’s quite likely that True may be suffering from a mental illness – sez me an Interwebs amateur – but I don’t think this takes away from the vile nature of the “philosophy” of misogyny. I think there are plenty of misogynists who are sane by all measures. But there does appear to be some particular attraction to this nonsense for people with certain neurological disorders. Disordered thinking is attracted to distorted thinking? Disordered thinking – so long as it fits within certain frames finds a home with those who have distorted and hateful philosophies. This doesn’t just apply to misogyny, I think there are examples with anti-semitism, racism, gay-bashing and religion-bashing, etc.
While autism isn’t mental illness, it is a neurological disorder and some of this ‘new misogyny’ certainly seems to find a happy home with many young men on the spectrum. In my own marriage, my unDXd husband – who I am sure is on the spectrum – fell in with this new misogyny crowd shortly after our son was born much to the detriment of our relationship. In some ways, I think it gives him comfort because it gives him rules for relationships, but it also gives him an explanation for why I’m so “awful” for insisting that he do his share of childcare and requiring some basic intimacy in our marriage. It also gives him a “good reason” not to do so. I’m a self-described feminist, who’s ridden the cock carousel etc. etc. He falls short in some areas, but this stuff gives him a really easy way to blame me and excuses for sabotaging my efforts. And he’s not even fully bought into this stuff (but bought into it enough to make my life a misery, that’s for sure.)
On the upside, if he had to pick on someone I’m so glad that True picked on a rugby team. Hopefully the girls who he assaulted physically and verbally will have an awesome resource to fall back on as their teammates rally round. I play women’s rugby and it’s a truly amazing kind of relationship.
And well done school system for supporting girls’ rugby! Best sport ever!
I didn’t say anything about whimsicalrogue’s comment, so I’m not sure why anyone would leap to the conclusion that I thought it was over the line. That is a leap. Nobody had any information one way or the other what I thought about it, because I had said nothing one way or the other about it, but I guess everyone thought I was secretly going ballistic and keeping it to myself, or maybe hiding it in code words?
I know I was gone from the board for a couple of months, so let me say this plainly: I don’t hide what I think and I don’t write in code. If I’d thought whimsicalrogue was saying an illegitimate thing, I would have said so.
Insofar as David’s comment, I said, in my second response to it:
Tell me what about that was unclear and I’ll clear it up. I don’t write in code, but sometimes I don’t include the message I intended.
If it helps to end the speculation about True’s current state of mental health, court reports have noted that he experiences both post-traumatic distress disorder and depression.
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2015/04/reed_college_student_jeremiah.html
Even so, I still think it’s unproductive to speculate on how this may or may not have influenced his actions and beliefs. Many people experience both. I experience both. Although nobody’s experience of mental health difficulties is the same, I think it’s safe to say many of us don’t end up acting like misogynistic asshats. Even while on drugs.
PoM,
You’re not the only poster in the thread. Andiexist objected to Maude’s comment which I found similarly innocuous. As for your own opinions, it’s of course true that you didn’t mention whimsicalrogue by name. You did say “If he has a disorder, then he deserves treatment for it and I hope he does receive treatment for it. I just don’t see how talking about that is useful or constructive.” It seemed to me that this implied that whimsicalrogue’s comment would be destructive. If you’re making a distinction between mentioning help in passing and “talking about” it, then I apologize for the misunderstanding; it wasn’t clear to me from context. I’m also unsure who you consider part of the flood of internet diagnosis to which David opened the gates and who you consider a productive poster, which make it hard for me to evaluate your position.
Misunderstanding something you say, or making a guess and asking for verification, or simply noting confusion is not the same as accusing you of speaking in code. Communication is difficult enough at the best of times; a breakdown requires neither malfeasance nor incompetence from either party.
OK, so some people really, really, really, REALLY want to be able to say mental illness may have had something to do with True’s behavior. Ok.
Mental illness may have had something to do with True’s behavior. Now what? Have I shed any light on the situation? Are we further along than we were in the last post about True? No?
Have several people now taken this opportunity to wax ignorant about supposed connections between mental illness/autism and misogyny? *scrolls up* Yes? Wow, it’s almost as if all those people who tried to stop that shit before it started had a point! Who knew!?
This is the only site where I can and do happily post stuff about my mental health issues without being afraid of the reactions.
That is all.
As a person with bipolar disorder, I can see that this guy is probably in a manic state, and probably enhancing that with recreational drugs. For that reason, I hope he gets treatment. Underneath it all, though, he’s probably still an asshole. Treatment for mental illness doesn’t change you from bad to good, it just tampers the crazy so you aren’t so erratic and destructive. It doesn’t make you less of a bad person (if you are bad) or more of a good person (if you are good), it just enables you to be more in control of your actions. I don’t think we have to discuss this as an EITHER “get him help” OR a “he’s coopted MRA language and that’s a problem.” Both can be true at the same time.
Because I am a lousy flouncer, I’m back within the day. The strawmanning and weaselly redefinitions PoM pointed out were getting to be a bit much and I needed a break. Thanks for your concerns and kind words, dhag85, andiexist, sunny–I think I should just stay away from ableism discussions because I get too upset (and possibly triggered, though I’m not sure by what), which was what I meant when I said I’m gone. I certainly acknowledge the complexity of this issue and I know people are well-intentioned. I’ll save more TL;DR thoughts for later, maybe an open thread.
“Talking about it” meant “talking about his mental disorder, if any.” I apologize for not being clear.
Internet diagnoses:
The original, coming before David’s comment or mine, but hardly the last. The remainder come after that comment.
This is phrased like a subtweeted response to me, but I don’t know what made zyvlyn think I was ever claiming that nobody having a psychotic break is ever dangerous. I would never make that assertion, because it is obviously false.
Not “help” but “psychiatric help.”
I’m actually not sure what to do with this comment. The rest of it makes it clear that WWW is dealing with some serious business, and probably anything I say about it in any direction is going to be unhelpful.
The sentence that comes after this makes it clear that the schizophrenic woman was not dangerous, so I think this comment probably came from a good place. It is, however, an internet diagnosis, and frankly kind of reductive and insulting regardless of the motive.
Right here on this page, rugbyyogi is making some kind of argument that frankly confuses me, but the upshot seems to be that MRAs are disproportionately mentally ill, and/or possibly autistic, because of reasons.
This is obviously not representative of this thread as a whole. Many people are making comments that either ignore the mental illness angle, or are saying, “Hey, knock this ableist shit off.” Nevertheless, that looks like a lot of internet diagnosing to me. A vague “this guy be crazy” statement is at least as harmful as a “this guy be schizophrenic” statement, and maybe more so because it hurts every mad person instead of just schizophrenics (who already have enough unavoidable shit to deal with without cultural shit being artificially generated and dumped on them, too).
I don’t know why I didn’t see anything Andiexist had said, so I apologize for that. Retroactively amend all my previous comments to speak only for myself and not anyone else.
Yanno, I’m coming off my third night shift in a row so my filters might be a bit down but, here goes:
Before I was nurse, I used to be a therapist. I have a master’s in clinical psychology, so I have a bit of a passing familiarity with mental health diagnoses. (Especially enough to know that I do not have the education or experience to make a mental healt diagnosis. Or a medical diagnosis, for that matter). And we do not know if True is detached from reality or in a psychotic break. We just don’t. What we have is a written manifesto and second-hand accounts of True’s behavior. And everything he’s written, and everything he’s done, is bizarre. Bizarreness, in and of itself, is not sufficient to determine whether True has a mental illness or is in the middle of a psychotic break. It’s just…not. There literally is not enough information to make that determination. A trained psychologist or psychiatrist would have to sit down face-face-face to make that determination.
It would be like diagnosing lung cancer based on a dark spot on a chest x-ray without a biopsy or CT scan. Yeah, that dark spot might be a mass. And yeah, True might be psychotic. Yeah, bizarreness is a symptom of psychoses. But there’s lots of other differential diagnoses, if you will. Here are a couple. True might have a brain tumor. He might have SIADH, or acute liver failure and his ammonia levels are elevated, or he might have a really bad UTI. Or maybe he drops acid every day. Or maybe he’s an elaborate troll. Or maybe he’s just your garden-variety misogynist asshole with a flair for the dramatic. No doctor (or at least one who values zir license) would diagnose a person with lung cancer based on just a dark spot on a CXR. In the same way, we can’t know what True’s grasp of reality is based on the on the information we have.
Which is why this is so fucking frustrating.
What we do know is that we live in a sexist society. And even if True is “crazy,” then the way that is manifesting is part of that. He sexually harrassed teenage girls. He demanded to be allowed to continue to disrupt classes to talk about rape, other people in the class be damned. If that’s not a manifestation of privilege, I don’t know what is.
And that’s the issue here.
@Policy of Madness I’m actually not sure what to do with this comment. The rest of it makes it clear that WWW is dealing with some serious business, and probably anything I say about it in any direction is going to be unhelpful.
Maybe my comment seemed to come out of nowhere, so sorry. I don’t want to engage with the motivations of any particular individual – I don’t think that is useful. The editors of the New York Post were unlikely to be mad or high when they introduced True’s rantings approvingly to a wider audience, and its this wider social context which matters, and what I said about mental illness specifically has nothing to do with True or his actions.
However, your comment and many others here seem to me to suggest that while mental illness may have a disinhibiting effect, like alcohol, it doesn’t alter people’s base personality – and that if they do nasty things while mentally ill, they are probably the sort of people who would do them anyway.
This may be many or even most people’s experience of mental illness – it is certainly not mine. My personality is skewed and unbalanced when I am mentally ill – I certainly am not as capable of being as loving, generous and creative because I am exhausted and self-obsessed around my perceived failings. I struggle to be considerate of my husband and friends’ needs. I am luckily, like most mentally ill people, not dangerous or violent. That has not been the case for all of my family members, but I honestly believe they would not have done the actions they did or believe the things they did, if they were not ill.
I have been hesitant to bring this up because its in a context of internet analysing the actions of some individual, and I totally agree we shouldn’t do that. I just actually think its a wrong, and potentially hurtful model of mental illness.
tldr; I don’t think I’m horrible just because I can be horrible when I’m sick.
And, of course, as has been well pointed out by Policy of Madness and others, this kind of speculation on a person’s mental health when they do something assholish actively harms folks with a mental illness. So that, also.
@andiexist “All of these things are possible. But… saying that “hey, *everyone* could benifit from getting ‘help’” is very much a misdirection from the fact that you probably wouldn’t tell someone acting “normally” that they should get help.”
Uh yes, I would, and have , told normal people that they should seek help from a mental professional. It’s not only mentally ill people that have troubles that a trained professional can help sort out. I’ll give you two examples.
My *very* sane husband has old hang ups from the past surrounding money in relationships. I convinced him to go to couples therapy with me, (and I could only get him to go by informing him I would leave otherwise!), he was terrified to go at first, but once he got comfortable he spent much of our sessions having the therapist deal with his personal issues. Therapist and I suggested that maybe a couple of individual sessions would be of help, he basically refused, and while he won’t say it, it’s because he views people in therapy as “crazy”.
Second, mother was dx with cancer and given a short time to live, I asked if she was going to speak to someone to help sort things out, she said she was fine, she felt no anxiety or depression, she didn’t feel out of control, I said fine I supported her no matter what, and she was fine.
On the other hand, I’ve seen men with longstanding issues with severe depression and anxiety refuse to get help, stating that they don’t *need* therapy, that therapy is only for people deeply disturbed.
See how the belief that only mentally ill people get help hurts everyone? It’s like if we said, “Only people with severe illness go to the doctor, if healthy people go, they must be dying”. It’s stupid.
As to the general conversation in the thread;
I’m not trying to hurt you, or trigger you. I’m just saying that, in general, these things can be nuanced. Neither misogyny, nor mental illness, nor sanity, nor organic brain issues, nor society’s influence, exist in a vacuum. It doesn’t do anyone any good to pretend otherwise.
And as for this kid in particular? I’m sticking with “troll until proven otherwise”.