MAJOR CONFERENCE:
We are at an extremely critical time, more than ever before in our lifetime. That’s why we are planning this major, unique, impacting conference on September 27th, a few weeks before the upcoming 2024 election.
The year before the 2020 election we held a major conference at the National Press Club in Washington. DC. “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership” conference was considered important enough that it was broadcast for all 3 hours on C-Span. The second edition of our New York Times bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, was released at the conference. As never before or since, we brought together thirteen highly respected experts from many different areas of expertise including psychiatry, law, political science, economics, history, journalism, climate science, and nuclear science. The conference was convened by Dr. Bandy Lee, moderated by Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, and among others included Dr. Jerrold Post, the psychiatrist who established the CIA’s program for psychologically evaluating foreign national leaders who in one of his final public appearances applied all of his experience and knowledge to warning about Donald Trump. Please watch this 17-minute video that opened the past conference as well as some highlights of the conference itself.
We have a rare opportunity to highlight the issue that has been central from the start of Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency and beyond: Trump’s dangerous mental state! Media and public refusal to focus on this central issue has already had devastating ramifications, including 1.2 American deaths, most of which could have been prevented, a violent insurrection that came too close to overturning our government, and escalating threats of continuing and expanding social and political violence. Now, we still face an all-too-possible return of Trump and what he would bring with him to the White House, including Project 2025 and the new Supreme Court designation of “Presidential Immunity.” At this critical time, we now have to work even more strenuously to explain and expose how he came to power in the first place: through what Dr. Bandy Lee has called “Trump Contagion,” the title of her new book. We must finally contain it, prevent it, and protect our country and our world from it. Like any other pandemic, we cannot simply expect that it will go away on its own, especially if Trump were to return to the U.S. presidency which remains a serious possibility.
Read Dr. Lee’s Substack article announcing this new, urgent conference: “Major Dangerous Case of Donald Trump Conference in Washington, DC.” And watch Dr. Lee discuss the reasons for and importance of this proposed conference on a recent episode of The Weekend Show which has had nearly a million views, so many that as never before this well-respected Meidas Touch program has asked Dr. Lee to return every week now through the election.
To make this a significant live event in Washington, we now have professional media persons working with us to prepare it and to publicize it. We also have professional video persons who will make the conference quickly available from our new conference dedicated website, DangersOfTrump.com, as well as on YouTube. We are also trying, as we succeeding in doing for our previous conference, to get C-Span to broadcast the conference as well. We need to try to make this a significant newsworthy event, including having members of Congress and major media attending it and covering it. The theme of the conference will be that Donald Trump absolutely must be kept from entering the Oval Office again, and that the three criminal trials—the January 6 insurrection in DC, classified documents in Florida, and election interference in Georgia—must all proceed to conclusion. To make this a major talked-about event, the opening session with feature short, intense presentations from each of the many experts from diverse fields, as was done for the previous conference. Then there will be discussion among the panelists. And then there will be an extensive question-and-answer session and discussion with major media, members of Congress, and those in the audience. To conclude the conference, there will be a reception for all attendees followed by a special limited sit-down dinner with the conference participants and major media people. And then, after the conference is concluded, we need to have a major publicity campaign so that Americans throughout the country will know about it and be able to watch key excerpts from it which we will have quickly edited and made available. Immediately after the conference, we will have a team of professional video editors put together an hour-long documentary incorporating the key segments of the conference, along with a selection of short clips of key conference moments —all to be quickly put online and circulated to major media for their use immediately after the conference concludes.
This conference will only be worth doing if we can reach a vast audience of millions—with many persons filling the Ballroom at the National Press Club and millions more being made aware of it and watching highlights from the conference, and the entire conference if they wish to, in subsequent days online. The conference will only be worth doing and have the kind of influence we need to have if it can be done in this major way and made widely known. We have very limited time now to get everything in motion and to make this happen. This can only happen if we quickly raise the funds and co-sponsorships needed. An initial donation in August has allowed us to begin the planning for this conference.
Please urgently consider joining with us and contributing to making the conference possible and impacting.
Here are the elements all coming together to make this Conference of major significance.
NEW BOOK with theme of Conference: A short new book titled, The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew, will be published by the World Mental Health Coalition and featured at the conference. Dr. Lee became nationally known through the book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, published the first year of the Trump presidency. This new book will be deal with all that has happened since and all the dangers still ahead with Trump Contagion – of concern in different ways whether or not Trump returns to the White House. It is vitally important for psychiatric professionals and colleagues to educate the media and the public applying mental health principles to what is happening nationally, globally, and how we might promote collective healing.
PARTICIPANTS: These are the multidisciplinary persons from many areas of expertise who participated in the previous conference. Many of these persons will be invited to join in this new conference along with a few special additional persons:
- Bandy Lee – Leading Forensic Psychiatrist, President of the World Mental Health Coalition, and Author of “Profile of a Nation” and “The Psychology of Trump Contagion”
- Jeffrey Sachs – Leading Economist, University Professor at Columbia, and Coauthor of a recent landmark report on Avoidable Covid-19 Deaths in the U.S. Click here for his “First 100 Days” recommendations, presented at the conference.
- Richard Painter – former Chief White House Ethics Counsel for the Bush/Cheney Administration, Professor of Law at University of Minnesota, and Coauthor of the recent devastating report on the Department of Justice under Attorney General William Barr
- Ruth Ben-Ghiat – Leading Historian, Professor at New York University, and Author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present”
- Jason Stanley – Leading Philosopher of Language and Epistemology, Professor at Yale University, and Author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them”
- Gar Alperovitz – Leading Political Scientist, former Professor at the University of Maryland, and former Legislative Director of the U.S. Congress and Special Assistant in the U.S. Department of State
- Joseph Romm – Leading Climate Expert, Physicist, former Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, and Editor-in-Chief of Front Page Live
- David Cay Johnston – Pulitzer Prize-winning Investigative Journalist; Reporter on Worldwide Tax, Public Finance, and Business; and Founder of DC Report
- Mehdi Hasan –Journalist and Broadcaster of Zeteo
- Philip Zimbardo – Leading Social Psychologist, Professor Emeritus at Sanford University, and Principal Investigator of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment
- Jerrold Post – former Leading CIA Psychological Profiler and Director of Political Psychology Program at George Washington University
- Noam Chomsky – Leading Linguist, Cognitive Scientist, and Cultural Critic
- Jamie Raskin – U.S. Representative for Maryland, Lead Impeachment Manager for the Second Impeachment of President Donald Trump, and Member of the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack
- John Dean – former White House Counsel for President Richard Nixon, Leading Political Thinker, and Coauthor of “Authoritarian Nightmare”
BUDGET: To put on this very special conference in the main ballroom of the National Press Club in Washington DC, to advertise and promote the Conference, to get major media and members of Congress to know about and attend, our overall minimum costs will be $67,500. This includes facility costs and many expenses needed to put on such a major conference. This also includes if funds are available a full-page about the conference in Politico, professional video crew, ongoing social media promotion, conference security, reception costs where hors d’oeuvre and drinks will be served, and private dinner for panelists and media. As of early September we have raised about two-third of the funds needed. We have to raise the rest in the days ahead by 15 September so we can proceed with everything in a way to truly make this conference widely known and impacting.
The more funds we raise the more promotion and media engagement we will be able to pursue to make the conference of exceptional quality and notoriety.
