VEN (OAKLAND) — Carla is angry.

A woman’s studies major at Mills College,  who volunteers at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California,  Carla (not her real name) will not date or even talk to anyone she thinks voted for Donald Trump.

“First, I’m an atheist/humanist and I self-identify as Questioning.   The Bible is this terrible misogynistic book written by men who wanted to subjugate women, men like Donald Trump.

“Not only is Donald Trump a f***ing misogynistic rapist (he raped his own wife!), but he’s destroying our planet,  causing the death of hundreds of thousands of freedom-seeking, peace-loving Latino and Muslim immigrants fleeing chaos and death in their own countries, and making millions for himself with illegal business deals as president!

“He’s mentally unstable, sexually assaults women just because he can, and has his hand on the button ready to start a nuclear war over nothing!

“OMG! And he is such a F***ING liar!  I mean Putin?  Are you kidding me??!  And where are his tax returns?  He’s the only president in the history of the United States not to release his tax returns!  What’s he hiding?  His ties to Russia? The fact that he’s not really a billionaire?

“And he hates black people.  He was busted by the Feds three times for not renting to black  families in need, and he refuses to hire black or Latino caddies at his golf courses!

“And he’s a failed businessman — six personal bankruptcies, are you f***ing kidding me?? He has fake hair, yet he calls CNN fake news.  He’s not literally Hitler, he’s worse than Hitler!  I hope he chokes on that f^^^ing chocolate cake he likes so much and dies!”

Dr Paul Weatherford of Stanford University, a psychology professor who studies Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), tells VEN that cases like Carla’s are unfortunately not that rare.

“These people live inside progressive echo chambers, never thinking for themselves. They become leftist Normies who repeat the talking points of a tendentious liberal media until they reach a kind of Pavlovian breaking point where — consumed by uncontrollable, inchoate rage — they react viscerally to, say,  something as innocuous as someone mentioning President Trump’s name.

“In fact, that’s what triggering means in behaviorist psychology — a conditioned response to specific stimuli.  And the irony here is that these self-proclaimed humanistic, caring, Social Justice Warriors — from the liberal arts majors to the Antifa rioters — are incredibly INTOLERANT.  They demonize anyone who disagrees with them, and devalue them to the point that they believe it is OK to physically harm them.

“In many respects what we’re looking at is something akin to an epidemic on the Left of Borderline Personality Disorder with histrionic affect which — because everything is so politically charged now — remains undiagnosed.

“It’s really sort of Orwellian.  These people talk about the importance of critical thinking, yet by critical thinking they really mean  mindless indoctrination.  In a very real sense, these people live a profoundly unexamined life, like the prisoners chained in darkness unable to turn their heads in Plato’s allegory of the cave.

“They refuse to read Nietzsche, for example,  because he supposedly influenced the NAZIs, Hemingway because he’s an alpha-male misogynist who was a hunter and liked bull fights, or Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot because someone told them they were anti-semitic!

“It’s really very disturbing.  Their perspectives are systematically narrowed instead of expanded by their unexamined polemic, and they judge everything as either black or white.

“My own daughter, for example — a sociology major at Pepperdine — calls me a fascist because of my work with TDS,  and has stopped talking to me because she insists I must have voted for Trump (I didn’t).

“However,  she’s fine with my continuing to pay her tuition/room and board, which is substantial, but is now insisting — through her mother — that I also pay the tuition for an undocumented immigrant to atone for my white privilege.

“I told her that if she wants to pay her own way at Pepperdine, I’ll be happy to contribute to a scholarship fund for minorities.  I also sent her a copy of Plato’s Republic and The Children of Sanchez by Oscar Lewis.

“She hasn’t replied to me yet, and this time we’re very much hoping that her silence means she’s finally starting to grow up.

“Embracing reality is the only antidote for TDS, no matter how upsetting that may be at first for the disillusioned.

“As Samuel Johnson said, When a man knows he is to be hanged, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.  We do all breathe the same air, and as I tell my students, it’s really time to start focusing on what — as Americans — we all have in common, instead of searching for and dwelling on those things that divide us or — in the case of TDS —  tear us apart.”