Lyle Rossiter

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Style over substance
Pseudoscience
Icon pseudoscience.svg
Popular pseudosciences
Random examples

Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., like Michael Savage, thinks that liberalism is a mental disorder.

Unlike Savage, however, Rossiter is a psychiatrist and is actually serious when he says that. He has written a book, The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness, which claims to trace the psychological factors causing people to become liberals.

Promoting his book on WorldNetDaily, Rossiter quote mined a 2001 statement by Barack Obama about "redistributive change" and the civil rights movement.[1]

In a nutshell, the book's thesis is, 'My political views are so obviously correct that anyone who doesn't accept them just has to be nuts.' It presupposes the truth of a right-wing political outlook and then tries to plumb the reasons why other people do not accept this truth, the conclusion being that they have to be in massive denial. He chastises liberals for being "uncivil, overly sure of their correctness, and willfully ignorant of facts that contradict their worldview."

Joan Swirsky, a fan of the book, notes that it "avoids all the usual psychobabble."[2] We hazard a guess that this is because the book does not contain any actual psychological science.

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

References[edit]