Georgetown tried to gaslight COVID skeptic

Photo by Alex Wolowiecki on Unsplash

During the pandemic, there was a lot of stuff being said. It was hard to swallow all of it, especially when so much of it contradicted earlier, basic things. My favorite example was when we were told not masks wouldn’t help right up until we were told we had to wear masks everywhere.

I can’t imagine why people are so distrustful of authority these days.

Yet some people were skeptical of various aspects of the pandemic response pretty early on. Others came on board along the way. Still others are still drinking the Kool-Aid.

Few, though, were gaslit by their university.

From the New York Post:

A Georgetown University law school graduate claims he was forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation for questioning the school’s COVID policies. 

William Spruance, currently a practicing attorney, said he was suspended, forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation and threatened by administrators in August 2021 for questioning the law school’s COVID and masking policy. 

“So after I was encouraged to give a speech to a student council-type group at Georgetown, I received an email that I was indefinitely suspended from the school, that I’d have to undergo a psychiatric evaluation and waive my right to medical confidentiality,” he alleged Monday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

“During the psychiatric evaluation – It would start with kind of innocuous questions like, ‘Do you ever get angry?’ Followed by ‘Do you get angry about masks? And then do masks make you want to hurt anybody?’ So it was an ongoing cycle of questions that were designed to make me seem unhinged for being willing to question their COVID policies.”

Now, if Spruance were threatening people, that would be one thing. That doesn’t look to be the case. After all, if he were issuing threats, that would have been grounds for expulsion.

Instead, they tried to gaslight him.

Spruance doesn’t phrase it that way and neither does Carlson, but I don’t see how it’s anything else.

Gaslighting is when you try to make someone think they’re crazy, that the things they saw or believe simply cannot be so.

So what else do you call a mandatory psychiatric evaluation for someone who is skeptical of the school’s policies? The implication is that there may be something mentally wrong with that skepticism.

Nothing about this is right. Nothing about it passes the sniff test.

If Georgetown Law did this, then it’s one of the most disgusting things we saw out of the pandemic and is a great example of why academia needs serious reform. That should never have been tolerated.

Gaslighting is considered a form of abuse, and it looks like a major law school did that to at least one of its students.

One can’t help but wonder how many others suffered from it.

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