SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A27
T
here is almost nothing I wouldn’t do
for you, dear reader, and last week,
in your behalf, I made a painful
sacrifice: I joined Truth Social so
you don’t have to.
I endured weeks on the waiting list for
the Donald Trump-created, Devin Nunes-
run attempt at a Twitter killer, and I suffered
through a series of technical glitches. But
eventually I gained access. As a result, I have
come to be in possession of the following
new pieces of information about the war in
Ukraine:
Hunter Biden is involved in building and
running biolabs in the country.
The CIA and National Institutes of
Health are both “deeply involved” in the
Ukrainian biolabs.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was set in
motion by a CIA false-flag operation that
was funded by George Soros.
The covid-19 pathogen originated not in
China but in Shpyl’chyna, a village in
Ukraine.
The bioweapons developed in Ukraine
specifically target the “Abrahamic
B loodline.”
Neo-Nazis from Ukraine joined with the
FBI to infiltrate the Capitol on Jan. 6 and
participated in the insurrection.
Ukraine was planning to use drones to
attack Russia with pathogens from the
U.S.-funded bioweapons labs.
President Biden has been using Ukraine
to launder money.
Ukrainian neo-Nazis controlled the
Ukrainian city of Mariupol before Russians
invaded.
Russia’s alleged war crimes were staged.
I also found many posts calling President
Biden a pedophile (or a “groomer” in the
new parlance of QAnon). I found badly
photoshopped images of Vice President
Harris in sexualized situations. I found
ceaseless attacks on trans people, an edited
video of a cat attacking House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, attacks on Disney for oppos-
ing Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation,
references to satanic sacrifice by the “deep
state,” a few racist epithets and endless
accusations about Hunter Biden’s laptop
and drug abuse.
I signed up for Truth Social, which
launched its attack on Twitter soon after
Vladimir Putin launched his attack on
Ukraine, on March 3. “Due to high demand,”
my “waitlist number” was 986,565.
I promptly forgot about Truth Social.
Apparently, so did everybody else. The
Wrap, an entertainment news website, re-
ported last week that the app has seen a
93 percent drop in sign-ups (weekly installs
on the Apple App Store have fallen from
872,000 at launch to just 60,000, according
to analytics firm Sensor Tower) and a “simi-
larly steep decline in traffic.” Truth Social
had almost 1 million daily visits at launch,
but that has fallen to fewer than 300,000 —
well below Gab, a social media site that
attracts white supremacists, according to
SimilarWeb, another analytics firm.
Seems Trump’s social media venture is
headed the way of Trump University,
Trump’s Atlantic City casinos, Trump’s char-
ities, Trump mattresses, Trump steaks,
Trump clothing, Trump perfume, Trump
lighting, Trump floor coverings, Trump eye-
wear, the Trump presidency and American
democracy.
But last week, I got the coveted email
welcoming me to Truth Social, with the
caveat that “we are still fixing many bugs.”
Sure enough, I clicked on the provided link
to my profile — and got an error message.
Eventually, I followed all the accounts Truth
suggested for me, including Kyle
R ittenhouse, Maria Bartiromo, the Epoch
Times, Hot Chicks Golfing, Dr. Fauci Sucks,
Sean Hannity, Eric Trump, Fake Hunter
Biden, Dan Bongino, Breitbart News, Don-
ald Trump Jr. and Donald Trump. House
Republican leaders are on the platform,
with red checkmarks instead of Twitter’s
blue. In fact, the whole thing looks similar to
Twitter, with “Truths” instead of tweets; the
only differences are the lack of functionality
and users.
I searched for the hashtag #Ukraine,
hopped into the rabbit hole and was quickly
swimming in a cesspool.
There were posts from Russian state
propaganda. There was a doctored image of
Trump holding a sign saying “Zelensky is
the Avenatti of leaders.” There was a doc-
tored video of Putin saying “Let’s go, Bran-
don.” There were posts about Ukrainian
leaders being corrupt. There was a claim
that Ukraine is “defending the NWO” —
New World Order.
I scrolled on: Ukrainian soldiers are
“white supremacists and neo-Nazis,” the
“globalists” are backing Ukraine, the U nited
States has “no business in this fraternal
conflict,” a U.S. undersecretary of state paid
$5 million to elect Volodymyr Zelensky,
sanctions on Russia are hurting the U.S. dol-
lar, Ukraine attacked Russia. Oh, and the
Democrats (“Demon Rats”) “did not want
Trump to know that they were creating a
CIA colony in Ukraine,” so “they paralyzed
his administration with two fake ‘impeach-
ment’s and ultimately stole the election.”
Busted!
I did find the occasional pro-Ukraine
“Truth.” And — who knows? — if I searched
long enough, I might have found something
accurate. But I didn’t. Instead, I found a
small clump of angry people shouting into a
void. And that’s the sad truth.DANA MILBANKI tried Trump’s
Truth Social
so you don’t
have to
BY DEVYN GREENBERGT
he American Psychiatric As-
sociation recently updated its
bible, the Diagnostic and Sta-
tistical Manual of Mental Dis-
orders. For the first time, this highly
consequential guide categorized grief
as a disorder when it is “prolonged”
beyond one year.
One year?
Soon, it will be two years since I
lost my best friend and father, Garry
Greenberg, to covid-19. He was
68 years old. I think about him every
day. I’m pouring coffee and I hear his
laugh; I’m running and I think of
something I want to tell him.
I flash back to a soccer game I
played at age 12. Only minutes re-
mained. Score tied. A tense, respect-
ful silence among the parents on the
sideline was broken by the sudden
boom of a fog horn: womp, womp,
wooooomp. “Go, Dev, go!”
That was my dad. That was always
my dad, radiating boundless love and
support. When I picture him, I pic-
ture the sparkle in his huge “Green-
berg eyes,” beach days filled with Billy
Joel and sandy snacks, his 6-foot-4
bear hugs that winded me.
I also picture the first time I ever
saw my dad on Zoom. It was April
2020, and he was sedated on a
ventilator in a crowded New York City
hospital. I was gripping my brother
Kyle’s hand nearly 100 miles away,
and it felt as if an octopus were
squeezing my heart. My dad wasthinner than I’d ever seen him. He
looked scared and alone. Machines
beeped everywhere, so the social
worker held her phone closer to him.
Every word I spoke sounded saccha-
rine and wrong.
Since he died, on April 25, 2020, I
have immersed myself in a world ofgrief and loss, seeking solace and
connection. I have joined support
groups, read dozens of grief-related
books and explored ways to devote
my career to supporting the
b ereaved.
The purpose of this work has been
to internalize the message that what
I’m feeling is okay. If grief is the
corollary to love, if grief is l ove, why
set expectations on its pace or tex-
ture? Why pathologize love?
It’s not just personal indignation
that stirs me about the association’s
decision. I worry for others who have
loved and lost — at some point, all of
us. I worry that this framing will
render us even lonelier in our pain,even more convinced that our nonlin-
ear, unpredictable paths through loss
are “wrong.”
Grief is an experience with no road
map. Ask anyone who has lost an
immediate family member about
grief’s “five stages,” and you’re likely
to get a shake of the head. No, grief is
more akin to bushwhacking through
a gnarly forest. Each of us needs
validation that we can cry out from
the thorns in our sides, that we aren’t
crazy for enjoying a sudden clearing,
that whatever route we’re taking
(granted we aren’t harming ourselves
or others) is the right one.
Many of the symptoms the psychi-
atric association uses to define “pro-
longed grief” are shockingly com-
mon. “Intense emotional pain (e.g.,
anger, bitterness, sorrow)”? Let’s call
that a Tuesday. “Identity disruption”?
When you’ve walked through a portal
through which you cannot return, of
course your sense of self changes
dramatically.
Further, duration of grief isn’t the
appropriate parameter to define who
needs medication for what they’re
feeling. One therapist I’ve spoken
with said that grieving only starts at
the one-year mark. “Prolonged grief”
is perhaps a way of defining every
instance of grief.
The association’s choice risks cre-
ating false positives: Doctors might
tell people that they are mentally ill,
when they are moving through their
losses in constructive ways. We live in
a society that fears death and fails tohonor loss (see: absent workplace
bereavement benefits). The last thing
grieving people need is another layer
of alienation.
Some instances of grief, of course,
are debilitating to an extreme and
merit tailored support. The associa-
tion is right that additional research
and treatment options should be
provided for such cases. Yet to prop-
erly care for those individuals, we
must not conflate their experiences
with the intense but ultimately nor-
mal pathways of most grievers.
C.S. Lewis compared the death of a
loved one to an amputation.
W.S. Merwin’s loss went through him
“like a thread through a needle,”
everything “stitched with its color.”
Linda Pastan described grief as a
“circular staircase,” an inescapable
trap.
It is time we accept that we don’t
“move on” but move forward. It’s time
we stop pathologizing grief.
Here, we can all learn something
from my dad. When he lost his
beloved sister Lenore on April 25,
2007, exactly 13 years before his own
death, he let himself break. He had
the courage to face his pain, embrace
it and not force it to go away in weeks,
months, even years. He recognized
the centrality, the necessity, of grief. A
circular staircase, a trek in the woods
and a condition of love.The writer is a student at Stanford
Graduate School of Business and Harvard
Kennedy School.Grief is love, not a mental disorder
ANN KIERNAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTWhen you’ve walked
through a portal through
which you cannot return,
of course your sense of self
changes dramatically.
Russia. It could gamble that the presi-
dent (no matter America’s official policy)
would back down rather than risk esca-
lating toward a full-fledged, or “stra-
tegic,” nuclear exchange.
The administration has responded to
the changed circumstances. Biden re-
portedly told European heads of statelast month that he would not formally
weaken the United States’ nuclear-use
policy, as some of them feared. Mean-
while, his fiscal 2023 defense budget
released last week funds several nuclear
weapons programs initiated in the
Trump administration that are under
attack from disarmament advocates.
Unfortunately, it may not be enough.
The budget still terminates the Penta-
gon’s development of a tactical nuclear
weapon delivered by a sea-launched
cruise missile (or SLCM, sometimes pro-
nounced “slick-em”). This decision, an-
nounced in the middle of Putin’s war on
NATO’s doorstep, could needlessly cre-J
oe Biden campaigned in 2020 as a
nuclear arms-control enthusiast,
declaring that “the United States
does not need new nuclear weap-
ons” and embracing a “sole pur-
pose” policy that would narrow the
circumstances in which he might direct
the military to use one. Fourteen months
into his presidency, he has been forced to
abandon both commitments.
Two intervening events explain the
change. First, in 2021, satellite images
made public the construction of as many
as 300 silos, apparently for interconti-
nental ballistic missiles, in western Chi-
na. The extent of Beijing’s nuclear ambi-
tions could no longer be ignored.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine while
rattling its nuclear saber. Nuclear weap-
ons haven’t been used, but they’ve al-
ready set the terms for the conflict: It’s
only because of these weapons that
Russia’s military can fight a convention-
al war in Ukraine without a credible
threat of direct Western intervention.
Specifically, Vladimir Putin’s war has
highlighted Russia’s yawning advantage
over the United States in nonstrategic, or
“tactical,” nuclear weapons, which have
shorter ranges and smaller yields. Mos-
cow’s military doctrine exploits its
roughly 10-to-1 advantage in the smaller
weapons, and greater diversity of deliv-
ery systems, by contemplating their use
on the European battlefield in a conven-
tional war with NATO.
If an American president has fewer
options for a proportionate response to a
limited, tactical nuclear strike, such a
strike might look more attractive toate doubt in Moscow about Washington’s
will in a nuclear standoff.
The commander of U.S. forces in
Europe is already sounding the alarm. In
testimony before the House Armed Ser-
vices Committee on Wednesday,
Gen. Tod Wolters said the United States
should continue developing the SLCM.
“Having multiple options,” Wolters said,
“exacerbates the challenge for the poten-
tial enemies” probing for ways to cir-
cumvent our nuclear deterrent.
Multiple options means more than
one type of low-yield weapon for a
president to choose from to respond to a
limited Russian nuclear strike on a
NATO ally. The aim would be to restore
deterrence without unduly escalating.
The defense budget wisely doesn’t seek
to dismantle the W76-2, a submarine-
launched low-yield weapon that Biden
opposed when it was first deployed in
2019.
In an email, a senior Pentagon official
cited “the deterrence contribution of the
W76-2,” as well as cost constraints, to
explain the cancellation of the SLCM. But
the W76-2 is delivered by a long-range
ballistic missile, which means it can’t be
carried on most Navy submarines and
would look like a “strategic” weapon on
enemy radar. The Pentagon fielded it as a
second-best alternative to the SLCM only
because it could be ready earlier.
To Biden’s credit, the budget main-
tains funding to develop the planned
Long-Range Standoff Weapon, a nuclear
cruise missile launched from an Air
Force bomber. But planes are easier to
detect than submarines and might takelonger to get into position. The SLCM —
which was also deployed late in the Cold
War — is a powerful complement to the
Air Force’s planned weapon.
It’s true that NATO’s conventional
firepower could overwhelm Russia’s mil-
itary. But consider that early in the Cold
War, the roles were reversed. The Soviet
Union had the more powerful land army
in Europe, while the United States, un-
der its doctrine of “massive retaliation,”
planned to use nuclear weapons to meet
a conventional attack.
There is nothing especially irrational,
then, about Russian threats of nuclear
force in a conventional war against a
superior opponent. The solution is to
show Moscow that it has no hope of
victory from a limited nuclear escalation
because of NATO’s ability to match it at
every step.
Nuclear deterrence can be debated
endlessly because there’s mercifully little
empirical evidence against which to test
theories of how it works (or doesn’t). But
China’s nuclear rise and the simulta-
neous return of war in Europe have
shattered, at least for the foreseeable
future, any claim that unreciprocated
American nuclear disarmament is a real-
istic path to peace.
If the SLCM could create even margin-
ally more certainty in the minds of
adversaries that the United States could
— and would — respond in kind to any
use of nuclear force against allied terri-
tory, it’s worth funding. In a destabiliz-
ing world, even perceived gaps in Ameri-
ca’s guarantee of deterrence make the
unthinkable more likely.JASON WILLICKBiden sends Putin a muddled nuclear message
The solution is to show
Moscow that it has no hope
of victory from a limited
nuclear escalation because
of NATO’s ability to match
it at every step.
sunday opinion