MADMEN: Did King George suffer from porphyria?

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2025

Did he spot a ball of worms? Is something wrong with Elon Musk? No, really—is something "wrong" with Musk?

We've shared some of the gentleman's tweets in recent days. We should have included his additional comment, offered this Monday, about the ball of worms he and his teen warfighters have apparently discovered in the halls of USAID: 

The first lieutenant's assessments
"USAID was a viper's nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America." 

"USAID is evil." 

“USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” 

"We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead."

 "It became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it. What we have actually is just a ball of worms."

At DOGE, the kingpin spotted a ball of worms—and he fed them into a chipper!

Those statements by the lieutenant strike us as highly unusual. It's hard to avoid wondering if something might be "wrong" with this rather strange individual, or even with the commander who has commissioned this nighttime assault.

Could something be "wrong" with Elon Musk? In theory, everything's possible! Meanwhile, in this morning's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof describes the peculiar arrangement which currently obtains as Musk and his band of warfighters conduct their night-time assault:

The World’s Richest Men Take On the World’s Poorest Children

The world’s richest man is boasting about destroying the United States Agency for International Development, which saves the lives of the world’s poorest children, saying he shoved it “into the wood chipper.”

By my calculations, Elon Musk probably has a net worth greater than that of the poorest billion people on Earth. Just since Donald Trump’s election, Musk’s personal net worth has grown by far more than the entire annual budget of U.S.A.I.D., which in any case accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. It’s callous for gleeful billionaires like Musk and President Trump to cut children off from medicine, but, as President John F. Kennedy pointed out when he proposed the creation of the agency in 1961, it’s also myopic.

As he continues, Kristof describes the things he's seen around the world as USAID saves children from starvation. He also explains the way these missions serve the American national interest, as President Kennedy said.

Kristof has seen starving children. By way of contrast, the world's richest person says he has spotted a ball of worms. He's spotted the vipers and the radical Marxists who need to go into the chipper! 

Is something wrong with this guy? Could something even be wrong with the commander who unloosed Musk on the world? 

It can almost seem like a fairly obvious question—but under current rules of the game, it's a question the tribunes of our failing discourse aren't allowed to ask or explore. Under prevailing rules of the game, attention must not be paid! 

Example:

On this morning's Morning Joe, the word "crazy" was uttered, again and again, as David Ignatius and others described the commander's now retracted plan to remake Gaza as a Pleasantville.

The proposal came, and then it went. The word "crazy" was in wide employ on Morning Joe, but it can't be found in Ignatius' column, which appears beneath this unflattering dual headline:

Real estate developer in a china shop
To a region still recovering from the trauma of war, Trump’s proposed takeover of Gaza was incendiary.

The word "crazy" doesn't appear in that column. Instead, we see the "incendiary" proposal described as "jaw-dropping" and "capricious," with this sidelong observation thrown in:

There have been signs for months that the plan had taken root in the mind of the former real estate developer.

The jaw-dropping, capricious plan had been taking root in his mind. That said, there is no claim that the plan, or even its craftsman, could perhaps be crazy in some way. In high-end journalism, for better or worse, such things simply aren't done.

We very much don't offer this as a criticism of the invaluable Ignatius. For better or worse, we'll guess that we're looking at an aspect of Post editorial policy.

That said, we are looking at a basic feature of contemporary public discourse, in which we aren't allowed to wonder if something might be (clinically) "wrong" with the world's most powerful men.

Is Lieutenant Musk a madman? As we've told you again and again, there's no such clinical term! 

Beyond that, a more nuanced discussion is strictly forbidden in the case of major political figures, including those who capriciously shut down programs which keep starving children alive.

Over on the Fox News Channel, the flyweights, stumblebums and Stepfords continue to recite the mandated points about the brilliant work of the commander and his lieutenant. Within the beachfront properties of Blue America, our own journalists—such as they are—are forbidden from thinking about a fairly obvious, if highly complexificated, matter of possible public concern.

It's verboten! Tribunes aren't allowed to talk about "mental illness," which most clinical practitioners prefer to refer to as "mental disorder." As we noted yesterday, there seem to be hundreds of such disorders—but if you believe in this branch of medical science, you can't reveal that here.

We do speak freely about "mental illness" in the realm of everyday street crime. Also, we're allowed to speak about such matters regarding historical figures. Just consider poor King George!

What the Sam Hill was wrong with King George? The leading authority on a 1994 feature film offers this overview of the matter:

The Madness of King George 

The Madness of King George is a 1994 British biographical comedy drama film directed by Nicholas Hytner and adapted by Alan Bennett from his own 1991 play The Madness of George III. It tells the true story of George III of Great Britain's deteriorating mental health, and his equally declining relationship with his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, particularly focusing on the period around the Regency Crisis of 1788–89. Two text panels at the end of the film note that the color of the King's urine suggests that he was suffering from porphyria, adding that the disease is "periodic, unpredictable and hereditary."

The Madness of King George won the BAFTA Awards in 1995 for Outstanding British Film and Best Actor in a Leading Role for Nigel Hawthorne, who was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. 

What the heck was wrong with King George? Questions abound:

Did he really engage in conduct which could be described, if only colloquially, as a type of "madness?" If so, was he suffering from porphyria, and is porphyria a "mental disorder?" 

In these decidedly latter days, we're allowed to ask such questions about public figures, as long as they exist in the past. Regarding the status of porphyria, the leading authority on the topic offers such assessments as these:

Porphyria

Porphyria is a group of disorders in which substances called porphyrins build up in the body, adversely affecting the skin or nervous system. The types that affect the nervous system are also known as acute porphyria, as symptoms are rapid in onset and short in duration. Symptoms of an attack include abdominal pain, chest pain, vomiting, confusion, constipation, fever, high blood pressure, and high heart rate. The attacks usually last for days to weeks. Complications may include paralysis, low blood sodium levels, and seizures...

Most types of porphyria are inherited from one or both of a person's parents and are due to a mutation in one of the genes that make heme. They may be inherited in an autosomal dominant, autosomal recessive, or X-linked dominant manner.

[...]

History

The underlying mechanism was first described by the German physiologist Felix Hoppe-Seyler in 1871, and acute porphyrias were described by the Dutch physician Barend Stokvis in 1889.

The links between porphyrias and mental illness have been noted for decades. In the early 1950s, patients with porphyrias (occasionally referred to as "porphyric hemophilia") and severe symptoms of depression or catatonia were treated with electroshock therapy.

[...]

Notable cases

George III. The mental illness exhibited by George III in the regency crisis of 1788 has inspired several attempts at retrospective diagnosis. The first, written in 1855, thirty-five years after his death, concluded that he had acute mania. M. Guttmacher, in 1941, suggested manic-depressive psychosis as a more likely diagnosis. The first suggestion that a physical illness was the cause of King George's mental derangement came in 1966, in a paper called "The Insanity of King George III: A Classic Case of Porphyria," with a follow-up in 1968, "Porphyria in the Royal Houses of Stuart, Hanover and Prussia." The papers, by a mother/son psychiatrist team, were written as though the case for porphyria had been proven, but the response demonstrated that many experts, including those more intimately familiar with the manifestations of porphyria, were unconvinced. Many psychiatrists disagreed with the diagnosis, suggesting bipolar disorder as far more probable...

Quite a few other notable cases are thumbnailed. We are allowed to discuss the "mental illness" of major public figures—just so long as they aren't present-day spotters of worms or serial dispensers of jaw-dropping proposals. 

According to the leading authority, King George III actually was gripped by "mental illness." Porphyria may not be a "mental illness" itself, but it seems to be linked to same.

Under current rules of the game, we're allowed to talk about that. For better or worse, we aren't allowed to talk about this—about the nighttime assault now underway on our own sacred Troy, the assault which is proceeding along on a crazy daily basis.

Did the king ever spot a ball of worms? Citizens, we're just asking!

Tomorrow: Pity for the afflicted