Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Michael Savage
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ISBNs: 978-1-5460-8293-4 (hardcover), 978-1-5460-8290-3 (ebook)
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1: WE’VE REACHED A NEW MASS HYSTERIA INFLECTION POINT
2: THE HISTORY AND MECHANICS OF MASS HYSTERIA
The Truth about Human Nature
From 60 Minutes to Sixty Hookers
3: MASS HYSTERIA: Anarchy’s Secret Weapon
The More Things Change…
The Truth Will Out
Crowd Psychology
The Spark of Hysteria
Hysteria, Victimhood, and True Trauma
4: FROM PLYMOUTH ROCK TO CITY HALL: The Seeds and Blossoms of Mass Hysteria
In the Name of God… or the Godless
Hysteria as Bullying
Groupthink and Out-Groups
5: FROM SALEM TO CNN: How Hysteria Taught Us to Anesthetize Ourselves
The Devil in the New World
A Real War against Women
Imagined Threats versus Real Danger
It’s All Going to Pot
The War on Vitamins
6: FROM ASSASSINS TO GENERALS: Mass Amnesia and Lunacy of Marijuana Advocacy
Protesting and Patriotism
Liberty, Loyalists, and Liberal Lies
7: FROM WAR TO PEACE: The Enemy Without Becomes the Enemy Within
Tipping Points
Swelling the Ranks
Hysterics versus Heroes
From the Bible Belt to the Libel Belt
The (Imagined) Enemy Within
We Must Protect This House
8: FROM PEACE TO WAR: Hysteria Creates Seismic Shifts in America
Democrats: The Party of “Compassion”
Dramatizing the Sins of the Father
The Rush of Hysteria
9: FROM REGIONAL WAR TO PROHIBITION: Hysteria Outside the Trenches
The Birth of a War
Hyphens and Hysteria
Temperance and Hysteria
Repealing Hysteria
10: FROM REDS TO FASCISTS: Global Threats Produce Greater Hysteria
Red Scare
An Axis to Grind
11: FROM COMMIES TO COMICS: Congressional Witch Hunts Destroy Lives and Careers
The Blacklist
Seeing Red
Juvenile Delinquents
12: FROM THE CATHOLICS TO FLOWER POWER: When Everyone Had a Pulpit
JFK and the Balance of Panic
The New Hysteria
Hippies, Yippies, and Hysterics
13: FROM GAS LINES TO REAGAN: Not All Hysteria Is Manufactured
Community Standards
Manufactured Evil
Hysteria Begets Hystericals
Political Madness and the Death of Common Sense
14: FROM CONSUMABLES TO CLIMATE CHANGE: The Nation Creates New Venues for Hysteria
Poisonous Ideas
Climate Hysterics
15: FROM TREASON TO TOMORROW: Mass Hysteria on Overdrive
Hypocrisy and Hysteria
Acting Hysterical
Eight Years of Self-Destruction
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Michael Savage published by Center Street
Notes
Newsletters
This book is dedicated to the men and women of law enforcement who are on the front lines protecting the rest of us from the violent, radical, left wing street criminals whose goal is to tear our society into pieces.
1.
WE’VE REACHED A NEW MASS HYSTERIA INFLECTION POINT
Hatred is in the air. We are living in an age of hate, in which mental pollution is worse than air pollution. The most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents, hatred is spreading like a virus into all-too-willing hosts. It unifies knee-jerk liberals, no matter what their other differences. Hatred of conservatives, Trump, and his voters is just one of many cases of mass hysteria infecting American society today, but it is likely the most destructive.
As I write these words, three of the most malicious acts in living memory have been perpetrated by agents of the left. First, AntiFA—that group of lawless, self-styled, antifascist anarchists masquerading as “activists”—has published the home addresses of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),1 essentially guaranteeing that these hardworking, law-abiding, honest, and decent men and women will be harassed at levels no citizen should be forced to endure. And that’s if they’re lucky. With these cowardly, masked goons, violence against our public servants is inevitable.
The second obscenity was the odious suggestion by Peter Fonda, brother of the infamous Hanoi Jane, son of the onetime gray-listed communist sympathizer Henry Fonda, that Barron Trump, son of the president of the United States, be locked in a cage with pedophiles.2 It’s appropriate that, in this stoner’s view, the real animal is the one outside the cage.
Flip that for a moment. Can you imagine what would have happened to anyone who tweeted that kind of sentiment about the daughters of Barack Obama? Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and every shockable Democrat on Capitol Hill would have been calling for blood.
The third obscenity is courtesy of mad California congresswoman Maxine Waters, who screamed to an audience at a toy drive that they should harass President Donald Trump and the people who work for him. “If you see anybody from that Cabinet… you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them.…” 3 She has decided, apparently, that God is on her side. Maybe she heard that from a burning bush. Or a burning tire at a riot… the kind caused by the kind of incendiary, high-decibel, hysterical rhetoric of which she is so fond.
Where is the outrage? More important, where is the humanity? Where is the decency?
It is gone. It is lost in the sea of mass hysteria that dominates our world in a way and at a level that history has never before seen. Can it be stopped before we have an actual civil war? Can it be stopped before America is lost?
The question is a real one.
On the same day as those earthquakes hit the cheering mainstream media, President Trump—after just one day of bad social media and press—issued an executive order that terminated the administration’s policy of splitting migrant families.4 Mind you, the
policy was designed to stop criminals, to prevent individuals from crossing our borders illegally. For these people, children were just the props to make leftist hearts bleed and to let the lawbreakers take advantage of the benefits of living in this country.
I was initially disappointed in the president. But then I thought about what he said: “We’re keeping families together and this will solve that problem. At the same time we are keeping a very powerful border and there continues to be zero tolerance.”
There was a storm of protest from the left, one that the media would have fanned so that the smoke of that fire would obscure every goal President Trump has for this nation. He made a disagreeable decision, one that went against the law and his own ideals. He made a political decision. Maybe that’s why he may turn out to be the greatest commander in chief of our era.
Trump put statesmanship above the desires of his electorate. You know, if President Richard Nixon had done that when the Watergate scandal broke—owned up to an environment he created that allowed for corruption—he might never have had to resign. It would not have defined his administration and obscured his real achievements.
The president capitulated so that we could get off this topic and try to solve the problem of illegal immigration and anchor babies through legislation, which, of course, the Democrats have been stonewalling in an effort to poison Trump to voters. Care for the illegal immigrants? That’s not even on the Democrats’ radar.
The jury is out on whether the president, by putting out this fire, can turn to stopping the bigger one: our porous and ineffective borders. My fear—and my gut—tell me that the social virus of all-consuming hate of the left is impervious to dispassionate reason, just as physical viruses are impervious to antibiotics.
The left does not just hate President Trump. They hate this nation.
In this book, I will expose the many contemporary and historical cases of mass hysteria, going as far back as Columbus. Whether the mass movement is run by Farrakhan, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Muhammad—it doesn’t matter. The cause and the symptoms are the same.
I’ve found that virtually all mass movements rely upon hatred, with perhaps the exception of modern Christianity. In the beginning, Christianity was not born of nor was it spread by the gospel of hatred. Christianity was born of love and spread through the gospel of love, overcoming the gospels of hatred in the past and during our time. Can you say the same about other religions?
In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer wrote, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” He posited that the strength of the mass movement was proportionate to the “vividness and tangibility of its devil,”5 an insight not lost on Adolf Hitler. Hitler once said that if the Jew did not exist, “We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.”6
Hoffer relates the story of a Japanese mission, visiting Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement, lamenting they had no “devil” equivalent to the Jews in their own country.7 Chiang Kai-shek had the same problem in galvanizing his mass movement when he failed to replace the vanquished Japanese with a new devil.8
The new “Jews” for progressives are Trump and his supporters. The hatred for Trump is at the same fever pitch as was the hatred for Jews in early Nazi Germany. The patriarchy, the family, the church, white people, the police, the military, capitalism, conservatives—the Bible itself—are all hate piñatas for hysterical progressives. They attack anyone and anything the liberal media tell them to hate.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time.”9 That’s just as true today. Do television viewers really know what’s been passing in the world in their time because they watch the news? I don’t care what channel it is. Is what you see on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC really representative of what has been passing in the world in your time?
No, it’s a snapshot. It’s not a movie. Whether you know it or not, you’re living through a mass hysteria primarily of the left, but not solely of the left. How absurd they have become in their hatred of Donald Trump and those who voted for him. Their hatred has reached a fever pitch comparable to mass movements in totalitarian states.
Hatred has now become mainstream, especially on CNN and MSNBC. FOX does not use hatred as a unifying principle. But the news czar of CNN was apparently raised on the mother’s milk of hatred, because it’s all his marionettes spew. Whoever it is that runs NBC must also have been suckled at the breast of hatred, because that’s all you hear from MSNBC’s mouthpieces. It’s their stock-in-trade.
Samuel Johnson, one of my favorite essayists, wrote the following in 1780: “Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.”10 Now, what does he mean by “martyrdom is the test”? Are you willing to die for your beliefs? Let’s hope you don’t have to, but anyone can shoot off their mouth.
You know which side you’re on by who you hate. If you hate Trump, you also hate white people—with impunity, by the way. From there you conclude that all people who voted for Trump are racists, which on its face is absurd, but your unhinged hatred and anger allow you to believe it. And you go on watching and listening to hate shows that preach that anything they disapprove of is racist.
Today the word racist is used the way communist was used in the early 1950s. They used to smear people by saying, “Are you now or have you ever been a communist or a communist sympathizer?” And now these left-wingers play a new game, which is, “Are you now or have you ever been a racist?” That’s the one word that fits all they hate.
Ironically, while there certainly were people wrongly accused of being communists during the so-called Red scares, the accusations of communism or sympathy with communism during the mid-twentieth century were mostly true. The Venona Project proved communists had infiltrated Hollywood, newspapers, academia, and even the government.11 At least two members of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, were Soviet spies!12
Today, however, while racism certainly exists, and some people are rightly called out for it, the accusations of racism against anyone and everyone who criticizes a non-Caucasian person in any way are mostly unfounded. While African Americans and other minorities suffered real inequities during the first half of the twentieth century—virtually all institutional racism by some level of government—that fight was won. Today, the idea that “people of color” are disadvantaged is just another case of mass hysteria, propagated mostly by people who have no one’s best interests at heart but their own.
So, if you voted for Trump, fill in the blank. You’re a racist. If you believe in the Second Amendment and own guns, you’re a racist. If you believe in the traditional family, the traditional institution of marriage, or the church, you’re a homophobe. If you are a person who achieved some degree of financial success, you’re a “capitalist pig” who hates poor people. If you support the police, you’re a racist who hates blacks. If you support the military, you’re a mass murderer. If you go to a NASCAR race, well, fill in the blank.
Certain things hold true. No matter what changes, they remain the same. Many examples of covert racism in America today can be seen in the newspapers, which is why they’re going out of business. By and large, the primary readers of newspapers are old “progressive” or self-described “liberal” white people. And so they appeal to them with their propaganda sheets attacking police, patriotism, the traditional family, the military, and one race in particular. For example, newspapers in San Francisco don’t exist anymore. When I moved here, there were two good newspapers: the San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner. But they died. They died because they submitted to covert propaganda.
For example, rarely do the
y show pictures of criminals unless the criminal is Caucasian. The physical characteristics of a “minority” criminal are almost never described. Neither are the names or religious affiliations of terrorists released, until it is impossible to conceal them any longer.
On June 4, 2018, the Supreme Court, in a landmark 7–2 decision, said that the misnamed Colorado Civil Rights Commission had trampled on the rights of a Colorado baker who declined to make a cake for a gay couple. “The Commission’s hostility was inconsistent with the First Amendment’s guarantee that our laws be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion.13 What we learned—what history failed to teach us, but the Constitution ultimately did—is that mass hysteria cannot, must not, and will not be tolerated in this nation.
Did the newspapers across the nation celebrate this affirmation of one of our most basic, cherished freedoms? Of course not. Instead, they blared, “IN A NARROW MARGIN SUPREME COURT RULES IN FAVOR OF CHRISTIAN BAKERS.” The vote was 7–2. Only editors in the grip of liberal mass hysteria could call that margin “narrow.”
A few months ago, a headline I posted on my website, MichaelSavage.com, screamed, “FASCIST LIBS IN UK ARREST ANTI-IMMIGRATION PROTESTER, IMPOSE TOTAL PRESS SILENCE! LIBERALISM WILL BRING ABOUT A CIVIL WAR HERE IF THIS IS TRIED.”14 They had arrested the anti-immigration protester and activist Tommy Robinson, head of the English Defense League, without charges. The judge then imposed a total press blackout on the arrest. They redacted the charges, saying they will be shown to the public after he is released from prison.
A van full of police officers pulled up and told Robinson to stop live-streaming, even though he wasn’t disturbing the peace in any way. This is an example of the religion of liberalism run amok. It’s what happens when a religious fervor takes over a political movement, something that is happening all over the West among antipopulist, antinationalist, and, in America’s case, anti-Trump mobs.
This book covers not only the present madness, but similar instances of mass hysteria going all the way back to 1492. It is an attempt to stop the mass hysteria of our time before it leads to a civil war.
Stop Mass Hysteria Page 1