In short, today’s mass hysteria must end before it ends us.
2.
THE HISTORY AND MECHANICS OF MASS HYSTERIA
The run-up to the 2018 U.S. midterm elections has proven that the voices of mass hysteria now control the news media and social media with everything from vile tweets to Bolshevik-like marches. They are attempting to corrupt our political system with undocumented voters and uninformed rhetoric to demonize President Trump, Republicans, and conservative thinking in general. If they are allowed to triumph, if Congress is lost to the Democrats, Trump will be impeached, and all his work will be undone.
So will the future of our nation.
The bases for fomenting and maintaining hysteria have been in place long before there was an America. Only the goals and slogans have changed. That is why I have chosen to write about history. It is scary to see how little we have learned over time, and I hope—with your help—we can start to change that. If we do not, then we will again prove true George Santayana’s chilling but prescient statement: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”1
This book is about the past, the present, and the future. If you listen to my radio program, The Savage Nation, then you know I am very, very concerned about the mass hysteria choking our nation. It is manifested in shouting and bullying that prevents dialogue and hardens adversarial stances. We will be discussing the many forms mass hysteria has always taken, but here are three topics you will instantly recognize:
Guns. Donald Trump. Russophobia.
Gun control is an area where mass hysteria has trumped sound regulation. The left exploits horrors like school shootings—a mental illness and pharmaceutical issue, not a gun issue—as opportunities to repeal the Second Amendment. This is using mass hysteria, trying to implement regulation based on emotional reactions to traumatic events.
As we have seen throughout American history, guns have a place. Many of the events that led to the founding of our country would not have occurred if the colonists hadn’t kept weapons. The Founding Fathers knew this when they included the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights. We cannot, must not, and will not let the left weaken us, opening us up to tyranny with cheap emotional ploys designed to generate mass hysteria.
As for President Donald Trump, is there a figure who has been so consistently, maniacally, and wrongly reviled as the forty-fifth president? Every commander in chief, like every human being, makes mistakes. But the way the mainstream media and social media fan the hate, this effective leader is not only called the Antichrist, he is called a bigot, a misogynist, an Islamophobe, a hater—the list is nearly endless. Most of those are agenda-driven lies. No one in the media will give him credit for what he is: a leader.
His administration has accomplished more in nearly two years than Obama managed in eight. But people make obscene gestures when they see him, have chest pains when they hear him, spit when someone mentions his name favorably. That is mass hysteria at work.
I had my own brush with this madness when President Trump invited me to visit him in the Oval Office this past April. We discussed a topic about which I am passionate: a ban on the catastrophic and inhumane hunting of elephants. About ten minutes into our meeting, a red button flashed on his desk. I thought—I feared—that it was a nuclear launch button. I asked, half-joking, “Mr. President, did you just launch a nuclear weapon?”
The president laughed and answered, “Yeah, I launched an atomic bomb.” Then he waited a moment—with what professional entertainers would call perfect comic timing—and added, “No. I’m ordering a Diet Coke.”
He asked if I wanted one. I laughed. It was self-effacing and funny. How did the Trump-hating mainstream media play it?
“President Trump Jokes About Launching Nukes with Talk Show Host Michael Savage.”2
They will say anything, twist any event, distort any fact, spin any achievement, to make him appear incompetent, dangerous, and hateful. None of it is true. All people can, and should, have differences of opinion. But the media contemptibly uses mass hysteria to transform disagreements into psychotic breaks.
The insanity over Russophobia is unlike anything we have witnessed in a half century. Without evidence, with just bold propaganda, half our population3 has decided that Russia controlled the 2016 presidential election. No one can quite articulate how or why Russia did this, not even individuals investigating the claim—which, of course, was promulgated by the losing party and magnified thousands of times by the corrupt, degenerate left-wing media.
I’m not sure readers will even remember that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s own “witch hunt,” as the president calls it, was begun to investigate Russian interference in the election and whether any members of the Trump campaign “colluded” with Russia. As of this writing, it has been going on for more than a year, at the cost of tens of millions of dollars, and hasn’t produced any evidence of such collusion.4 Not able to do so, it has morphed into a personal vendetta against the president and anyone associated with him.
The Mueller investigation has become so protracted and far afield of its original purpose that even Mark Penn, pollster and adviser to former president Bill Clinton and political strategist for Hillary Clinton in 2008, has called for its end. In an op-ed for the Hill, Penn wrote, “Rather than a fair, limited and impartial investigation, the Mueller investigation became a partisan, open-ended inquisition that, by its precedent, is a threat to all those who ever want to participate in a national campaign or an administration again.”
Even the story that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort engaged in collusion with Russian officials is falling apart. Manafort has been indicted on money-laundering and tax evasion charges unrelated to the Trump campaign, in an effort to pressure him to turn state’s evidence against the president or former members of his campaign. But according to the Washington Times, when Manafort’s attorney, Kevin Downing, asked the special counsel’s office during mandatory discovery for evidence of the widely reported phone calls, during which Manafort supposedly worked with the Russian government to hack the Democratic Party’s emails, the Special Counsel’s office replied that they had no such evidence.
“The special counsel has not produced any materials to the defense—no tapes, notes, transcripts or any other material evidencing surveillance or intercepts of communications between Mr. Manafort and Russian intelligence officials, Russian government officials [or any other foreign officials],” wrote Downing in his filing.5 “The Office of Special Counsel has advised that there are no materials responsive to the request.” So, the news reporting trumpeting such evidence is mass hysteria at best, deliberate lies at worst.
Sometimes mass hysteria morphs into sheer hypocritical stupidity. For example, the Trump administration has made it a priority to reinvigorate our moribund space program. In so doing, he saves us the $70 million we pay Russia each time they send one of our astronauts to the space station,6 which is the only way we have of getting there since Obama killed the manned space shuttle. So you have President Trump depriving “malicious” Moscow of income it sorely needs, creating both American jobs and a sense of national purpose. Yet to the illiberal lunatics, he is still Russia’s pawn and bad for America.
Sadly, even facts and reason cannot instantly tamp out mass hysteria. Like the reckless push to legalize a dangerous hallucinogenic drug, called marijuana, mass hysteria is stoned on its own fumes. Like the hateful, unfounded cries of “white privilege” that stain the lips of people looking to blame someone for their own failures, mass hysteria hears only the echoes of its own mind.
THE TRUTH ABOUT HUMAN NATURE
Shocking historical events have always brought out the best and worst in human beings. The 2001 World Trade Center attacks saw victims helping victims, strangers helping strangers, and first responders helping everyone. In the hours and days following 9/11, there was little mass hysteria. By that I mean the unhinged impulses that occur when a self-serving charlatan politicizes or mo
netizes an event and then rallies disciples blinded by manufactured outrage.
Unfortunately, the opportunists eventually poked their heads from the still-smoldering debris. There were the cries of the self-described “Truthers” that this was a government operation. The anti-Zionists declared “Israel knew!” and told Jewish workers to stay home. The warmongers used false evidence to launch a disastrous invasion of Iraq.
There was no social media then like we have now. It took time for the madness to catch fire among a wounded, susceptible populace looking for order in a suddenly disordered world.
Fifteen years later, another form of mass hysteria emerged: the widespread conviction that Donald J. Trump was the Antichrist. As I wrote in Trump’s War, and discussed with candidate Trump many times on my radio program, no one at first took him seriously as a candidate. As he began to win primaries and knock off well-financed, machine-supported, veteran political rivals like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, half the nation slept soundly, comfortable in their belief the self-serving, corrupt, victim-harvesting, born-again progressive Hillary Clinton—with the full might of an equally corrupt Democrat machine—would send the upstart home to Trump Tower.
As we know, that did not happen. The pundits, the polls, the still-diapered Millennials, and, most of all, the agenda-driven factions on the left had a collective coronary from which they still have not recovered. Shock shaded to denial shaded to mass hysteria, vigorously and unrelentingly fanned by the twin evils of social media and the extreme left-wing, biased, mainstream media. According to these people—who are still suffering from postelection psychosis—there was and is nothing President Trump can do right.
Considering the generally respectful conservative opposition to the man who preceded him, a president who did very little right, this reaction is hysterically over the top.
The unthinkable mass shooting in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, which left fifty-nine people dead and more than 520 wounded at an outdoor country music performance,7 was another opportunity for the hysterics to deliver a body blow. Rational minds and compassionate souls immediately called for blood donations, offered free hotel rooms for the victims’ families, and rallied to find missing persons. Law enforcement swiftly but methodically sought motives and possible accomplices.
The left’s response was another story altogether. Before the blood had even dried, liberal politicians and hysterics were out in force. Within hours, Hillary Clinton went on a Twitter rampage against gun silencers, arguing that more people would likely have died had the murderer used a suppressor.8 Ignoring the fact that a high-caliber automatic rifle cannot be silenced, the failed presidential candidate quickly turned that baseless allegation into a full-throated roar against the National Rifle Association.
Clinton was joined by a fellow Democrat, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who said, “thoughts and prayers are not enough.”9 Translation: mass hysteria against everyone who does not think like you is the only possible response. Warren got her way when an attorney at CBS took a jackhammer to the cause of national unity by saying she was “not even sympathetic” to the victims because “country music fans often are Republican.” That attorney was fired from her post, and good riddance.
On October 3, that progressive mouthpiece the New York Times did its part to create divisiveness and hysteria when it recounted how, in 1966, shooter Charles Whitman defined the twisted phenomenon of mass sniping by shooting sixteen people during a rampage at the University of Texas at Austin.10 The point of the article? Fear the male—implicitly, he is more dangerous than Radical Islam or AntiFA. The article neglects to mention that those latter two movements are driven by ideology, not sociopaths. Mass hysteria does not bother with fact or reason.
Part of the reason mass hysteria takes root more readily is that we no longer have a legitimate, responsible press to arrest it. Today the press skips from manufactured crisis to crisis, from Trump and groping to Trump and Russians to Trump and chaos on his staff to Trump and “white supremacy” to Trump and imagined racism. But unlike the proven crimes of Hillary Clinton, none of those issues are valid or sustainable. They are mass hysteria.
In addition to all things Trump, today’s hysteria often revolves around the concept “fear the male,” whether he is Christopher Columbus or movie mogul Harvey Weinstein. The abuse of women by that Hollywood mover and shaker and major Democrat donor—for whom former first daughter Malia Obama interned11—rocked the news media for weeks. Weinstein wasn’t unique: Women have been victimized by filmmakers probably as far back as the days of the pioneering Lumière brothers of the late 1800s. The so-called casting couch is not a new phenomenon.
After the first wave of accusations against Bill Cosby and eventually some white men, the left acted on its alleged inclusionary nature to indict all men. Media personality Tavis Smiley, business mogul Russell Simmons, and sports figures Ike Taylor and Marshall Faulk have all either been suspended from their jobs or otherwise had their lives disrupted by accusations of sexual misconduct.12 That’s “accusations,” not “convictions”—in other words, they are guilty until proven innocent (and maybe not even then). The left now asserts that any form of contact constitutes unwanted sexual contact. A self-hating male New York Times columnist wondered “how all women don’t regard all men as monsters to be constantly feared.”13 Maybe it’s because, unlike this observer, not all men view themselves as potential predators?
Rape and sexual assault are terrible actions, and those convicted of these crimes should be punished. You don’t have to be a Supreme Court justice to grasp that. But the Social Justice Warriors aren’t interested in justice and fairness. They are interested in smashing the patriarchy, as they define it. Social Justice Warriors don’t even attempt to disguise the fact that a broad, deeply rooted hatred of men underpins what they are doing. One leading feminist man hater believes all men should whip themselves in public displays of penitence while declaring “how they have hurt women in ways great and small.”14 And a Teen Vogue writer revealed the left’s agenda when she wrote, “If some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay.”15
This radical warrior is willing to pay the price of destroying innocent men’s lives. How nice of her, especially since she herself won’t suffer at all because of it. Of course, she doesn’t believe there are any innocent men. As she also wrote, “false accusations VERY rarely happen, so even bringing it up borders on a derailment tactic.”
This is how a new wave of femme-fascists inoculate themselves against any responsibility. In the eyes of the unvogue child writer, there are no innocents. And her day job is writing for an impressionable teenage audience.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that madness is taking root in our education system. When the University of Rochester didn’t immediately place one of its professors in stocks after allegations—allegations!—of “predatory and manipulative behavior,” the university’s board of trustees received a letter from more than four hundred unaffiliated educators saying they would discourage students from pursuing opportunities at the University of Rochester.16
The letter managed to be both hysterical and self-serving, which is more common than most people realize. In this case, if students are discouraged from going to the University of Rochester, they’re that much more likely to stay where they are, which helps to keep professors at these institutions employed.
Is this latest movement mass hysteria? It absolutely is. Some Democrats are agreeing with me, as their own loudest left-wing voices—Al Franken, John Conyers, Garrison Keillor, Charlie Rose, the comedian Louis C.K., and many others17—are caught up in this madness. Matt Lauer, the darling of morning TV and women viewers nationwide, has proven to be one of the worst offenders. Some of those named, perhaps, will justifiably lose their positions, and perhaps their liberty. However, others may suffer the fate of the bystander in a mass panic.
I have no sympathy for them. Their acc
users, the pundits and all who call for their heads, are their children, born out of their own insanity. The left has championed and profited from the victim culture for decades. Now that culture has turned against them.
It is astonishing that flawed, limping nations like Russia and China, like Spain and Greece, have survived for millennia while the United States may face extinction after less than three centuries. I am not a hysteric, and this is not—yet—a hysterical warning. It is a very strong caution. The strength of America is reflected in its great motto, E pluribus unum, “Out of many, one.” Diversity as a divisive weapon, not as an add-on to the normal growth and development of our country, corrodes the “one.” Progressivism masquerading as compassion weakens our ability to nurture the “one.” We cannot correct past injustices like slavery, but becoming hysterical about the fact that it happened keeps us looking backward in a punitive way that fractures the “one”—especially when the very pillars of our nation, our brilliant Founding Fathers, are attacked simply because they were white, male, and flawed. No man or woman is perfect. Not even the great ones.
The abolitionist icon Harriet Tubman was a passionate Christian (what would today be called “the religious right”) who suffered hallucinations due to an old head wound18 and regarded them as visions from God. In 2012, the very industry that damns moral corruption presented a play, in Los Angeles, called The Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King.19 The civil rights icon was a philanderer and he also liked his drink. Should we stop celebrating his birthday as a national holiday?
FROM 60 MINUTES TO SIXTY HOOKERS
For those wondering why President Trump isn’t bowing to this madness: I think it is because he, unlike the others, does not have a guilty conscience. Bill Clinton parsed the questions asked because he was guilty. Trump has flatly denied allegations because he isn’t.
Stop Mass Hysteria Page 2