There have been numerous accusations leveled against Trump in social media, as well as lawsuits that were eventually withdrawn. As of December 2017, thirteen accusers had yet to withdraw their claims. If we are going to treat women the same as men, with names named before they are found guilty, we should let the accusers’ names stand as part of the record: Kristin Anderson, Rachel Crooks, Jessica Drake, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Ninni Laaksonen, Jessica Leeds, Temple Taggart McDowell, Mindy McGillivray, Jennifer Murphy, Natasha Stoynoff, Karena Virginia, and Summer Zervos.20
Some of these accusers are reporters, and you know their feelings about the president. Several are models or actresses, and at least one is a porn star. Many describe the same situation over and over—Trump allegedly backed them against a wall and kissed them, sticking his tongue down their throats. One after another, that is what they say.
The sameness of their claims is made more ludicrous by a well-documented fact: Trump is a germaphobe.21 He doesn’t even like shaking strangers’ hands.
People say some of these allegations were made before Trump’s presidential aspirations were known—which, in several cases, isn’t true, as he first mentioned running during the late 1990s. But regardless of when his political aspirations became apparent, his money and his celebrity were always well known. Trump had been a staple player in the Forbes list of richest Americans, as well as a fixture on the gossip pages, for decades. Anyone wanting a shot at instant fame—or Trump’s money—would have been motivated to link herself with him.
The flash hysteria of people who are in positions of authority and responsibility is as dangerous, if not more so, than the kind that festers among a crowd and turns them into a mob. Soldiers or the police or any governing authority usually have the wherewithal to stop them. In the past, pamphlets and other media allowed people to become mobilized for good or, in the case of Occupy, for destruction. Now Twitter allows anyone with a raw nerve and a smartphone to hashtag their hysteria for the world to see. We see hysterics—some in positions of power—repeatedly threaten the president of the United States, as Missouri state senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal did when she posted on social media, “I hope Trump is assassinated.”22
Anti-Trump rants of that caliber, like antipolice tweets from self-impressed college “professors,” are the kind of hysteria that people would never hear if the media didn’t trumpet them. The hypocrisy of these individuals is a new low in the annals of mass hysteria. It’s like the old line, “Whatever he’s for, I’m against.” A kind of feral madness has consumed half the populace at the mere mention of the name Donald Trump. Ads for roommates specify that Trump-supporters need not apply—a discriminatory practice, the irony of which is lost on these people. If Donald Trump were to cure cancer tomorrow, the left would decry the female and minority doctors he is putting out of work.
There is a large degree of postelection psychosis attached to these reactions. Everyone expected Hillary Clinton to become president and continue the destructive policies of Barack Obama. When that didn’t happen, these same people were shocked that, after eight years of a half-Kenyan person of color who aggressively supported the rights of gays, transgenders, smokers like himself, and Muslims, we now had another European-descended, white male in the Oval Office.
The convergence of this lunacy and anti-white-male hate created a perfect storm of mass hysteria that does not permit the application of rational thought. The progressives refused to hear, for example, that they were citing the same electoral process they had demanded the right uphold (when they expected Hillary to dominate it) as the basis for their futile effort to delegitimize the election of Donald Trump. If they couldn’t draw that simple, A-to-B conclusion, you can see the problem with more complex reasoning. The left is stuck in the A–B disconnect.
With every passing day, the rhetoric becomes less rooted in rational thought, and today’s ugly rhetoric has a way of becoming tomorrow’s policy. We need to be on guard against this: just as some on the fringe, far right would suggest mass hysterectomies to control violent feminists, there are those crazies on the left who would deport all whites over the age of sixty to “end racism.” No, I am not suggesting there will be mass sterilization of women or deportations of white Americans, but I caution against what would be placed against this extreme background and offered as a moderate position.
The verbal, text, and social media hate—lovingly promulgated by the left-dominated mainstream media—is not only vile, it’s lawless. Protected speech does not include death threats against the president and his family—along with other members of government—with the speakers all given a free pass. Yet when Obama was hanged in effigy, once, on private property in Gainesville, Florida, in 2012,23 the media descended like rats on the perpetrator. The act was condemned. When it comes to Trump, however, the rats hoist the perpetrators on their shoulders and parade them on social media platforms as heroes of free speech and bold thought.
Donald Trump may lack finesse, but these people are obscene. The mass hysteria of Trump hate should not require white men to recalibrate their values, be demonized for their skin color, or be forced to apologize for whatever perceived “privilege” they may possess. White males who are or have been in line with America-first and patriotism should stand as a warning to the rest of America that without a polestar—borders, language, culture—the voices of hate and hysteria will lead us to destruction.
The left-wing, agenda-driven so-called news media is complicit as well. These hysterics are not looking to inform the public. The once-distinguished news program 60 Minutes contributed to this mania by giving a national forum to a porn star.24 A broadcast in March 2018 generated viewing parties like we have for the Super Bowl—each of which was a hall of mirrors for anti-Trump hysteria.
For those who missed it, 60 Minutes staged an unvetted side show, not out of concern for the health of our nation, but solely to enrich the bottom line of CBS. In doing so, they turned away from the crucial issues of our time—the ones where Trump is making a difference. Can you imagine if, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a prime-time news outlet had chosen to interview John F. Kennedy’s mistress Judith Exner, or do a major story called “JFK and RFK Killed Marilyn Monroe Two Months Ago!”? The result might have been nuclear war.
On June 14, 2018, Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz released the long-awaited findings on the conduct of the FBI and the Department of Justice regarding their investigation of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. Former FBI director James Comey and other agency personnel were excoriated by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle for their zeal in protecting the former Secretary of State, for bias, and for whipping up anti-Trump hysteria. Republican representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina called it “an alarming and destructive level of animus displayed by top officials at the FBI.”25
The perpetrators of this unlawful favoritism may yet receive the punishment they deserve. But what about the wreck of a nation they leave behind? The same hysteria-as-distraction phenomenon hangs over us today. Military negotiations with North Korea and economic chess with China could fall by the wayside if the president is distracted or busy defending himself from the opportunists like a stripper. Think it’s not possible? If not for Anthony Weiner sexting pictures to an underage girl,26 the presence of classified emails on his unsecure computer might never have been known. We live in an era when a local pervert like the former congressman can shape a national election.
The historic summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has inspired some mass hysteria among both the president’s political adversaries and his supporters. My view of this summit is that it was somewhere between Reagan and Chamberlain. Yes, this was a diplomatic breakthrough, but all history shows us is that we must remain vigilant.
Korea has made promises in the past and broken them repeatedly. Kim has signed documents before. In October 1994, Bill Clinton made a speech about a landmark nuclear agreement between the Uni
ted States and North Korea saying, “This agreement is good for the United States, good for our allies, and good for the safety of the entire world.”27 So, what makes this different?
Well, the leaders are different. Kim Jong-un is not his father, and Donald Trump is not Bill Clinton. Perhaps that can make a difference.
The document they signed said it would work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in exchange for security guarantees to Kim, including halting military exercises. But it said nothing about human rights abuses, nothing about the tens of thousands of people dying in death camps.
There was another document signed once upon a time by two men: Their names were Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler. The document supposedly secured “peace for our time.”28 Then Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Bohemia, and Moravia on his way to taking over Europe.
Trump responded to NBC reporter about calling Kim “very talented,” knowing that he’s killed family members, citizens, and Otto Warmbier—the American student who tried to steal a poster from a North Korean hotel. Warmbier was arrested, beaten into a coma, and died shortly after his return to the United States29 Trump said he “is very talented. Anybody that takes over a situation like he did at twenty-six years of age, and is able to run it and run it tough, I don’t say it was nice or I don’t say anything about it, he ran it—very few people at that age, you can take one out of ten thousand probably couldn’t do it.”30
We need to be careful not to gloss over the death and starvation of millions of people. The old New York Times reporter Walter Duranty famously ignored and denounced reports of famine in Ukraine under Soviet control, and often explained away the brutality of Joseph Stalin, saying it was necessary to implement that system. Stalin loved the coverage he got from Duranty as he ruthlessly imprisoned and killed millions. Duranty even got a Pulitzer for his efforts.31
Yes, some reporters asked President Trump about these abuses, to their credit. But Trump’s answers were lacking. You can say that’s diplomacy, but President Ronald Reagan wasn’t afraid to call the Soviet Union an evil empire or tell its then-leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down that wall in Berlin.
This is not an average business deal. This is tens of millions of lives on the line. So, while this is a decent first step, these crimes must be addressed, and we need proof that they will stop. We must be more Reagan and less Chamberlain.
Small distractions have a way of creating big results. The left knows this and is not above manufacturing little scandals to generate mass hysteria. The news jackals are so interested in showing profit and pushing their liberal agenda that they don’t care if the nation falls along with the president. In contrast, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are focused on their own well-being.
Freedom of the press is a necessity in an open society. But lurid gossip from the mainstream media is a corruption of what our Founding Fathers intended with the First Amendment. The mainstream media has become not just the repository for fake news, it has turned into the flagship for agenda-driven, tabloid news.
Welcome to American mass hysteria, twenty-first century style.
Before we look back at the origins of mass hysteria in America, I want to discuss an event that took place right on the border of hysteria and legitimate fear. Employees at NASA refer to October 4, 1957, as “Sputnik Night.” That was the day the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite. As Roger D. Launius, a former chief historian at NASA, wrote, “The only appropriate characterization that begins to capture the mood on 5 October involves the use of the word hysteria.”32
But is that really the only appropriate characterization? True mass hysteria, the kind we talk about in this book, involves an irrational, overwrought action to a false threat—whether, as we will see, it’s an enemy who isn’t really there, a situation that has been wildly inflated, or a desire for unwarranted attention.
In the case of Sputnik, there was a very real threat. Just a dozen years earlier, the Soviet Union and the United States had been uneasy allies during World War II. After the war, the Soviets began treating the world like it was the board game Risk, with global domination and freedom in the balance. Launching Sputnik, a spy eye in the sky, the Russians suddenly had a very real tactical advantage.
A year earlier, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had told Western diplomats “We will bury you.” After Sputnik, that same man boasted that “the United States now sleeps under a Soviet moon.”33 His implied threat was clear: The same missile that had launched Sputnik into orbit would be capable of delivering hydrogen bombs anywhere in the world. Up into space, down onto New York or London or Paris.
America reacted, but not with mass hysteria. We met the challenge head-on with science. Within a year we had replaced the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics with NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.34 Many triumphs in space, as well as technological advances that improved life on Earth, followed. Our reaction was not hysteria but resolve.
It is the same resolve, by the way, that you see now in President Trump’s new, invigorated NASA. We are finally, swiftly resuming our role as the preeminent nation in space.
As we will see, true mass hysteria rarely has such positive consequences, and this is not the only instance in which the Establishment has falsely labeled legitimate fear of a real threat as mere “mass hysteria.” When we discuss mass hysteria, we will often be talking about replacing freedom with an agenda—often a very dangerous one.
3.
MASS HYSTERIA
Anarchy’s Secret Weapon
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE…
I have on my desk a copy of the Connecticut Courant newspaper from June 1, 1795. On page two is a report from Paris about chaos in the streets. The item was filed at a point during the French Revolution when royalist thugs were attacking revolutionaries. I’m certainly not siding with the revolutionaries, whose bloody, socialist Reign of Terror became the blueprint for violent, left-wing gangs like the Weather Underground in the 1970s and AntiFA today. Nonetheless, the Courant article includes this observation about roving gangs who were supporting the brief reign of Louis XVIII: “Is it not evident that they are paid by the villains who wish to overturn the reign of justice and of liberty?”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Fittingly, it was the French who coined that expression, which translates as, The more things change, the more they stay the same. More than two centuries later, those same words can be applied to the masked AntiFA marauders who terrorize decent American communities.
There haven’t always been anarchists and agitators—but you have to go back to the dawn of human activity to avoid them. When primitive people lived in caves, they couldn’t afford to whine about “privilege” or social classes. Everyone in the tribe pulled together, and with sharply defined responsibilities. The stronger young men were hunter-gatherers. The women nursed and cared for children. Identity politics and gender reassignment? I have been around the world and I haven’t seen those topics in any cave paintings I’ve looked at. I have seen renderings of what appear to be gods in Paleolithic caves of Lascaux, France, at Ukhahlamba Drakensberg, South Africa, and at Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria.1 I doubt anyone objected to the presence of an almighty in their primitive communities.
Up to the dawn of the Bronze Age, circa 3000 B.C., there was no need for anyone to revolt, no call for anarchy. In fact, there wasn’t even a word for the concept until the ancient Greeks coined anarchia and anarchos to describe the absence of rulers.2 Historians agree the concept was first used in a political sense in the play Seven Against Thebes (467 B.C.) by Aeschylus.3 In that drama, the character Antigone refuses to obey a political order not to bury her apparently traitorous brother Polynices: “I will bury him alone,” she said. “Nor am I ashamed to act in defiant opposition to the rulers of the city.”4 Antigone acted with dignity and nobility; as the children of Oedipus, she and Polynices had learned to stand up for what was moral.
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br /> However, acting in the name of honor and ethics is rarely the case with anarchists.
The terrorist Guy Fawkes, whose likeness adorns the mask of modern-day anarchists, was a Catholic who helped mount the Gunpowder Plot in England in 1605. The plan was to blow up Parliament and assassinate the Protestant king James I, a scholar for whom the King James Bible was named. When the Catholic Lord Monteagle was advised to stay home that day, he became suspicious and alerted the monarch. King James had the cellars under Parliament searched. The gunpowder was found and the conspirators tracked down. Fawkes confessed under torture and was executed.5
Anarchists like Fawkes don’t want discourse. They don’t want to level the playing field, but rather they seek to destroy it—while hiding behind masks or in the shadows, of course, so they will survive. This is not to say that factions in any society do not have legitimate grievances. Quite often they do. Throughout the history of civilization there has been resentment and often struggle between the aristocracy—those who have had wealth and power handed to them without earning it—and those who by birth are denied even the opportunity to better themselves.
Socialists would eventually warp and pervert this idea into meaning that everyone should have the benefits of society handed to them. Thus was born the concept of “class conflict,” popularized by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century. In some cases, when the issues involve human rights such as freedom, the conflict is just. One example is the Thracian slave and gladiator Spartacus, who led a revolt against the Roman oligarchy in the 70s B.C. The communists would later co-opt his noble struggle for freedom and dignity into anti-social-structure propaganda.6
Spartacus and Guy Fawkes represent the extremes of what are popularly perceived to be just and unjust movements. In America, we have seen those extremes play out within a single generation. Instead of the quest for true, inherent rights like liberty, private property, and the right to be represented in any government claiming jurisdiction over them, violent leftists, militant feminists, radical gays, and black liberationists are now claiming a privilege—the privilege to engage in antisocial behavior and immunity from prosecution for violent and destructive actions during “protests.” They co-opted necessary social change and turned it into a power grab, a vendetta, demanding reparations and payback.
Stop Mass Hysteria Page 3