Stop Mass Hysteria

by Michael Savage

  They did this by applying the proven technique of “mass hysteria,” a tactic that has given us ancient wars and modern holocausts. As daily listeners of The Savage Nation know, it has reached a fine assassin’s art as billionaire socialists like George Soros use social media and the corrupt, liberal mainstream media to infiltrate legitimate social activities with violent, salaried terrorists.

  In this book, we will look at the past to understand how we got here—and where our nation, our world, is headed if we are not vigilant. Even now, we see the likes of New Jersey senator Cory Booker, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, and media mogul Oprah Winfrey warming up in the Democrat bull pen for 2020. Even Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is reportedly considering a run, a Trojan horse if ever there was one.7 His “interest” in protecting illegal immigrants is actually self-interest. Where I live, Bay Area employers are increasingly using the threat of reporting foreign workers who step out of line to immigration authorities. You better believe these employers want an unending stream of undocumented workers: they represent a captive, underpaid workforce for the Silicon Valley overlords, a collection of modern plantation owners.

  And what are plantation owners without a future source of cheap labor? During the spring and summer of 2018, the hot-button issue for the left was another bogus one: the separation of children from their parents. Never mind that the entry into our country by all of these people was illegal. These rabid bleeding hearts would have us believe their interests were social and compassionate, not political and self-serving.

  In my book Trump’s War, I offered wisdom and warning for Donald Trump as he took on the role as president. I urged President Trump to “make sure GOP doesn’t mean Grand Old Party, but Government of the People.” Then I implored the president to be cautious of those who claimed to support him, those who alleged to represent the policies he set forth, calling upon the words of Shakespeare, “Et tu, Brute?”

  Today, as Republicans join with Democrats to demand an end to separation of families as the illegals cross the border, we see the warning I put forth coming to fruition. Congressional Republicans as well as high-profile conservatives have caved to the emotional outcry championed by the leftist media. Oddly enough, their concern for these children has only come about under the Trump administration, as this practice was largely ignored in the Bush and Obama eras.

  In fact, Democrats stalled attempts to stop this practice in 2014, when Senator John Cornyn of Texas introduced a bill to help the inundated Department of Homeland Security as a surge of illegal children reached the border.8 From there, laws and courts have further complicated the policies for border detentions.

  Not only has Congress rejected efforts to remediate these practices, but it has also failed to replace the largest immigrant family detention center, T. Don Hutto, in Taylor, Texas, which was closed in 2009.9 Since that time, only one family facility has remained open, in Pennsylvania. Our lawmakers have neglected this issue for nearly ten years, and now, when it’s politically expedient, they are exploiting these children at all costs.

  Yet again, we witness the media, the Democrats, and even Republicans being persuaded by madness. Public figures are attempting to influence the masses with outrageous statements and exaggerations. Most irresponsible came from former CIA director Michael Hayden as he compared this policy to Nazi Germany. On Twitter he wrote, “Other governments have separated mothers and children,” along with a black-and-white photo of the Birkenau concentration camp and death camp in Poland.10

  As one commenter pointed out, “There were no cafeterias and teachers and video games in the concentration camps of Germany! The kids in our amnesty detention facilities have all of this and more. This is nothing but leftists trying to avoid the real issue of a need for the Democrats to sign on to legislation that will address our immigration laws.”11

  Another found irony in their hypocrisy and wrote, “The National Socialist German Workers Party, AKA Nazi party murdered 6+ million innocent Jews who committed no crimes. The National Socialist American Non-worker AKA Democrat party has slaughtered 60 million innocent babies chopped them up their tiny bodies and sold the parts with the same zeal shown by their ancestors in the SS who pulled gold out of the teeth of their victims. For me the moral outrage from the common useful idiot on the left rings just a touch hollow.”12

  Rather than a logical debate on our nation’s policies, we are once again dragged into an emotional hysteria that will undermine our nation’s borders. Where we may have been able to deter the wave of illegals trespassing into our nation, our representatives would rather send a signal to the world that we are even more welcoming and inviting to these invaders.

  I along with many other Americans would not choose for children to be separated from parents but, then again, we would all choose to live in a world where all parents were responsible, attentive, and caring to their children. Unfortunately, we do not live in such a place.

  How is this different from the drug-addicted mother who is sent to rehab or the father sent to prison and whose children are removed by Child Protective Services?

  Couldn’t we argue that these people are so-called victims, too? Victims of the pharmaceutical companies, victims of their circumstances, and the list could go on from there. It does not override the fact that these parents have made a choice to commit a crime and the decision they have made has consequences for them as well as their children.

  Now, some may say that those who are attempting to cross the border are simply doing so as “asylum seekers,” but with a 27 percent jump in new applications in 2017 alone,13 we would be foolish not to recognize that this is simply a ploy to avoid deportation.

  It’s always about the children. How many of them are being used as fronts for gangs? How many of these kids are bringing in drugs? How many of them are bringing in other contraband under the guise of family separation? Of course, the left ignores this and simply screams in chorus that we must let them all in and not separate children from their parents. Well, that sounds very compassionate on paper. However, we have millions of American people of all races who are poor, broken with nothing, without housing. We have homeless all over the streets of New York, San Francisco, and many other cities. Don’t we have an obligation to take care of our homeless before we take care of the Third World’s children? You might say, “well, we’ll do it all.” But we can’t do it all. The solution to the border problem is the wall that we were promised.

  We must not listen to the hysterics who are screaming that you can’t separate children from their families. We must not allow the forces at work to entice us into an emotional compromise. We have to have the guts to stand up and say, “I’m sorry, but the lifeboat is full.” We have to take care of our own poor first. When we detain people at the border with or without children, we must say, ‘You’re going home. We’re giving you a care package. We’ll give you clothing, but you can’t come in the lifeboat; it’s full.” That’s how you stop illegal immigration. That is how you support your national sovereignty and that is how you support your nation’s identity.

  Now take a step back and ask yourself, why don’t the Democrats care about national sovereignty and integrity? Because the agenda of the Democrats and open-borders advocates is now to push to finish the job and make open borders the legal, as opposed to only the de facto, status quo. The reason is simple: millions more illegals means millions of additional reliable votes for Democrats in their plan to make the United States a one-party socialist country, such as what they have achieved in the state of California in less than two decades as the result of the invasion of illegals there, most of whom can now vote.

  THE TRUTH WILL OUT

  These tsunamis of special interests are already stoking the divide their predecessors created with opportunistic stands on child separations at the border, and with anti-Confederate and pro-drug legislation. It is just a short hop from firing up the base to burning up the Constitution and the rule of law.

  If you are n
ew to my books or The Savage Nation, understand that while I am a conservative, I am first and, above all, a patriot. And the son of immigrant parents. I was born in the Bronx. My father owned an antique shop and died of a heart attack at age fifty-seven. I put myself through college, became a biologist, a teacher, and then earned advanced degrees in botany and anthropology. I earned my PhD in nutritional ethnomedicine from the University of California. The earliest of my nearly four dozen books were about nutrition and human health.

  I turned to radio in 1994 after my manuscript for a book about the correlation between illegal immigration and disease was unable to find a publisher. I was fundamentally a political independent until the increasing and increasingly vocal insanity from the left forced me to “pick a side,” as it were. I have often said that liberalism is a mental disorder in that it rejects the essentials of borders, language, and culture as cornerstones of our America. As I did in my earlier works on physical disease, until that political sickness is cured, I will continue to speak out, as I have done for nearly a quarter century.

  CROWD PSYCHOLOGY

  Mass hysteria—or mass hypnosis—is insidious and stealthy. It falls into two categories. The first is “positive hallucinations or hysteria,” when you believe something is real, absent evidence, just because someone says so or it fits your preconceived notions. The second is “negative hallucinations or hysteria,”14 when you deny the existence of something real, despite overwhelming evidence that it exists. The media and governments exploit both—for example, selling the absurd notion that Russia cost Hillary Clinton the election or denying France and England are crumbling under the weight of Muslim immigration. One is demonstrably untrue, the other demonstrably true. Yet those in denial refuse to accept reality in either case.

  You or people you know may be reasonable, sane, logical, and compassionate under most circumstances, but as the word implies, “hysteria” overcomes these qualities. Consider what occurred on October 30, 1938, when the radio anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast a dramatization of H. G. Wells’s science fiction tale The War of the Worlds. The format of the one-hour broadcast was seductive: fake news bulletins inserted in a program of easy-listening music. The reports told about explosions seen on Mars, a spaceship landing in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, and extraterrestrials emerging with a death ray. The account went on to tell of similar landings across the country.

  Panic ensued because many listeners believed these stories that were early examples of fake news. But it came from a reliable medium in a familiar format, spoken by familiar, trusted voices.15

  Think about that for a moment. Listeners were driven to panic by a report about Martians. That was the stuff of science fiction magazines, of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers comic strips, of the new Superman comic book stories. Now, people in the New York to Philadelphia corridor were relatively sophisticated in 1938. They read newspapers, subscribed to magazines, listened to the radio. How did this panic happen?

  The reality, of course, is that Martians weren’t the cause. How could they be? There weren’t any. Instead, the panic was caused by otherwise rational people allowing their emotions to overcome their reasons. A century and a half earlier, Founding Father John Adams noted: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”16

  Adams spoke those words while defending the soldiers accused of murder after the “bloody massacre,” known today as “the Boston Massacre.” Most of the soldiers charged were eventually acquitted, thanks to Adams’s skillful defense. While undoubtedly a patriot, Adams refused to allow the mass hysteria resulting from the event—partially ginned up by his own cousin, Samuel Adams—to destroy the concept of justice, even if it meant defending King George’s soldiers, whose presence in Boston he otherwise objected to.

  John Adams was later appalled by the Boston Tea Party, a wanton destruction of private property, despite his political opposition to the way the tax on tea was used to try to control the colonial economy. Most Americans today don’t know this, but the objection to the tax on tea was not primarily over lack of representation in Parliament, which the colonists did not even want. It was over the king exempting the East India Company and handpicked colonial importers from paying the tax, thus undercutting colonial smugglers of Dutch tea.17 Adams agreed with the tea partiers, but not with their methods.

  Those examples of colonial mass hysteria provide insight into how a fearful, easily manipulated audience often reacts to demagoguery or self-serving media—even when that media is innocuous. When the War of the Worlds broadcast aired, it was heard by an audience that had been primed for hysteria by the German annexations of Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia. Against this reality, there was just enough suspicion among this entertainment program’s audience that they were prepared to think it was real. Sadly, with a little skepticism and a twist of the radio dial, they could have discovered there was no reason to panic. But they didn’t. A necessary component of mass hysteria is the mob’s desire to believe.

  The impact of the War of the Worlds hysteria was ultimately limited—unlike earlier mass hysterias in our country, such as the Salem Witch Trials of the late 1600s. We’ll be looking at these in greater detail, but in the supposedly enlightened colony of Massachusetts, dozens of people—mostly women—were killed during a panic of supposed morality. It was a mindless wave of fear in which anyone who attempted to inject a note of sanity into what the God-fearing public viewed as legal proceedings was viewed either as a witch or sympathetic to witches, and thus became a target for persecution, torture, imprisonment, and death.

  The late 1930s and early 1940s were a banner time for these panics. Nathanael West was an American author who lived a tragically short life, dying in 1940 at age thirty-seven, the result of a car crash. A year before his death, West published the brilliant novel The Day of the Locust, which is set in and around Hollywood during the Great Depression. In an unforgettable climax, a crowd is gathered outside a Tinseltown movie premiere where a misbehaving boy throws a rock into the face of a simple man named Homer Simpson (yes, Homer Simpson). Homer lashes out at the boy, and the crowd, seeing only that, turns into a destructive mob, believing a pervert has attacked a child and ought to be “lynched.” Witnessing all this is artist Tod Hackett, who ends up injured and carried away in an ambulance—unable to differentiate between the siren and his own scream.18

  That crowd had been turned from reality by a misinterpretation of the truth of the scene. Mob violence—or as the psychiatrists like to whitewash it, “crowd psychology”—is a very short, incendiary step beyond mass hysteria.

  Whether it’s over witches, outsiders, or even government oppression—some of which is real, don’t get me wrong—fear has, again and again, provided the fuel for mass hysteria.

  THE SPARK OF HYSTERIA

  How does mass hysteria begin?

  It starts today with the likes of Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, who create algorithms that redirect young people to sites Google thinks they should see. Progressive sites that advance their agenda. The company that fired engineer James Damore for citing evidence that men and women have different aptitudes19—a controversial, not hateful idea—will obviously not be promoting balanced viewpoints.

  This type of thought manipulation is how you begin to move centrists to the left and leftists to pure madness. Encouraged by Google, people start tuning into leftist television and film “comedians” and actors, many of whom have become Democratic Party jesters. When the seeds have been planted and the mind control begun, the ground is fertile to cultivate mass hysteria. That is how supposedly objective media like the New York Times and CNN work. Relying on, preying on, the public’s short memory—John Q. Stupid forgot or never learned that the real danger is the masses’ wishes, inclinations, and passions, as John Adams cautioned—the corrupt mainstream media encourages people to be afraid. Afraid of Trump. Afraid of R
ussia. Afraid of extreme weather. But they’re never encouraged to fear Hillary or Pelosi or Warren or immigrant gangs, forces that serve the left’s agenda, although they should.

  The blitz from Wolf Blitzer and the rest causes a brutalized, frightened, susceptible public to buy papers, watch TV, and visit websites to see the latest developments in what they’ve been told they should be worried about. Here’s just one example. On August 23, 2017, the Left Coast Variety ran this headline:

  CEOS, MEDIA CHIEFS AGHAST OVER TRUMP’S RELUCTANCE TO DENOUNCE NEO-NAZI VIOLENCE20

  What the liberal mouthpiece failed to mention is what the president said on August 14, which was covered live on C-Span: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”21 In other words, a fake news headline was created, contrary to easily verifiable evidence. It was crafted both to inflame and to solidify a mean and disreputable point of view.

  The brainwashing and mass hysteria machine purred on so that bleeding-heart Hollywood would click on that article, nod solemnly, and spread the word, absent any reality check, that President Donald Trump not only supports racism but is himself a white supremacist. Meanwhile, organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center exist primarily to label anyone—or any organization—who does not agree with the left’s orthodoxy as a hate criminal or hate group. Those institutions of hate generate mass hysteria against those exercising their right to free, peaceful speech.