Stop Mass Hysteria

by Michael Savage

  There is no record of the specific charges against her, or of the trial itself. Only the fact that she was executed as a witch. However, there are a few social and cultural facts that point us in a direction of borderline hysteria against women—possibly propagated by women.

  Alse Young had a husband and a daughter but no son. Absent a male child, the woman would have been in line to receive her husband’s inheritance should he predecease her. The idea of a woman obtaining property was abhorrent to many landholders. Certainly, neighbors would have been terrified, since Alse’s holding land would have lowered the value of theirs. We saw this replicated three centuries later, when black Americans were forbidden to own property in white areas of the South and were discouraged from buying homes in upscale white neighborhoods elsewhere—even in liberal Hollywood. In 1948, superstar singer and jazz pianist Nat King Cole and his family found the word nigger burned into their lawn in the exclusive Hancock Park section of Los Angeles. Cole had already been cautioned by the property owners’ association that the community did not want “undesirables” in their midst. His response? “Neither do I. And if I see anybody undesirable coming in here, I’ll be the first to complain.”16

  Back to Alse Young. It is reasonable that one or two landowners wanted her gone—possibly even her husband—and a solution was obvious. That winter and spring, New England in general and the Connecticut town of Windsor specifically suffered through a severe bout of influenza. All that had to happen was for a rumor to be spread that Alse was a witch and responsible for the disease that killed a high percentage of children, and mass hysteria took root.

  Though this charge was unprecedented in America, allegations of witchcraft were common in Europe and were on the rise in England thanks to the Witchcraft Act of 1604. Ostensibly a means of ferreting out witches, it was a way to discourage groups of women from congregating and exchanging ideas that might be injurious to men, such as the notion that a woman might own land. This means of striking fear into the populace was well known to the American Puritans of the time.

  Whatever the cause or reasons, the public was roused against Alse Young and, in 1647, she was hanged as the first witch to be charged and executed in the New World. Talk about a nation being hatched with the mark of Cain: supposedly devout people, for reasons that were never supported by fact (since Alse was not a witch), allowed the base needs of a few to sway them to a murderous frenzy. But the civil crimes against the family did not end with her death. Thirty years later, Alse’s daughter Alice Young Beamon—undoubtedly shadowed by her family’s past—was also accused of witchcraft in Springfield, Massachusetts. There is no record of the charges, though we know that Alice escaped her mother’s fate and died in 1708 at age sixty-eight.

  But witch fever was rife among the populace of New England, the seventeenth-century equivalent of mass hysteria about Russians swaying the 2016 election or the hunt for Confederate statues consuming liberal lunatics in the summer of 2017. Through newspapers, through mails, through travelers, fear and hysteria spread with narcissistic enthusiasm. It was common, at the time, for articles to be reprinted from other newspapers, so witch hysteria offered a chance for a Connecticut journal to become known in Rhode Island. Out-of-colony newspapers might pay for the rights to reprint these stories. Merchants on the way from Hartford to Boston might get free food or lodging if they had a frightening tale to tell. Mail would have to be read aloud to the many who were illiterate, a chance for educated men and a few women to get attention. Make no mistake: The witch hunts were a socially fueled frenzy. The proof of this is that after Alse Young’s death in 1647, another ten women throughout New England were randomly executed for witchcraft between 1647 and 1662.17

  Then there was Ann Glover.18

  It was 1688, eight years after Glover had come to Boston with her daughter, when she had an argument with Martha Goodwin, the thirteen-year-old daughter of well-to-do John Goodwin. Glover had worked for Goodwin as a washerwoman, and had a reputation for being confrontational with the family. After the dispute, Martha and several other of John Goodwin’s six children began exhibiting a variety of unexplainable symptoms, including random pains in their necks and backs, distended tongues, spontaneous vocal outbursts, and occasional loss of control over their bodies. A physician was called in to cure the children. When he failed to do so, he pronounced the condition beyond his superb medical care because, said he, they were “bewitched.”

  Ann Glover became the scapegoat. She was charged with witchcraft and Boston went mad with hate for her—if not because she was a witch then because she was the next-best thing: a transplanted Catholic from Ireland whose husband had been executed for not renouncing his faith while the couple had been living on a sugar plantation in Barbados. Yes, this story happened in Boston. This hysteria continued as late as 1795. When the city’s first Roman Catholic bishop arrived, only one percent of New Englanders were Catholic. In Boston, anti-Catholic feelings more than a century before the bishop’s arrival were deep and unshakable.

  Ann was of lowly birth and lacked any sort of education. Those citizens who would come to be known as the “bluenoses” of Boston (apparently named for a kind of potato)19 needed no more than that to spread hate about Ann through the community. Before long, everyone knew she was guilty. During trial, Ann’s lack of anything beyond basic English language skills, compounded by her panic at being arrested, caused her to answer questions with a frenzied gibberish—which was later determined to be her native Irish. By the time prosecutors realized their mistake and found a translator, mass hysteria had done its work. She had already developed an irreversible reputation for speaking in a demonic language. But that was outside the courtroom. Inside, the poor woman’s inability to communicate with accusers at her trial was a form of self-incrimination. At one point, prosecutors asked her to recite the Lord’s Prayer, which she did—in Latin from the masses of her youth, as well as in Irish. But not in English. No one understood her. Or if they did, they failed to come forward.

  Then the big blow was struck. The infamous Cotton Mather, a minister at Boston’s North Church, visited Ann during the trial and observed her chanting.20 When he asked her what she was doing, she responded in her broken English that she was speaking to “spirits,” which Mather interpreted, and later disseminated, as a confession that she was communing with the Devil. What Glover was actually doing, no doubt, was praying in Irish to the Catholic saints she remembered from her childhood. Praying for them to help her, since no one else would help her.

  There was more such “evidence,” of course. Two men who claimed to speak Irish said Ann had confessed in her native tongue, and their testimony was never challenged. A search of her residence turned up a collection of dolls—which would have been appropriate for a mother who had a daughter around the ages of the children of her employer. Obviously, she had used those to cast some voodoo-style enchantment over the Goodwin children.

  As if the outcome were ever in doubt, Ann was found guilty and hanged on November 16, 1688.

  Ann’s legacy, however, extended well beyond the grave. Cotton Mather distributed his book Memorable Providences Related to Witchcrafts and Possessions in 1689. In it he used the case of Ann Glover to codify the guidelines that would characterize additional accusations, including those four years later in Salem, Massachusetts. When the state stopped killing witches, Mather turned to “curing” them, what one might describe as the “gay conversion therapy” of its day.

  Mather’s book was fake news at its destructive best, and, like the fake news of today, it had very serious consequences.

  GROUPTHINK AND OUT-GROUPS

  Psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that it takes a hysteric to cause hysteria. He wrote that, in both perpetrator and victim, “a constant tendency to make himself interesting and produce an impression is a basic feature of the hysteric. The corollary of this is his proverbial suggestibility, his proneness to another person’s influence.”

  There is a subtle difference between th
at concept, hysteria, and the insidious practice of “groupthink.” The idea was first named by author George Orwell in his prescient masterpiece 1984. The term groupthink was co-opted by the psychological community in the early 1950s to describe a group for which the need for conformity and concord is so strong members will make decisions they know are wrong in order to achieve it. If you don’t like a movie, but others do, you may very well say you do to avoid being seen as stupid, to avoid contentious debate. Others will do the same about different topics. For example, when ESPN decided that announcer Robert Lee should miss a broadcast because he had the same name as the suddenly toxic Civil War general,21 they really weren’t concerned about rioting if he did a play-by-play. No living human, not even the least educated among the Social Justice Warriors, would ever have mistaken that young man for someone who has been dead since 1870. What the network was doing, by this act, was “virtue signaling.” They were participating in leftist groupthink by letting the viewers and the world know that they did not support the Confederacy or its die-hard supporters.

  Under groupthink, personal opinions, essential points of view, even questions are no longer welcome. The result is a so-called in-group that feels it can do no wrong and is impervious to outside criticism. Moreover, it feels both justified and moral in attacking any “out-group.”

  The difference between groupthink and mass hysteria is time. The former takes awhile to congeal. The latter can happen overnight. Groupthink among the Nazi hierarchy produced a policy of anti-Semitism. Mass hysteria among the populace enabled the Holocaust.

  More recently, groupthink allowed the press and nearly half the electorate to speak no ill of Barack Obama and to speak calumnies of out-group members like myself for pointing out his grave and divisive shortcomings. Groupthink has given free passes to countless figures in recent history, finding no flaws in everyone from the now-sainted Princess Diana to Muhammad Ali. It only takes a few highbrow art dealers or critics to elevate the ordinary to the extraordinary, such as the pour-and-dribble-paintings of a Jackson Pollock or the blown-up comic book panels of a Roy Lichtenstein. How many film critics did it take to elevate the box-office flop Citizen Kane to the greatest movie of all time? Essentially, one. New Yorker magazine film critic Pauline Kael achieved that with her 1971 book, Raising Kane,22 and all the other critics followed suit. Just thirteen years before, at the Brussels World’s Fair, critics agreed that the honor belonged to Sergei Eisenstein’s silent Russian Revolution masterpiece Battleship Potemkin.23 The movies hadn’t changed. Only the groupthink did.

  Groupthink and mass hysteria dominate college campuses where conservative or traditionalist voices are silenced by shrill professors, shouting mobs, and now violence. In August 2017, Berkeley, California, mayor Jesse Arreguin told my hometown newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, that he urged the University of California’s flagship school to cancel a late-September free-speech forum by conservatives. His reason? “I’m very concerned about… right-wing speakers coming to the Berkeley campus,” he told the paper, “because it’s just a target for black bloc [sic] to come out and commit mayhem on the Berkeley campus and have that potentially spill out on the street.”24 Rather than protect the rights of the out-group students who invited them, Arreguin would rather gut our Constitution.

  Incidentally, Orwell also coined the term “newspeak” in 1984 to indicate a form of controlled speech designed to inhibit thought. That’s been on the rise, too, especially in the corrupt mass media. As I write this, the Associated Press, a once-reliable news source, has shifted from using the phrase “illegal aliens” to the flatly incorrect “undocumented citizens.” By no law of the land, by no possible progressive distortion of reality, are illegal aliens “citizens.” This is the level of idiocy that clear-headed men and women must deal with.

  Whether it was Cotton Mather on witches, Hitler on Jews, or Barack Obama on American exceptionalism—remember his “You didn’t build that” speech in July 2012?—mass hysterics do one thing more that Jung did not mention. They frequently use hysteria for one of two ends: to turn attention from their too-slow or utterly failed policies, or to pave the way for an even greater atrocity. For example, anti-Semitism was the catalyst that Hitler used to rouse German nationalism and force-feed war down the throats of a people for whom World War I was still a painful memory. Obama crafted racial tension to turn attention from catastrophic economic policies, inept and disastrous foreign policy, and to open the door to placating social engineering policies such as Obamacare and gay marriage.

  Pertinent to the history we have examined thus far, we presently have a hysteric serving as the mayor of New York City. With more homeless than ever living in the streets of the city; with disgusted police literally turning their backs on His Honorless after being shackled by mayoral distaste for law and order that protects the status quo; with open contempt for parades that honor traditional European values—for instance, St. Patrick’s Day and Columbus Day—the raging communist Bill De Blasio has fully embraced the tactics of hysteria. Rather than fix problems or repair broken relationships, in August 2017 he formed a task force to root out statues and street names that might be offensive to a minority of New York City citizens. (I wonder when this lunatic will decide to curtail the city’s annual 9/11 commemoration since some Muslims may find it insensitive. Mark my words, that’s coming.)

  On his list of targets was the statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle at the foot of Central Park, an icon gifted to the city in 1890 by legal Italian immigrants,25 and Grant’s Tomb. What was the crime committed by General Ulysses S. Grant, the man who defeated General Robert E. Lee whose statues offend so many, the Union leader who won the Civil War against the slaveholding Confederates? Grant had condemned Southern Jews who were smuggling cotton to the North during the Civil War. Grant later regretted his statements.26

  No one would agree that this statement is true now. Today, America is a country of white men, white women, black men, black women, Hispanic men, Hispanic women, Asian men, Asian women—you get the picture. But 150 years ago, the United States was still a country run by white men. That’s a historic fact. Hence the 1868 Democrat Party slogan “Let white men rule.”27 Politicians play to their base or they become ex-politicians. De Blasio did not complain when either of the Obamas slammed whites. Remember when Barack Obama made the incendiary comment, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,”28 referring to the black teenager shot in 2012 during a confrontation with neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman—who was later acquitted of second-degree murder? Remember when Michelle Obama said, during the ascendency of her incompetent husband during the 2008 presidential race, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country”?29 De Blasio didn’t bat an eye.

  De Blasio probably believes the utter nonsense he’s spewing, but in defacing or entirely rewriting history—following in the footsteps of the Nazis, Stalin, and the Iranian ayatollahs, to name just a few—he displays his own hysterical nature while fueling mass hysteria in others. It is fair to say that many New York youths know nothing about Columbus or Grant other than what may—may—be mentioned in the schools controlled by bitter, contemptuous liberals, which is that these two older Caucasian men were both ruthless conquerors and white supremacists. That is a moronic simplification and distortion of the facts. But remember what Goebbels said: Facts don’t matter. All that matters is the lie, repeated over and over.

  My observations here are not solely political. They do not just reflect my natural distaste for anti-American rhetoric and the politicians who opportunistically wield it to whip up, but not help, the underprivileged or suffering members of their base. If anything, I should be grateful to these ham-fisted officials for simultaneously alienating a large swath of the electorate, like Italian Americans who revere Columbus or older whites who do not happen to be former hippies and who do understand the world in which Ulysses S. Grant lived. The De Blasios of the nation, of the world, go out of their way to
try to make those of us who are not “of color” hate ourselves and be ashamed of our past. It is a new application of mass hysteria, not focused on the “other,” like witches or Jews, but on the “self.” Do you know the name Sherrod Brown, Democratic senator from Ohio? How about David Howard, former staff member to Washington, D.C., mayor Anthony Williams? Maybe Stephanie Bell, a fourth-grade teacher in Wilmington, North Carolina? Each of these people was chastised—or, in the case of Howard, asked to resign—for using the English word niggardly, which means “stingy,” and which comes from the Old Norse word hnøggr,30 and has nothing at all to do with the word that blacks find offensive, other than when they use it among themselves as a term of endearment or fraternity. The hysteria foisted by the uneducated upon the educated is upon us and is proliferating.

  Modern De Blasio–style mass hysteria actually embraces a return to the discredited fourteenth-century concept of self-flagellation, which was practiced by extremists in the Catholic Church. Monks, priests, and other adherents would whip themselves in order to beat to death whatever sin was within them. The church eventually banned this practice, preferring the more genteel fasting as a form of atonement and purification. Don’t expect politicians to do the same. Aging white baby boomers still vote, still give campaign donations, and, as they watch their grandkids struggle in the aftermath of the Obama-sustained recession, they can be guilted into accepting blame for the nation and the race that supposedly spawned this crisis. While writing this section, I saw a photo online of the seventy-seven-year-old actor Sir Patrick Stewart—a British citizen who made his fortune in America, in the Star Trek: The Next Generation TV series and films—holding a sign that said, “People will not listen unless you are an old white man, so I’m an old white man and I will use that to help people who need it.”31 After Donald Trump’s election as president, Sir Patrick also applied for U.S. citizenship to “fight” him. That was his word, mind you. “Fight.” A combative, violence-inducing word chosen to roil those who haven’t the wit to distinguish him from the benign, high-minded captain he played in Star Trek. I also saw a photograph of the two white stars of The X-Files “taking a knee” in support of NFL protesters.32 If “the truth is out there,” as the show says, don’t count on these two self-important stars to find it.