Causing mass hysteria in the name of a fictional hero. Maybe Sir Patrick read Ripley’s Believe it or Not, too. We have a modern-day Daniel de Bouchet, donning the armor of St. George to cause hysteria—not among the opposition but among his followers. Like De Blasio, he is not sowing frenzy among the enemy but among his slavish fans.
It will come as absolutely no surprise that Sir Patrick lives in a borough of De Blasio’s city. And both of them should be careful what they wish for. One hundred years hence, when white people are a minority and no longer welcomed at all in history books, both of those men will disappear, just like the towering figures they seek to erase.
In the summer of 2017, I coined a phrase, “Enemies without Enmity.” The origin of that phrase was in a story I heard about a German tank commander who obliterated a British position during World War II. Finding just one Allied survivor, the Axis officer took him aboard and delivered him from the battlefield. Though the two forces were at war, these two men were not. The hysteric cannot afford to embrace that quality. President Trump invokes the idea when he talks about America being for all Americans, even those with whom he disagrees. He is sending a signal from the top that we should all try to be “Enemies without Enmity.” This acknowledgment of differences was something Barack Obama never even attempted.
The journey in America from mass hysteria toward a group to mass hysteria directed at oneself was an evolution, one that was centuries in the making. And the first stirrings of this occurred in an event I mentioned in the introduction—the abomination that has come to be known as the Salem Witch Trials.
Today’s youth are the targets and cause of campus progressives. Children have always been victims of manipulation. The testimony of children was used against the supposed witches in Salem, Massachusetts. Children are the ones whose minds are being anesthetized and destroyed by drugs, including pot. Throughout history, those who perpetrated hysteria are immune from the consequences. The essential question our nation has been forced to ask, over and over, is: Who is pulling the strings and why?
5.
FROM SALEM TO CNN
How Hysteria Taught us to Anesthetize Ourselves
We are at risk of returning to this medieval state as we allow the corrupted mainstream press and agenda-driven agitators to gain control of sections of the population. How is the nation’s best interest served when the self-serving, New York race-baiter Al Sharpton calls for federal defunding of the Jefferson Memorial? He complained on TV that his tax dollars should not have to pay for a man with “that kind of background.” This from a man whose background includes vocal visible support for fifteen-year-old Tawana Brawley from Wappingers Falls, New York, who in 1987 lied and claimed she was raped by several white men, police officers among them.1 Sharpton was joined by those other pillars of the black community, the racist Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan, and that famed booster of women’s rights, Bill Cosby. Together with a complicit media, they whipped up blind frenzy, mass hysteria—all of it based on a lie. Brawley later converted to Islam, changed her name, became a nurse, and moved to Virginia. Though Sharpton lost all credibility for his rush to judgment, he continues to do now what he did then: spread mass hysteria that elevates him in the eyes of his community. Like the inhabitants of seventeenth-century villages, people hear him speak with authority about subjects in which he has absolutely no objectivity… yet they cheer and follow and call for blood. Today it’s mass hysteria raised against one of the towering figures of American history.
Do I have to school anyone on the background of Thomas Jefferson—a flawed man, yes; a slaveholder, yes; but the author of the Declaration of Independence and a man who, at great personal risk, helped to found this nation, a nation in which Sharpton lives quite comfortably? The idea that we should erase large swaths of our history because the men and women who made it weren’t completely devoid of flaws is one of the more insane examples of mass hysteria I’ve even come across. Nothing and nobody is perfect: not Thomas Jefferson and certainly not Al Sharpton. And no political platform will ever please 100 percent of the population.
I don’t like that my tax dollars are continuing to fund a land war in Afghanistan. A lot of people who read my books, who call into my radio show, don’t like the fact that our tax dollars pay to help the members of Rev. Sharpton’s congregation. They didn’t like the fact that Barack Obama was okay with allowing tax dollars to fund the surgery of transgender individuals serving in the military, a policy reversed by President Trump. But they’re not calling for Sharpton’s or Obama’s memory to be erased from the history books.
This is why primaries and elections are held, because this nation isn’t about just us, whoever that “us” happens to be. I would add that it’s a good thing our nominating and election process takes so long. In most cases, mass hysteria burns off under the scrutiny of leaders with moral character and a responsible press. An honorable grand jury and legitimate journalists were the ones who exposed Tawana Brawley as a fraud—not Al Sharpton.
This nation is about everyone living legally within our borders, a lesson Sharpton apparently never learned. Apparently, during those dozens of visits he made to the Obama White House to “counsel” the president on race relations, no one ever tapped Rev. Sharpton on the shoulder and reminded him that this is a nation of “all,” not of “Al.”
Unity is not a word in the vocabulary of the Al Sharptons of this nation. It is not a message the mainstream media wishes to promote. In 1776, when the so-called “free” colonies forged a nation with the “slave” colonies, they knew they were making a pact with a devilish practice. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Continental Congress president John Hancock, and the other members of the Continental Congress were not stupid. They understood the hypocrisy of the words in their Declaration, that “all men are created equal.” Many recognized that slavery and second-class citizenship for women could not be reconciled under that document. But if they were ever to be free of the tyranny of Great Britain, they understood the need for compromise. Perhaps independence-advocate Adams grasped that better than most, since he left his farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, in the care of his wife, Abigail. Their unbroken correspondence gave Adams the courage he needed to continue his uphill battle to persuade his fellow members of Congress. In fact, though she later scaled back her own rhetoric, the future second first lady of the United States may have set the tone for today’s civil disobedience when she cautioned her husband in one letter, “If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”2 The difference, of course, is that Abigail was an educated, traveled woman, one who stood up for the rights of all people. Personally enrolling a young black boy in a local school, she crushed the objections of some by stating, “merely because his Face is Black, is he to be denied instruction? How is he to be qualified to procure a livelihood?”3 No further complaints were heard.
There was no hysteria in Braintree and there was never any mass hysteria to the south in Philadelphia, in Congress—not then. There was heartfelt debate, reason, and compromise. That is how progress is made. It is a skill we have lost, a concept on which the media and the demagogues and their constituents have willfully turned their backs, and we are poorer for it. As a result of them putting self-interest ahead of the national good, cities like Ferguson and Charlottesville burn—just as women did when subjected to mass hysteria in the seventeenth century.
The art and craft of the mass hysteric has been refined to a high degree. The approach is to exploit an existing weakness or predisposition among the target group. If blacks feel oppressed by whites, fan those flames. If whites feel threatened by people of color, stoke those resentments. If progressives feel threatened by any religion except the one they should fear, then rally round the mosque. If gays feel a bias against them, highlight that insecurity by picking on a single bakery that won’t make a wedding cake instead of
the countless others that will.
It is a noxious tactic that refutes the wishes of the American citizen. In the late summer 2017, a Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey found that fully 85 percent of American adults believed honoring the constitutional right of free speech was more important than protecting the snowflakes who might be offended by what is being said. A slender 8 percent believed it was more important not to give offense.4 No sane American can disagree with those sentiments.
THE DEVIL IN THE NEW WORLD
It’s fascinating to me that a culture that once feared witches enough to put them to death has done a 180-degree turn. Over the last hundred years, they are best known as figures of entertainment in movies such as The Wizard of Oz and the television series Bewitched. Zombies and ghosts appear far too frequently in today’s entertainment. But witches have been rehabilitated by a name change: The ladies who were once executed as witches are now respected as practitioners of Wicca, pagan witchcraft. They embrace both atheistic and pantheistic beliefs and work their magic through various rituals and tools such as candles, knives, incense—basically, all the things you’d expect to see in a pagan pantry. It’s harmless at worst, a fascinating anthropological study at best. On the road to earning my PhD I earned my first master’s degree in anthropology in 1972. In my scientific investigations I encountered many religious and quasi-religious practices around the world that were based on minerals, flora, and other earth-related elements. The practitioners were generally quite dedicated to their beliefs, and I never found any of it either classically threatening or as broad and comical as in the movies or on TV. I think one of the most vocal proponents of witchcraft in the mid-twentieth century, Sybil Leek, was right when she said, “All human beings have magic in them.”
It is more than just our relatively enlightened times that allow us to embrace the different faces of witchcraft. Most people are still afraid of the dark, and under the right circumstances even a highly educated person would be afraid to walk alone through a graveyard. The difference between the seventeenth century and today is that power was invested in a handful of centralized voices, typically the clergy or magistrates. Those figures spoke for God and governors.
Salem Witch Trials is the name given to events that occurred in a string of New England towns from February 1692 to May 1693.5 The cases were all tried in a Salem town court created by Governor William Phips.
Why was a special court necessary?
For decades, the Puritan colonies were effectively a theocracy. The Bible was law, and the interpretation of Scripture was controlled by a few men. We have seen in our own time how such systems can be triggered and corrupted by greed and/or sex. One need only look at ISIS to see how dogma was used to acquire oil profit, sex slaves, and also to murder and maim nonbelievers. Wherever the ISIS barbarians went, videos chronicled their abuses to spread fear and mass hysteria: conform or die, horribly. When you create a situation of mass hysteria, and people cannot get away—as we saw with ISIS—the result is utter submission. Against all reason, the citizenry will do what you tell them. The terrorists flourished, not just abroad but on our shores in the person of lone-wolf killers. And if that situation seems to pose an obvious response—stop the monsters—think about how little was done against ISIS during the Obama administration. Even the media was complicit in Obama’s Islamophilia, providing scant reporting on the ISIS atrocities, the mass rapes of innocent Christian girls, for example.
Now try to imagine yourself a hardworking, God-fearing New Englander of that era, one who had lived his entire life in a single community. Life was a constant misery since you and your family were frequently ill, not only with minor maladies but with diphtheria, dysentery, yellow fever, smallpox, and polio. In response, your church taught that the fitness of the soul was more important than the health of the body. You were most likely illiterate: according to estimates, only 30 percent of the population could read, with the figures slightly lower for women than for men. Outside religions were a mystery and a terror. The only Jew known to be living in the entire northern region of the continent during that time was Solomon Franco from Holland. He came to Boston in 1649, but his stay was brief: there was a dispute over monies owed to the merchant he represented, and Franco was booted out. Quakers, Anabaptists, and other Christians were generally not tolerated, and I have not been able to find any Muslims on these shores during that period.
Given a very cloistered life of constant hardship, how quickly would local villagers toe the line when men of learning and power spoke to them with authority, especially when that authority came not from a king but from God?
Now flip the coin. Among those leaders, it is impossible to know how many colonial leaders actually believed in the faith-based guidelines they professed to their congregations… and under which they committed their atrocities. I suspect that for many there were very strong core beliefs that drove them to seek out witches. Keep in mind, to many of these people the Devil and his minions were every bit as real as God and his Heavenly Host. Indeed, it would be counterintuitive to believe in one without giving some credence to the other. But it is also clear that many behaved the way they did… though the impending loss of power and local property issues no doubt factored into the trials, just as they did in Connecticut.
A REAL WAR AGAINST WOMEN
In 1692, the foremost Social Justice Warrior of the era was someone I mentioned earlier, Cotton Mather, who had a hand in the earlier witch trials. By modern standards, the well-educated Mather was surprisingly young to have gained the prominence and wield the influence he did. At the time of the first Salem Witch Trials, he was not yet thirty. But Cotton Mather had been ahead of his peers for most of his life: He graduated from Harvard College in 1678, at the age of fifteen. By the time he was twenty-three, he had been named pastor of Boston’s North Church.6
Mather was a gifted and charismatic orator, combining a measured vocal tone with vivid rhetoric and fantastic images of corruption and damnation. Had he merely stayed with the North Church as its minister, he would be remembered today as a relatively enlightened church leader. But when the Salem Witch Trials began, Mather moved from being the peripheral voice he had been in Boston to a highly influential figure in Salem.
The hysteria against witches in the Salem region was fomented in an environment of economic and sociopolitical turmoil. Three years earlier, the English monarchs William and Mary had begun a war against France in America. It was known as King William’s War, and for nine years it was waged largely in upstate New York, Nova Scotia, and Quebec.7 The conflict sent countless refugees south, many of them to Salem Village. The needs of these outsiders were many and their resources were few, and they exacerbated preexisting tensions between the port city’s wealthy merchants and the less affluent farmers. The Puritans had a simple explanation for all the strife: It was the work of the Devil. And the Devil had a favorite target.
The minister of Salem Village was the strict, pious Rev. Samuel Parris, who had a son, Thomas, and two daughters, ages eleven and nine. In January 1692, the girls began having tantrums—“fits,” as they were called at the time. They threw objects, screamed, made strange noises, and twisted themselves into bizarre positions. As with John Goodwin’s children in Connecticut, a doctor was summoned. And once again unable to cure the girls, the physician pronounced the ailment to be demonic in nature. When another local girl, eleven-year-old Ann Putnam, began behaving in a similar fashion, a pair of magistrates demanded that the young ladies name the source of their bewitchment. On February 29, under pressure, the girls identified three women: Sarah Osbourn (also Osborne), an elderly woman living in poverty; Sarah Good, a pregnant beggar woman; and the Parrises’ Caribbean slave, Tituba. Conveniently and predictably, two of them were among the rabble that authorities did not want in their town. Good and Osbourn professed their innocence to no avail, and so did Tituba at first. Though slaves were rare in the region, she had been with Rev. Parris for fourteen years and she loved
the Parris children, for whom she was largely responsible. But Parris whipped her into confessing, promising to secure her release if she did. The poor woman admitted to the magistrates that “[t]he Devil came to me and bid me serve him,” and added that she was not the only local witch wanting to harm the Puritans. She also informed them that she had in fact baked a “witch cake” from rye and urine with which she gave the family dog, just in case the pet was a “familiar” or helper of a local witch.
The three women were imprisoned the next day; despite his promise, Parris bowed to political expediency and allowed the slave to remain behind bars. It would be late spring before the governor finally convened the Special Court of Oyer and Terminer.
As soon as the women were imprisoned, the Salem authorities undertook a program we know all too well: the art of distraction. If there were problems between the merchants and farmers, if there were challenges to the local theocracy, then leaders must create a diversion, an event that would dominate what passed for a news cycle in 1692—and that was witches, right in their midst. Tituba had said there were others; the word was spread that they had to be found. Using the tactics of mass hysteria and paranoia, Europe had purged itself of tens of thousands of undesirables that way. Salem and its environs had to do the same.
Stop Mass Hysteria Page 8
