Stop Mass Hysteria

by Michael Savage

  These days, we’ve lost our ability to distinguish which causes are truly worth fighting for, which groups are truly worth championing. Propped by the profit-minded, agenda-driven media—now, as just before the Spanish-American War—the hysterical, vocal minority has come down hard on behalf of the new arrivals, be they legal or illegal. The problem for them is that they are not defending something they own. It isn’t a rounded, functioning community with a consistent citizenry, shared history, and point of view. It is a subjective viewpoint with a shifting perimeter and ever-changing content, defined by whatever is the oppressed group of the moment: Hispanics, blacks, Muslims, women, gays. Never, of course, fetuses, whites, Jews, or job creators.

  In addition to their selective vision, their moral indignation and constantly flapping tongues have blinded them to the larger reality, that in great numbers illegal immigration renders a community, a nation, incapable of lawful functioning, since not only is the immigration unlawful but the stopgap measures to permit it—the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or DACA, for one—are helplessly unconstitutional. How is a traditionalist supposed to feel in his or her home as the very fabric of its legal system no longer applies? How is a lawful American citizen supposed to react when informed that the dreams of nonlegal residents are more important than their own? When the taxes that American citizens dutifully pay are used to undermine, through progressive programs, the very nature of the traditional, vital, growth-oriented “American Dream”? There is only one dream DACA individuals should have, only one dream that should be encouraged by any right-thinking and compassionate individuals: becoming American citizens and participating in the legal process that has successfully embraced millions of refugees and immigrants since the earliest days of the colonies. Anything other than that is ruinous to the sovereignty and future of our nation. Of course, that requires assimilation to a large degree—something that the progressives also find offensive. In their view, anything that white Europeans conceived of, including American democracy, is de facto no good.

  The progressive response to anti-DACA passion is too bad… deal with it. That isn’t an answer, it’s a loathing for an American system that, admittedly, has done the wrong thing from time to time. At one time we permitted slavery and put Japanese citizens in internment camps. We shot students at Kent State. Those were awful things, but they were aberrations in a history that has shown more respect for individual rights and human dignity than any civilization in human history. Those heinous black marks did not then and do not now define what America is in a larger sense. Tear our nation down from guilt, in atonement, and there is nothing. That is why I, and a lot of my fellow Americans. have a slow-burning rage. In 1969, President Richard Nixon popularized a half-century-old expression and called us “the silent majority.” Originally, that phrase referred to the dead. Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan famously used those words in 1902 to refer to the losses on both sides of the Civil War. In his 1955 book Profiles in Courage, Senator John F. Kennedy changed the meaning somewhat to express the response of most Americans to “the screams of a vocal minority.” That Pulitzer Prize–winning book was where Nixon encountered the phrase. Though we, the formerly silent majority, are increasingly becoming less than a majority, we still managed to elect Donald Trump against all odds.

  One of my favorite pieces of writing in the English language—and I believe I can still say that without fear of being called a “white nationalist”—is Sir Walter Scott’s poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which was written in 1805. It contains these immortal lines:

  Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

  Who never to himself hath said,

  This is my own, my native land!

  Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,

  As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,

  From wandering on a foreign strand!

  I do not believe there are many progressives who can say that about themselves and their nation. They cannot see or feel history because their entire worldview is a hysterical tantrum. Like that girl in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—Veruca Salt, the spoiled brat everyone remembers—they want what they want now. That is why I mistrust them as gatekeepers, as teachers, as journalists, as politicians. Not only do they fail to understand the concept of home, they repudiate it. They are about temper, not temperance. My own personal rage has been building since the first American flag was burned in protest during the Vietnam War. However justified the protests, the contempt for country made the flag burners unpalatable to me. The progressives and their hate is even worse because it skips from one issue to another in search of fuel to keep the rage burning.

  Importing labor with open disregard for both the process of immigration and the people being relocated created decades of hardship for Hispanics. With the door open to Puerto Ricans and others from the Caribbean, especially the Dominican Republic, it opened wider for Mexicans as well. Throughout the early years of the last century, for example, the American government was content to allow Hispanics to immigrate as a source of cheap labor in factories, canneries, and in agriculture. In 1942, while young men were off fighting in World War II, Washington created the bracero program, which brought in thousands of Mexicans to work on U.S. farms. Eleven years later, the government initiated “Operation Wetback,” which deported 3.8 million people—many of whom were American citizens.8 The stereotype of these people as essentially interchangeable and disposable has not changed in more than a century.

  Emotionally, this plays into the current uproar over the president’s timely and overdue termination of the DACA program. Hispanics understandably resent the century of oppression and are vocally opposed to Trump’s action; Americans who support the president are also understandably tired of the continued dilution of our borders, language, and culture. Critics of the right have said that we are anti-immigrant. That is demonstrably false. America has always been a multinational melting pot. What we are fighting, now, is a multicultural fascism—the left-spurred desire to destroy everything of European origin going back five centuries. But those are the old battle lines, the ones close to the surface that fan the hysterical reaction we’ve seen. The real issues today are more complex than Apple’s Tim Cook or actors seem to understand when their knees jerk in defense of illegal immigrants. These issues require something more intelligent and comprehensive than Obama’s illegal, free-pass document. The drug scourge has become a massive drain on this nation—costing billions of dollars annually in some states, like New Hampshire—and those narcotics are coming from south of the border. In fact, the Castro brothers, whom Obama welcomed into the fellowship of the civilized world, have been among the facilitators of their transport to these shores. Additionally, there are now a staggering thirty to fifty million illegal immigrants in the country, the majority of them Hispanic, most of them taking our jobs and/or straining our social welfare resources. And Islamic terrorists are almost certainly moving northward with the influx, along with the criminals we know about who are robbing and killing in our sanctuary cities.

  As long as the left continues to fan mass hysteria over the supposed injustice of deporting illegal citizens, many of whom only “dream” of violent but lucrative criminal activity or shipping American dollars to their families in Guatemala or Mexico or Ecuador, the old biases will remain and grow stronger. In that respect, the resolution of another bias of even longer standing provides clues as to how hysteria can be managed and reduced. As long as the progressives refuse to reach across the aisle and acknowledge that half the nation cannot simply be trampled under, this nation will remain polarized. And polarization is the short road to mass hysteria and the evils of hate.

  HYPHENS AND HYSTERIA

  We’ve talked about how, in the nineteenth century, nativism caused a backlash against several non-WASP groups. This bias continued to be felt particularly hard among German Americans. The rage generated by the Hessians who fought alongside the British during the Revol
ution was forgotten; religion was not quite the hot-button issue it once was; but while the reasons were murky, the hatred remained and flourished with the coming of World War I.

  Since 1914, when fighting first erupted in Europe, Americans had heard stories of German atrocities, whether burnings of libraries, strip searches of nuns, or wholesale rapes and massacres. And when German submarines sunk the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania in 1915, one in ten passengers was American.

  Even after all this, Washington was not moved to fight Germany militarily. But American civilians felt no such restrictions, and their war frenzy manifested itself against anything that evoked the German people. In some cases this led to renamings reminiscent of 2003, when French fries popularly became “freedom fries” after France disapproved of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In 1914, sauerkraut was out: the pickled vegetable was now called “liberty cabbage.”9 Frankfurters became hot dogs, and dachshunds were renamed “liberty pups.” “German” hospitals in New York and Chicago were rechristened “Lenox Hill” and “Grant.” Even German measles, which in theory should have been left alone to carry the stigma of illness, was renamed “Liberty measles.”10 Streets bearing names of German towns or leaders were given names to celebrate Americans such as Pershing or Wilson. (Ironically, the revered John J. Pershing, who became commander of our forces during World War I, was of German heritage, his family name having been Pfoerschin.)

  Syracuse, New York, went a symbolic—and idiotic—step further, issuing a ban on the card game pinochle because of its roots in the German game binokel.11

  But in the growing hysteria of the early twentieth century, these moves were seen as anything but silly. Indeed, a noted American seized upon the concept of nativism to publicly—and rightly—denounce a plague that is still with us, the hyphenate. In 1915, Theodore Roosevelt, now a private citizen, used an address to the Knights of Columbus to denounce all conflicting loyalties when he thundered:

  The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.12

  German Americans did not help their situation. Their near-monolithic insensitivity and intransigence contributed to American panic. In 1916, not long before the United States declared war on Germany, a Chicago-based German pride organization made a point of loudly celebrating the kaiser’s birthday.13 Throughout the country, Germans—whose culture embraced brewing and consuming beer—were particularly tone deaf to the bourgeoning temperance movement, which we’ll be getting to shortly, and campaigned avidly against it. With the start of World War I, temperance organizations made sure that anti-German propaganda often included images of menacing Germans with beer steins, or soldiers represented by marching beer casks.14 And the German American media had long urged neutrality in the European war, but that was widely regarded as self-serving.

  When the United States finally declared war in April 1917, everything German-related came under additional scrutiny. Schools eliminated German language instruction. Business groups that had tolerated multilingual employees—in particular, Germans—stopped doing so. And not all of the anti-German hysteria was paranoia. Germany secretly made overtures to Mexico, seeking a military alliance. While Mexico declined, Americans were infuriated by the potential of a two-front war instigated by Germany.

  War removed the last restraint from rational behavior regarding German immigrants, and mass hysteria was everywhere. The Department of Justice began a tally of German aliens and imprisoned thousands under charges of espionage or supporting the German war effort. More than two thousand were arrested and sent to internment camps. Their cases were supervised and reviewed by a team led by young J. Edgar Hoover.15

  German citizens not scrutinized by the U.S. government were made to show their patriotism by buying war bonds, often in amounts that exceeded what they could afford. Stores held bonfires of merchandise made in Germany. Shops owned by German merchants had their windows smashed, or the word kraut painted across their fronts. And one German man living in Illinois had been put into protective custody but was dragged from the jail by a mob, forced to walk across broken bottles, and made to kiss an American flag before being lynched, hanged from a tree three times—as someone in the crowd put it, one time each for the red, white, and blue. The eleven men tried for his murder were acquitted in what a newspaper editor later termed “a farcical patriotic orgy.”16

  The film industry stoked the fervor as well. One of 1918’s biggest movies was The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin, which played to crowds that cheered the image of an American soldier punching the German leader. In Omaha, Nebraska, a truck advertising the film drove through the streets with an effigy of the kaiser hanging in its back. That same year, Charlie Chaplin’s comedy Shoulder Arms depicted a French soldier who uses Limburger cheese against the Germans and gets past the dull-witted enemy disguised as a tree. It was the superstar’s most successful movie to date.17

  In a case of too little too late, German Americans trotted out the slogan “Germany is my mother; America my bride.”18 Americans weren’t buying. Echoing Theodore Roosevelt’s earlier words, President Wilson said, “Any man who carries a hyphen around with him, carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic when he gets ready.”19

  The war was won, of course, and many of the symbolic name changes were rescinded. Others, however, took their place. Many German Americans changed their surnames and the names of their businesses. German-language newspapers were mostly gone. America and its outwardly contrite German American population healed their wounds, and all was very slowly and tentatively forgiven. It was a too-brief respite before Germany started a new and more terrible conflagration.

  Just fifteen years after the end of the war, the rise of Adolf Hitler triggered a mass migration of Germans and Austrians to these shores, including filmmakers, actors, and composers who settled in Hollywood, and scientists like Albert Einstein. Mistrust of these émigrés was nothing like it had been in the previous generation. The reason was simple and there is a lesson for today. These new arrivals did not gravitate toward German enclaves in America. They immediately and proudly sought to assimilate into the culture and traditions of their new land, the land that saved many of them from destruction. They were grateful and respectful.

  Contrast that with the Cedar Riverside section of Minneapolis, Minnesota, where it is impossible to know how many Muslims have settled from Africa, South Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Because the Census Bureau is not permitted to ask question about religion, estimates range from 20,000 to 130,000.20 Interviews with many outspoken youth not only advocate sharia law, but passionately refute freedom in general and criticism of Muhammad in particular. Andrew Luger, U.S. attorney for Minnesota, acknowledged that his state “has a terror recruitment problem.”21

  It was mass hysteria to turn on all German Americans in the early twentieth century, however little they did to address the hot-button issues. Despite their awareness of the challenges of being hyphenates, they stubbornly refused to capitulate. That wasn’t anti-Americanism as much as it was German pride. They did not seek to make everyone celebrate Oktoberfest—and certainly not in place of another long-established American holiday.

  The situation in Minneapolis and in other cities around the world—we discussed the dire condition of Great Britain earlier—is different. It is not irrational to be concerned about avowed enemies within one’s borders. The lesson to be learned from the past, however, is that mechanisms already in place must be employed before we reach a point of no return and start burning witches or tarring and feathering former loyalists to the British Crown. There’s
a word that describes talk of tearing down the nation’s laws and Constitution: sedition, a revolt or incitement to revolt against the lawful government. Much of this is not protected speech as defined by the First Amendment. Freely granted interviews, along with posts on social media, pass by a wide margin the threshold of a “clear and present danger.”

  Despite what the Social Justice Warriors and progressive champions of diversity would have the gullible believe, the loss of our national identity and character is the loss of America itself. And if sharia law ever comes, those liberals—the ones who embrace abortion, equality for women, religious freedom, gay and transgender rights, pot legalization—will be the first to be hanged or thrown to their deaths from rooftops. And then watch mass hysteria reach new heights as those frightened progressives stop toking long enough to seek the once-reviled police to protect them, or come sniffing around for NRA members who have the wherewithal to fight back. If you think it can’t happen here, take a closer look at what is going on in France and Great Britain. The third world war will not be fought with North Korea or nuclear weapons. It will be to save Europe from the scourge that its own liberal insanity has allowed to take root and flourish.

  Borders, language, culture. I will repeat those words as many times as it takes for them to register.

  TEMPERANCE AND HYSTERIA

  We were talking earlier about mass amnesia and the ravages of marijuana on generations of Americans. Apart from the anti-American propaganda to which we’re constantly exposed from the left, brains and ambition continue to be dulled by the psychoactive alkaloid tetrahydracannabinol (THC).