Stop Mass Hysteria

by Michael Savage

  Perhaps the first and last lines from Kipling’s poem “If” apply:

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…

  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

  And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

  Today’s Muslims pretend they are oppressed in America, and they have vocal allies. That was not the case when anti-Catholic hysteria crested and broke with John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960. As a result, Christianity overall struck back with hysterical self-defense when an offhand remark by a prominent musician triggered a massive pro-Christianity hysterical backlash. That was just the beginning of the 1960s. Hysterical overreaction dominated the decade, from the Black Lives Matter movement of its day, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, to the anti-Vietnam activists, ban-the-bomb radicals, and—once again—the uprising of impressionable, pliable youth. As today, anti-Establishment hysteria was the new normal. Then, as now, most would-be Social Justice Warriors were focused more on tearing down than on what would replace what they had destroyed.

  12.

  FROM THE CATHOLICS TO FLOWER POWER

  When Everyone Had a Pulpit

  JFK AND THE BALANCE OF PANIC

  The new decade brought with it the shadow of an old hysteria, only now that panic had a face: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, senator from Massachusetts, who was running for president. And this time, though that hysteria kept resurfacing, it was successfully beaten back.

  I was a teenager in 1960, and I was fascinated by politics—especially where ethnicities were involved. Back then, when you grew up in a poor neighborhood in Queens, you got to know people who came from everywhere on the planet. That’s still true, to a degree: you can go to Astoria and find a Greek restaurant next to an Indian restaurant next to a Chinese restaurant with Japanese, Turkish, Ethiopian, and others a short walk away.

  It didn’t seem strange to me that a Catholic was running for president; Catholic churches were everywhere in my neighborhood. But there was talk about Kennedy’s candidacy at school and in the streets. I found out only one other presidential candidate had been Catholic and that was New York’s governor Alfred E. Smith in 1928. Among the allegations made against Smith were that he would amend the Constitution to make Catholicism America’s official religion, and that he would build a tunnel from the White House to the Vatican. He didn’t win. He didn’t even come close. In fact, he didn’t even carry New York.

  The reason the talk never became hysteric in JFK’s case was that he didn’t let it go unchallenged. He confronted the issue early in the campaign in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors when he asked, in the televised address, “Are we going to admit to the world—worse still, are we going to admit to ourselves—that one-third of the American people is forever barred from the White House?”1

  The speech insulated him from Alfred Smith’s fate, even as 150 Protestant ministers gathered in Washington and challenged Kennedy to repudiate the teachings of the Catholic Church to prove his independence.2 He didn’t. Instead he gave another speech, this time to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. After expressing sincere frustration that he was being forced to address this issue again, he said, “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source.”3

  The address became JFK’s stump speech whenever he felt it was needed, though his rival—Republican vice president Richard Nixon—felt JFK deployed it cynically, using it in Catholic neighborhoods to remind voters there that he was one of them. It is understandable why Nixon was frustrated. In the closing days of the campaign, Catholic bishops in Puerto Rico forbade Catholics from voting for any politician who was in favor of birth control or abortion. The edict received widespread coverage and when Kennedy did not challenge it, Nixon began to gain on him dramatically in an already tight race. JFK held on to win, but by the thinnest margin.4

  I bring this up not because of the supreme irony of the Democrats nearly being brought down because of their silence on the twin issues of abortion and birth control, but because it’s one of the few times hysteria was tamped down. I could talk again about the platitudes—a lie told often enough becomes the truth and all of that. But after nearly a quarter century on the radio and writing books where I unfailingly speak my mind, I can tell you that like JFK, like William Gaines, like Joseph Welch, all it takes to deflate hysteria is the truth.

  People are emotional, at times they’re reactionary, and too often they are stupid. But ordinary people—what I call the Eddies and Ediths—don’t have the innate capacity of a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to live with hypocrisy or lies. If you don’t believe me, sit around the dinner table with family, friends, or even strangers. You will have a pretty good idea, within a minute or two, who is trustworthy and who is not. It’s language, it’s body language, it’s narcissism, it’s talking instead of listening, it’s many qualities. How long or how many times will you go to that dinner table before saying something about what you know isn’t true or honest?

  When a politician or a media outlet lies to create mass hysteria, it’s like someone new has joined the table. For a minute or two—or a week or two—we may buy what they are saying. But then our fundamental humanism rises to the surface, like armor, and disavows that fear and falsehood. It’s like the autonomic nervous system. We cannot ignore what we know to be true. We can only choose not to act. Which is how the Cotton Mathers get to execute innocent women. Which is how the Obamas and Pelosis get to let in refugees who common sense tells us likely conceal terrorists in their midst. It is still fundamental humanism to harbor sincere concerns and take reasonable precautions about people whose brothers and sisters celebrated in the streets after the attacks of 9/11.

  John F. Kennedy assured the nation that the pope would not sit by his elbow in the White House. He told the truth. Barack Obama assured this country that he was a good Christian. He did not tell the truth. But he did have Pope Francis, “Lenin’s pope,” as I have called him in other books, sitting by his elbow. Francis’s socialist pronouncements have become the new orthodoxy of the Church of Liberalism. It is so explicit that more than two hundred scholars and priests signed a letter accusing Francis of spreading heresy, according to Politico.5

  Kennedy’s policies were permitted to continue by the election of Lyndon B. Johnson. Obama’s policies were repudiated by the wholesale rejection of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election—a rejection that turns out to have been even larger than we knew, now that voter fraud in a state she “won,” New Hampshire, has been proven.

  I mentioned earlier that there are nine Muslim mayors of cities in Great Britain. One could argue that there is no cause for hysteria because none of them has said anything incendiary or contrary to Western values. Let’s assume that’s correct. This is also true: There are presently fifteen–twenty million Muslims living in the European Union. That number is expected to double by 2025—just a few years from now.6 Should the United Kingdom just assume everything is going to be fine? Should the English be complacent about Tower Hamlets in East London, a borough that is referred to locally as the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets?

  I am by nature a thoughtful man. I do not want to participate in spreading unrest or being caught up in mass hysteria. But I am also not naïve. Unless and until some of these British mayors come forward and acknowledge the simmering fear and concern, the way JFK did; until just one of them takes actions that repudiate the transformation of the nation into a sharia or Islamic state; until then, I will continue to be vigilant. The joke buried in all of this is that while unvetted Muslims are permitted in the United Kingdom, I am not. In 2009, without specifying why, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith—whose U.S. counterpart, perhaps coincidentally, was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—made me one of sixteen people
banned from her country’s shores as a “threat to national security.” Others in that group include Yunis Al-Astal, who heads the terrorist group Hamas, and former KKK grand wizard Stephen Donald Black.7

  On one level, I don’t care. I live in a sanctuary city that is being devoured from within; I don’t need to visit a sanctuary nation undergoing the same transformation, the same fate. But as a humanist, I do care. Hysteria against reasonable voices of dissent can be just as damning as hysteria promoting a false or dangerous narrative.

  JFK wasn’t a great president. He mismanaged the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, which failed to overthrow Castro. He allowed the Cuban Missile Crisis to spiral out of control, causing a short-lived mass hysteria that the United States was going to suffer a nuclear attack. He even went on television to suggest the risk was real and that he intended to establish a naval blockade to isolate Cuba. If JFK had known anything about his Soviet adversary, Nikita Khrushchev, he would have understood that the man was a game player. Khrushchev had risen to power in 1953, in the power vacuum of the post-Stalin era, partly through inimitable bluster that played exceptionally well in the media, including his famous threat “We will bury you!” leveled at the West in 1956 as well as removing his shoe and pounding it on a desk at the United Nations in 1960 to protest comments about Soviet repression in Eastern Europe.

  Kennedy was a man who understood the importance of image but not of political theater. Think of him as the Kim Jung-un of his day—well-heeled, armed, and tucked snugly into a phalanx of yes-men and repression. JFK and his advisers believed Khrushchev might be crazy and acted accordingly. While the media in the United States went berserk for two weeks in October 1962, showing Kennedy and his advisers meeting late into the night, looking grim and haggard, the Soviet premier smiled and went to the Bolshoi Theater.8 9 10

  Eventually, a backroom deal ended the crisis. The Cuban missiles were removed in exchange for the United States dismantling missiles in Turkey that were aimed at the Soviet Union. The deal should have happened on day one, but the hysteria revved up by the crisis team in Washington and disseminated by the media had to play out. Unfortunately, there had been no one at Kennedy’s side to say, “Jack—remember how you rationally and intelligently confronted the Catholic issue without overreacting? Do that here.”

  THE NEW HYSTERIA

  Mass hysteria did not accompany the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963. I remember spotty concerns about whether the republic would fall, but those seemed more emotional than realistic. Television helped us through: it was the first time such extensive remote coverage had been attempted, and it came off in a way that did the medium proud. The nation mourned as one. It would be six years before we did anything in unity again, briefly coming together to celebrate the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon—an event that also caused a growth spurt in television as live pictures were broadcast from the moon. Before and after that historic day, however, the nation was defined by bitter divisions on the left and right, among races, among pacifists and warriors, among the young and the old, among dopers and straights. In short, it was as if everyone had become hysterical.

  It was not like any kind of hysteria we had seen before. In 1964, young girls went crazy for the Beatles, but we had seen that for Frank Sinatra in the 1940s and Elvis in the 1950s. Today Instagram is the new mass hysteria for girls. They seem to believe they cannot exist without constant “likes” of their computer-augmented self-portraits. There was a war in Vietnam but, at first, when President Johnson escalated the conflict in 1964–65, it was still much less of a war than Korea, which was just a little over ten years old and remained fresh in people’s minds. There was concern about civil rights, especially after JFK and his attorney general and brother Robert kicked open some college doors in the South. Johnson applied real federal muscle to the problem, and while there was spotty panic in the South, the nation generally approved of what he was doing. I remember thinking at the time, I wonder if the South will try to secede again? but the question was more rhetorical than practical. Blacks represented a double-digit percentage of the population in most southern states. And their voting rights were federally protected now, thanks to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  But that era also introduced new hysterias and new hysterics, as well. The Beatles were a tremendous, unprecedented, and for nearly ten years a nearly unstoppable force for change in music, coiffure, clothing, spiritualism… pretty much everything. Why do I say “nearly” unstoppable? Because in 1966, John Lennon created a hysteria that nearly derailed an upcoming United States tour and featured a cameo from the always-ready-for-a-fight KKK.

  Lennon had given an interview in 1966 in which he said, without malice or judgment, that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus right now,” and added “I don’t know which will go first—rock and roll or Christianity.”11

  The quote first appeared in an English newspaper and caused no reaction whatsoever. Nor should it have. It was not theological or judgmental. It was simply about numbers. But when it was reprinted in an American magazine, southern radio stations misrepresented it in an attempt to try to stop the changes being wrought by the Beatles juggernaut. They stopped playing Beatles songs and organized bonfires that were fueled with Beatles records and memorabilia. Images of hysterical, enthusiastic crowds were frighteningly reminiscent of the book burnings in Nazi Germany just a quarter century earlier. The band came close to canceling the tour; when it didn’t, the Ku Klux Klan picketed the venues where the Beatles were playing.

  Nevertheless, the hysteria over Lennon’s comment frightened the Beatles and helped motivate the group to abandon touring in favor of focusing on its studio work. As Lennon would later remark, “[I]f I hadn’t said [the comment about Jesus] and upset the very Christian Ku Klux Klan, well, Lord, I might still be up there with all the other performing fleas! God bless America. Thank you, Jesus.”12

  The Beatles’ reaction to the threats proved to be to culture’s benefit: the first album the group produced after its renewed dedication to studio work was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, a revered recording that helped give birth to the “concept album.”

  Hysteria elbowed its way in again toward the end of the decade when those demographic and sociological schisms I mentioned above converged and clashed over two issues: the out-of-control war in Vietnam—our nation’s first televised war, with unfiltered footage shown nightly on the news, in color—and the militancy of the black population. And what triggered the eruption of mass hysteria on both sides were the back-to-back assassinations in 1968 of civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King in April, and then antiwar icon and 1968 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy in June.

  For a nation still coming to terms with the murder of a president, the outrage over these killings was unable to be contained. The death of Dr. King in April resulted in the so-called Holy Week Uprising, with riots taking place in the nation’s capital, Baltimore, Kansas City, Detroit, and Chicago, among other places. President Johnson wanted force applied where it was needed and believed—perhaps rightly—that the violence wasn’t just about Dr. King but about the war draft, about the war itself, about poverty, about countless other social ills. As Johnson told his press secretary, George Christian, “When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.” For that reason, Johnson also seized this opportunity to push the wide-ranging social programs that were stalled in Congress. I remember one reason New York City was relatively calm was because Mayor John Lindsay went up to Harlem to urge calm and reassure the black community that City Hall was doing everything it could to fight poverty. Like JFK before him, Lindsay was in earnest, and they believed him.

  The hysteria quickly burned off and turned to mourning. The holdout was the Black Panther Party, founded in 1966 as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and devoted to that cause.13 By the end of 1968, however, with g
roup-high membership at two thousand, the mission and tactics had changed. Violence, robbery, extortion, and murder were its tools, and the FBI branded it a “black nationalist hate group.” The group increasingly lost influence through the next decade, to be replaced in these times by the equally hostile, violent Black Lives Matter organization—funded to a great extent by that all-around disturber of civil societies worldwide, George Soros.

  The Black Panthers dissipated because anger and hysteria cannot be sustained, especially when people refuse to sign on. The vast majority of blacks were too busy trying to educate their children and build their communities to dedicate the time, energy, and resources to being militant. Many knew great strides had been made in a few short years and were willing to work with the Establishment. At the time, the name of the game was still one America.

  HIPPIES, YIPPIES, AND HYSTERICS

  Vietnam was a different matter. Everyone knew someone who was serving there. Most of us knew of someone who had died there. And the death count continued to rise as progress against the communists continued to slow. It wasn’t so much spoken of at the time, but I got the feeling America was sick of fighting communists. It was like crying wolf. Where was the threat? Our system was clearly not in jeopardy. Communism was no longer a monolithic, Stalinist entity. It was openly repressive in Eastern Europe, impoverished throughout the Soviet Union, and militarized in sections of China… but poor and starving elsewhere in the vast nation. Cuba was a puppet state without the means to do us harm. And Vietnam had less meaning to most Americans than any of those.