Stop Mass Hysteria

by Michael Savage

  There was also a very fundamental question of legality, which the liberals ignored—just as they have always ignored the law of the land. Models and actors creating pornography were paid. They were being compensated for having sex. That’s prostitution. That’s illegal. For that reason alone, the industry should have been shut down.

  But it wasn’t. The debate died down with the coming of the Internet and the notion that everyone can be a porn star on pay sites catering to every taste, every fetish. That is what the liberals have wrought, the easy promulgation of mental pollution to every device in everyone’s pocket or purse and the regular, ceaseless consumption of work hours, family time, and economy. And that’s not all. There is one area of the report that I find particularly fascinating and especially relevant today. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop conducted workshops and one of his conclusions was that “[p]rolonged use of pornography increases beliefs that less common sexual practices are more common.”24 We need only look around at the nation today to see how that truth has flourished. Every gay pride parade grows thicker with flags for different subsets of lesbians, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and supporting persons. And those are just the public expressions. I am unaware, but would not be surprised, to find that there are flags or symbols for sick fetishists, bondage enthusiasts, sadomasochists, and acts your mother could not imagine.

  I strongly disagree with people who say that these obsessions are nature, not nurture. Even if I allowed that homosexuality is nature, I do not believe it is what God intended. There is increasing and persuasive evidence that the chemical changes to women’s bodies, caused by the advent of the birth control pill in the 1960s, has created a generation of sexual abnormality. A science has grown up around that idea, epigenetics, and one of the foundational ideas is that since every fetus is exposed to hormonal fluctuations, the artificial hormones in the pill may have triggered an increase in homosexuality.

  What Surgeon General Koop posited has come to pass. Artificially bred sexuality, masquerading as “nature,” and psychologically impaired nurture have conspired to legitimize qualities that should properly be dealt with on a psychiatrist’s couch. We do that with rapists, flashers, pedophiles, and nymphomaniacs. I’m not talking about degree, because violent sexual beings should be taken off the streets, not gays or transgenders. But to Gilberto Vitale, New York’s infamous “Cannibal Cop,” who, in 2013, allegedly wanted to abduct for gang rape, and then cook and eat, women.25 That was normal. I did a quick check on his fetish. It’s got a name, gynophagia, and it has a Twitter presence with hundreds of followers.

  The question is, why should any nonnormative sexual expression be treated as nature? Does anyone emerge from the womb already thinking they should pursue gynophagia? Why is “nature” the default, and who gets to decide what is or isn’t natural? I can answer that. The primary purpose of sex is procreation. Yes, there are ancillary aspects such as love and intimacy and pleasure. But any other primary justification does not come from nature. As I have stated numerous times over the years on my radio program, I am a sexual libertarian. If it is consensual and does not harm or include children, it is not the business of government.

  Of course, a quiet conversation about the previous paragraph cannot be had. The hysterical, screaming liberal advocates of anything goes (except heterosexuality, even if you agree to be called the profoundly unnecessary new coinage “cis-gendered,” which means you identify as the gender of your birth)—these pathologically irrational progressives won’t allow the discussion to be had. I believe strongly in many positions but I am not a strict ideologue. If people have rational ideas, I want to hear them. It’s what I do every weekday on the radio. But it is almost universal that liberals who phone my radio show are hysterics who place the call to shout memes, spit bile, and depart—convincing no one and hearing nothing.

  MANUFACTURED EVIL

  Children can be manipulated. We saw this in the Salem Witch Trials, when it was done with malicious intent, even if the full repercussions of their actions weren’t clear to them. Sometimes, though, children manipulate adults often without trying. There was a little-known phenomenon from Louisiana, in 1939, that illustrates this point. The Twitching Epidemic of 1939 began when a teenage girl started to suffer uncontrollable twitching in her right leg during a school dance, either from anxiety, using muscles she didn’t ordinarily use, or a medical cause like alkalosis (the amount of acid in her blood). The twitching continued for weeks and soon a half dozen of her female classmates were experiencing it as well. Hysterical parents took their children out of the school, and shortly thereafter the malady stopped just as suddenly as it started. It turned out the cause was psychological; “Twitching Mary” did not really know how to dance and her malady was a subconscious expression of that. It was also a way of getting attention from her boyfriend, whom she apparently didn’t want dancing with other girls. Her fellow students? They became what they beheld. Psychosomatic illness caused by hysteria.26

  A similar hysteria happened in 1989 at a youth center in Florida. Sandwiches were provided each lunchtime, and when one girl vomited because of what she’d eaten, other kids started complaining of nausea, headaches, cramps, and similar ailments. In just over half an hour, 63 of the 150 children were ill and more than a third of them had thrown up. The children were taken to hospitals, but no illness was uncovered. Laboratory tests on the sandwiches also came back negative. As with the twitching, it was the power of suggestion—group hysteria.

  But sometimes, adults manipulate children—and this has the potential to ruin lives and destroy communities.27 I know I don’t have to say this, but I will: our children are sacred. It breaks my heart to see latchkey kids around my own city, getting into trouble while they are still adolescents because they are being raised by a single mother who is working and have no strong male role models who are willing to step up and fill the role of absent fathers. If there is any deep-set rot in American society, the decay of the family is it. Children who do not have their parents around often look for attention. That is what happened in the summer of 1983, when a new wave of hysteria crisscrossed the nation, fueled by moral horror. That new panic was the preschool Satanism scandals.

  It began with the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, which was run by Virginia McMartin and her daughter Peggy. A male boy’s painful bowel movements led to an investigation of sodomy—a teacher and the boy’s estranged father were the alleged perpetrators—and though the boy’s testimony was wildly inconsistent, he added that McMartin staff had sex with animals and that the teacher could fly. The charges shifted to embrace the existence of a satanic cult operating in the area, possibly as a result of abuse therapy clinic interviews that, to put it mildly, asked leading questions. Arrests followed that year. After years of highly publicized criminal trials with no convictions obtained, the charges were dropped in 1990. Everything from withheld prosecution evidence to false memory syndrome was blamed for the witch hunt and its failure. What is astonishing is that the hysteria whipped itself up again as parents engaged an archaeologist to investigate whether there were secret tunnels under the school. There weren’t. A fact that the trial did find, however, is that the mother who had first made the allegations, the mother who was having trouble with her former husband, had psychological issues.

  What was sickeningly prophetic about this trial—which was the most expensive ever, at $15 million, if not quite “the trial of the century”—is that the media generally bought the point of view of the Los Angeles County prosecutors that something was going on there. You know, where there’s brimstone there’s fire. Leave it to the already-corrupted New York Times to put a self-serving face on what was widespread media rush to judgment: “Publicity surrounding that case helped focus attention on what many experts saw as a long-neglected problem.”28

  The McMartin travesty caused a spate of allegations nationwide about Devil worship going on at day care centers with ritual abuse (sexual and otherwise), blood-dr
inking, animal sacrifice, and more. It was so widespread that the phenomenon even got its own acronym, SRA—satanic ritual abuse. One of the last of the thirteen major cases in North America occurred in 1992, in Saskatchewan, Canada. In overturning the conviction of the woman who ran a babysitting service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police finally called the nine-year odyssey what it was: “emotional hysteria.”29

  What is particularly tragic is that it is possible that somewhere amid all the wild lies about all various centers, there may have been some tragic truth—not about satanism but about child pornography or abuse. We will never know. The opportunity to get to the truth was crowded out by hysteria over the most sensational charges, which discredited similar claims.

  HYSTERIA BEGETS HYSTERICALS

  There’s an absurdist, surreal juxtaposition of the McMartin case with another event that involved children in 1983. Despite all this, adults were again willing to act irrationally and hurt one another based on the words of the young… only this time it had nothing to do with the Devil.

  In 1983, the manufacturer of Cabbage Patch Kids dolls had woefully underestimated demand. Stores that had received a few hundred of the dolls faced thousands of determined adults… if someone unwilling to say no to a six-year-old can be called an adult. Nonetheless, parents wanted their children to have the pinch-faced rags for all the reasons any child would want a doll—but also for status.30

  This hysteria was manufactured in perhaps the truest sense of the word. In 1982, toy company Coleco licensed the dolls from the original manufacturer. At that time each doll was made by hand, a distinctive creation. The next year, instead of hand-crafting Cabbage Patch Kids, Coleco mass-produced them. They also cut the price from $125 to $25 and mounted an aggressive television campaign.31 The company held a mass adoption ceremony in Boston; part of the gimmick was that these dolls came with names and birth certificates. They weren’t bought, they became part of your family.32

  Coleco executives expected a modest hit. What they got was a craze. The company had made two million dolls. Thanks in part to each doll’s perceived uniqueness, and in part to their resale value, adults weren’t just buying one per child. The entire run sold out by early October but the demand continued.

  Humorists picked up on the craze. A disc jockey announced that two thousand dolls would be air dropped on a stadium. Anyone who wanted one should bring a catcher’s mitt and, if lucky enough to catch one, should hold up a credit card so people in the plane could photograph it for payment.

  A dozen people, gullible and hysterical, showed up.33

  Coleco stepped up its production. But as each new shipment hit stores, it sold out. Some retailers advertised for shoppers who had bought several dolls and who might be willing to part with them for above what they had paid, but below what the store would resell them for.

  With Christmas approaching and the demand not slacking, parents began to panic. There was no Internet to spread the word in real time as to which stores had received new shipments, so parents would line up and wait for toy stores to open. Those lucky enough to grab a doll had to run gauntlets in order to get to a checkout counter, and many had the dolls ripped from their grasp by other shoppers. When shoppers fell, they were often trampled.

  A riot in a Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, store may not have been the worst of hundreds of similar incidents, but it was captured on video—a rarity for the time. I get sick when I watch it, not because of the unchecked consumerism, but because of the feral hysteria embodied in each and every shopper like rogue coyotes. In the footage, a clerk stands on a counter waving a baseball bat at crowds of shoppers and screaming at them. In the background, panicked store workers throw dolls into the crowd. At least one shopper suffered a broken leg.34

  The riots meant more media coverage. The additional million dolls Coleco produced before Christmas still didn’t meet demand.

  One would expect children to be upset and disappointed, which is why parents have a responsibility to step in and manage expectations. But that assumes someone managed theirs. At the time, mothers freely voiced their tremendous indignation at the lack of dolls. In news reports they wondered aloud what they were going to tell their children on Christmas morning? That you were good but Santa ran short? The elves were unionized and took too many breaks?

  The hysteria was pathetic, and it died down as Coleco caught up with its back orders; the gotta-have-it mania passed because people could have it. There was no natural selection, no survival of the fittest. Yet the company actually managed to go broke in 1988,35 in large part because management believed that the hysteria was about the inherent superiority of their product and not about the underlying greed, status-craving, and inability to treat children like children rather than as entitled little tyrants. Their video game system, ColecoVision, and add-on computer, Adam, were massively overproduced for a demand that never materialized.

  The hysteria was neither unique nor informative. Some of us had seen it before, such as with the national craze in 1954, coonskin caps from Disney’s Davy Crockett TV series. They suffered a shortage because, selling at a rate of five thousand a day, there were no more raccoons from which to remove the tails that hung down the back of the cap.36 The key word, in both this instance and that of the Cabbage Patch Kids instances, is shortage. In 1958, the nation had a Hula Hoop craze, those plastic rings you twirled on your hips. The manufacturer was making more than fifty thousand hoops a day. But there were enough to go around—thus no hysteria.

  None of that must-have mania was new, but here’s what is informative about the Cabbage Patch Kids. The girls and boys receiving those dolls are in their early forties today. The grandchildren of the indulgent parents are in college. Seen in that context, self-centered righteousness on university campuses makes sense. Each of those students at Berkeley and elsewhere who protests speeches by conservatives is acting out the same hysteria they saw modeled for them by their parents; they, and their “muscle” AntiFA, conspire to decide who gets trampled. Never mind that another kid wants a doll, or to hear a speaker with a different viewpoint. They can’t have that. And the parent—in this case, the university—indulges them. Cause and effect is as predictable as the seasons.

  And not everything changed after the Cabbage Patch Kids craze died. Every Christmas season still brings “door buster” sales with temptingly low prices for a limited supply of hot items. What used to be a President’s Day car sale is now an “event.” Each new Apple device debuts with long lines outside each Apple Store. Hyperbolic marketing is now designed to stir hysteria. If it hadn’t been for a decade of severe recession ended by Donald trump, one can only wonder in what uncharted territory consumerism would have taken us.

  POLITICAL MADNESS AND THE DEATH OF COMMON SENSE

  There are few terms in the English language that have done more harm and stirred more passion than politically correct. It suggests a kid-glove approach to reality that offends by failing to offend; that is, it self-censors many of the very topics we should be talking about. And it has changed from being a thoughtful way to crafting speech to frankly a dumb form of self-censorship to something much more dangerous—a repudiation of the very differences that the Social Justice Warriors and diversity police claim to want.

  The term politically correct appears in a 1793 Supreme Court decision discussing the difference between “the United States” and “the people of the United States.” According to the Court, the latter is “politically correct,” since it is the people who brought the United States into existence. That is why the people and not the states should be protected. A subtle adjunct to this idea occurred after the Civil War. Until then, many reporters and ordinary civilians said of our nation, “The United States are.” Afterward, we were one. “The United States is.”37

  Over the past two-hundred-plus years, the phrase has been perverted. Today’s idea of American political madness shifted from its noble origin and has its roots in Marxism. Ninety years ago, Italian communist Antonio Gramsci
envisioned a state in which people couldn’t resist a progressive agenda because it was impossible to articulate countering views. According to Gramsci’s scheme, such views would have been labeled shameful, and the actual vocabulary for challenging them would have been eliminated.38 This was Orwellian theory before Orwell, and leftists learned well. By labeling something politically incorrect, they believed they would stifle debate. For example, in Marxist thought there can be no class structure. The idea is that if you remove the language that indicates any ties to groups from the past, be they economic, religious, cultural, or educational, you remove the barriers between people.

  In those terms, it sounds acceptable. If you stop to think about the deeper implications for just a few seconds, however, the sinister, manipulative quality of that kind of erasure is at once apparent. A banker is just a man, a worker is just a man, and society is scrubbed of its color and texture. Our individual distinctions are the basis for our national identity: borders, language, culture.

  It wasn’t until the 1980s that modern political madness gained its toehold in the United States, thanks to academia. Professors who had been students in the Marxist-embracing 1960s now had tenure, and they wanted to use their status for power. The question was how to do it without a Russian-style revolution—which, indeed, many of them advocated. What grew, like mushrooms in this intellectual darkness, was modern political madness.

  The Western system would be permitted to stay intact—at least, that’s what radicals among both the faculty and students told administrators. They just wanted representation for their own thinking. Since “do your own thing” was the byword of the counterculture, universities went along with this. Nobody but the rabid radicals thought that their impact would weather the decade. Because the radicals were not yet hysterical but intellectually grounded, they would prove the administrators very wrong.