Stop Mass Hysteria

by Michael Savage

  So? What exactly does that say? First, “on record” is limited to roughly a century. And eighth lowest… relative to what? When was the lowest, what is the context, what does it mean besides the fact that NASA is funded by the government and studies like these help keep the dollars flowing?

  But even NASA is not impervious to the truth. In late 2017, it released evidence of a mantle plume—a naturally occurring heat source—deep below Antarctica. The new findings revealed that water levels within Antarctica’s rivers and lakes ebb and flow rapidly. Where this happens, there’s friction. Where there’s friction, there’s heat. And where there’s heat, ice melts.

  NASA’s conclusion was that changes in geothermal conditions cause warmer water to move closer to the ice sheet covering Antarctica, which in turn generates natural loss of ice.

  If you haven’t heard about this study—“Influence of a West Antarctic Mantle Plume on Ice Sheet Basal Conditions”—don’t be surprised. There’s more money in creating hysteria over climate change allegations than in understanding and explaining natural phenomenon.11

  The data cannot be much plainer, but activists who have experienced twenty, thirty, forty winters in their lives are convinced that it’s getting warmer, that hurricanes are more ferocious and frequent, that our actions will doom us the way acid rain did in the 1970s. Except that that particular hysteria du jour, acid rain, went away with reasonable desulfurization processes. I daresay that most young climate hysterics never heard of that end-of-the-world phenomenon.

  But the use of weather as a terror tactic and profit center does not stop there. No one would say that islands and cities in the way of hurricanes should not take precautions to protect themselves. Hurricanes are unpredictable by nature, and the so-called cone of uncertainty in their tracks is valid meteorology. And certainly Hurricane Harvey hit Texas with merciless destructive force. There, the alerts were appropriate. But as I’ve said elsewhere in this book, the more viewers tune in to the weather on TV and the more they click on weather apps, the more money the providers make. So weather-focused media outlets are going to push the limits of responsible forecasting to ramp up doom scenarios. And not just a day or two before, but a week or two before. The weathercasts make these “events” part of our pop culture psyche with their superlatives of “the biggest” or “the strongest” storm ever. During the Florida landfall of Hurricane Irma in the fall of 2017, I know people who were watching it unfold on a Sunday night as if it were reality TV. After Irma, Hurricane Jose came barreling through the Northern Leeward Islands, causing stunning devastation.12

  Almost at once, it was setting its sights on the East Coast of the United States. We were warned this was the first time that the Atlantic had two hurricanes with winds of more than 150 mph at the same time. Obviously, climate change had to be the cause and the North Atlantic states were on edge over the trajectory, fearing a catastrophic rerun of Hurricane Sandy from 2012.

  That was September 8. By September 18, Jose had vacillated between a tropical storm and a Category 1 hurricane but, in any case, it was only going to graze the Sandy-traumatized region. That didn’t stop the news media from headlining that Jose would “hit” Long Island. You had to click on the story to find there was only going to be rain and waves. The populace could relax… until the next Atlantic storm could be turned into the “worst ever.” But the meteorologists had another one in the batter’s box, Hurricane Maria, which was going to impact the Leeward Islands again. But to tweak some fear, we were also told that would cause dangerous surf and rip currents from Delaware through Massachusetts. I have been to a lot of beaches around the world and I have never seen one that is not regularly subjected to dangerous surf and rip currents. How is that even newsworthy, except to stir fear? How is it newsworthy, in the United States, for a Maria headline to say: “To go outside… is to play with death” with no more information than that. It is lurid, in the way that yellow journalism has always embraced.

  We have seen enough megastorms in our lifetime to treat them with great, great respect. There was Katrina in 2005. Before that, I remember Hurricane Carla slamming Houston on TV. Coverage of that storm in 1961 gave young Texas reporter Dan Rather his first national exposure. But quiet caution and occasional updates does not fix people’s eyes to their TVs or devices. Constant attention and hysteria are needed for that. What’s astonishing is that we keep falling for it in every walk of life. Not just the big storm but the big game, the news item you won’t believe unless you click on it, the trial of the century, as if O. J. Simpson mattered as much as the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, in which the subject of evolution being taught in schools was the issue.

  I’ll say it again because it merits repeating. The subject is not climate or extreme weather, it’s money. The greening of earth is not about grass but dollar bills. That is the real inconvenient truth.

  We are now in the era of “treason chic,” in which activists hysterically subvert the United States as a way of expressing their individuality. Hand in hand with this hate-filled hysteria are the daily baseless accusations against President Trump, which range from the conflated to the absurd. The left has moved mass hysteria from an organically occurring phenomenon into a social justice tactic. In the process, it is cutting its own collective throat—and potentially taking us with it.

  15.

  FROM TREASON TO TOMORROW

  Mass Hysteria on Overdrive

  In 1791, a middle-aged white man published his memoirs. I read it in high school. I doubt many people do so, today. They should. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin lays out in concise, witty language how a nation is born and how individuals can participate in or even precipitate that process.

  To the latter point, while aware that colonials who proposed war with England were committing treason, Franklin explained how a native military came to be born in Pennsylvania. One word: need. He wrote:

  With respect to defense, Spain having been several years at war against Great Britain, and being at length join’d by France, which brought us into great danger; and the laboured and long-continued endeavour of our governor, Thomas, to prevail with our Quaker Assembly to pass a militia law, and make other provisions for the security of the province, having proved abortive, I determined to try what might be done by a voluntary association of the people. To promote this, I first wrote and published a pamphlet, entitled Plain Truth, in which I stated our defenceless situation in strong lights, with the necessity of union and discipline for our defense, and promis’d to propose in a few days an association, to be generally signed for that purpose. The pamphlet had a sudden and surprising effect. I was call’d upon for the instrument of association, and having settled the draft of it with a few friends, I appointed a meeting of the citizens in the large building before mentioned.1

  Once armed and, more important, organized to defend the motherland in proxy wars, a colonial army was able—and willing, and eventually motivated—to defend itself.

  Treason was slippery, then. We were Americans, we were British subjects, we were torn. Good men like Benedict Arnold, who had a heroic record of leadership during the early days of the Revolution, were driven by circumstance or pride to return to the service of King George—to Arnold’s eventual discredit, since he picked the losing side.

  Franklin defended our revolution by declaring, “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”2 He is not incorrect, of course, though there is some wiggle room in the definition of tyrant. That leeway does not apply to the hysterical traitors who sought to undermine the United States over the last few years.

  Hysteria—and treason—do not require a long fuse. At times they only need paranoia and a desire to lash out at someone or some institution.

  Chelsea Manning, thirty-one, served as a U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Iraq while she was still Bradley Manning. In 2010, WikiLeaks began posting some of the 750,000 classified and/or sensitive military and government documents Manning had smuggled out and forwarded. Why? According to an a
rmy psychiatrist, Manning felt isolated due to his gender identity issues in the extremely masculine environment.3 Which begged the question: What did Manning expect to find in the army? Arrest, court-martial, and prison followed. What came after that is beyond belief: prison treatment to correct his “gender dysphoria,” paid for by the military, and then her thirty-five-year sentence commuted by that traitor of a different kind, Barack Obama. Just how much does that man hate this nation? And just how hysterical is the nation? Obama got a pass for that, but Trump was derided for pardoning former Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona for criminal contempt due to his supposed racial profiling of people he suspected of crossing into the United States illegally through his jurisdiction along the nation’s southern border. The reaction to Trump is, at every level, hysteria. Yet the fawning over Manning wasn’t finished. In September 2017, there was very briefly an offer for Manning to be a “visiting fellow” at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. That incomprehensible honor was very quickly withdrawn.4

  And then there’s Michael Isaacson, twenty-nine, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who tweeted this on August 23, 2017: “Some of y’all might think it sucks being an anti-fascist teaching at John Jay College but I think it’s a privilege to teach future dead cops.”5 Technically, that does not fall under the category of treason. But it does smack of sedition and reeks of stupidity. John Jay College let Isaacson go—eventually.

  What these three individuals share are flashes of indignation that resulted in an impulsive act—hysteria—that allowed each of them to burn, briefly, like a supernova. Not one of them professed an ounce of thought, of talking their deed out with another, and only Manning was ever apologetic, which people being court-martialed often are. His explanation, in court, is stupefying:

  I am sorry that my actions hurt people. I’m sorry that they hurt the United States. I am sorry for the unintended consequences of my actions. When I made these decisions I believed I was going to help people, not hurt people.… At the time of my decisions I was dealing with a lot of issues.

  I am not a psychiatrist and have not personally met Chelsea Manning or Michael Isaacson. I cannot say what is inside their heads, only what they did. I would not like to meet any of them over dinner, since I value digestion, though I’d be happy to interview them on my show. But that will never happen. Even if they agreed, they would say everything they have to say in about ten seconds. There’s nothing more to say about hysteria.

  As long as we have left-leaning organizations leaping like panthers to defend these extremists—as the ACLU and GLAAD did with Manning—there will be no incentive to act responsibly and serve the common, national, rational good.

  And while they may not fit the legal standards of treason, acts like these are in a tragic, antisocial, or even sociopathic class by themselves.

  HYPOCRISY AND HYSTERIA

  Mass hysteria in America has had a long, destructive journey. There is something almost biblical about its immortal nature and its ability to take many guises—now a serpent in Eden, encouraging the rejection of authority. Now a frenzy at the foot of Mount Sinai, as monotheism is repudiated for a traditional Golden Calf. Now a crowd calling for the life of the thief Barabbas over that of Jesus, driven to hysteria by the whispers of pro-Roman voices. And it’s not yet through. Like an infectious disease, hysteria continues to morph. It can be big and global or it can be scalpel-precise. Today, uniquely, it can be both. Whereas it took some effort for a Cotton Mather or Carrie Nation to get into a position where people noticed, while the communists in czarist Russia had to print handbills on concealed presses and clandestinely pass them out—all it takes now to start a social fire is a blog, a tweet, or a hashtag.

  In late summer 2017, a pair of liberal Hollywood lions stirred mass hysteria from their den on the West Coast. Rob Reiner—who began his career as “Meathead” on All in the Family—and Morgan Freeman helped launch a group predicated on a delusion I told you about at the start of this book, when I wrote about “positive hallucinations or hysteria”—people believe things are real, absent evidence, just because someone says so. According to a statement on the website of the Committee to Investigate Russia, “The Russian Active Measures campaign aimed at the United States has been exposed. Using hacking, Twitter armies, and fake news, the Kremlin engaged in an aggressive effort to subvert the American democratic process.” In a video he made for the launch, Freeman says, “We need our president to speak directly to us and tell us the truth. We need him to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office and say ‘My fellow Americans, during this past election, we came under attack by the Russian government.’”6

  The website and Morgan Freeman both declare, as fact, something that is not only untrue but is demonstrably untrue. Why? Because their own hysteria dies hard. They still cannot accept that Hillary Clinton lost the election. In effect, what they are asking is that Donald Trump tell the electorate that if not for Russia, Hillary would be sitting behind his desk. What is at once amusing and painfully sad is that neither of these men seems to be aware of how much the name of their group, “Committee to Investigate Russia,” sounds like something from the McCarthy era, when anti-Soviet rhetoric was coming from the far right. Rhetoric that, to a one, they all decry.

  Almost at once, nearly sixty-five thousand people followed the Facebook page of the Committee to Investigate Russia. That is how mass hysteria works today. A celebrity promulgates positive hysteria and the doped-out and/or starstruck and/or aging hippie population listens. The good news is, social media “events” tend to have the life span of a mayfly. As the days pass and the committee asks for donations or sends email updates that blend into the dozens of other email updates these people receive, their attention will wander. As the committee fails to present real evidence to support its thesis, those followers will turn their hysteria to the next fad du jour. And on and on.

  Actually, most of those followers probably forgot about the committee in a day or two after attending a Paul McCartney concert. The college kids, ex-hippies, and urban leftist elites group-hugged by singing former Beatles bandmate John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” Arriving or going home stoned, they lacked the mental faculties to process reality. Did they imagine Kim Jung-un was listening? Will that stop him from publicly executing McCartney’s fellow musicians by strapping them to the muzzles of antiaircraft guns, as the Transnational Justice Working Group in Seoul has reported? Will a song prevent Kim from turning countless North Korean girls into sex slaves? What about the ayatollahs in Iran? Would Hitler have listened to the message of “Give Peace a Chance”? Should Abraham Lincoln have listened, allowing the Confederacy to coexist with the United States and permitting slavery to continue by giving peace a chance? Barack Obama did that in Iraq, to his eternal shame, and gave the world ISIS. It’s on his head that the terrorists he dismissed as “JV,” junior varsity, killed 170,000 Christians and Shiites, and took thousands of women as sex slaves. Where is the Rob Reiner/Morgan Freeman committee or peacenik sing-along for them? You won’t see one, of course. Reality does not fit these people’s pie-in-the-sky narrative. That is the fundamental flaw of liberalism: the inability to carry a thought beyond a mantra.

  The stoners on the left can barely carry a cogent thought beyond the time it takes to swipe left or right on Tinder, yet they can carry grudges for decades. Remember how I told you during the HUAC hearings actor Robert Taylor testified against communists in his industry? He had been so popular everywhere else in the world, his films made so much money for MGM, that the studio named one of their soundstages after him. By 1990, MGM had vacated the Culver City lot and it was then Lorimar Studios. The already leftist Hollywood decided that Taylor did not merit that honor because he “named names” during the hearings. His name was removed. The political madness as conceptualized by Antonio Gramsci was already taking root. Remove the identity and you socialize the community.

  Thousands of sociopaths and haters, their mania still immature, ca
n find countless reasons to explode into full, hysterical flower. And there are equally underdeveloped thinkers, especially in the entertainment industry, whose narcissism spurs them to “lead.” (If they didn’t crave attention, they wouldn’t be actors and musicians who intentionally place themselves in the public eye.) There may even be a valid social point in what someone is saying. But carried aloft on the shoulders of a mob, its impotent rage suddenly unleashed, power and attention inflate a conversation into a confrontation, a query into a demand, a thought into a mandate. This can happen overnight, without the time it takes to refine or rethink an idea. It took intellectual giant Thomas Jefferson seventeen days to take to write the approximately 1,300 words of the Declaration of Independence. Tweets and blogs are authored by emotion-charged narcissists, out-of-power politicians, and bitter, entitled whiners in a snit at Starbucks.

  ACTING HYSTERICAL

  I’m going to leave you with what may be some of the most important cautionary tales of the book, since they are happening now. They involve our entertainers and cherished, pervasive art forms, and they show the dire results of mass hysteria sharpened to a laser point, what I call “focused hysteria.” Focused hysteria allows you to destroy more things faster—not just institutions but careers. Like the Nazis in occupied nations, it allows you to line citizens up against a wall to be shot, creating a fearful object lesson for the rest of the population.