Coronavirus Isn’t the Only Sickness in America Today

This conversation occurred in DC last fall, as we saw in the news: 

“Do you have any information regarding the president of the United States accepting any bribes?” Chris Stewart (R) asked.

“No,” Ms. Yovanovitch, former Ambassador to Ukraine, responded.

“Do you have any information regarding any criminal activity that he has been involved with at all?” the Utah Republican continued.

“No,” she said.

The day previous, Ambassador Taylor and George Kent, State Department Ukraine expert, were both asked to point out an impeachable offence the president committed. Neither man said a word in response to the challenge from John Ratcliffe (R).

Yovanovitch was dismissed from her position in May, months before the July 25th phone call. Neither Taylor nor Kent have anything but second or thirdhand hearsay information. Neither have ever met Trump, or spoken with him on the phone. Since then, documents have been released that show that the ambassador lied during much of her testimony regarding her self described lack of knowledge about Burisma, the company at the center of the impeachment scandal.

But the Democrats impeached Trump on this sort of testimony. And, since then, we’ve learned that Joe Biden lied, that what Trump accused him of is very probably true. We’ve learned that Biden’s son, Hunter, has received millions of dollars through selling access to his father, the vice president. We’ve learned that Biden himself lied when he told Americans that he never discussed his son’s business affairs with him. Now, we find out Joe Biden actually met with people his son did business with, that his son consulted him at every turn.
So just what is going on here? Why do so many democrats believe every spurious and specious claim made about President Trump? Why do they so casually and without thought accept the lies from their own party?

I’ve thought long and hard about this. An offhand comment made on my Facebook feed by a friend pointed me in what I believe to be the right direction.

Democrats and Never Trumpers are suffering from a mass psychogenic illness, defined as a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief and sometimes hallucinations are transmitted from one individual to another.
Honestly, I can see no other explanation for the past four years. Look at what’s gone on. 

In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the left chooses to believe that Trump is an existential evil, that conservatives are a lower form of life, with substandard IQs, are misogynistic, racist, homophobic and - well, you know the litany of insults. If you’ve participated in the public debate in any way, you’ve probably been the recipient of one, if not all, of these slurs.

Democrats also believe that Russia caused Hillary Clinton’s loss, that Trump thinks the coronavirus is a hoax, that Trump is to blame for the coronavirus epidemic, that Trump won’t leave office if voted out in 2020….it just goes on and on. This is happening despite there being no proof of any of it, and oftentimes, a great deal of fact disproving what democrats think -- often from other democrats.

Let’s look at this from the most basic level -- we all know democrats. Some are even members of our families. We know they aren’t all wild eyed, long haired communists, smoking dope and engaging in wild sexual debauchery. We know that many of them oppose the tactics of groups such as Antifa, even if their leaders seem to approve, or at any rate, not disapprove. 

We know most are reasonably intelligent, if badly misinformed, and we don’t think them to be evil.

By the same token, every democrat knows at least a few conservatives, and again, some are even members of their families. It beggars belief to think that the only conservatives a majority of democrats know are all members of the alt right, Neo Nazis, people who beat up gays, and treat women as non equals. Et cetera.

We know this can’t be the case because -- we are conservatives, we know who and what we are, and we know that very, very few of us are like that. Just as we know that very, very few democrats are the kind of person who would attack and seriously injure, over political differences, a stranger using a metal bike lock. Both extremes exist, but are a tiny fraction of the whole.

Yet -- go to the comments section of virtually any newspaper and read how democrats speak of conservatives. The language, the comments, will quickly have you despairing of any hope for reconciliation between the two sides in America.

Mass psychogenic illness, mass delusion, or mass hysteria as it’s sometimes referred to, has been defined as “a socially contagious frenzy of irrational behavior in a group of people as a reaction to an event, or alternatively, “a condition in which a large group of people exhibit similar physical or emotional symptoms, such as anxiety or extreme excitement. Also called epidemic hysteria.
Another definition from the same source states it is a “spontaneous, en masse development of identical physical or emotional symptoms among a group of people, as seen in a classroom of school children; a socially contagious frenzy of irrational behavior in a group of people as a reaction to an event.”

I apologize for the multiple definitions here, but in reviewing them, we begin to see a pattern. “Frenzy”, “socially contagious”, “irrational”, a “reaction to an event”, “anxiety”. Does this remind you of anything you’ve observed since, oh, let’s say, November 8, 2016 at about 9pm EST?

Another description of mass hysteria states that it is “a phenomenon that transmits collective illusions of threats, whether real or imaginary, through a population in society as a result of rumors and fear”. [2][3]

Doesn’t that last description define what we are seeing on the other side of the street? Illusions of threats -- conservatives are Nazis, alt-right, transphobic, haters, and so on. 

And the source of these threats? Rumors and fear stoked by rumors. And not just rumors, but by fake news stories, or stories blown wildly out of proportion by irresponsible members of the news media.

Prime example number one: the Russian collusion story. The left felt -- still feels actually -- that the voting system and American democracy itself are threatened by Russia acting in concert with conservatives. This feeling continues in spite of the evidence, as brought out in the Mueller investigation, that no Americans, including those in the Trump campaign, colluded or conspired with Russia.
Since then, we’ve found out that the entire Russian collusion issue was instigated by Hillary Clinton as a ruse to distract people from her email scandal. There never was any Russian collusion.

Do those on the left believe this? No. In fact, many claim (seriously!) that Mueller was bought off, or that his report actually does show collusion. Or -- or -- or -- anything to sustain the delusion they are suffering from.

This of course is a symptom of cognitive dissonance, which is essentially the psychological, and sometimes physical, discomfort caused when facts don’t align with one’s beliefs. According to psychologist Leon Festinger, “When confronted with facts that contradict beliefs, ideals, and values, people will try to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.”[4][5] 

How do they do this? 

According to Festinger, people seek to deal with cognitive dissonance through avoidance of “circumstances and contradictory information likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance”.

In other words, practice confirmation bias to reduce the distress. Avoid watching Fox News and don’t read the my blog, or National Review, Washington Times, or the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, since these sources generally disagree with the democrat’s chosen narrative. 

When engaged in a discussion online in which a conservative presents facts, call that person a racist and then, block them so you don’t have to hear them anymore. Refuse to speak to friends and family members who support Trump.
I’m sure we’ve all had that happen to us. In my case, it happened earlier today as a woman didn’t like me pointing out that she had no facts to back up her claims.

Getting back to mass hysteria, many people are likely to claim no such thing exists, or if it does, it’s not a modern event. That’s not true. One of the most recent mass hysteria events was the highly publicized ‘evil clown sightings’ of 2016. 

Americans, Canadians and individuals in 18 other countries were suddenly spotting people in ‘evil clown’ costumes. The Guardian has an interesting article on the genesis of the clown hysteria, which apparently started with a young boy in Greenville, SC, not far from where I’m writing this in fact. (https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/05/clown-sightings-south-carolina-alabama)

The article goes on to describe the development of the mass delusion, but one line in the article referring to those affected struck me as redolent of what we are experiencing in today’s political sphere: “They (those suffering the clown delusion) had lost all capacity for critical thought.”

One of the article’s interviewees was sociologist Robert Bartholomew, who worked at Botany College in New Zealand. He said “the current clown scare is a result of two rising forces in the US: social media, and a fear of otherness…”

Now isn’t that intriguing? A majority of Americans get their news through social media now -- and if social media is anything, it’s replete with false news. 

People have lost their ability to discern the truth in the news it seems. The fact that so many people push a false narrative that readers are blindly accepting further exacerbates the problem.

And “otherness” -- well, haven’t the media and many politicians been pushing the “otherness” of their political opponents for years now, painting those differences in dastardly hues? Could it be that what we are seeing today are the fruits of this continual bashing of one’s opponents and supporters of a different political philosophy?

Throw in a little identity politics to create even more “otherness” that excludes members of the other party and it’s starting to look like you have the recipe for a big mess of mass delusion. Does this sound even a little bit like what the left has been doing for years now? Vilify the leaders of the right, denigrate them in any way they possibly can, attack them whenever possible, à la Maxine Waters, Madonna, Sean Penn, Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon…

We’ve seen this tactic used to convince democrat voters that Trump (or GW Bush, or H. Bush, or Ronald Reagan, AG Barr, Justice Kavanaugh, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, etc.) are truly evil people. We’ll see it again, because it works, because it speaks to what democrats want to believe about Republican leaders.

This has been the playbook of democrats for years now. We’ve watched it in real time, seen the deliberate lies over and over again about Republican leaders, and the mendacity of those on the left in discussing them.

One of the most blatant of the many examples of this behaviour was the claim by former Democrat leader Harry Reid. Then Senate Minority leader, Reid, while being interviewed in 2012 by Huffington Post, claimed that Mitt Romney had not paid income taxes for ten years. He made the same claim on the Senate floor a few days later. He then made the claim a third time, this time stating he had an “extremely credible source” to prove it. Romney, as we know, lost that election.

CNN interviewed Reid upon his retirement, and he bragged to the interviewer that his lies caused Romney to lose: “"They can call it whatever they want. Romney didn't win did he?”

The ends justify the means it would seem. And since there’s no penalty for the lying, the attitude on the left in particular seems to be, ‘why not?’ And so, we saw Adam Schiff blatantly fabricating the words of the July 25th phone call between President Trump and Ukraine president Zelensky. For years, we watched as he claimed he had absolute proof of “collusion”, proof that we’ve never been shown. All lies. We’ve listened as the media claimed Trump called the coronavirus a “hoax”, until it was just too obvious it was a lie and even left wing pundits stopped claiming it.

If you want a primer on just how pervasive the lying actually is, I suggest you read Sharyl Atkisson’s 2017 book, The Smear, in which she outlines just how media and political operatives shape the narrative we see and hear in our newsfeeds. It’s actually frightening to realize that much of what we see and hear is planted, false, created simply to advance an agenda. 

Ball of Collusion, by Andy McCarthy, is another recommended read. There are others in this same vein. 

Many on the left see what’s actually happening, but the message isn’t sinking in. The lies keep on happening, in large part because there is no penalty, no price to be paid by the liars. 

That 80% of Americans don’t read past the headlines according to copyblogger.com's Brian Clark doesn’t help the situation at all. Forbes notes that 59% of Americans will forward an article without reading it. 

“We have met the enemy and he is us” -- Pogo wisdom worth thinking about.

The bottom line here is that we have been observing, since Trump was elected, the largest incidence of mass hysteria ever seen. Not hundreds, not thousands, but tens of millions of Americans believe things about President Trump, about conservatives, about current events, about anything to do with this president and his supporters in fact, that are provably not true. 

When you attempt to point out the truth, you typically end up being called a ‘racist’, a ‘Russian sympathizer’, or any of several dozen other pejoratives. Or the other person flatly denies what you say, even when you have proof of it.

I recently experienced this in a discussion with my friend Steve, a retired lawyer, and democrat. He made a comment regarding the American economy that I told him was false. He disagreed, whereupon I pulled up proof in the form of statistics that clearly made my point.
Steve immediately, with no further insight of any kind, said my stats were wrong. I asked him to prove that. He couldn’t, in fact he wouldn’t even try, but continued to insist that the facts I had were wrong.
I suggested to him that if, in a court of law, he couldn’t disprove what the other lawyer was claiming, then the other lawyer’s claim was ipso facto in the eyes of the law true. He refused to accept that, and stubbornly insisted that I was wrong, that my demonstrably proven facts were false.
Now Steve is an educated, intelligent and accomplished man. He’s no fool, but he was entirely unable to accept the truth of what I told him. 

Worse still, he did the same thing on another issue that night. He simply refuses to believe anything that doesn’t agree with his liberal worldview, even when that worldview  is proven incorrect.

The problem is, there are millions of Americans right now just like Steve. They refuse to believe what is provably true because it disagrees with what they desperately want to believe. That is a major problem. The willingness of democrats to believe whatever their media and leadership tells them empowers the politicians on the left to continue to contrive false narratives, to create and foster even more lies, further degrading the political condition in America.

How long can this go on? What, if anything, will change it? 

I honestly don’t know the answers to those questions. My immediate answer would be a democrat winning the 2020 election, but in that case, the cure would most assuredly be worse than the illness. The side effects of the ‘cure’ would be infinitely more damaging than the disease.

I can tell you what needs to change however. More than anything, the news media -- and I don’t mean opinion journalists, but actual news reporters -- needs to stop opining, and start reporting the facts fairly and fully. No lies of commission, or omission.  We can form our own opinions, or turn to the Op-Ed pages to find theirs if we so wish. 

Political leaders have to stop pandering to their constituents, and start telling them the hard truths. For example: ‘Trump won the 2016 election fairly’ would be a great start. 

Follow up with something like ‘We disagree with his policies and we will work in a bipartisan fashion to implement what we believe is correct through legislation in the House and Senate.  We will do this for the good of America, and all Americans. We will not work falsely outside of those bodies to discredit the election or this Administration or President. We will work to win the next election by putting forth candidates and policies that Americans will vote for.’

I know, I know -- it’s not going to happen, but we can dream. 

The truth is, were Democratic leadership to do something of this nature, to clean up their act -- they’d win the next election hands down. And that’s not going to happen either, because they are suffering from the same malady as the rest of the democratic party: Orange man bad.

Except he’s not. It’s a fever dream, a mass hallucination. Perhaps Trump’s re-election in 2020 will shake up the patient enough to seek a cure. We can only hope.

1. Wolf, M. (1976). Witchcraft and Mass Hysteria in Terms of Current Psychological Theories, (are caused by used of medical/experimental delusions). Journal of Practical Nursing and Mental Health Services 14: 23–28.
2. Bartholomew, Robert E. (2001). Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illness and Social Delusion. McFarland & Company
3. Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. California: Stanford University Press.
4. Festinger, L. (1962). "Cognitive dissonance". Scientific American. 207 (4): 93–107. Bibcode:1962SciAm.207d..93F. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1062-93