I know I am not alone in being bewildered by the daily pummeling of President Trump throughout the media. We are witnessing something more than the usual criticism any politician can expect. Instead, it’s become a kind of madness, where the president can be depicted with his head cut off, standing naked, or being hung from a tree.
All these images were reported by the major media. In the aftermath of Charlottesville, Virginia the president has been repeatedly called a "racist" in the mainstream media, including The Washington Post. But that’s not the worst. The president has also been routinely compared to Hitler and the Nazis.
The German magazine Stern published a cover depicting President Trump giving a Nazi salute while draped in an American flag. In England, The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland said, "We thought the Nazi threat was dead. But Donald Trump has revived it."
Freedland went on to predict an American outbreak of anti-Semitism based on the fact that many white supremacists have free speech rights. Entertainers fantasize about "killing the president." Rosie O’Donnell tweets to her 1,000,000 plus followers about a game she plays, "Pushing Trump off a cliff." A New York Times reporter calls The first lady a "hooker."
These attacks defy the standards of commonsense and public civility. Their sheer viciousness points towards an deep and more disturbing explanation — a mass hysteria elicited by the surprise defeat of Hillary Clinton. One could hardly find a better description than this published by John Waller of the British Psychological Society, "'[M]ass hysteria' are cases in which groups of people act upon beliefs which gain exaggerated credence in times of social and economic distress."
This hysteria outbreak should have been widely recognized the day after the election.
Recall how college campuses across the nation responded to the election of President Trump with support groups, cancelled classes, creating "safe spaces," and "self-care guides."
Dan Gainer of Fox News described the media’s reaction to the election as a "primal scream." In California, Washington, and Oregon, efforts are launched for those states to secede.
The central symptom of hysteria is "ungovernable emotional excess," which in this case has become a case of mass hysteria, one largely due to the incessant use of social media to wage political and ideological war.
Writing in The Atlantic, Laura Dimon connects increasing outbreaks of mass hysteria, or mass psychogenic illness (MPI), with the impact of Facebook and Twitter. Formerly people had to be in the same room to share in the hysteria, but that’s no longer the case. Today, social media has become "extensions of our eyes and ears." It has made hysteria a global phenomenon.
Just think about it, Rosie O’Donnell has over 1,000,000 followers on Twitter. Many Trump-haters have far more. Katy Perry has over 100 million followers; Justin Bieber, 99,000,000, Rhianna, 76,000,000; Ellen DeGeneres, 70,000,000; and Lady Gaga, 69,000,000.
High-minded conservatives who sniff at these numbers and their cumulative influence are dissociating themselves from the way we live today.
Writing in Psychology Today, Romeo Vitelli, Ph.D., describes the symptoms of mass hysteria: including having "no known organic basis," meaning no basis in fact; occurring in a specific group; extreme anxiety; spread by world of mouth or popular media; spread from older to younger victims; and predominately female.
Regarding the last symptom, I would offer the observation that both the viciousness and sobbing character of the anti-Trump hysteria does have, at least to me, a curious female aspect. Just as Esther Goldberg has described former FBI Director James B. Comey as talking "the way high school girls talk," the catty displays of commentators like MSNBC’s Chris Matthews are positively feline, "One good thing Mussolini did was execute his son-in-law," said Matthews — referring to Jared Kushner.
Some theorists of mass hysteria say that these outbreaks usually pass quickly. That’s not been our experience. The hysteria over the bogus Duke University rape allegation did not subside until all charges were dropped over a year later. Similarly, it took over a year for the Charlottesville, Virginia police to find no evidence of the rape on campus reported by Rolling Stone for which they paid heavily in civil damages. In the meantime, in both cases, all the mainstream media joined in the chorus of defamation.
Who will play similar role in the case against President Trump? Who will help calm the hysteria? Perhaps, it will be people like Sen. Diane Feinstein , D-Calif., who recently stunned an audience in San Francisco with her refusal to support impeachment, saying Trump "could be a good president." A reporter at the meeting said, "the crowd reacted with stunned silence, broken only with scattered 'No's' and a few hisses and some nervous laughter."
It’s in a moment of silence like the one elicited by Sen. Feinstein that the much-needed injection of reason and civility can take place and the mass hysteria can begin to pass.
Dr. Deal W. Hudson took over Crisis Magazine in 1995, leaving in 2010 to become president of Catholic Advocate. While at Crisis, Hudson led the Catholic voter outreach for President George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, and later advised the campaigns of both John McCain and Donald Trump on Catholic outreach. In 2014, he began his weekly two-hour radio show, "Church and Culture," on the Ave Maria Radio Network, and launched www.thechristianreview.com in 2015. His books include "Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction" and "Onward Christian Soldiers: The Growing Political Power of Catholics and Evangelicals in the United States." To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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