Stop Mass Hysteria

October 15, 2018
Controversial conservative talk radio host Savage (God, Faith and Reason) condemns the unhinged alarmism and name-calling rampant in American politics—except when it targets left-wing outrages—in this scattershot polemic. Savage surveys episodes of public hysteria from the Salem witch trials to modern-day panics over climate change, Russian election meddling, guns, and President Trump. Savage’s case meanders like a talk radio monologue from snippets of history to imprecations against government regulation, “social justice warrior” excesses, and the Obama administration. Threaded through is a confusing taxonomy of justified and unjustified fear. McCarthyism, Savage contends, was not mass hysteria because the communist threat was real, while liberal opposition to McCarthyism was “one of the most insidious mass hysterias”; Prohibition was a bad hysteria, and the push to legalize marijuana is also a bad hysteria; 19th-century hysteria over immigration was wrong because back then immigrants assimilated, while the 21st-century version is warranted because latter-day immigrants allegedly do not. Savage’s own rhetoric is flagrantly hysterical, whether he’s denouncing the “corrupt, degenerate left-wing media,” challenging the “femme-fascists” for their “deeply rooted hatred of men,” or warning that “the United States may face extinction” from runaway diversity. The result is a jumbled jeremiad that will inflame the uproar rather than stop it.