How do destructive ideas and bouts of collective madness so quickly become policy, law, and the status quo? After all, most have little public support—and are not Western nations supposedly rationally governed?
There is usually a multi-step process on the road to these self-destructive fits of society-wide insanity.
The suicidal impulse so often begins with left-leaning researchers in elite universities (i.e., the tenured in search of a novel, grant-getting theory). They begin insisting that a new existential threat requires immediate government intervention, novel legislation, ample funding, and public awareness of the impending danger.
So out of nowhere, the public is warned that the scorching planet will be inundated by rising seas in a mere decade. Or that millions of transgender youth are our next civil rights frontier, given that they suffer in silence without political advocacy, new laws, programs, and the chance for “life-saving,” powerful hormonal treatments and radical sex-reassignment surgeries. Indeed, the travel time from an outlandish idea by the faculty lounge to liberal status quo is a mere few years.
Next, the media, hand-in-glove with academia, springs into action to persuade the skeptical public to “follow the science” and “trust the experts.” It castigates any doubters as cranks or “conspiracy theorists” who spread “disinformation” and “misinformation”; or as racists, nativists, sexists, homophobes, and transphobes who must be silenced.
Hollywood and sports celebrities often piggyback on the frenzy, hijacking awards ceremonies and pre-game national anthems to out-virtue-signal each other, warning the public that they must adapt and change—or else!
Almost overnight—to take just one example—going to an isolated beach without a mask during the COVID pandemic, showing skepticism about the efficacy or safety of experimental mRNA COVID vaccines, or daring to believe that the Wuhan gain-of-function virology lab (in part aided and abetted by grants and support from Dr. Fauci’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases and the National Institutes of Health) was the source of a manufactured COVID pathogen became heresies. And the perpetrators, as always, had to be punished either legally or through social ostracism and cancel culture.
Third, liberal foundations begin funding more “research” to “prove” that partisan “experts” should not be ignored. They also fund activist groups that hit the street to gin up popular support, which often results in the required tumult and occasional violence. They embrace the theory that any disruption will so bother the public that it will support almost anything if it just makes the bedlam go away.
New victims and their oppressors are created ex nihilo.
Hellbound and Down 