Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

In response to School Disciplinary Actions Over Faux Guns Do More Harm Than Good:

After a few months of government-sponsored and media-promoted hysteria over guns, the mass roundup of toddlers and preteens wielding high capacity pointyfingers is hardly surprising. 

Lefties are fond of lecturing (and writing books, and plays, and movies) about the famously dark days of McCarthyism, where right wing Bircher paranoiacs supposedly were looking for a ‘Red under every bed.’ I suppose to a certain extent they had a point, but the sum total impact of that brief 50’s reign of terror seems to be that a couple of Hollywood writers lost screenplay deals.

Contrast that with our new age of left wing paranoia. Now that the national boogie men are Gunnies rather than Commies, there ain’t no bed, or closet, or playground safe to hide from our brave safety crusaders. No one is above suspicion, and so holy is their cause that even crayon-scrawled representations of Demon Gun must be banned. Obviously, we have to arrest children precisely because it’s For The Children. Welcome to New Salem, with the Reverend Piers Morgan as our new Cotton Mather. 

One doesn’t have to dig too far in to history to learn what happens when the progressive therapeutic community goes on one of their righteous crusades. I refer you to the “Repressed Memory” and child sex abuse hysterias of the ’80s and ’90s.

To paraphrase that great surrealist Rene Magritte, “ceci n’est pas une gun.”