Mass Psychosis And Left-Wing Groupthink

Mass Psychosis And Left-Wing Groupthink

Real truth doesn’t need a shield from questions — only mass psychosis does.

Jim Davis for American Thinker

In the warped universe of today’s Social Justice Warriors, Trump is Hitler. Racism is baked into our DNA and lurking around every corner, Nazis are hiding under every bed, white supremacists run the show in our major institutions, and any inconvenient facts that punch holes in this nonsense just prove how sneaky and deep-rooted the evil really is.

The more they scream it from the rooftops, the more it solidifies as “truth” in their echo chambers. Their sealed-off media bubble keeps the illusion alive, sucking believers into an endless loop where everything gets twisted to fit the narrative, no matter how absurd.

Playing the race card, or defining anyone who disagrees with their lifestyles as a “bigot” or a “homophobe,” is their first and only line of defense. It’s all framed to protect their sacred cows — gender as a pick-your-own adventure, identity politics as the ultimate power play, systemic racism as the original sin, CRT as gospel, science bent to political whims, Modern Monetary Theory as economic voodoo, and the rest of their pet theories.

These aren’t up for debate or real-world testing; they’re handed down as unquestionable truths. “Believe the science,” they said. “The vaccines are safe and effective,” they said. But here’s the kicker: a lot of this junk is actually checkable against hard evidence, if you know where to look — and it crumbles under scrutiny — yet the true believers won’t let facts get in the way.

Just the other day, Glenn Beck was chatting with Buck Sexton about his new book, Manufacturing Delusion, which digs into how propaganda and brainwashing tricks have cranked out obedient sheep throughout history.

Sexton tipped his hat to Joost Meerloo, a Dutch-American M.D. and psychoanalyst, for laying the groundwork. I stumbled onto Meerloo myself about 30 years ago, when researching a term paper for a political science class.

In Meerloo’s 1961 classic, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, he laid out how mass delusions can be engineered on purpose:

If one can isolate the mass, allow no free thinking, no free exchange, no outside corrective, and can hypnotize the group daily with noises, with press and radio and television, with fear and pseudo-enthusiasms, any delusion can be instilled.

We saw the inducement of mass psychosis shifting into overdrive during the 2020 campaign with “Hunter’s laptop is Russian disinformation.” Then we saw it again during the COVID pandemic, when experimental mRNA vaccines were described in the same glowing terms as the polio vaccine, which saw 16 years of rigorous clinical trials before limited distribution.

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At the same time, COVID restrictions on mass gatherings — and Joe Biden’s understandable choice to campaign from his basement in Delaware, since the elderly are high risk — induced a mass psychosis that believed he was just as mentally competent as he was in the 1990s. And we saw yet another inducement of mass psychosis with the anti-Trump Lawfare of 2024.

It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots: the war on free speech isn’t some side hustle.

Mass psychosis is a house of cards. It can’t handle a stiff breeze of challenge — it needs a fortress of censorship protecting it. Expose these delusions to just a few sniper shots from critics, who are well-armed with the facts, and the contradictions pile up until the whole house of cards collapses. (And you can rely on a few key essays of mine to provide those facts.)

Once it’s lodged in the collective skull, the psychosis turns defensive, like a cornered animal. It’s been said that “It’s easier to fool someone, than to convince him that he’s been fooled,” but Meerloo nailed it:

Delusions, carefully implanted, are difficult to correct … The mass delusion that gives him feelings of belonging and omnipotence is dearer to him than personal awareness and understanding.

That’s why these mass psychosis hysterias so often slide straight into authoritarian thuggery. Shut down independent thought, gut the forums for real debate, and watch anxiety skyrocket — then the frightened herd of sheeple begs for a strongman to impose “order.” Any outfit peddling stability looks golden, even if they’re the arsonists who started the fire.

In a few critical months in 1917, Soviet leftists ostensibly offered stability, prosperity, and a rebirth of national pride in the chaos of post-revolutionary Russia. Then Hitler stepped into the politics of the inflation-wracked Weimar Republic, offering the same promise. It just keeps happening, and their history is a cautionary tale for America and the West in 2026.

Look at modern politics — it’s this same vicious cycle on repeat: sow chaos, then swoop in with vows of “normalcy,” from the very same left-wing clown car that created the disaster with its toxic narratives.

Sure, humans are champs at kidding themselves, but these groupthink psychoses aren’t bulletproof. They start cracking when ideas flow freely — more questions, more pushback, more rival info streams, and more Democrats being asked tough questions. You may have noticed that they avoid interviews where they’ll be asked tough questions. They always get interviewed by Axios, CNN, MSDNC, or Daily Beast, rather than Daily Wire, Newsmax, or American Thinker.

It’s no coincidence that this is the polar opposite of the gatekeeping game. Stifle dissent, slap “misinformation” labels on it with left-wing “fact checking,” or just purge it from the conversation, and your belief bubble stays intact instead of getting stress-tested.

Gad Saad calls this the Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome — the knee-jerk denial of plain reality for feel-good fairy tales. In his book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, Saad puts it straight:

There is no ‘black mind’ or ‘white mind,’ no ‘white male way of knowing.’ There is only one truth, and we find it through the scientific method.

Both sides of the aisle hurl “you’re delusional” accusations at each other’s conspiracy theories. In a limited sense, yeah, both might have a point — but only if the conspiracy theories were equally debunkable. Spoiler Alert: they’re not. A psychosis that withers under contradiction is worlds apart from one that’s rigged, so that every scrap of data, even the data that screams “this is wrong,” gets spin-doctored as confirmation. And the left-wing propaganda bureaus that were once known as “news media” and “public schools” are working full-time to rig this mass psychosis.

Meerloo dropped this gem way back in 1961, and it’s still spot-on:

We must fight man’s growing fear of thinking for himself … Governments may be overthrown not only by physical violence, but also by mental violence — by conditioning, regimentation, and prohibition of dissent.

A healthy free society hangs not on forcing consensus, but on vigorously defending the right to disagree without being shamed. Real truth doesn’t need a shield from questions — only mass psychosis does.

Image generated by ChatGPT.