How many times since they dredged Kamela Harris out of the bilge of Lost Ship Biden have you heard the movers and shakers of Progressivism tell us we must “believe the woman"? I’m no mind reader, but I can guess the number you are thinking of right now. That number is “zero!” And you are of course correct. No one ever tells me to believe the woman anymore, other than my wife. But why is that? Why has that once sparkling mantra become as stale and out of fashion today as paisley bell bottoms and belly chains? It was once the most enchanting phrase in the English language. It was powerful, almost magic. Why, then, when they need it so desperately to breathe life into a moribund presidential campaign, have the leftists not even tried to sell us on it, if only for the sake of “saving democracy?”

“Believe the Woman! It is the Akey Breakey song we cannot get out of our heads, the catchy phrase we wish we could forget. But if it was valid and true three years ago, why not now? The answer, of course, is because it no longer works. Quite simply, the spell has been broken. Its claim on our psyche is dead, and it would be counterproductive to attempt to revive it even for the hapless Kamela. In fact, the sound of it is cloying now to the point of regurgitation. Rigor mortis has set in. It just plain stinks, and even its most ardent promoters of the feminine mystique will no longer touch it.

So perhaps an autopsy is in order. But first, a preliminary investigation. Remember when Bret Kavanaugh had been nominated to the Supreme Court, and the influence peddlers had the whole country sold on the notion that Christine Blasie Ford, on account of her gender, could not possibly be lying in her claim that the judge had conducted gang rape sessions at college parties? What did our national thought police tell us then? Let’s say it all together, one last time! “Believe the woman!” (Gag me with a spoon!) There! Let’s hope that gets it out of our system.

Evidence against Kavanaugh included the shocking revelation that he liked beer, and to argue against the seeming consensus that he was guilty felt to me at the same time both blasphemous and absurd. Blasphemous because the arbiters of public truth were rending their garments over those few doubters who dared to raise their voices in dissent. (But then, no one lies like a “fact checker.”) Absurd, because the whole charade was, as we are at long last very much aware, downright silly.

The insistence that we implicitly trust persons with vaginas (bear in mind, that was before men had them) was, for want of a better word, a taboo, and a profoundly ridiculous one at that. Nevertheless, esteemed men and women of whom we had a right to expect at least a little wisdom enthusiastically mouthed it ad nauseum as a substitute for both evidence and common sense. But of course, the acceptance of that absurdity was not offered to us as a free choice. The alternative we were offered was social exile, and that meant cancellation, ghosting, and in short banishment from all the benefits of respectable conformity. The penalty for rejecting the visions of the anointed, as Thomas Sowell might have called such delusions, was to become what the Soviets quaintly referred to as a “non-person.”

At that time, that is, at the peak of our thralldom to that taboo, I suggested in an article in this publication (“Believe the Woman”) that we were witnessing a mass hysteria, a.k.a. a mass delusion. I compared it to the Salem Witch Trials, at which hysterical young girls had convinced themselves and their community that they were victims of the most outlandish witchcraft at the hands of their neighbors. I also compared it to Koro, a contagious mental disorder that causes otherwise sane individuals to imagine their genitals are shrinking or falling off.

But perhaps the better term for such compulsive group-think is “mass formation psychosis,” a diagnosis Doctor Robert Malone created to describe people’s overwhelming acceptance of the Covid-19 mNRA inoculations and all of the pseudo-scientific BS that went with them. I prefer Malone’s term because it seems to me the more precise. A psychosis is a mental disorder under which sufferers (or in this case groups of sufferers) perceive events in abnormal ways because they have difficulty understanding what is real and what is not.

But whatever the term, the phenomenon we are really talking about here is that old fashioned mob psychology that somehow spontaneously erupts into dogma, however temporary, over some event or assertion about which sounder judgment should have prevailed. To create such a mass delusion you need only three things, a naked emperor, a shill, and some fearful or anxious dupes. Because—and this is key – for the most part the contagious psychoses we participate in today are not spontaneous. They are deliberately and craftily manufactured, and then systematically imposed upon us from above.

When every organ and carnival barker of the establishment is chanting the same nonsensical dogma, sometimes using the same phrase and other times a single word, their intent is to infect us with that psychosis. And with many of us, it works. It is hypnotic, and often causes even a majority not only to accept pure garbage but to dash to the head of the mob and preach it. In our analogy, the multi-faceted deep state is the shill. Just about any bit of fatuous nonsense can serve as the naked emperor’s splendid new suit. And the dupes? Well, that is us.

The saying has been attributed to Joseph Goebbels that “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” I’m afraid that Nazi propagandist was mistaken at least to this extent: It has been my observation that the process really doesn’t take very long. As William Shirer noted in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” the German people of that day firmly believed the almost daily nonsense they were being fed by their masters. It is easy to believe what it is dangerous not to believe, particularly when alternative points of view are stifled.

“Men can get pregnant.” “Hunter’s laptop has all the earmarks of Russian disinformation.” You get the drift. “The Covid virus did not come from a Chinese lab.” J.D. Vance is “weird.” (If ever a man was more normal and down to earth, I have not yet met him.) We are living in an ochlocracy, which is a difficult to pronounce name for a system of mob rule that is directed from the top. Three weeks ago, Kamela Harris was a loser who needed to be cut from the Biden ticket and replaced with someone—perhaps Gavin Newsome or Michelle Obama—with whom the Democrats could win. Because you see, Joe Biden was then “sharp as a tack” and Kamela was dragging him down. But now, suddenly, Biden has been sequestered into custodial care because everyone realizes he is daft, and Kamela is the candidate of “joy,” that new euphemism for cackling idiocy.

And sharing that factitious joy with Kamela is that ever-gaping cheerleader Tim Walz, with his false exuberance and his leering, lunatic grin. Walz, you will recall, was the author of the risible myth of the bleeding boys. (Weird!) He put tampons in the male restrooms of Minnesota’s tragically failing public schools because…? Well, because male menstruation was his “truth” and his most demanding priority. You know a psychosis has become epidemic when even a Supreme Court justice cannot tell you what a woman is.

“Joy!” “Happy days are here again!” That is what we are now supposed to believe about the Democrat ticket as Kamela hides from both the press and the public so as not to be exposed for her ludicrous inconsistencies and Walz glad-hands his way past his flagrantly stolen valor, his almost incestuous relationship with China, and his asinine policy proposals. (And more recently his Walter Mitty fantasy that he coached a varsity champion football team. In reality, he was an unpaid assistant to the 9th grade team.) But why not! If “Hope and Change” were sufficient to propel a folksy community organizer into the Whitehouse, then “joy” should buy the Harris-Walz ticket a piece of the moon.

Only does it make sense? The idea our elites propose, or perhaps better to say the not-so-subtle suggestion, is that we should give over our own observations and our reasoned conclusions in exchange for myths that will make us fit in more comfortably with the mob. I don’t know about you, but this whole approach to reality scares me. Because to me this “joy” they are raving about looks like nitwit lunacy.

Oops! I just got all my social media accounts cancelled. Come on, guys, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it. Come to think of it, the “woke” communism of those who want to “save democracy” from Trump is starting to sound pretty good right now. After all, which should I believe? Should I trust what the party and the mass media are telling me with all the assurance of their institutional prestige and all their somber affectations of gravitas? Or should I trust my own lying eyes?