The cannons roared. The soldiers charged. Hurrah! The soldiers died.
We threw dirt clods at one another; pinecones were hand grenades. We pretended they were the Germans, and they pretended we were the Germans . Most of our fathers had been in either “the war” or Korea. Confederate memorials were everywhere—every courthouse, every church—and on our farm there were several rows of dead men from the 9th Virginia Cavalry.
We all knew where the battles were, which relatives had fought in them, and which of our houses the Yankees had burned. Some were torched by Cornwallis, rebuilt, then destroyed again in 1864. Some still had cannonballs lodged in their walls. Lafayette had slept in many of them. History surrounded us, soaked into the soil.
It was all so glorious.
We were proud.
We dreamed of taking part one day.
Bottom line: we dreamed of killing people.
War is sometimes necessary, but history makes one thing clear—more often than not, it is spectacularly foolish. What drives men to such folly? Pride. Overconfidence. Hatred. But the most accurate word—the engine behind nearly all of history’s catastrophes—is mania.
Tolstoy put it better than anyone:
“Millions of men perpetrated against one another such crimes—frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, the issuing of false money, burglaries, incendiarism, and murder—as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.”
In explaining Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, Tolstoy insisted there was no single cause—no villain twirling a mustache in a candlelit room—but rather a million small, uncontrollable forces, each reinforcing the other, all marching forward without restraint.
Left alone, the average man—even a weak one—tends to behave reasonably when guided by personal experience and common sense. Trouble begins when he abandons judgment in exchange for approval. When the weak-minded outsource thinking to the crowd, mania takes the wheel.
Earlier in War and Peace, Tolstoy describes members of the Petersburg elite desperate to be politically fashionable, calling them “those men who choose their causes in the same manner as their clothes, according to fashion, and for that very reason appear to be the warmest partisans.”
The species has not gone extinct. Today it has merely changed wardrobe.
Now the demographic is liberal white women and effeminate men—the angriest, most unstable faction in the body politic. Emotion masquerading as virtue. Histrionics elevated to moral authority. Rage, but with better branding.
How do manias form? There is no single answer, only a rule: history moves whether we understand it or not. People are born into environments that often exist for rational reasons—until they don’t. Some manias are harmless: Beanie Babies, winning sports teams, temporary obsessions that burn themselves out.
Politics-as-fashion, however, is different.
Most fads have no identifiable origin; they rise and fall naturally. Manufactured manias do not. They are engineered, funded, and sustained.
The most dangerous variety is induced by fear—an ancient tactic perfected by tyrants. Matthias Desmet, a Belgian psychiatrist and historian, gave it a modern name: mass formation psychosis. A condition in which large groups abandon reason, embrace absurdities, and develop a tribal fury toward anyone who refuses to affirm them.
Welcome to 2025.
Men choose their sex. Parents mutilate their children to remain “affirming” and fashionable. Murderers and rapists are released for reasons no one is allowed to question. Illegal immigration hollowing out public resources is a virtue. Eliminating fraud, waste, and corruption is immoral.
During COVID, I could not understand the hysteria. Looking for an explanation, I found Desmet. Anxious, unhappy people—already predisposed to fear—latch onto an ideology that justifies their anxiety. They redirect their aggression toward a sanctioned enemy. Suddenly life has meaning. There is a cause. There are villains. There is a brotherhood.
At that point, facts become optional. Critical thinking is heresy. The faithful enter a trance-like obedience to godlike leaders. Totalitarianism stops sounding scary and starts sounding compassionate. This is how people cheer murder and openly call for more of it—so long as the targets are approved.
The media now insists that recent elections turned on “affordability.” This presumes the radicalized electorate is still capable of rational calculation. It is not. Until the trance is broken, reason does not apply.
The Left excels at one thing above all else: spending other people’s money. Innocuous-sounding government programs exist almost exclusively to launder funds back to ideologues and their preferred causes. Those funds are then used to manufacture fear.
Forty percent of young women now claim they want to flee the United States because of—nothing. Nothing except narratives paid for with their own tax dollars.
It begins with the rape of the U.S. Treasury. NGOs, grants, university funding and “special programs” funnel money into nationwide protests—“No Kings,” “Elon Musk is a Nazi”—and into media outlets that dutifully amplify the panic. Stacey Abrams creates a nonprofit with $100; the Biden EPA gifts it $20 billion. For comparison, the entire Trump campaign spent $1.6 billion in 2024.
Abrams’s grift is a rounding error. The real money is used to radicalize the base and inoculate it against reality: Trump is Hitler. ICE is the Gestapo. Crime is compassion. Chad sounds like a nicer place to live.
Dear reader, your government’s treasury is being looted to manufacture chaos, nihilism, and institutional collapse—and it is happening in plain sight. Your money funds a permanent agitation campaign.
The irony is brutal. There has never been a safer, wealthier time to be alive. Not long ago, survival meant not starving or freezing to death. Yet we are told anxiety has never been higher.
The only explanation is manufactured mania.
The solution is not found in policy white papers or panel discussions. It is brutally simple: stop the looting. Slash federal spending. Starve the machine.
No money to steal.
No money to radicalize.
No fuel for the madness.
I wish everyone the peace that surpasses all understanding, the very peace your tax dollars are being used to destroy.
