Social psychosis in Minneapolis
When protesters start to belive they’re bulletproof, we have a problem.
Bradley Steffens | February 3, 2026
The recent cases of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have been described in many ways: tragic, reckless, heroic, foolish, principled, misguided. But one descriptor has been missing from the public conversation: symptomatic.
Good’s refusal to comply with law enforcement officers’ demands and especially her final words to officers — “I’m not mad at you” — suggest that she was oblivious to the risk she was facing. In that moment, Good was suffering from a delusion. She sincerely believed that nothing bad could happen to her. Pretti appears to have suffered from a similar delusion when he waded into conflict with law enforcement officers while wearing a gun on his belt. These delusions did not arise from personal mental health issues. They were symptomatic of a social psychosis — a witch’s brew of moral panic, identity fusion, and mass sociogenic illness.
Few of us in the United States have lived through genuine periods of sociogenic illness, but that does not mean they have not happened here. The Salem Witch Trials are the best known example, but the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II and the Red Scare of the 1950s also meet the textbook definition of a type of sociogenic illness known as a moral panic. I was born in the midst of the Red Scare, and I know that its delusional thinking was alive and well at the grassroots level well into the 1960s. On the day that President Kennedy was assassinated, our next door neighbor, a member of the John Birch Society, told my mother that Kennedy’s murder was part of a communist plot — this, long before Lee Harvey Oswald’s involvement with Fair Play for Cuba or his defection to the Soviet Union were known. Evidence was not needed. It was a fact. The commies did it.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/02/social_psychosis_in_minneapolis.html
