by Bradley Steffens
When protesters start to belive they’re bulletproof, we have a problem.
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.
It appears that we are in the midst of another moral panic, one emerging from the demonization of Donald Trump, his supporters, and anyone who carries out his policies, including law enforcement officers. For many liberals, disagreements over policy have morphed into a deep-seated belief in their intellectual and moral superiority to Trump and his minions. The reason that Good and Pretti acted irrationally is that they were so convinced of their intellectual and moral superiority that they refused to view the law enforcement officers as a threat, as if their moral righteousness literally made them bulletproof. In short, they did not respect the officers surrounding them. This delusional lack of respect convinced them that such inconsequential human beings could not harm them. Why, you could even be nice to them and tell them you are not mad at them. They could never intrude upon your godlike domain.
Moral panic alone does not explain the behavior of individuals who act immune to bullets. For that, we must look to another phenomenon. In 2024, psychologists William B. Swann, Jr.; Jack W. Klein; and Ángel Gómez identified a phenomenon called identity fusion — a state in which a person’s political identity becomes so tightly bound to his sense of self that he will take extreme risks to defend it. Fused individuals typically display moral absolutism, perceived invulnerability, and disregard for personal safety. This phenomenon is visible in the Minneapolis cases with painful clarity.
Unfortunately, identity fusion is not confined to the Land of 10,000 Lakes. The belief that one is morally untouchable, that one is “safe” because one is “right,” is spreading through social contagion. This is why the Minneapolis tragedies matter. They are symptoms of a broader phenomenon that is affecting millions.
Irrational at its base, this social psychosis cannot be defeated at the ballot box or argued out of existence in the marketplace of ideas. It needs to be studied by independent researchers, perhaps with funding from the National Institutes of Health. If found to be a public health crisis, the surgeon general should address it. Until then, social and political commentators should be mindful that what they are witnessing is far deeper and more complex than most of the issues they normally address.
Bradley Steffens is the author of two novels and seventy-four nonfiction books for young adults, including Donald Trump: Controversial 47th President and the forthcoming Understanding Anxiety and Panic Attacks.
Image: Tony Webster via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped).
Bradley Steffens
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/02/social_psychosis_in_minneapolis.html
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