On Friday, Michael Savage — conservative talk show host and Berkeley Ph.D. in nutritional ethnomedicine — referenced Nathaniel West’s classic 1939 novel about the burning of Los Angeles, The Day of the Locust, to describe what will occur in the USA should Trump be brought down by his assorted “Globalist” enemies.

People will “resort to mob violence” when they “are finally aware of the fact that they’ve been tricked by their society, and that no matter how hard they work as middle class people” they are denied.“That is what’s going to happen in this country,” Savage said. “You have not yet seen mob violence in this country. You’ve seen some mob violence instigated by George Soros’ mobs. … But you haven’t seen the thing I’m telling you is coming in this country. You haven’t seen the ‘Day of the Locust’ yet.”

“Deplorables” gone wild and burning down our cities? Civil war?

Savage seems to agree that the common man, whom he names Eddie, would not be amused: “And if [the left] take(s) Trump down, through (Special Counsel Robert) Mueller or through any other source and deny Eddie his vote, there will be a civil war in this country.”

As is well known, Savage, a onetime pal of Allen Ginsberg and other Beats, is now considered by many to be a “conservative extremist,” therefore a fringe personality from the fever swamps of conspiracy land. Nevertheless, he is the no dummy and is the author of 40 books on subjects as disparate as Alzheimer’s and beer-tasting, not to mention economics and politics. Few of his critics have anywhere near the vitae.

But that’s the anecdotal part. The more important question is is he right — is our democratic republic about to explode? Can the Deep State co-exist with an awakened populace, even a partially awakened one? Increasingly, beneath all the leaks and counter-leaks, the missing emails and accusations, what we are looking at is a sclerotic system that has become increasingly built on self-preservation and not on the people’s will, in fact is largely disinterested in and disconnected from that will.

Call Savage an extremist or whatever you want, but the truth is we are clearly on the edge of something explosive. The number of leaks is astronomical and they seem to come from everywhere, including our intelligence agencies, the FBI, and inside the White House. Just the other day we learned the FBI lied about the existence of documents pertaining to the tarmac meeting of Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch. When the most important law enforcement agency in our country lies and leaks, as it has more than once now, something is truly wrong. It’s rather frightening, actually, and combined with the serial “unmaskings” from NSA intercepts calls to mind that quote from Comrade Beria many are referencing lately: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

Much is being covered up. The list, as we all know, is long. And the people — notably those “Deplorables” — are not going to forget if Trump is defenestrated. And they are not going to forgive either. They shouldn’t.

I do not exonerate Trump completely in all this. He has not been as sophisticated a leader as he needs to be — shooting from the hip in too many instances and making poor judgments in the hiring department on occasion. That he is “just a businessman and new to politics” is not a good excuse, especially when he has told us he has been dealing with politicians for years. He almost seems, oddly, naive.

Still, compared to his adversaries, Trump is St. Francis of Assisi. Although nowhere near as entertaining, they are acting out like the lunatics in Milos Forman’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next.” The reason, I think, is they feel threatened in ways they never expected to be. Hardly anyone working there, Democrat or Republican, thought Washington would ever change, nor did they want it to — even when, perhaps especially when, they pretended otherwise. The gravy train was too good. And Obama, their ally, the Deep Stater par excellence, had lulled them to sleep. They woke up in a rage.

In 1988, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar scored one of his first big his with the black comedy titled, in translation, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. But that didn’t quite represent the Spanish title because in Castilian an ataque de nervios is slightly different from a nervous breakdown (crisis nerviosa). As Wikipedia explains,

Ataques de nervios are culture-bound psychological phenomena during which the individual, most often female, displays dramatic outpouring of negative emotions, bodily gestures, occasional falling to the ground, and fainting, often in response to receiving disturbing news or witnessing or participating in an upsetting event. Historically, this condition has been associated with hysteria and more recently in the scientific literature with post-traumatic stress and panic attacks.[5]

Remove the “most often female” as a one-time nod to political correctness and what you have is a pretty accurate diagnosis of the state of the American left today, not to mention some of the “Never Trump” right. It’s an ataque de nervios – hysteria too often justifying evil or sleazy behavior, even, dare I say it, “witch hunts.”

Will the next step be civil war? Since we will all probably find out about it first on TV, “stay tuned” seems an appropriate answer.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and co-founder of PJ Media. His latest book is I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already. He tweets @rogerlsimon.