A week or so before the election, there was a rumor bumping around the Internet which said Trump, if he were to become President, would immediately begin rounding up LGBT folk and placing them into camps. I replied to one of these exceptionally nervous people on Twitter, “It won’t be so bad. I hear Thursdays will be lasagna nights.” That earned me a blocking. (I have since deleted my account.)

Over this past weekend, a mob of angry females tromped through the streets of Washington DC. Boy, were they upset. Fuming. Nary a happy face. Trouble was, no one was able to discover why these citizens were displeased. Perhaps the nation is suffering a critical shortage of blue hair dye? Can somebody look that up?

One woman not reduced to incoherent ravings about her cat (that’s what I thought I heard), said Donald Trump was going to come after women and break them up like “puzzle pieces.” Jack the Ripper, look out! It’s Donald Trump, puzzle breaker.

The eminent New York Times writer Ross Douthat isn’t shivering over internment camps or feminist puzzle breaking, but he did wring his hands over the possibility that Donald Trump “will escalate from tweets to Erdoganian crackdowns, that truly independent journalism will be marginalized while the White House breeds a lap dog press.”

It doesn’t do to criticize Times writers, of course, but is it even theoretically possible for the press to more resemble a fluffy white pampered poodle, blind with devotion, madly licking its master, and barring its wee yellow teeth and yipping at intruders than it did during Mr Obama’s tenure?

Fear of an all-powerful Trumpenführer has not been confined to dyspeptics, dye-jobs, and diarists. The officially brightest among us — scientists themselves! — have convinced themselves Trump is going to confiscate their data. Headline at Forbes: “Fearing White House Purge Of Climate Science, Scientists Frantically Copying Data.” The author, James Conca, said:

It’s not like the new administration is going to start burning books or flushing files down the toilet, but website access will disappear, reports will be put in deep storage, and datasets will become more difficult to access, or will degrade in quality, as funding is cut from the agencies maintaining them.

Conca says this data is needed because the United States has been under attack from the Polar Vortex, a beast which he intimates was caused by global warming (which he mistakenly refer to as “climate change”).

Conca is calling these deletions, which have not happened, a “purging of science” which will result in the nation “sliding further into the abyss where truth and lies have equal weight and science is just another ideology to ignore when it’s inconvenient.”

Engadget asks whether the data panic is “irrational.” “Possibly”, they admit, but then they claim the new administration “has been picking climate change deniers for positions in relevant agencies, and has threatened to stop ‘politicized science.'” (Incidentally, no Trump hire has ever denied the climate has changed.)

How Trump will reach into the computers of all those scientists and vacuum up their precious bits hasn’t been specified. Maybe he will hire the Russians who hacked and stole the election from its rightful winner to do the job? Scientists will come in to their offices after a weekend to discover their hard drives have been purged of the proof the sky will soon fall and replaced with JPEGs of Rosie O’Donnell laughing.

Scary stuff! No wonder Harvard is sponsoring an “Archive-a-thon” to begin the backups before Trump comes after them. The announcement doesn’t say, but it’s a good guess the Archive-a-thon will take place in a Safe Space complete with puppies and coloring books to calm the nerves of these great brains. Don’t scoff. It’s got to the point where there is serious talk of scientists having a march on Washington.

Since there is so much angst out there, it is well to review its cause. Progressives assured us, in turn, that Ronald Reagan was Hitler, that George Bush père et fils were Hitler, that Barack Obama opponents John McCain and Mitt Romney were each Hitler, really that every Republican since Goldwater was Hitler, and so none of us would have been surprised to learn that Donald Trump was Hitler, too.

But it was worse! The Left insisted Trump was literally Hitler. Which brings to mind Mr Trump’s inauguration speech in which he spoke of “an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge” — including, as we have just seen, knowledge of the word literally.

After decades of creating and telling themselves horror stories, it was inevitable that the Left would begin believing them.

After decades of creating and telling themselves horror stories, it was inevitable that the Left would begin believing them. It is thus not surprising that Trump’s election resulted in a full-blown moral panic. We’re in for four (or eight?) years of having everything that goes wrong blamed on Donald Trump. Might as well enjoy it.