Some More News - SMN: Moral Panics And How To Spot Them

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Hi. In today's episode, we look at the similar patterns followed by nearly all moral panics, whether they're about teenagers eating Tide Pods or nonsense stories about litter boxes in school restrooms. These moral panics may seem silly, but they have very real and dangerous consequences for marginalized groups. Please fill out our SURVEY: https://kastmedia.com/survey/ Support us on our PATREON: http://patreon.com/somemorenews Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews?ref_id=9949 SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh   Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news  Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews  Athletic Greens is going to give you an immune supporting FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit https://athleticgreens.com/morenews today. Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at https://www.stamps.com/morenews. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yEcInh6XNDH85KqDmY9e4DBm3My1GivL4QK0YSC-Hik/edit?usp=sharingSupport the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, news geese. Quack, quack, moo. Take a gander at this goose. This big honking news goose, that is. I'm your noose goose, Coos Juice. Here to read the noose, or news, if you've already bailed on this bit, as I should have done much, much earlier than right now.

But I didn't, because I'm not a coward. Not like this goose. What a piece of trash. Anyway, news. Here is some news for you. Switchblades. Did you know that they were once like really scary? Here's a 1950 issue of Women's Home Companion

featuring the article, The Toy That Kills. The author recognizes that even though, quote, "'A knife to a growing boy is as important as lipstick "'to a young lady,' that a switchblade's chief purpose, "'as any crook can tell you, is for committing violence.'" The article was based almost entirely on anecdotal evidence and for that reason, it got some major things wrong. For example, the author writes

that crime statistics everywhere reveal that knives cause far more trouble than guns. Now, that statement is obviously laughably false in 2022, but it probably seemed entirely plausible back in 1950, even though it was verifiably untrue. Nevertheless, this was the catalyst for a national moral panic around switchblades. Congress held hearings and states banned them.

New York state became the first to ban automatic knives in 1954, resulting in the arrests of tens of thousands of New Yorkers, mostly black and Latino, over the subsequent 60 years. The panic permeated pop culture, resulting in a surprising number of very famous film sequences directly involving this awesome knife. It's worth noting that those bodacious movies all came out within a span of six years,

suggesting that popular media was completely inundated with the idea that switchblades were a pervasive threat. More specifically, that they were the preferred tool of young street toughs threatening civilized suburban areas, which is code for white people. Weird, racist stuff. But hey, thank goodness we live in a more sophisticated time where we don't lose our turds over meaningless moral panics like this one. Yes, definitely not a thing that happens today. No, sir, you can bet your coward goose on that.

Not a problem. Closing the book. Panic-tastic freaks and where to find them. Yeah, okay, sure, let's talk about moral panics. As an episode, this episode, oh, I already prepared, perfect. So just to define them real quick, moral panics are exactly what they sound like. Overblown media events that prey on our fears and insecurities.

And though they may have hints of truth to them, they ultimately lean on hyperbole or lies. And the thing about moral panics, both past and present, is that they all have a tendency to follow a very similar script. Though you won't see many people these days freaking out about knives unless they're a vampire in a Blade sequel,

the Switchblade discourse of 70 years ago perfectly mirrors the same arguments you hear today about all kinds of horse shit, be it violent movies or video games or dirty song lyrics. Of course, one thing we know from all the data we purchased from Facebook is that our viewers are really smart and well-read, and so we're probably not going to spend a lot of time explaining why a moral panic is silly. not going to spend a lot of time explaining why a moral panic is silly. Instead, we want to break down the actual anatomy of them so that we can perhaps start avoiding them in the future. That's right, we're going to really dig into moral panics using an intellectual shovel, an incisive pickaxe, and a

cerebral switchblade that I just bought on eBay. Step one, take a true story and lie about it. The first thing to keep in mind is that these panics typically start with something actually real. That real thing can be benign or malignant, a fantasy role-playing game, or a series of kidnappings and murders. The moral panic purveyors love their truth kernels,

mind you. It gives a sense of validity to an entirely incorrect and destructive panic. It also makes it harder to argue with these panics because people feel like by recognizing the true parts, they are showing some kind of weakness. The reality is that it's extremely important to understand and acknowledge when a moral panic comes from some morsel of truth, because sometimes that truth is a real thing we should be concerned about, just not in the way these moral panics are trying to spin it.

For example, teens and Tide Pods come to mind. Do you remember that panic? It was something the media specifically wanted parents to worry about and framed as this huge trend. It was often regarded as a deadly challenge. And here's the thing, it is absolutely true that eating Tide Pods is deadly in that it has killed eight people in the United States,

except none of those people were teenagers. It was a couple of children under the age of two and the rest were older people with dementia. And so while there was absolutely a spike in teens poisoning themselves because of this meme, a total of 86 in the beginning of 2018 alone, that number is absolutely nothing compared to Tide Pod incidents among elderly adults who have Alzheimer's or dementia,

and way more among children under five, about 10,500 cases in 2017. You see how while the headlines are technically using true statements, they completely omit all the context in order to sell a specific narrative. The context being that your boomer parent is more at danger than your shitty teen child. And they are shitty.

I mean, just look at them. Awful stuff. Or better yet, here's something real. One established side effect of SSRIs, which are commonly prescribed antidepressants, is a decreased sex drive. That's something true that everyone agrees on. It is acceptable to some people with depression who are seeking treatment, and to others, it's not. But let's just see how far that true thing gets us when we're trying to inspire a new

moral panic. In the same journal in 2020, researchers found that, quote, post-SSRI sexual dysfunction is under-recognized and can be debilitating both psychologically and physically. Well, that's kind of a problem too. If it steals your sex drive, maybe it's stealing your soul. No, ignore it. Only cult members care. Then last year, researchers in Sweden found that, quote, there may be an increased hazard of violent crime during SSRI medication in a small group of patients. It may exist across age groups and throughout treatment periods, and it possibly persists for up to 12 weeks after treatment discontinuation.

So even after you stop taking the drugs, you may be impotent, infertile, violent. Jeez, okay. So I really don't have time to get bogged down debunking every moral panic, but I simply must spare a few seconds to verbally slap Tucker in his waxy little cherub cheeks. First of all, nobody is saying,

ignore it, only cult members care when discussing the sexual side effects of SSRIs. It's a conversation pretty much every patient has with their doctor before they start taking them. Secondly, there's no firmly established link between antidepressants and increases in violence. And there's certainly no link between antidepressants and mass shootings

as Carlson and some elected officials have irresponsibly suggested. That Swedish study cited by Tuks Carlby, that's his hobbit name, specifically says, quote, we don't claim that SSRIs cause the increased risk we see in our data. They clearly state that the disorders that SSRIs cause the increased risk we see in our data. They clearly state that the disorders that SSRIs treat, such as depression, are driving the association. The

researchers also cite the rarity of violent crimes in Sweden as a reason that it might be tough to extrapolate too much based on the data. Remember, Sweden has significantly lower rates of violent crime than the U.S., probably because they're rates of violent crime than the US, probably because they're all too busy listening to ABBA, so increases from small numbers are going to be more pronounced than they would in a place where violent crime is higher. You simply can't start with antidepressants lower your sex drive, which is true for some people, and then go right into they turn you into murderers. That's just not true, my creepy dude. And it's incredibly disingenuous and creates a real world stigma

that impacts the very people on whose behalf you're manufacturing your outrage. And that kind of disingenuous twisting is the first step in any moral panic. At some point, somebody has to fib or stretch the truth. Probably some teen, am I right? Terrible humans. Don't tell them I said that. But that 40 second clip is duplicated with different topics every night on Twacker's show, or some other also bad show, or in talking points across Twitter, or in your racist gam-gam's Facebook feed. Compare it to late 2018,

when a group of several thousand migrants from Central America approached the US border seeking asylum. Many of these migrants said they were fleeing persecution or threats from criminal gangs in countries like Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. These were desperate people, many of them families with children, taking a huge risk while undertaking an arduous

2,700 mile journey to get to the US. And that part is all true. Nobody is disputing it. But the Trump administration and conservative personalities painted a very different picture of what was happening, extrapolating the real story into a worst case scenario, casting the migrants as a serious and even existential threat to honest, hardworking Americans,

which once more is code for white people. General Terence O'Shaughnessy, who is the head of the US Northern Command said, quote, "'This caravan is different "'than what we've seen in the past. "'What we have seen is clearly an organization "'at a higher level than we have seen before. We've seen violence coming out of the caravan,

and we have seen as they pass other international borders, we've seen them behave in a nature that we have not seen in the past. So to restate, the caravan is in fact heavily male and highly dangerous. When the Mexican ambassador says that to public radio, what you're looking at obviously is racism, more right-wingery.

Just kidding. What we're actually seeing is relentless dishonesty from the very people who are paid to inform us. Your views on immigration will have zero impact and zero influence on a house dominated by Democrats who want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants. Those clips make it very clear what the argument is and who the supposed victims are. And I don't know, it feels like maybe promoting the racist great replacement theory to inspire panic in your white conservative audience is a way more likely

inspiration for mass shootings than fucking Zoloft. Remember, the entire argument here is based on one piece of evidence, that thousands of people from Central America wanted to immigrate to the United States, literally walking thousands of miles to escape violence, uninhabitable conditions, and extreme poverty. Nevermind that in the year 2000, there were far more migrants moving unchecked through the southern border, and that the percentage of single men crossing, as opposed to families including children, was significantly higher back then.

But of course, we all know why lies like these get by, right? It's a word, and it starts with an R, and it ends with an ism. And this is where step two comes into play, which is the use of scornful othering language that casts a typically marginalized or easily feared group of people as the villain and frames the panic as a good versus evil,

us versus them fight. We love our little teams, don't we folks? Step two, othering language. Before we dig into the language specifically, we've got to acknowledge the overarching role that the concept of the other plays in moral panics. Stanley Cohen, the criminologist who coined the term, defined a moral panic as when a condition, episode,

person, or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests. In his 1972 book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, he details a moral panic that overtook Britain in the 1960s, involving two subcultures of young people, the mods and the rockers. And while it is extremely British to be frightened of two groups

that sound like charming roller derby teams, here in America, we're currently terrified of books that confirm the existence of gay people and M&Ms that aren't sexy enough. So whomst are we to judgest? In brief, these mods and rockers held a series of parties over holiday weekends, getting into some fights

and initiating minor acts of vandalism. Over time, the media exaggerated the threat these groups pose to regular people and their families, or as Cohen said, to societal values and interests. And this is the key thing to understand. There are no moral panics about an asteroid hitting the Earth or hurricanes, astracanes, hurricanes, humble sharknadoes, or any other such force majeure.

It's always groups of people who are seen as the threat, people who are outside of what those in power consider the cultural norms. Sometimes that's just disgusting teenagers. Other times it's a fucking skin color. But the panic can only happen if there's a visible enemy in the form of a group of people who are othered and separated from the status quo.

President Donald January Trump called the migrant caravan an invasion and described many people in the group as gang members without citing any evidence to back up those claims. He pretty much ran on the othering of immigrants. Similarly, the modern right wing has attempted to connect basically the entire LGBTQ community

with pedophilia by labeling them groomers, a move dangerously similar to the child safety paranoia of the Satanic Panic. You know, that time conservatives thought fantasy improv theater with dice was a recruitment tool of the literal devil. Heck, even Tipper Gore labeled a group of musical artists the Filthy Fifteen when she was railing against song lyrics

she didn't like in the 1980s. Those songs were by artists that included Madonna, Prince, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, and Cyndi Lauper. And as you might have noticed, none of those managed to bring about the collapse of society. Black Sabbath had already been recording music for nearly two decades by the time Tipper singled them out.

In fairness, there's still time for them to bring about a nuclear apocalypse or some such, and honestly, anything can happen at this point. Good luck to Black Sabbath. There is a reason Cohen's book about moral panic starts with folk devils. It isn't about a disagreement or a political difference with another group. It's the idea that one group

is fundamentally less valuable than the other and thus less human. The panicked group is civilized while the scary others are not. The late researcher, Amanda Roloff, summarized the civilizing process as described by sociologist Norbert Elias as, quote, the process whereby one group of people come to see themselves as more civilized than another group of people,

thereby enabling these self-identified civilized people to commit acts that at other times would be seen as uncivilized. In other words, convincing yourself and your followers that you are more civilized than your enemies provides an extremely effective excuse to do some pretty fucked up things. We see this every time a transgender person or someone mistaken for a transgender person is harassed in a public restroom. We see it every time people are harassed

for not speaking English in public. And we see it every time an are harassed for not speaking English in public, and we see it every time an honest goose tries to buy a switchblade. The othering language allows the harassers to feel justified in their actions. It's a tool of dehumanization. It's the same reason Dwayne Johnson called people jabronis before rock-bottoming them into the center of the earth. He wants us to clap, not boo. This is, of course, what makes the language often contradictory. A targeted group can be both intrusive and exclusive.

Another can be lazy and inert, but also aggressive and pushing. The enemy has to be both laughably weak and indescribably powerful at the same time. It's the language of fascism. Antifa, it's a bunch of soy boys who are dangerously violent. And you of course, probably know one of the best examples of this. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime,

they're rapists, and some I assume are good people. The contradiction in language, often in the same breath, kind of gives the whole game away. Whatever the panic is supposed to be about isn't really what it's about. The only goal is to demonize a group of people. Donald Jabanet Trump III didn't cite a bunch of charts and data to back up any of his rhetoric.

He merely shambled onto a global stage and just, he just started saying shit, contradictory and dehumanizing shit, wholly untethered from reality. And while that's fucked up, there is, of course, a second component there. It's not enough to make these claims. Someone also has to amplify them. But before we do that, we need to amplify these ads. Oh boy.

I hope one of them is for that ball shaver that looks like a switchblade. Go, I hope. Oh boy, I am tired. Every day I work up a sweat. Then I bottle that sweat and go to my local mall and put the sweat in the big fountain. Soon the fountain will be all my sweat and I will have won. It's important to eat right

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Again, simply visit athleticgreens.com slash more news to take control of your health and give AG1 a try. Drink it, then sweat it out, then give that sweat to the world. Then you win, like I won. Okay, neat, we're back. We were talking about the use of othering language by bad actors, sorry, Dwayne, surrounding these moral panics. But this language is, of course, tolerated and spread, often by some sort of accomplice hijacking the attention

that the panic creates. And while technically that could be just like a dude on a bike with a bullhorn, spreading panic is often way more efficient when you have access to some kind of media conglomerate. Plus, everyone threw rocks at me and I fell off the bike. Step three, media exacerbation. Any burgeoning moral panic might fizzle out and die

were it not for a media ecosystem willing to carry its water. The media might sound like a boogeyman since it's such a broad and generic term, but when talking about moral panics, it's not enough to just say Fox News or grifting pundits. Giving validation to and aggravating the severity of moral panics really is a media-wide problem.

Sure, right-wing media is a huge part of it, but news magazines, local news, and even narrative content play a key role. After all, there was no News Corp back when 60s Britons were getting their dodgy old knickers in a twist over the Mords and Rockers, eh? Regret doing that voice. But I mean, Rupert Murdoch was just a,

he was a sprightly young, he was 30 year old newspaper tycoon at the time. Good God, that guy's old. Oh my goodness. Old man. The point is, the game the media plays with moral panics has been consistent for decades. The rage clicks of the present

were the Newsweek subscriptions of eras past. The poster child for modern, media-inspired freakouts is arguably Dungeons & Dragons, a key target in what later came to be known as the Satanic Panic. Mary Towie was killed by two friends, Ron Adcox and Darren Molitor. The crucial point is, can a game create

psychosis, or is someone like Darren Molitor an accident waiting to happen, with or without the game? But many grieving parents believed there was a connection. Pat Pulling's teenage son committed suicide, and she spoke publicly, claiming that his game playing

contributed to his death. These children not only begin to have violent dreams or violent thoughts or negative depressing type things, they become very much a part of this character. The kernel of truth here was that a game exists. And at the time, that game was played primarily by people perceived as social outcasts, nerds, geeks, book fuckers, et cetera.

And a few people who played that game in the 1980s died under tragic circumstances. The same way a small portion of all the people who watch football will succumb to alcoholism or Velveeta-related heart disease, or just, you know, unrelated tragic accidents. Correlation doesn't equal causation, yada yada, you get it. But after one college student disappeared in 1979,

a private investigator hired by his parents concluded that the student's enjoyment of Dungeons & Dragons was somehow involved. Even though the student had a history of depression and drug abuse, and his enjoyment of tabletop gaming was never shown to be a factor in his disappearance and suicide, that story generated a surprising amount of breathless media attention. And because of all that attention, casting Dungeons and Dragons

as a dangerous underground movement instead of fantasy little league for indoor kids, sales of the game shot up, which generated more media attention, suggesting that the concern from frightened religious parents about their children falling prey to satanic cults was warranted. Also, that private investigator, who was totally wrong write an entire book claiming that OJ Simpson's son actually murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman because he's just a guy with some theories and lies

who makes shit up to sell books. Because while creating the panic was done with negative intent designed to vilify an entire group of people, spreading it is often done with no agenda whatsoever beyond making that sweet, sweet paper. Sure, news organizations will absolutely highlight and amplify stories that align with their worldview

or advance their own interests or the government's interests, but sometimes it's just plain laziness or a ratings chase. One good example would be media coverage of crime rates since early in the pandemic. As we discussed in previous episodes, there's been a real disconnect between the reality that murder rates increased while other violent crimes decreased and what the media is saying. Rising murder rates are of concern to people, which fuels a feedback loop of journalists writing about them. But then you'd think the reporting would have a duty

to reference that murder rates are still significantly lower than they were decades ago, and to include that information somewhere above the 16th paragraph of an article. But of course, that's less interesting. And even when crime was a problem, like New York in the 1970s, rarely did the media explain the economic problems

and mob involvement that led to that situation. Instead, the narrative was heavily reliant on street thugs and gangs, which absolutely were also a problem, but it's not like they all just showed up one day. There's far more nuance than a bunch of warriors types invading the streets. However, this is what the media,

and then of course Hollywood glommed onto. Sometimes resulting in entire film series devoted to shooting brown people. Oh yeah, you shoot that guy in the back, you hero of the film, you. This is also how we get movies like the Tom Hanks alarmist classic, "'Mazes and Monsters'," and the heavy metal slash babysitting cautionary tale, "'The Gate.'" Narrative films pick up what the news media is putting down.

And once you're hearing about the satanic panic in Hollywood movies, as well as every night on the seven o'clock news, it is as real as Santa Claus, who is fake, but paradoxically also real enough to secure lucrative soda endorsement deals. Remember all those switchblade films from earlier? Those narrative films didn't need to make an argument

or justify their use of knife-wielding street toughs. They were just true things that existed, unalterable truths that keep rattling around our brains and thus distort our thinking. It's called the availability heuristic. For example, around six deaths in the US every year are attributed to venomous snakes and lizards. But if each of those six was a national news story,

you'd probably be looking over your shoulder for gun-toting salamanders everywhere you went. And we would make competing films where people have shootouts with giant reptiles, which saying it out loud sounds awesome. Snake guns, lizard shooty story. I'm not a title guy, sorry. This is what happened in the 1990s

with the panic over frivolous lawsuits. Individual silly lawsuits were highlighted by corporate groups seeking to clamp down on litigation against them, and the media played along. The most famous example concerned 79-year-old Stella Liebeck. In 1992, she was fixing her coffee between her legs while in the parking lot of McDonald's when she spilled some on herself, resulting in third degree burns across 6% of her body and other burns over one sixth of her body. The burns were so severe, she was in the hospital for eight days and had to get skin grafts. That's, that's the word. Too fucking hot,

as in roughly 180 degrees. Like, are you kidding me? Why should any liquid intended for human consumption ever be kept at a temperature sufficient to literally melt the flesh from your body? Are you hunting demons with that coffee? Are you going to throw it into Harvey Dent's face to score a mistrial for Basmaroni? The only food item that should be that hot

are McDonald's apple pies. Liebeck even admitted the spill was her fault, but insisted that the temperature of the coffee was unreasonable and unsafe. She was only initially seeking $20,000 to pay for her medical expenses. But because McDonald's had received at least 700 reports of coffee burns

over the previous decade, a jury decided to send a message and awarded her $160,000 in compensatory damages and $2.7 million in punitive damages. It was a classic story of a corporation cutting corners, resulting in harm caused to their customers. At least, that's how it should have been reported. The report aired on more than a dozen national broadcasts and twice as many local news shows. The condensed telling of the story created its own version of the truth. Instead of pointing out she spilled the coffee in the passenger seat of a parked car, this was the new narrative. It seems she was holding a cup between her legs while driving.

Clamped it between her legs, drove down the street, spilled it, burned herself, sued McDonald's, and collected. A woman was awarded $2.9 million in a lawsuit against McDonald's. She spilled hot coffee on her lap while sitting in her car and claimed it was too hot. Every day we hear about another outrageous lawsuit. Who pays? You do. Tell the legislature we can't afford another million-dollar cup of coffee. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Joke? You do. Tell the legislature we can't afford another million dollar cup of coffee. Ha ha ha ha ha. Joke's on you, 79 year old woman who had to get skin grafts. Honka honka, don't trip over this banana peel, you klutz. It's like people will sue over anything these days,

is apparently the lesson from all of that. And once that kind of narrative gets established, it's just out there in the world. It's just a thing that exists now. Everyone knows that frivolous lawsuits are a major blight on society, right? It's now something that doesn't need to be backed up with evidence and can simply be commented on by our popular sitcoms.

Sorry, are you kidding? You did me the biggest favor of my life. I spoke to a lawyer, we're suing for millions. Suing? What for? The coffee was too hot. It's supposed to be hot. Not that hot.

Yeah, Kramer's right. It wasn't supposed to be that hot. You ever notice? Coffee? Anyway, even though this particular story has been revisited in the years since to try and set the record straight, none of that does much good for Stella Liebeck, who was permanently disfigured from the coffee

and turned into a nationwide laughingstock. She died in 2004 before the media caught up and told the truth about her story. She also didn't live long enough to see the end of the Stella Awards, created by a syndicated columnist who made a nice little living writing about so-called frivolous lawsuits until he shut it down in 2012. But don't worry, he's still selling the book.

Again, the truth to all this was obvious to anyone who was really paying attention or wanted to do the research. That reporter we showed earlier said Liebeck held the coffee cup between her legs while driving, which was false. She wasn't driving. This was known at the time and many outlets got it right.

And sure, that's a comparatively minor mistake, right? We've made them ourselves. Like that time we said the Iraq war was started by President Urkel. Not sure how we screwed that one up, but the point is that once a lie is casually repeated enough times by the media, it becomes as good as fact to the public. And this is predictably, tragically, where we talk about social media and how it's now just so much easier to spread this kind of lie. Take the recent groomer panic that has right-wingers all bunched up in their grundles

about supposed pedophilia and out-of-control wokeness in Disney cartoons and public schools. The Libs of TikTok account, which we have talked about before, takes advantage of the fact that moral panics usually begin with factual events before escalating to absurd jibber fibs. In this case, sometimes gay or bi or trans teachers or caregivers will talk to students about their identity. If anyone sits and really thinks about this, it's not a big deal at all.

There's no formal instruction going on about gender identity or sexuality with young kids. And if you watch the videos posted by the account, it's typically just a teacher or caregiver talking about identity in a totally reasonable way. The same way you might explain to a child why someone's skin color is different from theirs. But Libs of TikTok's audience hates queer people.

So once they establish the true story of some teachers speaking to their students about gender identity, they begin to build on that story with manufactured bullshit designed to whip people up into a sudsy panic, a real froth fest, the great British hate off.

And the people buying into the panic are none the wiser because it confirms their prejudice. They're disinclined to verify whether or not it's actually true. That was the case when the account promoted blatantly false information about Boston Children's Hospital, including the lie that the hospital gives hysterectomies to young girls. Those lies resulted in threats against the hospital and their staff. It's also the case in this other Lives of TikTok post where, quote, it was revealed that a Michigan school placed litter boxes in the bathroom for students that identify as cats. Spoiler alert for this video, that was not revealed at all.

And so yesterday I heard that at least one of our schools in our town has a, in one of the unisex bathrooms, a litter box for the kids that identify as cats. in one of the unisex bathrooms, a litter box for the kids that identify as cats. And I am really disturbed by that. And I will do some more investigation on that. I know what's going on nationwide. I know it is. It's part of the agenda that's being pushed.

I don't even want to understand it. Oh, did you do your investigating? Did you buy a super sleuth spy kit and get out the little magnifying glass and walk around a public school like you're fucking Inspector Gadget? No, you didn't. Because if you had, you would have found that nobody is putting litter boxes in student bathrooms. That's not a thing, nor has it ever been a thing. It has never claimed membership to thinghood. But once you've been in frothing moral panic mode for months, you have to keep upping the ante with your examples. This lie would go on to spread on the Facebook group

Protect Nebraska Children, force an Iowa superintendent to say that it wasn't happening, let a Nebraska state senator to apologize for further spreading the rumor himself, and forced local newspapers to keep having to print fact checks about it months later. It's become that identical party anecdote

that everyone repeats. My cousin knew a kid who ate pop rocks and soda and exploded. But nobody stops to think about how illogical and silly it is, an urban legend, or rather a Roganism. Ready for this? My friend, his wife, is a schoolteacher.

And she works at a school that had to install a litter box in the girls' room because there is a girl who's a furry. In fairness, he later clarified that by saying my friend's wife, he actually meant a thing I read on the internet while high and then pretended I was personally connected to because perhaps I shouldn't be as prominent of a media figure as I am He actually meant, It's not a direct quote. Anyway, the right-wing's groomer spectacle has whipped people up for months with outrage based on non-stories and fake stories. It's resulted in real-world harm in the form of harassment and death threats and regressive bills being proposed

and passed across the country. Media of both the news and social variety have perpetuated this cycle. And instead of having any reasonable discussion about what and when children should be taught about sexuality and gender identity, people are believing that teachers are sexualizing children in preschool

and that students are literally shitting in litter boxes. By the way, I lied when I said that nobody's putting litter boxes in schools. They actually are doing that as emergency toilets in the event of a school shooting. What a perfect example of how moral panics completely divert from the actual conversation. So it's time to talk about why this all matters.

I mean, of course it matters, but I want to talk about the very real consequences and motivation for these bullshit frenzies, the actual moral panic we need to worry about here. And in classic media tradition, I won't tell you what that is until after these ads! Hey, it's Katie Stoll. You know, when I'm not working in the news mines, I run a small side business selling chemicals to taxidermists. You know, stuff like glycerin, bird feet injection fluid, fake eyes. Don't worry about where I get them from.

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hit me up. Don't worry where I get it from. Hey, we're back. And to recap, a lot of what we've said so far would take a moment. So we will. Everything we're talking about, these moral panics, are often really easy to spot after the fact, or even during the fact. The migrant caravans didn't take over America or replace all of its white people.

Studies have never reliably shown that video games inspire real world violence. Comic books are not responsible for teenagers acting like teenagers. The GOP banning books is far more of a threat to free speech than students walking out of a lecture. Teaching white children about the history of racism in the US is not forcing them to feel perpetually ashamed.

Almost nobody of teen age was eating Tide Pods. Kidnappings of children by strangers are pretty rare. There are basically no actual Satanists, and the only Satanists that do exist are either harmless edgelords or atheists highlighting religious hypocrisy, and shoplifting, even if it is on the rise, which there's not a ton of great data to suggest that it is, is not some kind of national crisis. So if you and I all know this already, how does this keep happening? If panics can be quickly identified, how do they get so out of hand?

There's a few reasons, but what sticks out is that once these moral panics begin, a lot of people simply don't want them to stop for let's call it reasons. Step four, the right people are victimized. To sum it up, modern moral panics are no longer anomalies but tools being used specifically to drive an agenda. They were also that in the past,

except the process has been so streamlined that they're now easily and quickly wielded like weapons, specifically and perhaps exclusively from one side of the political spectrum. In his 2004 book, What's the Matter with Kansas? Historian Thomas Frank argues that since political debates have become so framed around hot button culture war issues, low and middle income rural Americans

regularly vote against their best economic interests. He details how Democrats ceded this ground a long time ago to focus more on affluent professionals and rarely make the populist case that their economic policies would actually improve the lives of lower income rural people. In other words, the deck is currently stacked against dispelling moral panics

because they are now the primary issues of our political discourse, specifically as a distraction. Because the most frustrating thing about most modern moral panics, critical race theory, cancel culture, drag shows, the incivility of protesting outside someone's house is that the most vocal people know it's bullshit. Josh Hawley doesn't really think

that Disney is a woke corporation. He knows very well that Disney would feed one out of every 10 kids riding the Matterhorn to the Yeti if it would boost their quarterly profits. He just doesn't care. It's convenient for him to have a tangible enemy in his woke panic so he can pretend it's not just for spite over Disney's eventual denouncement of the don't say gay bill and pulling of some of its political donations. They're not even trying to hide it.

Here is conservative activist Christopher Ruffo admitting that the attack on critical race theory was just a branding exercise in order to meet the right's political ends. It's a smokescreen, a banana peel in the political game of Mario Kart. Because if you have people up in arms about pronouns or immigrants, then they won't notice when you're completely fucking them over. You've used a phrase, I want to make sure I understand what you mean by it. You've referred to people with a capacity for pregnancy. Would that be women? Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy.

Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy, as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy. So this isn't really a women's rights issue. We can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley. Since you are the president of the National Women's Law Center, I was hoping that you could define what a woman is for us in this committee hearing.

Well, as the president of the National Women's Law Center, you can imagine I say woman a lot in my day job. Okay, so I'm just asking for the definition. And so what I'll tell you is I am a woman, that's how I identify. Okay. But I wonder, however, if in part the reason that you're asking a question is that you're trying to suggest that people who don't identify as women can't find it. I'm simply asking the question and I simply want an answer.

And so I think it's actually really important to be very clear here that there are people who identify as non-binary. I think about 5% of young people do. We're not going to go there. I was hoping maybe you would say something that maybe we learned in high school biology that has to do with X and Y chromosomes, but which define male and female, but I guess we're not going to get there. Cool. Yeah. Score those culture war points, you weird ghouls. That's from back in July when congressional committees heard testimony about the impact of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Pretty weird that in this congressional hearing concerning what they claim to be protecting human life, which they claim to be really invested in, they also want to stop everything to do a Dave Chappelle-style tight five? Feels very unserious and perhaps a distraction from how they are actively taking away the rights of Americans. The same goes with the panic over protesting outside of the homes of Supreme Court justices. Supreme Court justices are public figures holding the highest seat of authority in the land. It's totally reasonable for people to gather outside their homes to peacefully protest their authoritarian decisions.

But the panic over protesting at justices' homes, of course, diverts attention from the actually really bad thing going on and directs it towards something that generates bipartisan anger, in this case, disrupting the sanctity of the suburbs. That's something both parties can get nice and riled up about enough to take immediate action. We need to protect those extremely powerful millionaires

or else they might actually hear some negative feedback about their decisions. See, it's a really effective system because even if we know that it's bullshit, the media has to then spend a lot of effort talking about why it's bullshit. It creates a fact-checking ecosystem. And so even when the misinformation is obvious,

it still accomplishes its goal of distracting everyone. If you take a dump in the middle of a Walmart, someone has to clean it up. No matter how silly you look, you have successfully used up resources that could have been spent elsewhere. Can you even imagine a productive news cycle covering parents at school board meetings,

talking about how schools in poorer neighborhoods get far less money per student than those in wealthier neighborhoods. Seems like it would make a lot more sense to make that the discussion about the state of education in the United States, instead of whether or not a classroom mask mandate counts as child abuse.

That's one of our favorite things to do these days, be outraged about child abuse as a way of distracting or even pushing actual child abuse. While shit like inspecting teen genitals as a result of trans panic, talking about drag shows as a danger to kids, as opposed to the supremely fucked up child beauty pageants that continue to exist.

Hey, remember when Netflix made a movie about how the sexualization of preteen girls is bad and everyone accused it of sexualizing girls without actually watching the film? What a perfect example of this. There are so many real problems in the world and these panics seem perfectly designed to distract from all of them. But of course, a moral panic's use as a distraction is just a bonus feature. The main course, and the reason it's so hard to break this cycle, is that the people they ultimately hurt are the exact people the purveyors want to see hurt. Here, no other state passed more laws that were anti-LGBTQ than Tennessee,

and it appears the state is on track to keep going when the new session starts in January, thanks to a new bill that would criminalize drag shows in public places. Never mind the fact that there's been absolutely no epidemic or even any evidence of drag queens molesting or grooming kids. That's something you can easily look into and disprove right now. It's certainly something history will confirm when it looks back at this era as a kind of weird Jim Crow for LGBTQ people. But of course it doesn't matter if it's true because the moral panic in this case, drag shows, will victimize the right people.

People deemed morally wrong by the people pushing the lie. It doesn't matter that the panic isn't real because for them, the ends justify the means. And so here we see a completely fabricated moral panic used to justify actual laws designed to remove people's human rights. That is, of course, the actual thing we should be upset about. And it happens way more often than it should. For instance, remember all the bullshit over the McDonald's coffee lawsuit? That created a real scare over lawsuits, which in turn created real laws passed two or more decades ago

that are still on the books today. A 2016 poll found that 87% of voters continue to believe that there are too many lawsuits filed in America, even though the number of annual lawsuits has steadily declined and Republicans still promote legislation aimed at shielding businesses from liability.

It's become harder and more cost prohibitive for people with real grievances to sue corporations. The frivolous lawsuit moral panic worked, aided by the media and hundreds of millions of dollars spent by industry groups and the US Chamber of Commerce. You don't regularly hear about satanic panic anymore and yet the fear of Satanists is still a running

theme in American politics. It inspired fucking QAnon and led a whole bunch of people to believe that a million American children had been kidnapped and sold into sex slavery. Video games are still regularly blamed for incidents of teen violence, and 37% of Americans believe violent movies and video games are a cause of mass shootings. Police get millions in new funding every time there's a new crime scare. And a bunch of states still have goddamn switchblade laws as though the country were regularly besieged by greaser bullies from Stephen King movies

instead of radicalized right-wing terrorists buying AR-15s at Walmart. And while we can't do anything about past examples, it's pretty gosh darn and dang important to think about what we can do about the moral panics happening right now. So it's time to see every piece of a moral panic, the lies, the othering, and the media exacerbation all in one clip. I don't think we have exact numbers, it's if we're talking about the drugs it's I mean millions do you talk about human hormone blockers yeah millions of kids have been on hormone blockers really I'm sure someone's gonna fact-check me on it but my my my guess is that we're in we're into the millions

now at this point yeah that would be my guess I can say for double mastectomies the most reason I've read a report recently that there were over a thousand done between 2016 and 2019. And when you compare that to how many were done between, you know, 2008 and 2015, it's just, it's a massive increase. And over a thousand girls had double mastectomies, gender affirming double mastectomies in that time frame. And when you say girls, you're talking about pre-pubescent? Right, minors.

And that's just up until 2019. And then we know that there's been this exponential increase with all this stuff year over year. So it's a lot. It's too many. Having this happen to one kid is way too many. It's a lot more than one. It says over the last five years, there were at least 4,780 adolescents who started puberty blockers

and had a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis. It says it's kind of undercounted, but that's... That would be a big undercounting. Less than a thousand people a year. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would guess hundreds of thousands,

but I could be wrong. A million sounds great. That's Daily Wire thunder chud Matt Walsh spitting absolute garbage about trans people on one of the largest talk shows in America. He begins by taking the truth that a few thousand adolescents started puberty blockers between 2017 and 2021, lying about it and making it millions of kids instead. in 2021, lying about it and making it millions of kids instead. When he was caught in that giant lie,

he just sort of shrugs it off because he's not actually interested in the facts. He also says that he read a study saying there was an explosion of kids being given mastectomies from 2016 to 2019. Joe qualifies it by asking if he means prepubescent girls and Matt yes-ands him without either of them realizing that you can't get a mastectomy without, you know, breasts.

He doesn't cite a specific study, but he's probably talking about this one, reported about here in the totally credible Christian Broadcasting Network under Faithwire. But even in that pretty fucking dubious article, they recognize that the average age for these surgeries were done on 17 year olds. And the increase between 2016 to 2019 is the difference between 100 and 489 procedures.

The total being 1,130 chest reconstruction surgeries in that three year span. When you actually look at the numbers given, it's not really an epidemic. Matt Walsh probably knows that, which is why he has to act like any number is too many. His beliefs being, I guess, that if you're a teenager, you shouldn't have surgery done on your private areas. So one imagines that he's equally upset that in 2020, a total of 3,218 year olds got breast implants, or that another 4,700 teenagers between 13 to 19 had reduction surgery.

Does that also bother him? Why do I feel like he doesn't care about those numbers? Why do I feel like the only thing he wants to portray as a big scary epidemic is that which relates to trans people? But because he can't just say, I hate trans people, he needs to frame it as some kind of health issue or about the decision to change one's body, even though he certainly

doesn't give a shit about all the other ways people do that every goddamn day. There's a moment in this conversation that's really telling, and it speaks to what Matt really thinks. Look, if you're an adult and you want to do that and you understand who you are and what you are and this is how you feel you should progress, you're an adult. This is a free country. You should be able to do whatever you want. But when you're talking about doing that to children, the fact that so many people are on board and so many people are angry, people are going to be angry at us that we're having

these conversations. Yeah, they will be. And I also. I actually think that that that this shouldn't this shouldn't be happening to. Hey, Matt. Finish that sentence. You actually think that this, as in gender affirming care, shouldn't be happening to whom? Considering what Rogan said,

it sure seems like he was going to say that he doesn't think adults should have this care either because he's just a bigot who wants to inflict his will on everyone using lies to scare people into thinking there's an epidemic to be concerned about, a perpetuation of a moral panic, the trans panic that we will inevitably look back on as being silly.

Joe Rogan is the media component. He expresses confusion as to why the conversation they're having is perceived as bad and why people are supporting procedures done on minors. Because what Matt has disingenuously omitted from the conversation is that these are teenagers, often older ones, and not prepubescent kids. Over a thousand girls had gender-affirming double mastectomies in that time frame. And when you say girls, you're talking about prepubescent? Right, minors. It's a really solid example of everything we've talked about.

He took a real fact, the rise in gender-affirming care, and then twisted it to seem way more widespread and insidious than it was, even trying to lie about the numbers before getting caught. He fudged the age group being talked about to make it seem more outrageous and omitted all of the context, like how we're talking about people making these decisions with their doctors,

people he couldn't possibly know the lives of. And Joe Rogan, while doing some fact-checking, ultimately just shrugs it off and continues to give him a podium. Walsh knows what he's doing. He has an agenda, a really hateful one at that. And apologies, but I'm going to have to read two of his tweets to demonstrate this.

Tweets specific to those abortion hearings, which read, these hearings on abortion are instructive. The liberal witnesses have refused to condemn infanticide, refused to define the word woman, and claimed that men can get pregnant. We cannot share a country with these people. There can be no unity. They are lunatics and monsters.

And then, I don't respect them. I have nothing in common with them. I detest everything they believe and stand for. They feel the same about me. We simply cannot go on this way. Cool, Matt. No, seriously, like chill the fuck out is what I meant by that.

Just to remind you, the actual facts Matt is reacting to is that pro-choice witnesses refused to label abortion as infanticide, because according to every medical definition, it isn't, and used inclusive language when speaking about abortions, because there are people who do not identify as female, such as trans men, who can become pregnant. That's, um, it.

But to Matt, this thread of logic is the domain of lunatics and monsters with whom he cannot coexist. Note the severity of Matt's conclusion. It's not, I don't agree with these people, and I never will. It's, these people should not be allowed to live

in this country, which is a goose step and a jump away from these people should not be allowed to live. How else are we, and more importantly, Matt's followers supposed to interpret that? He ends his rant by saying, there can be no unity and we simply cannot go on this way. You can't finish that line of thinking without violating Twitter's terms of service.

At least before Twitter's moderation team was hollowed out by a rich weirdo. He's inciting violence and he knows it and his followers know it. Because again, for Matt, the ends justify the means. The means being lying and the ends being the victimization of the specific people he doesn't like. People who have done nothing wrong

and are just trying to like exist. Who Matt very clearly wants to do away with, but he can't say that. So he has to pretend that these people create some sort of danger. He has to dehumanize them with othering language so as to justify any cruelty that results from his terrible speech.

It's almost like, geez, it's almost like the damage caused by a moral panic is way worse than the actual pretend thing the moral panic is about. And the people who perpetuate these are often aware of that fact and are doing it specifically to hurt people. I don't know, fuck those people. Fuck them right in the neck. Or failing that, mock them. Or ignore them. Or mock and then ignore them. And then focus on the people they are trying

to hurt. Because a key component to all of this that we haven't really talked about is the word panic. Panic is the actual factor that makes this so easily weaponized. Because when you are panicked, you aren't thinking, you're scared. Or horny if you have a panic fetish. And even when there is a real threat, the panic still leads to some terrible, often worse decisions. See terror, the war on.

We got 9-11, remember that? I forget the exact date, but the result was a series of wars, rollbacks on privacy, and racist paranoia that resulted in way more death and destruction than what sparked it all. Not to mention the terrible, terrible TV and movies that soon followed.

We work for Atlantis Cable News, and we wanted you and your first officer and flight attendant crazy lady to be the first ones on this plane to know that our armed forces killed Osama bin Laden for you tonight. You're serious? Yes, sir. We reported the news. Powerful, hilarious stuff. See, moral panics come and go, but their effects can last for decades or more.

And the first step in dealing with them is to not panic, even when there's something to panic about. Things like climate change and fascism and genetically enhanced smart spiders are real things that can make you feel quite panicked. But the solutions to those things require us to tackle them with a level head. It's weird to say the answer is stay calm,

but that's seriously a key component to combating this problem. And always remember the actual people that these moral panics hurt and do what we can to help those people. Like maybe if they need some fruit sliced for them, we can do that with our brand new switchblade. Guess what just came in the mail while we were talking?

I am gonna be the coolest kid on the block. Ow! Oh! Mm! Mm! while we were talking. I am going to be the coolest kid on the block. Ow! Oh! Mmm! Mmm! Oh, that hurts so bad! Oh, my God!

Whoa! Mmm! Oh, they should put a warning on these things or something. Mmm! Mmm! Mmm! Mmm! Mmm! Mmm! I just wanted a switchblade. Where'd it go?

Where'd it go? Oh no. Oh no, it crawled away. Oh, here's switchbladey, switchbladey, switchbladey. Here's switchy, switch no, it crawled away. Oh, here's Switchblady, Switchblady, Switchblady. Here's Switchy, Switchy, Switchy. Oh, where did you go? Oh, ow, ow, oh, oh, no. Oh, oh, we are banning Switchblades.

We're banning Switchblades. We're banning boxes. We're banning the end of this show, which is over now. What the fuck? Thanks for watching. The episode's over. And this is the part that you've stuck around for, which we appreciate. And it's the part where I say, like the video and subscribe to the channel on youtube.com.

It would help us out. And we've got a podcast called Even More News. You can listen to this show as a podcast it's called some more news on all your podcast applications and we've got a patreon.com slash some more news uh early release no ads if you hate the ads and other stuff stuff and joy we have merch with I guess the opposite of joy on it Wormbo and you know what

the fuck to call back to the beginning of this short clip