00:00:36.380We're going to be talking about moral panics.
00:00:38.120So there are some trigger warnings coming up because, you know, while a lot of these things can be quite silly, many of them deal in kind of a weird funhouse mirror way with very serious concerns about sexual assault, childhood abuse, et cetera, et cetera.
00:00:52.640Just two quick more housekeeping items.
00:00:55.060One is this show had a very extensive slideshow, which we're sharing on our Patreon.
00:01:02.520We're not going to share it totally publicly, and we apologize for that, just that we didn't
00:08:28.860And so like now these things that are kind of like often interesting little like historical tidbits or funny stories or like fringe obsessions.
00:08:39.780Now they're becoming like really important in a way that seems different from anything that happened like in my living memory.
00:08:46.460Yeah, they always tend to become public policy in some way, right?
00:20:03.980I think Jean-Jacques Rousseau has that line, like, books to be read with one hand.
00:20:08.360It's like, they were pretty explicit about this.
00:20:10.280But the only thing that's worse than reading by yourself is reading as a group.
00:20:15.000So this is a thing that young people get up to together.
00:20:18.400There is this example of Werther, not the one you're thinking of, but a novel by Goethe from 1774, which famously became a youth phenomenon.
00:20:30.280It was widely read among all age groups, but it was the reading of the young of this book that became this kind of flashpoint.
00:20:39.320With a lot of panics about media change,
00:20:41.840we tend to select for what young people do with it, right?
00:21:08.100It was this, right, this idea that, you know, the kids, they're too dumb to understand the difference between fantasy and reality.0.97
00:21:14.520And it's like, it seems like the adults are the ones who don't get it.
00:21:17.340Yeah, and I think that with this panic, this became very clear that, like, you know, people of all age groups and of all genders read this, but they fixated on young women, which did have to do with, and so a little bit of a trigger warning, there appear to have been suicides inspired by this book because it ends, spoiler alert for a book that came out in 1774.
00:21:38.100the hero commits suicide at the end of the book.
00:21:43.100There were attempts to ban the book at the time,
00:22:08.100Right. So he's already kind of taken the piss and saying, like, come on, like this book can't do that.
00:22:14.180But to just be serious for a second, of course, the Werther effect, right, the idea that like people can be inspired to kill themselves by stories of suicide.
00:22:25.300That is documented in the literature. And like there are people in the late 18th century like, well, we don't know about this novel, but like this is a real thing.
00:22:32.380Suicide clusters exist. And this is something that people still kind of deal with. So it is a real question. One of the most uncanny things really about human volition that it seems to me. So they're grappling with a very serious question, but they're grappling it. And this is why I would say it is a moral panic in spite of everything. They grapple with it in kind of deeply unserious ways.
00:22:54.420yeah well i feel like there's this idea in a lot of moral panics that everyone is kind of simpler
00:22:59.860on the inside than me you know i is the person who sees the moral panic and kind of i'm seeing
00:23:05.860things as they are and this kind of the it's very appealing to think like i have become enlightened
00:23:11.560i get it now it all makes sense and really kind of it's you're the one who's kind of
00:23:18.180thinking much more simply about things if you you kind of feel like you've unlocked this one
00:23:23.220theory that makes everything make sense and so we just keep the scary book away from people
00:23:27.720and everything will be fine yeah yeah so i think mora you had our second moral panic do you want
00:23:33.980god is it mine already you went very local which i love i went for something that is sometimes
00:23:40.920turned the baby roast or as it was parodied on the simpsons the california cheeseburger
00:23:51.020so this is a moral panic that really originates with an urban myth and it's probably one a lot
00:23:59.780of you guys have heard before so the story goes that a young couple are desperate to have a night
00:24:07.500out away from their baby and they hire a new babysitter who shows up and is something of a
00:24:14.300hippie and when they get back after partying they find that this hippie babysitter who is high on
00:24:24.480acid has put a turkey in their baby's crib and their baby in the oven for dinner now here's my
00:24:34.980question right just one without well yeah but without getting into anybody's drug histories
00:24:42.280if you've you know used use psychedelics but acid specifically
00:24:48.940have you ever felt inspired to make a turkey
00:24:52.360like even sober people don't want to make a turkey
00:24:58.060i find that in a lot of our crime moral panics which do tend to focus on drugs uh the description
00:26:16.060her reign of terror ends tonight folks
00:26:20.480your fashion sense won't save you that's right
00:26:25.360because this story was already being debunked by like responsible media by 1973
00:26:33.420and one of the most plausible stories of its origin is actually joan didion's 1967 fa slouching
00:26:42.540towards bethlehem in which i love that we tell ourselves stories in order to live and sometimes
00:26:50.100those stories are about a baby in the oven for those of you who have not read the essay which
00:26:55.900is really beautiful and kind of withering and you should read it the Saturday Evening Post sent0.62
00:27:00.620Miss Didion to the Haight-Ashbury not too far from here where she hung out with the hippies who
00:27:06.800had assembled there and she did not care for it did not care for it she was not impressed
00:27:12.480And one of the central instances, the central scenes in that essay is a moment in which Didion is ushered in to some hippie house because the hippies want to show her what they think is the coolest thing ever.
00:27:27.600And it's that they have given one of their five-year-old daughters acid.0.55
00:33:14.860It's like spoken as someone who lived through 2020. It's like that's not that's not how that works.
00:33:18.480Yeah, totally. Which like just to tie it back to like some of the stuff about like, oh, like you have these like poor people in rural areas who are like feeding their children drugs.
00:33:28.960It's like a way to judge people and like a crisis in general of like opioids in this country.
00:33:35.380For example, I mean, especially in somewhere like San Francisco, where you have some people here who talk about it in really disgusting ways and the way that they can't even pass a person on the street without making a negative comment.
00:33:46.380And it's like so many people talk about these sorts of moral panics in place of like actual empathy and wanting solutions for things.
00:33:56.040And it's just a way to feel like, well, I would never be that person.0.99
00:34:01.060Well, and I feel like the appeal of a moral panic, too, is that it allows you to believe that all of your hatred is righteous and necessary and that empathy is for idiots.0.99
00:34:11.200And the fact that you're not bothering with it is just proof of your intelligence.0.94
00:34:16.240And it feels like, honestly, the moral panic itself is a very powerful drug, you know, for people who like to panic about better drugs.
00:34:25.680so the next one i didn't know anything about except for the things i googled in order to
00:34:32.260put them onto this slideshow this is about something called pitting i was like what did
00:34:36.420you mean petting and i think it was not well that's a good panic too yeah this is this is
00:34:40.840one of my all-time favorites this is the seattle windshield pitting panic this
00:34:45.940the northwest is a wacky place as we all know but yeah so this was a nice little this is twilight
00:34:54.360exactly it was vampires it was always vampires yeah so this is kind of like a nice bite-sized
00:35:00.320moral panic and pretty much a victimless one but this happened in the greater seattle area
00:35:04.940in the spring of 1954 and basically oh my god you already got pingo well done i actually gasped
00:35:15.460okay great okay come on up come on up hi hi what's your name sam hi sam so you got it
00:35:23.780that's right they were all they were there the 1950s you did it wow thank you thank you so
00:35:31.400congratulations all right folks you still have two chances two hoodies to win an in bed with
00:35:39.080the right branded hoodie so yeah what oh my god wait already what did we say what is prizes on
00:35:47.900there? Masks in 2020. There we go. We definitely did all of that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That was us.
00:35:56.640Congratulations. Thank you. All right. So find us and we'll get you your sweatshirt. Thank you.
00:36:00.780So I think the COVID thing opened now. I said it. Okay. All right. You're number three. Sorry. No
00:36:08.140more. No more sweaters, everyone. But keep doing it. But anyway, we were talking about windshields.
00:36:40.220So, okay, so this one is fun because, to me,
00:36:43.100this says a lot about kind of how we perceive and how we imagine sort of perception to work versus
00:36:48.180how it does. So basically, kind of in areas around Seattle, I think this started actually maybe in
00:36:53.320Bellingham, people started being warned about people's windshields were getting these little
00:37:00.380nicks and pits and scratches in them. And nobody knew why it was happening. But there were there
00:37:05.640were initially theories that it was like a gang of youths, like it always is with BB guns. And so
00:37:12.360the police started getting more and more calls about it. It was on the news. It was in the paper.
00:37:19.480And so as you can imagine, the effect this had is that if you hear about this problem with
00:37:23.900windshield pitting is that you run out and you look at your windshield and then you say, well,
00:37:28.360buy gum. There are flaws in my windshield too. It happened to me. Moira, you've got a good head
00:37:35.380on your shoulders. Why do you think people were suddenly noticing those things?
00:37:39.720I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it was brought to their attention to look for things that previously would not have occurred to them.
00:37:46.700Yeah, exactly. And a windshield or a window is something that you're normally looking through at something.
00:37:53.360And I'm sure we all probably have the experience of like suddenly when you start to clean a window, realizing exactly how disgusting it is.
00:38:02.060It was something that you're able to ignore for a while because you were looking through it at your yard and not at a bunch of handprints.
00:38:08.740um see here's a concerned citizen yeah and so and the spiraled more and more out of control
00:38:16.440and there was this feeling too that like it had started off like north of seattle but it was
00:38:21.120marching towards seattle this mysterious force like like the africanized killer bees but in
00:38:26.580reverse yeah exactly yes the old reverse killer bee offensive and and then like people just kind
00:38:33.620of started theorizing like well if it's not youths like maybe it has something to do with atomic
00:38:37.720testing in the Pacific. Maybe it's sand fleas. There were people who claimed to start seeing
00:38:43.240like bubbles appearing in their windshields before their very little eyes, you know,
00:38:47.460and eventually it just kind of died down. And I think like there was an interview with a police
00:38:53.560officer who said, I think this is just, you know, 5% hooligans and 95% panic, basically. And I think
00:39:04.100everyone kind of agreed that they felt a little silly and moved on which is proof that we are
00:39:11.040capable of that if you aren't able to make an entire career out of you know making up stories
00:39:17.100about marginalized minorities so that's really nice yeah and that was our little windshield0.55
00:39:22.260panic it's kind of unusual because like we we often sort of find that they don't go away but
00:39:27.180like i don't think the pitting panic has come back did anybody yeah like go to jail or get
00:39:32.240persecuted because of the pitting panic no because that's the thing was that you can i guess it would
00:39:36.720be the kind of thing where if you could find somebody seemingly catching them red-handed
00:39:41.020then you would get somewhere but it was just sort of like go look at your windshield later today
00:39:45.340it'll have scratches so this is gonna be our last one before intermission and this one i thought was
00:39:52.400like a hard turn from sarah's but actually not really uh because it is also one that's all about
00:39:59.160like the very local thing right like the idea that like oh windshields exist everywhere but
00:40:04.520the seattle windshields oh they're very special and this one is a very british panic this is the
00:40:09.320nasties panic so the video nasties this is from a murdoch paper from back then uh banned video
00:40:17.280nasties are now freely available on the scots black market this is a scottish this is i think
00:40:21.460the Daily Mail equivalent. For three pounds. Yeah, for three pounds. Yeah, and they're poor,
00:40:28.840scratchy copies. I mean, you're finding nasties and they're even worse. They're such small portions.
00:40:34.160Adrian, what is a nasty? Yeah. That's a great question. So I blacked out the one movie they
00:40:42.620mentioned. What are the kinds of movies you think they're talking about? Like clearly a nasty,
00:41:04.860The blacked out one is Reservoir Dogs.
00:41:09.940The clue to what a video nasty is, which is why I didn't define it, is in that last sentence.
00:41:15.060It was simply a name given by the Yellow Press to non-approved movies, things that hadn't passed the British Board of Film classification.
00:41:23.100Some of that was because they were fairly violent or sexually explicit.
00:41:28.040Some of it was because the studio had forgotten to submit it to the British Board of Film certification.
00:41:34.060The other ones listed are, I think, The Exorcist, which had been released theatrically in Britain, but had not been approved for video sales.
00:41:43.400This is a panic very much about the new market of VHS tapes, right?
00:41:49.460They're bearing the lead, which is Reservoir Dogs only three pounds.
00:41:53.780But like the funny thing is, right, like there were these crazy claims made for, you know, what these video nasties were doing, which is really funny if you think about the fact that they were available in like France, the Netherlands, the United States.0.92
00:42:09.520French kids are made of stronger stuff, I guess.0.76
00:44:53.420It's the wide spaces. It's the prairies and the mountains. But yeah, so that's one of mine. I always think this is a really interesting one because it shows that like, on the one hand, these panics are often about globalization. They're often about people coming in, goods coming in, sort of people flowing across the planet.
00:45:10.240right they're very frequently center immigrants but they also can be intensely local where like
00:45:16.160you go to a place and they're having a panic and you realize that like if this were happening here
00:45:22.240it would have to happen the same way in 15 other countries but it doesn't and people somehow never
00:45:28.020stop to ask like is that odd how would that be possible statistically how likely is that
00:45:35.160And for me, the video Nasty's Panic is a perfect example of this, where like it becomes this kind of navel gazing and this kind of preoccupation with yourself at the expense of being truly global.
00:45:49.180And that's, I think, what makes them so much fun to debunk today, because we all do have Twitter and Google can be like, well, that doesn't work out, actually.
00:45:56.940So like it's actually very fun to kind of like use their localism against them.
00:46:00.740This might be a good place for us to end on. You know, we are spending a lot of time sort of like laughing at the people who invest in these ideas. And like, often it is quite funny, right? But like, I also think you can extend a little bit of empathy and understand people who are trying to wrap their heads around a world that is changing in ways that are like genuinely frightening or surprising or that they really don't know how to make work for them.
00:46:28.160Because I think it's like pretty typical to look at like the murder of a two-year-old by two 10-year-old boys and be like, I need a reason for that.
00:46:38.880I mean, I think Cohen actually in the third edition to that book that we showed you, which came out in the mid-90s, like talks about that case and says like, yeah, exactly that.
00:46:47.300It's not crazy to want an explanation.
00:46:50.620It's not lazy to latch onto something.
00:56:23.640That it's, you know, your average teenager is like one dose of LSD away from finding it totally reasonable to broil your baby or that, you know, within the satanic panic, my favorite panic that, you know, there's this idea that A, that satanic cults are somehow have such a steady supply of babies that they're able to sacrifice like, I don't know, probably about like a half dozen per ritual, according to some accounts.
00:56:50.080And also that no one finds it objectionable to be eating them, you know, that you like go from a regular civilian to like you go to your first satanic chapter meeting and suddenly you're eating, you know, the crockpot baby.
00:57:02.680I mean, if this were really happening in California, the Pacific Northwest, someone would be like, well, I'm vegan.
01:10:02.260Being like, I don't know if people know how hyperlocal this is.
01:10:07.320Drag Queen Story Hours was started in San Francisco,
01:10:09.380I believe by Michelle T, local legend.
01:10:11.660And the first one, I think, was at the Eureka Valley branch, not two blocks from here.
01:10:18.840Shout out to the Eureka Valley branch of the San Francisco Public Library, my library.
01:10:23.720It's a great place for elderly men perusing the internet and for drag queens reading to children.
01:10:30.480And it occasioned an immediate freak out by people who, as we find often to be the case,
01:10:37.360were nowhere near the Eureka Valley branch of the San Francisco Public Library.
01:10:40.980This is another thing that I think we haven't talked so much about, that one thing that people discount when they create these moral panics is local knowledge, right?
01:10:50.040I feel like as a queer man living in San Francisco and teaching at a university, like, I come face to face with this phenomenon all the time that people are very, very sure what my world is like.
01:11:03.840And when they describe it, they're like, well, did you know that on campuses?
01:11:06.900And it's like, well, that's not happening.
01:11:08.280Did you know that in San Francisco you can't?
01:11:09.840right did you know that gay people like well whatever right like there is this incredible1.00
01:11:14.640discounting of local knowledge i mean i think the gang panic is sort of a classic case of this where0.82
01:11:19.600the one group of people that they never asked about being in gangs were the people in gangs
01:11:23.720it was always like this is nice cop says this stuff it's like there's a youth standing right
01:11:27.860next to him you could point the camera in his face and put the put the mic on him and see what he has
01:11:32.760to say and this is one of those cases where just like very rarely in the media hubbub which one
01:11:38.920should be fair, was mostly confined to Fox
01:21:30.720But it's also, like, it becomes also something1.00
01:21:33.120you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps about, right?
01:21:36.200Like, this is entirely my responsibility, and therefore, I have to be the person who's in charge of the epistemic authority. I have to do my own research. I have to create my own beef tallow from a calf I raised by hand, like Martha Stewart. You know, it's just like, the amount of—
01:21:57.140But like, you know, the ballerina farm of it all, the sort of like conspicuous, laborious independence is, I think, also very American, right?
01:22:08.920Like, OK, you're not going to take care of me, Uncle Sam.
01:22:13.580These people want you to treat your health like it's a business and like you have to have like an entrepreneurial spirit about your own body, which is crazy.
01:22:24.480and also the only reason that the people at the top whether they're Gwyneth love her or
01:22:31.000RFK they all have the most to gain from it and that's the thing that makes me really laugh about
01:22:37.320especially like Gwyneth Paltrow I try not to think about RFK too much Gwyneth Paltrow is just like
01:22:41.520easier for me to digest she's so pretty but it's because like you know all of these people
01:22:51.880explicitly or less so will peddle this idea of like big makeup l'oreal or big pharma like
01:23:00.320they they don't have your best interest they're trying to scam you so like here i am with my 90
01:23:07.100dollar essential oils i'm purely in the business of doing what's good for you
01:23:11.460goop.com black friday sale happening now make sure to use the affiliate link
01:23:16.940so i think we have one more uh do we have one more in us for one more excellent
01:23:24.760but trigger warning this one's about trigger warnings uh this is the one that's near and
01:23:30.080dear to my heart just because it's such a i don't know it's for me it's also a meta moral panic in
01:23:34.880the sense that like yeah it's a moral panic about moral panics it's like all the kids are panicking
01:23:40.180yeah it's also this funny thing where like often with moral panics like the person who's frothing
01:23:45.180at the mouth is like well i'm the one keeping a level head you're the one doing satanism i was
01:23:49.420like i don't know what to tell you i think that kid was just rolling a die and like this is uh
01:23:53.700and this is like sort of a classic version of this um i i love this too because like it's like
01:23:59.640it just becomes this kind of meta thing like for people who truly are in the jesse waters uh you
01:24:08.340know cinematic universe um i'm sorry is he saying like the woke mob won't even let you have your
01:24:14.580trigger warnings anymore yeah that is literally what he's saying this is a reference to the
01:24:19.520elimination of harmful language initiative uh list that a conservative group dug up at stanford
01:24:27.040uh two years or three years ago and which was reported first in the wall street journal as
01:24:33.480having eliminated all these words at stanford and you're like well what does that mean it's like
01:24:38.260what it was was like some kind of google doc where a bunch of staffers had put in like
01:24:41.880what are words we should avoid and it is a a document they clearly looked at um once and
01:24:49.300then never again because like it is very clearly your first draft but unfortunately it's also
01:24:53.600wasn't like wasn't it like internal to the it department it was only for like people doing
01:24:58.480like not for academics yeah no and i mean like a university can't ban these kinds of words at all
01:25:04.880so like it was just about like what do we put on our websites and i was even i think about the code
01:26:20.000That means that people are like, and the young people with their trigger warnings, right?
01:26:23.860Like it just gets like lumped into these little like lists.
01:26:27.220And I think that's really key here, that this becomes kind of a discourse about, you know, lefties and campus wokesters, et cetera, et cetera.
01:26:38.260never something never a discourse of them themselves it's also not actually about academia
01:26:43.720like i looked at the earliest mentions of this word and trigger warning was it comes out of
01:26:49.180trauma discourse it comes out of psychology and it was actually an online word that then
01:26:53.440got sort of absorbed into people's syllabus design in some cases right and so after 20
01:26:59.140if you look 2010 to 2012 you just get mentions in online spaces 2012 2014 yet some people sort
01:32:05.260He has never, to my knowledge or anyone, any of, like, the coalition of Jews who were campaigning for him, he's just not an anti-Semitic guy.
01:32:13.520What we do have is an enormous spike in anti-Semitism right now in the right wing of this country and within the MAGA movement.
01:32:24.020More people know about Nick Fuentes right now, who is a very prominent neo-Nazi online, than at any other point in his decades-long career.
01:32:34.760He, just a couple years ago, had dinner at Mar-a-Lago. He was recently embraced by the
01:32:41.280president of the Heritage Foundation, which is the biggest conservative think tank in America.
01:32:45.780And this is someone whose entire worldview and politics are informed by anti-Semitism and the0.90
01:32:51.220belief that like the global Jewry are unraveling the social fabric of society. But we can't talk0.86
01:32:59.180about the most important people in this country, not the people with the biggest microphones,
01:33:03.080because they are in bed with those people.
01:33:26.600to channel fear about the real increase
01:33:30.260and rise in antisemitism in this country and in general
01:33:33.680It's much easier to just filter that all into this like funnel of racism, which is entirely what the panic about anti-Semitism and Muslims and Zoran Mamdani is really about.
01:33:46.020I don't know if that was comprehensive enough, but.
01:33:50.260Oh, hi. I'm sorry. I don't want to wire dads this too much, but Sarah, have you seen weapons?
01:35:26.440The thing that combines specificity, attention to the human cost of something, and a broad-based sense of why this is a problem, right?
01:35:35.700I mean, there's a lot of, like, in terms of the opposite of a moral panic, if you don't want to think of it as, like, justified concern or, like, statistically embedded concern, you can also think of it as, like, unjustified unconcern, right?
01:35:48.180Like something that was actually kind of dark about when we were planning this episode is we kept realizing that a lot of these moral panics were meant to or not like consciously meant to, but functioned to distract from real kinds of violence.
01:36:01.760And particularly we kept coming back to like, oh, this is how you don't deal with actual sexual abuse of children, which is happening like in families and in churches and is like not uncommon and is quite devastating.
01:36:14.200and the actual ways it happens are not dealt with what we get is like they're hiding them in wayfair
01:36:21.280like warehouses right well no um and that there's kind of like a a set of psychic and material
01:36:28.880mechanisms in play to like obscure a lot of violence is actually happening i think that's
01:36:33.580like kind of what i think of as the opposite of the moral panic um i think tolerance of discomfort
01:36:38.880is important too you know because i think and just in terms of something that you can practice
01:36:43.380individually, that there's a lot of information that I have really had to sit with over time,
01:36:48.800and especially kind of learning to grow as a citizen. You know, kind of at the start of the
01:36:54.800Black Lives Matter movement, like that was information that felt radicalizing, because as
01:36:59.360white Americans, generally, you didn't have to encounter it. And there is, I think, maybe
01:37:06.500something just in the act of empathy and of listening to someone's experience and
01:37:13.260believing that someone has had an experience and it's real just because you haven't had it
01:37:19.640because you know when one of the themes of what we've been talking about so much tonight is kind
01:37:23.160of the moral panic is almost protection against the often uncomfortable experience of empathizing
01:37:30.120with another human being yeah i think i just want to reiterate how important like information and
01:37:41.580misinformation is in the line between like a moral panic and reality. All of these things
01:37:47.640are just reinforced by bad information that's often very easily disproved. I don't think I
01:37:54.000like shit on Bill Maher enough this evening. Another person who should have his microphone0.99
01:38:01.440revoked for being wrong about everything for so many years. But for example, Bill Maher thinks
01:38:06.820that, like, Democrats started losing because of trans people,
01:38:10.120which is, like, a really common school of thought
01:38:26.580But he has this podcast called Club Random,
01:38:28.700and he was just, like, kind of ranting about this again,
01:38:31.240and he said that California just introduced a law
01:38:36.160that you cannot have a gender marker on newborn's birth certificates.
01:38:42.400Now, what the law was actually was you have the option
01:38:47.720to not include a gender marker on a newborn's birth certificate.
01:38:51.760But that twist of the truth in order to convey this panic0.99
01:38:57.580that he's saying about like, well, the wokesters are just out of control.1.00
01:39:02.660And it's like, well, that's something that you can Google.0.98
01:39:04.980And that's something that you can very quickly find is like not real. And I think it's hard because misinformation fuels so much of this. And we're living in a time where like misinformation is more rampant than ever, especially now that content moderation is like not what they're doing at the tech oligarchy because Trump doesn't want it.
01:39:25.820But like, we're also in a time where like, good information is more readily than it ever has been. And so I just think that like, you, you have to keep seeking out good information and like, sending it to your mom. I don't know.