Inventing Moral Panics, or how Muslims are the new Jews: Part 1
It's always been about fear of "The Other", even when they don't really exist.
Like his mythological $150,000 “Welfare Queen”, a claim he never provided evidence for the specific outrageous claims about, Reagan knew how to create fake problems. Or in some cases like the massive influx of cheap and abundant cocaine as the product of his campaigns to covertly fund and train right wing death squads in Central and South America, create real domestic drug problems for the purpose of generating fear as a distraction, or to justify the militarization of regional police forces.
Under his watch we had the Satanic Panic, the primary focus of which were the daycare centers which permitted women to enter the workforce. While there’s no evidence that the Reagan administration had anything to do with the creation of it, it’s important to note this moral panic as it connects to conservative Christianity and the kind of anti-feminist sentiment which was the focus of so much attention going forward. By shaming women for wanting careers with accusations of endangering their children by placing them in facilities where they’re allegedly subjected to what turned out to be provably impossible acts of supposed satanic ritual abuse, a foundation was laid for the continued ridicule we see today. Never mind that before 1980 the necessity of a two income family to meet the cost of living was considerably lower than it was by Reagan’s second term in office.
The most important ingredient of any moral panic is fear. The purpose of a moral panic is to direct fear. Some of these panics spring forth organically, some are crafted either whole cloth, or to take advantage of events or circumstances which have come to exist on their own. An example of an organic moral panic which grew out of rumors and to my knowledge has no direct creator would be the razor blades in Halloween candy/apples panic that started in the 70s and lasted into the 80s. Hospitals offered the use of their x-ray facilities, police warned the public and parents used it as an excuse to loot their children’s sugary booty. It lives on today in the form of warnings of cannabis infused candy being distributed in spite of the fact that such products are at least 20 times more expensive than regular candy.
For the past two years there has been an attempt to create a new moral panic based on false claims about various mass shooters being Transsexual. The latest incarnation of this panic is being fueled by Activision’s “Call of Duty” as having “Transsexual Bullets” available for players to act out “Trans mass shootings”. I’m not going to waste time debunking this here, go read Kotaku’s coverage of the matter, but needless to say there aren’t “Transsexual Bullets” and you can’t do mass shootings in that game, only war crimes.
The way this panic has been bolstered though is by people with large followings, usually “Libs of TikTok”, jumping into social media and posting claims that the most recent mass shooter (I can’t believe we live in a world where I can use the phrase “most recent mass shooter”) is Transsexual, sometimes accompanied by photographs of some Transsexual individual who isn’t the shooter. This instantly creates malicious emotional responses, thousands and thousands of shares and the possibility that the person who’s photo is shared might suffer attacks at the hands of outraged idiots. It happened previously when 4chan users published the photo of an autistic individual claiming that he was the Parkland shooter. That individual, with the help of Mark Bankston, an attorney in Texas who represented several of the Sandy Hook families in suing Alex Jones, sued the crap out of InfoWars employees who spread his photo on their platform with the claim he was the shooter.
Statistically 75% of all mass shooters have associations with, have expressed strong opinions of or identify as right wing. This means that the people who are attempting, time and time again, to create the illusion that so many of these shootings are being done by anything other than right wing extremists are trying to provide cover for that fact.
If fear is the fertile ground in which these panics grow, once we understand the purpose of such manufactured moral panics we can quickly see the reason for the selection of the targets of such attacks. Because these are propaganda attacks they’re akin to the work of the Nazi propagandists in trying to remove mentally challenged, gay, Romany, physically disabled and Jewish people from among the living. It requires a deep comprehension of what the Germans call Zeitgeist.
Zeitgeist literally translates to mean “The spirit of the times”. In Christian communities the spirit of the times often gets equated with the verse in Ephesians 6:12 which gets translated as “The darkness of the age” when speaking of how the real struggle isn’t against flesh and blood, but instead is a spiritual warfare. In my own faith I’ve come to understand this to mean an internal spiritual conflict, a war between my fleshly urges which manifest in self abuse, abuse of others and generally un-Christlike behavior, and my spirit which longs to be a better person who expresses the love of Jesus in the world. In the New Apostolic Reformation this means actively, in a strategic manner, exerting effort in a campaign against demonic spirits.
It becomes easy to see how NAR believers can quickly leap to the assumption that any person acting in a manner outside of what they perceive as being in line with Christianity as they know it must be demonically possessed, or worse that they are themselves demons. In early America we saw how people labeled as witches were dealt with by Christians, how much worse can we expect literal Biblical demons to be treated?
From a populist position there’s very little difference in practicality between the NAR idea that their enemies are demons, and the QAnon idea that they’re all vampiric pedophiles. There’s plenty of overlap which could be leveraged to strengthen a lunatic base without having to concern one’s self about policy. They’re a “Set and Forget” population which can be locked in for votes without fear that they could be swayed by most economic, domestic or foreign policy statements, so long as the promise that destruction of the monstrous “others” will be punished for being evil.
Cindy Jacobs, a superstar among the NAR Prophets, has released a YouTube video which claims that the recent pro-Palestinian protests on campuses are part of a Muslim campaign for insurrection to overturn the United States government to create a global caliphate. Never mind that Muslims make up less than 2% of the U.S. population, or that recent polling by Dr. Matthew Taylor show a disturbing trend of Evangelical churches embracing much of the NAR rhetoric of Christian domination and colonization putting more than 50% of the population on a path to radicalization as they literally demonize Muslims and Transsexual people.