Episode 108 -- Live from San Francisco, It's Moral Panic Bingo Night!

Speaker 2 Hello, I'm Adrienne Daw, and this is Embed with the Right.

Speaker 2 I wanted to briefly contextualize what you're about to hear.

Speaker 2 This is the audio from our very first real live show that we did on November 20th, 2025 at Swedish American Hall in San Francisco, which was absolutely amazing.

Speaker 2 We had a conversation about moral panics with Sarah Marshall and with Matt Bernstein and with 250 of our closest friends and fans. It was great.
We're going to be talking about moral panics.

Speaker 2 So 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.

Speaker 2 Just two quick more housekeeping items. One is this show had a very extensive slideshow, which we're sharing on our Patreon.

Speaker 2 We're not going to share totally publicly, and we apologize for that, just that we didn't clear any of the images. But if you're on the Patreon, it should be linked in the show notes below.

Speaker 2 Finally, we'll obviously also link some of our sources in the show notes. So please check that out if you have any questions about what we said, right, we were recording live.

Speaker 2 So there are definitely details that we may have missed. It's not quite the level of fact-checking that you're used to from us.

Speaker 2 But in the show notes, you should be able to find our sources and follow up on anything that either didn't sit right or you felt what you wanted to learn more about. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 Hello.

Speaker 2 Hi, I'm Adrian Dobb.

Speaker 1 And I'm Moira Donegan.

Speaker 2 Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

Speaker 2 We made it through, yeah.

Speaker 2 Hi, everyone. This is incredible.
This is our

Speaker 2 108th episode spectacular. Feels really good.
We were going to aim for a 100, but it snuck up on us. And we're just super excited to be here and to get to talk moral panics with you folks.

Speaker 1 So before we get started, I wanted to introduce two amazing guests that we have with us here tonight. The lovely and talented Matt Bernstein of A Bit Fruity

Speaker 1 and the incomparable and indomitable Sarah Marshall of Your Ramadan.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so

Speaker 2 in terms of how this evening is going to work, Moral Panics was kind of a joint idea for the whole panel. The bingo night was Sarah Marshall's idea and initially it was just a joke.

Speaker 2 And then we were told that like, no, we should really have a bingo night. So the way this works is you all have your bingo cards and as

Speaker 2 we converse up here,

Speaker 2 some of these terms may or may not come up.

Speaker 2 And yeah, like you can actually win bingo.

Speaker 2 We're a little terrified that like people will like shout it at the wrong time,

Speaker 2 but you know, these are all growing experiences, so that's exciting.

Speaker 3 Well, if you shout bingo, you just have to come up here and tell everybody about a moral panic. That's right.

Speaker 1 That's a good idea.

Speaker 2 But for your labor, you get something really cool. Namely, our first prize is going to be a free year of our Patreon.

Speaker 2 2026 is going to be a... I think we're going to have a lot of content, it's sort of my guess.

Speaker 2 Unless the next month goes very differently from what we're anticipating. And the second and third prizes are sweatshirts.

Speaker 1 Sweatshirts.

Speaker 1 If you want to.

Speaker 2 Which we don't have because we don't know your sizes, but we're going to order them and you're going to get them. Yeah.
I hope you're all local.

Speaker 2 And if you're like, oh, we'll send it to wherever you are. But if it turns out you're in Antarctica, it's going to be kind of a bummer to find out.

Speaker 1 It might take a little longer. Fun story.
We actually tried to get special merch printed for this event, but the printer wouldn't print it.

Speaker 2 It was a good merch, too. We made a t-shirt that said Team Pervert.

Speaker 2 And they were like, we can't print this. And we're like, we got Masterpiece Cake Shopped.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, we are being silenced, actually. I was like, Brett Kavanaugh, hello?

Speaker 4 They thought you were coming out in favor of the Epstein file.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think people.

Speaker 2 In hindsight, when they emailed me, I was like, it's possible we got off easy.

Speaker 2 Because I was like, depending, if people don't want to walk around with our merch, because they're like, oh, this whole Epstein thing, I don't really feel good with this.

Speaker 2 We're like, do we do Team Preacher? We're like, no, we're just gonna, we're just not gonna do this.

Speaker 1 But all that said, you are playing bingo, you are in competition with one another, and we do want to hear when you get that solid line. We can do up and down across or diagonal.

Speaker 1 Something that we actually had to figure out.

Speaker 2 Yeah, literally, this was a text exchange. We're like,

Speaker 1 point of order, how does bingo work?

Speaker 2 But Maura figured it out.

Speaker 2 These are all your creation. It's great.

Speaker 1 Oh, and please take your bingo marker home with you at the end of the evening because my wife bought 240 of them.

Speaker 1 So those are yours now.

Speaker 1 But let's get into it. Tonight we're talking about moral panics.
And one way I thought we could start is just by asking you folks, like, what do you think a moral panic is?

Speaker 1 What's your like working definition?

Speaker 3 I mean, my working working definition is that it's a smokescreen created by guilty people to redirect attention elsewhere. And, you know, and since we have

Speaker 3 truly, I'm sure we've had sex criminal presidents before, you know, to an extent, but now we have our biggest one ever. And now it's become satanic to notice that.

Speaker 3 And I think that's really fun. What about you, Matt?

Speaker 4 I think for people who buy into moral panics, a lot like conspiracy theories, it's just, and a lot like religion.

Speaker 4 It's a way to help you make sense of a world that doesn't make sense or is out of our control. And sometimes, like, I don't know, you think you really understand the world better by drinking raw milk.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, you get to die from a preventable illness and then not have to worry about any of this anymore.

Speaker 1 So that's kind of... Nice.
Yeah. Fun.
For cute.

Speaker 2 For me, a moral panic is all about sort of, yeah, misdirected attention, the idea that something happens

Speaker 2 much less frequently than media coverage would suggest.

Speaker 2 That is to say, there are some moral panics, you know, Sarah studies one of them very intently, where really nothing happened of the kind that was described.

Speaker 2 But I think the classic moral panic takes a couple of of cases where people would say like, well, yeah, the thing that people are describing happened here, but it didn't happen nearly as frequently as the coverage would suggest, nor did it increase in frequency over a certain period of time, nor is it coming to a subdivision near you, nor are the young doing it, nor are, you know, college students preferentially doing it.

Speaker 2 Like, it's that kind of thing where like we take something that is fairly marginal in people's everyday experiences, and we just freak the fuck out about it.

Speaker 1 And I think one reason we've all been thinking so much about moral panics now in 2025 is not exactly that these are like happening more often, it's that they're becoming a little more powerful.

Speaker 1 Like now we live in an era where moral panics that are not really grounded in reality can influence all kinds of stuff, like actual policy regarding who gets to play school sports.

Speaker 1 Who gets like university funding.

Speaker 3 Who gets to be an M ⁇ M. Yes.

Speaker 1 That's right. Every girl's dream.

Speaker 1 And so like now these things that are kind of like often interesting little like historical tidbits or funny stories or like fringe obsessions, now they're becoming like really important in a way that seems different from anything that happened like in my living memory.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they always tend to become public policy in some way, right? Someone's going to go to jail. Someone's going to get drummed out of their job, but not that many people.

Speaker 2 Usually the damage is contained, but I think we have kind of gotten to a place in our society where it seems like governing decisions by the federal government are largely made on the basis of like yesterday's moral panic.

Speaker 2 And you're like, oh, wow, you still remember who Leah Thomas is. And now like this is again.

Speaker 3 That makes me think of also what feels to me like kind of a key element where it's, especially if you're like, you know, a federal agency who's decided to become governed by moral panic, that it allows you to tell a story where no matter how powerful you actually are, you're able to imagine yourself only as a potential victim

Speaker 3 and therefore to take everyone else's civil rights away out of an abundance of caution, allegedly.

Speaker 2 So maybe we should briefly look at a little bit of a definition for this. And I'm sorry, I'm a professor, so there's going to be some block quotes.

Speaker 2 This is taken from this amazingly covered book, Folk Devils and World Panics. This is Stanley Cohen, 1972, I believe.

Speaker 2 And he starts off with this long definition that I'm not going to read out for everyone, but people can sort of... Oh, wait, no, this is an audio medium as well, well, so I should read that.

Speaker 2 I just caught, I just caught myself.

Speaker 2 So, a conditioned episode, person, or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.

Speaker 2 Its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media. The moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians, and other right-thinking people.

Speaker 2 To me, this is what's great about this definition is that he kind of makes clear this can look a little bit like a conspiracy theory, this can look kind of daffy, but I think a good moral panic involves people who ought to know better.

Speaker 2 There's gonna be, right, at some point, people in suits and ties are sitting together, you know, in a TV studio talking about this problem, and then five years later, like walk away whistling, as everyone's like, well, that was ridiculous, right?

Speaker 2 I always think of it like selling the Iraq war on supposed weapons of mass destruction is not a

Speaker 2 moral panic. That's just government lying to you.

Speaker 2 But QAnon is not a moral panic either because, like, it's too daffy. It's like it merges silliness and people that we hold in esteem, right? Like the cops, well, not us necessarily here, but

Speaker 2 people tend to hold in high esteem, right? The cops, professors,

Speaker 2 members of parliament in the UK, etc., etc. And the one I always think of there, Sarah and I did an episode on the DD panic a couple of years ago.

Speaker 2 And the example that always comes to mind is like 60 minutes interviewing people about the dangers of Dungeons and Dragons who very evidently believe that Satan is real and talk to their kids.

Speaker 2 And you're like, CBS aired this at like seven o'clock. That is remarkable.
This kind of mix of like daffiness or silliness and

Speaker 2 seriousness and you know and and and prestige to me really kind of encapsulates that and and i think uh cohen is really really good on that

Speaker 1 so maybe like we should

Speaker 1 look at some of the general themes that tend to show up in moral panics, right? So there's a couple of like

Speaker 1 running themes. One is that moral panics tend to really simplify a really complex social problem and to cast them in ways that, as you're saying, Adrian, sort of make them seem unserious, right?

Speaker 1 So like, actually, I thought something was really interesting was that Cohen was kind of ambivalent about the term panic.

Speaker 1 He's like, well, you know, moral panics don't always express people's actual fears, right? It's not always something that people are talking about in a way where they feel genuinely threatened.

Speaker 1 There's more of like a titillation or entertainment purpose because the facts are so distorted. There's also frequently a moment of nostalgia, right?

Speaker 1 So like we're going to be talking about Jonathan Haight a little bit, I think, who talks a lot about like, okay, we've like ruined childhood.

Speaker 1 Childhood used to be better, and we need to bring back the way childhood functioned when you and I were children, right?

Speaker 1 And then, of course, there's like basically always a sense of disproportionality where pretty minor things get blown like way out of proportion.

Speaker 1 And I don't know, I think today we're going to go through some

Speaker 1 moral panics, some of which are like really old. This is actually like a much older phenomenon than I think I realized before we like dug into it all.

Speaker 2 But there's, you know, some of them are weird, some of them are little a bunch of them are forgotten and they're all very revealing at least that's the hope yeah the other thing that we briefly might talk about is also like there's kind of a description creep when with a lot of these uh it's like people meeting sort of over a particular word and not all meaning the same thing by it, but all warning about it.

Speaker 2 And that's that's often how the sort of game of telephone in these moral panics works, right? Like

Speaker 2 in the satanic panic, you often get interviewers saying, oh, people believe they're, you know, worshiping Satan.

Speaker 2 And the person they're interviewing is like, oh, no, they're actually worshiping the real person, Satan, that I know to be real.

Speaker 2 And these two people, and the game only works if neither of them is like, sorry, quick clarifying question. Do you think he's real? Right.

Speaker 2 And that's true for a lot of things.

Speaker 2 The one I always think of is the kind of panic over wokeness, whereas it worked because different people meant fundamentally different things by it and thought that something different had to be done about it.

Speaker 2 And one of the few funny moments of the second Trump administration is having to watch people be like, oh,

Speaker 2 that's what you meant by it. Like, yeah, yeah, they were Nazis all along.
Did you not catch that?

Speaker 3 Don't you get like, if everyone was so sure that Satan could be conjured through playing D ⁇ D, couldn't they have just played it on 60 Minutes and seen the show like

Speaker 1 do it now?

Speaker 3 And gets an interview with Satan, and he actually just has some policy ideas that are quite sensible,

Speaker 4 This isn't, I mean, this is like kind of related to people waking up about wokeness and it's like meaninglessness within MAGA.

Speaker 4 Not totally a moral panic note, but I just want to say the other day on Twitter, Laura Loomer, who is

Speaker 4 who is

Speaker 4 a Jewish woman and a fascist, tweeted, and I genuinely think she's stupid, but she

Speaker 4 tweeted,

Speaker 4 guys,

Speaker 4 the GOP has a Nazi problem.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 She thought she was on the team.

Speaker 1 Give the girl a prize.

Speaker 4 Awokeness also means Jewish Laura Loomer, and now you're not having as much fun as you thought you would.

Speaker 2 So in order to sort of get at this problem, we each nominated a couple of things. We don't know how many of these we can get through today.
We were probably over-ambitious, but

Speaker 1 you have no idea what this PowerPoint is. It goes on and on and on.

Speaker 3 We're going to be here all night and there will be a test.

Speaker 1 Get comfortable.

Speaker 2 Let's order some pizzas, open a keg, and just like, yeah, hunger down.

Speaker 3 We're going to need food for all these hostages.

Speaker 2 Well, one thing you know is that Maura loves buckets, so we decided to do four buckets here,

Speaker 1 which are, yeah. I created a moral panic taxonomy.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because they tend to have specific subject matter: Crime,

Speaker 1 media, sex stuff, and wellness.

Speaker 1 But like, should we dive in? Should we

Speaker 1 discuss our first moral panic of the evening? Because this one is, I think, from Adrian and Sarah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is one we both came up with, and we were like, let's share this.

Speaker 2 I want this for both of us.

Speaker 2 So media panics, obviously, like, it's easy to say they've been around since like there have been media shifts, but like recent media shifts really are.

Speaker 2 We don't know about when they switch to cuny cuneiform, whether like Mesopotamians were like, what? The children are engraving or something like that.

Speaker 2 But I wouldn't be surprised, to be honest. There's this article I found that described it as the Sisyphian cycle of technology panics.

Speaker 2 I'm like, yeah, it really, it's like a sigh turned into an academic article.

Speaker 1 Again.

Speaker 2 But so ours is, moral panic number one is reading.

Speaker 2 So Sarah, what's so bad about reading?

Speaker 1 Oh my God, everything when you think about it.

Speaker 3 you know? I mean, your children having thoughts that you didn't necessarily intend for them to have, always dangerous.

Speaker 3 Any kind of, you know, the feeling of discomfort of realizing that you've created an autonomous human being, that doesn't feel good, apparently.

Speaker 3 And I mean, there's so many elements to it, but my understanding, and you can kind of fill in the blanks here, is

Speaker 3 that essentially kind of mass production of books became possible to an unprecedented degree in the the 18th century. We suddenly also had kind of cheap novels becoming very available to people.

Speaker 3 It was kind of like, I don't know, I would say maybe comparable to the supermarket paperback as we know it today.

Speaker 3 And of course, whenever women do something, there's always the idea that we're somehow doing it incorrectly because we're dumb and evil. And so, of course, women were reading too many novels.

Speaker 3 We were reading about romance. We were becoming sentimental.
It was terrible. Our minds were already fragile and we're becoming warped by, you know, all of the hot, hot ideas.
And

Speaker 2 that's just science.

Speaker 3 That's good science, yeah. I always love the idea of kind of the Victorian penny dreadful and especially the fear of like

Speaker 3 This idea of true crime is like a marker of class because the idea is that if the working class is reading true crime, then it's teaching them how to commit crime.

Speaker 3 But it's still considered very wholesome, you know, in the 19th century in Britain for people to tour actual crime scenes where there's there's still blood on the ground.

Speaker 3 And it's kind of, I think, proves that you're middle class enough to be beyond reproach when you can go like look at gore in a house where someone has been murdered and feel like you're just edifying yourself and you're not placing yourself at risk.

Speaker 3 And so, yeah, reading is terrible for you.

Speaker 3 And if you've been struggling to read more and you see it as like this kind of positive, healthy thing, just see it as like the most dangerous vice imaginable.

Speaker 1 And that will probably help.

Speaker 3 Just like I have, to encourage myself to hydrate, I filled an old whiskey bottle with water, and now when I drink it, I feel like I'm digging myself an early grave.

Speaker 3 But so you have an example of this that I love.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, so the thing with reading is like there are two options, and they're both bad. One option is you read by yourself,

Speaker 2 highly suspicious.

Speaker 3 And also, what if a woman who's unattended in reading, you know,

Speaker 3 realizes she has a body and a hand that can touch it?

Speaker 1 I know.

Speaker 2 I think that's, I think Jean-Jacques Rousseau has that line. Like, the books we read with one hand.
It's like, like, they were pretty explicit about this.

Speaker 2 But the only thing that's worse than reading by yourself is reading as a group. So this is a thing that like young people get up to together.
There is this example of Werther,

Speaker 2 not the one you're thinking of, but

Speaker 2 a novel by Goethe from 1774, which famously became a youth phenomenon.

Speaker 2 Very much, it was widely read among all age groups, but it was the reading of the young of this book that became this kind of flashpoint.

Speaker 2 With a lot of panics about media change, we tend to select for what young people do with it, right?

Speaker 2 I think a good example of this is the fake news discourse of the late, like sort of after 2016, where it's like, your great uncle would fall for a bunch of fake shit on Facebook.

Speaker 2 And then people are like, are the young people falling for fake news? Right.

Speaker 3 It's like, it's always the young who use it wrong and like you you're probably fine it's like no this this man believes things that are certifiably not true one with the dnd panic too is this right this idea that you know the kids they're too dumb to understand the difference between fantasy and reality and it's like it seems like the adults are the ones who get it yeah

Speaker 2 Yeah, 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.

Speaker 2 There appear to have been suicides inspired by this book because it ends, spoiler alert for a book that came out in 1774.

Speaker 2 The hero commits suicide at the end of the book. There were attempts to ban the book at the time, which is kind of interesting.
And they were already kind of moral panic mythbusters at the time.

Speaker 2 I came across this pamphlet by, I think, a jurist somewhere in Germany who wrote, like, I am not aware of a single case of someone someone having killed themselves over this book.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't be surprised if someone hanged themselves after having to read all the horrible pamphlets about this book, right?

Speaker 2 So he's already kind of taken the piss and saying, like, come on, like, this, a book can't do that. But to just be serious for a second, of course, the Werther effect, right?

Speaker 2 The idea that like people can be inspired to kill themselves by stories of suicide, that is documented in the literature.

Speaker 2 And like, there are people in the late 18th century who are like, well, we don't know about this novel, but like, this is a real thing. Suicide clusters exist.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So they are 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.

Speaker 2 They grapple with it in kind of deeply unserious ways.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, and I feel like there's this idea in a lot of moral panics that everyone is kind of simpler on the inside than me, you know, that I is the person who sees the moral panic and kind of I'm seeing things as they are.

Speaker 3 And this kind of the, it's very appealing to think like, I have become enlightened. I get it now.
It all makes sense. And really kind of,

Speaker 3 it's, you're the one who's kind of thinking much more simply about things if you, you kind of feel like you've unlocked this one theory that makes everything make sense.

Speaker 3 And so we just keep the scary book away from people and everything will be fine. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I think, Maura, you had our second moral panic. Do you want to?

Speaker 1 Oh my God, is it mine already?

Speaker 2 You went very local, which I love.

Speaker 1 I went for something that is sometimes termed the baby roast, or as it was parodied on The Simpsons,

Speaker 1 the California cheeseburger.

Speaker 1 So this is a moral panic that really originates with an urban myth, and it's probably one a lot of you guys have heard before.

Speaker 1 So, the story goes that a young couple are desperate to have a night out away from their baby, and they hire a new babysitter who shows up and is something of a hippie.

Speaker 1 And when they get back after partying, they find that this hippie babysitter who is high on acid

Speaker 1 has put a turkey in their baby's crib and their baby in the oven for dinner.

Speaker 3 Now here's my question, right?

Speaker 1 Just one?

Speaker 3 Well yeah, but without getting into anybody's drug histories,

Speaker 1 if you've, you know,

Speaker 3 used psychedelics, but acid specifically, have you ever felt inspired to make a turkey?

Speaker 3 Like even sober people don't want to make a turkey.

Speaker 1 I find that in a lot of our crime moral panics, which do tend to focus on drugs,

Speaker 1 the description of the drugs involved feels very much like it was invented by somebody who has not used, though. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, like in Go Ask Alice, when she's done LSD and heroin and every other drug, and then she's like, and now it's time to try pot.

Speaker 1 It's so good.

Speaker 2 The Mount Everest of drugs.

Speaker 4 Wait, but like, I've never heard of it.

Speaker 4 This didn't happen, right?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 4 Making sure we're all on the same page.

Speaker 1 But it did go kind of everywhere. And it channeled a lot of anxieties, you know, about like the youth culture at the time.

Speaker 1 This was a story that a lot of people believed in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the rise of hippie culture was scaring people, when the rise of new drugs was scaring people.

Speaker 1 And it played on a lot of like older fears about like leaving your vulnerable child with strangers and what that means, about like the fragility of women's sanity, about like the kids these days.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there is one person to blame.

Speaker 1 That's right, Joan Didion.

Speaker 1 Her reign of terror ends tonight, folks.

Speaker 3 Your fashion sense won't save you, Cal.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 Because this story was already being debunked by like responsible media by 1973.

Speaker 1 And one of the most plausible stories of its origin is actually Joan Didian's 1967 essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Speaker 1 In which

Speaker 3 we tell ourselves stories in order to live. And sometimes those stories are about a baby in the oven.

Speaker 1 For those of you who have not read the essay, which is really beautiful and kind of withering, and you should read it, the Saturday Evening Post sent Miss Didian to the Haight Ashbery, not too far from here, where she hung out with the hippies who had assembled there.

Speaker 1 And she

Speaker 1 did not care for it. She was not impressed.

Speaker 1 And one of the central

Speaker 1 instances, the central scenes in that essay is a moment in which Didian is ushered in to some hippie house because the hippies want to show her what they think is the coolest thing ever.

Speaker 1 And it's that they have given one of their five-year-old daughters acid

Speaker 1 right

Speaker 1 and this is something I think is like I'm panicking yeah not not great I'm gonna be honest yeah this is like a frequent thing about moral panics is that like it takes something that's already quite bad

Speaker 1 but in like kind of a sad way and turns it into something that's bad in like a more exaggerated title almost exaggerated way. Yeah, like a silly way.

Speaker 3 And I feel like, and it plays on like the enjoyableness of experiencing outrage, you know, where like if you can get really mad about something, then it doesn't feel uncomfortable.

Speaker 3 It feels just kind of, you feel kind of alive.

Speaker 2 I also like the fact that I'd never thought about the fact that like it's bringing in the babysitter figure to put a hippie and a microwave in the same room in the first place.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Because otherwise, they're like, well, why hippies have a fucking microwave?

Speaker 2 But like, oh, they weren't babysitting. Well, then that makes sense.

Speaker 1 It has to be somebody else's house. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly. This story is such a paradigmatic example of a moral panic that has actually spawned its own genre of parody, right?

Speaker 1 So in 1990, the punk band Luna Chicks actually released their debut album featuring the hit single Babysitters on Acid. You can see them with the baby that they're presumably going to eat right there.

Speaker 1 It is a song that recounts this story from the babysitter's perspective.

Speaker 1 But even though it has has been so extensively parodied, the legend persists even now. It still gets rehabilitated.
So for example, in 2016, this fake news story, this did not happen,

Speaker 1 do not be alarmed. This fake news story about a Missouri babysitter who ate a child while on meth went viral and had to be debunked.
It's entirely fake.

Speaker 1 But like you'll see, they changed the drug of choice, right? It's no longer acid, which was plaguing the hippies.

Speaker 1 It's now meth, which is plaguing America's rural areas, the new site of moral panic and fear.

Speaker 1 So I think there's like kind of some classic moral panic features in this, you know, it's got like lurid little details that titillate an audience that like are based on some real crises, but tend to like obscure them more than anything else.

Speaker 1 It's like about, you know, crazed young people living bad values. It's got a threat to children.
These are all kind of like recurring themes that we're going to see a lot tonight. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, and so much of it, it is like an uppity way to just like judge people. Oh, yeah.
I don't know.

Speaker 4 I mean, we're going to talk about this in a second, but like, I think a lot about like AIDS and how the moral panic around AIDS was a way to just like justify homophobia through the lens of like, but we're talking about science and safety.

Speaker 4 Oh, we're talking about it now.

Speaker 1 We are.

Speaker 4 Is it my turn?

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is yours.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 4 I didn't mean to usher myself in that way, but

Speaker 4 we have more fun moral panics to talk about this evening. This is one of the less fun ones, but we have to earn the fun.

Speaker 4 To me, and like what I spend a lot of time with in my work online and in like podcasting and whatever is AIDS and AIDS history. And to me, this is like the hallmark moral panic in so many ways.

Speaker 4 I think moral panics are so often, as you said, Sarah, it's about like, what are we using this to deflect from, distract from, justify,

Speaker 4 you know, replace real concerns that we might have with like bullshit.

Speaker 4 And in this case, we had, you know, 1970s gay liberation and like post-Stonewall era and

Speaker 4 white Christian America was like really fucking uncomfortable with that. And because of bigotry.

Speaker 4 But then you have AIDS come along in 1981 and suddenly you have all of these people from the pulpits of their churches saying, our bigotry has a basis in science. And so now we can feel good about it.

Speaker 4 Now we don't have to question our own beliefs. And we can, you know,

Speaker 4 stratify homophobia by telling everyone that you can't hug someone with AIDS. You can't touch someone with AIDS.
You can't be in the hospital room with someone with AIDS.

Speaker 4 And I think to the point of what you said, Adrian, which is that like these things do lead to legislation.

Speaker 4 And the legislation that came out of AIDS, I mean, first of all, there was a lack of anything done in terms of AIDS research because people were like, well, it's happened to those people that we've decided it can happen to.

Speaker 4 And then you also had restrictions on movement for people who are HIV positive.

Speaker 4 And you still have those in places today when you're HIV positive, you can't enter certain countries without going through a whole thing.

Speaker 4 And I think it's just so interesting that like four decades after this, more than four decades, after this crisis emerged for the first time, I've had friends, romantic and sexual partners who are HIV positive, and they will happily tell you that despite

Speaker 4 all of the medicine and all of the science and the knowledge that we have now,

Speaker 4 these ideas that were fomented decades ago by bigots still play a huge role in their lives and their ability to date and, you know, be on grinder and whatever else.

Speaker 2 I also, I was briefly going to mention, we're going to talk about masks later, I think, but it's very funny that like now they'll wear masks

Speaker 2 for a disease that is not communicable by the air.

Speaker 3 Look at the, they are not wearing their masks properly at all.

Speaker 1 That's true.

Speaker 3 That's a real theme.

Speaker 2 It's like spoken as someone who lives through the 2020s. Like that's not, that's not how that works.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It's like a way to judge people and like a crisis in general of like opioids in this country.

Speaker 4 For 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.

Speaker 4 And it's like,

Speaker 4 so many people talk about these sorts of moral panics in place of like actual empathy and wanting solutions for things. And it's, it's just a way to feel like, well, I would never be that person.

Speaker 3 Well, 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.

Speaker 3 And the fact that you're not bothering with it is just proof of your intelligence.

Speaker 3 And it feels like, honestly, the moral panic itself is a very powerful drug, you know, for people who like to panic about better drugs.

Speaker 2 So the next one, I didn't know anything about about except for the things I Googled in order to put them onto the slideshow. This is about something called pitting.
I was like, did you mean pitting?

Speaker 2 I think it was not.

Speaker 3 Ah, well, that's a good panic, too.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this is one of my all-time favorites.

Speaker 3 This is a Seattle windshield pitting panic.

Speaker 1 This happened. Only you, Sarah.

Speaker 1 Only you. The Northwest is a wacky place, as we all know.

Speaker 3 But yeah, so this was a nice little.

Speaker 1 This is in Twilight.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 1 It was vampires.

Speaker 3 It was always vampires.

Speaker 3 So this is kind of like a nice bite-sized moral panic and pretty much a victimless one. But this happened in the greater Seattle area in the spring of 1954.
And basically...

Speaker 3 Hmm?

Speaker 1 Oh my God, you already got Pinko.

Speaker 2 Well done.

Speaker 1 I actually got it.

Speaker 1 Okay, great. Okay.
Come on, come on up.

Speaker 2 Come on up.

Speaker 1 Hi. Hi.

Speaker 2 What's your name?

Speaker 1 Sam. Hi, Sam.
So you got it, Josh. That's right.

Speaker 2 They were all here. They were there.

Speaker 2 1950s, you did it.

Speaker 1 Wow. Well done.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 thank you so much congratulations congratulations all right

Speaker 1 folks you still have two chances two hoodies to win an in-bed with a right branded hoodie so yeah what

Speaker 1 oh my god

Speaker 1 wait already what did we say hold on is prizes on there

Speaker 1 masks in 2020 there we go that's the we definitely did all of that yeah oh yeah that was that's congratulations thank you all right so find us and get you your sweatshirt Thank you.

Speaker 2 So I think the COVID thing. Oh, but now I said it.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 All right. You're number three.

Speaker 1 Sorry,

Speaker 2 no more sweaters, everyone. But keep doing it.
But anyway, we were talking about windshields.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I wish I had a sweatshirt. I'm excited about Satan, but we're talking about wind shields right now.

Speaker 3 What do we have on our first winning bingo card, by the way? I want to know what we got here.

Speaker 1 Nostalgia. Yep.
CBS News, which we we hit only talked about 60 minutes,

Speaker 1 free space classic 1950s, 1950s, and of course, Satan, Satan, everyone's special little guy.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 3 okay, so this one is fun because to me, this says a lot about kind of how we perceive and how we imagine sort of perception to work versus how it does.

Speaker 3 So, basically, kind of in areas around Seattle, I think this started actually maybe in Bellingham.

Speaker 3 People started being warned about people's wingshields were getting these these little nicks and pits and scratches in them, and nobody knew why it was happening.

Speaker 3 But there were initially theories that it was like a gang of youths, like it always is,

Speaker 3 with BB guns. And so the police started getting more and more calls about it.
It was on the news, it was in the paper.

Speaker 3 And so, as you can imagine, the effect this had is that if you hear about this problem with windshield pitting, is that you run out and you look at your windshield and then you say, well, by gum,

Speaker 3 there are flaws in my wingshield too.

Speaker 1 It happened to me.

Speaker 3 Moira, you've got a good head on your shoulders. Why do you think people were suddenly noticing those things?

Speaker 1 I'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. Yeah,

Speaker 3 exactly. And a wingshield or a window is something that you're normally looking through at something.
And I'm sure we all probably have the experience of like

Speaker 3 suddenly when you start to clean a window, realizing exactly how disgusting it is, but it 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.

Speaker 3 See, here's a concerned citizen.

Speaker 1 And so,

Speaker 3 and this spiraled more and more out of control.

Speaker 3 And there was this feeling, too, that like it had started off like north of Seattle, but it was marching towards Seattle, this mysterious force that was cutting out.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 3 The old reverse killer bee bee offensive.

Speaker 3 And then people just kind of started theorizing, like, well, if it's not youths, like, maybe it has something to do with atomic testing in the Pacific.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's

Speaker 3 sand fleas. There were people who claimed to start seeing like bubbles appearing in their windshields before their very little eyes, you know?

Speaker 3 And eventually it just kind of died down. And I think, like, there was an interview with a police officer who said, I think this is just, you know, 5% hooligans and 95% panic, basically.

Speaker 3 And I think everyone kind of agreed that they felt a little silly and moved on, which is proof that we are capable of that if you aren't able to make an entire career out of, you know, making up stories about marginalized minorities.

Speaker 1 So that's really nice. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And that was our little windshield panic.

Speaker 2 It's kind of unusual because, like, we often sort of find that they don't go away, but like, I don't think the pitting panic has come back.

Speaker 3 Did anybody like go to jail or get persecuted because of the pitting panic no because that's the thing was that you can i guess it would be the kind of thing where if you could find somebody seemingly catching them red-handed then you would get somewhere but it was just sort of like go look at your windshield later today it'll have scratches

Speaker 2 So this is going to be our last one before intermission.

Speaker 2 And this one I thought was like a hard turn from Sarah's, but actually not really, because it is also one that's all about like the the very local thing, right?

Speaker 2 Like the idea that like, oh, windshields exist everywhere, but the Seattle windshields, oh, they're very special. And this one is a very British panic.
This is the nasties panic.

Speaker 2 So the video nasties, this is from a Murdoch paper from back then.

Speaker 2 Banned video nasties are now freely available on the Scots black market. This is a Scottish, this is, I think, the Daily Mail.

Speaker 1 For three pounds.

Speaker 2 Yeah, for three pounds.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and they're poor, scratchy copies. I mean, you're finding nasties, and they're even worse.
They're such small portions.

Speaker 1 Adrian,

Speaker 1 what is a nasty? Yeah,

Speaker 2 that's a great question. So, I blacked out the one movie they mentioned.
What are the kinds of movies you think they're talking about?

Speaker 2 Like, clearly, a nasty, it's a tape of some kind, so scratchy copies. What kind of video were they talking about?

Speaker 3 I know what videos they're talking about.

Speaker 2 Warren, do you have any guesses?

Speaker 1 I'm guessing pornos, snuff film, ultraviolence, real gross stuff, nasties.

Speaker 2 The blacked out one is Reservoir Dogs.

Speaker 2 The clue to what a video nasty is, which is why I didn't define it, is in that last sentence.

Speaker 2 It was simply a name given by the Yellow Press to non-approved movies, things that hadn't passed the British Board of Film classification.

Speaker 2 Some of that was because they were fairly violent or sexually explicit. Some of it was because the studio had forgotten to submit it to the British Board of Film Certification.

Speaker 2 The other ones listed are, I think, The Exorcist,

Speaker 2 which had been released theatrically in Britain, but had not been approved for video sales. This is a panic very much about the new market of

Speaker 2 VHS tapes, right?

Speaker 3 They're bearing the lead, which is Reservoir Dogs, only three pounds.

Speaker 2 But like, the funny thing is, right, like there were these crazy claims made for, you know, video, what these video nasties were doing

Speaker 2 which is really funny if you think about the fact that they were available in like France the Netherlands the United States right the kids are made of stronger stuff I guess I guess

Speaker 2 it's so strange it's like just because your board of certification didn't classify this like doesn't mean it's inherently dangerous it's like an entirely circular argument right and they seem to somehow think that British children were uniquely susceptible to films that ostensibly children were seeing elsewhere.

Speaker 2 They also seemed to be very concerned that children were seeing these movies. It's like, I don't know how many children sit through the reservoir dogs, which is like

Speaker 2 a lot of talk.

Speaker 3 The ones with newly divorced dads, maybe.

Speaker 1 That's right. Also,

Speaker 3 free mince pie for you today. It's not all bad news.

Speaker 1 It's not all bad news, yeah.

Speaker 3 Wasn't The Evil Dead one of the videos?

Speaker 1 I think The Evil Dead would have been one of them.

Speaker 3 My favorite movie.

Speaker 2 And as you can sort of tell, connoisseurs of the genre will recognize the face of Chucky in that fire. Child's Play 3 was a big one of these.

Speaker 2 And this is where, unfortunately, we're going to, again, end on a little bit of a dark note, because there is a particular case that informed this panic.

Speaker 2 This panic had gone on for much of the 80s as the VHS market exploded and as rating certifications didn't keep pace with these VHS copies that were indeed kind of flooding Great Britain.

Speaker 2 But what had happened with what happened with Child's Play 3 is that there was an actual killing, a horrible killing of a boy of two, James Bulger, by two 10-year-old boys in Liverpool in 1993, I want to say.

Speaker 2 And that sort of rekindled that panic in a big way. One should say, this is not to make light of the crime.

Speaker 2 What is interesting is that there was no connection to Child's Play 3, other than some very incidental things that happened at the crime scene.

Speaker 2 One of the killers' fathers had in fact rented the film, but there was a divorce situation and the child had never seen it.

Speaker 2 And so there was no sense that these two had watched any of these movies, but it became yoked to that, right?

Speaker 2 Like it's this thing where the prosecution sort of took its time, as you would if you were trying two 10-year-olds as adults, by the way.

Speaker 2 They wouldn't release a whole lot, you know, enter the sun to fill in that void with crazy speculation about what movies they were watching, right? What music they were listening to.

Speaker 2 And it it created this very strange kind of circular and very British panic where somehow things that weren't occasioning violence elsewhere, right, the same way Marilyn Manson only ever gets American teenagers to commit murder and no one else.

Speaker 2 Like Finnish.

Speaker 3 We usually have very lax gun laws and for some reason, you know, Marilyn Manson has a worse effect on teens in a place where an 18-year-old can buy a gun at a gun show.

Speaker 2 It's the wide spaces.

Speaker 1 It's the prairies and the mountains.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They're often about people coming in, goods coming in, sort of people flowing across the planet, right? They're very frequently center immigrants.

Speaker 2 But they also can be intensely local, where like you go to a place and they're having a panic and you realize that like, if this were happening here, it would have to happen the same way.

Speaker 2 in 15 other countries. But it doesn't.
And people somehow never stop to ask. Like, is that odd?

Speaker 2 How would that be possible? Statistically, how likely is that? And 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

Speaker 2 preoccupation with yourself at the expense of being truly global.

Speaker 2 And 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.

Speaker 2 So, like, it's actually very fun to kind of like use their localism against them.

Speaker 1 This 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,

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Because 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. I want to know why.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I think Cohen, actually, in the third edition to that book that we showed you, which came out in the mid-90s, talks about that case and says, like, yeah, exactly that.

Speaker 2 It's not crazy to want an explanation. And it's not lazy to...
latch onto something. Like it's scary.
And he's like, but it's deeply human to want to find one.

Speaker 2 So yeah, maybe we'll leave it there there for the first half of this. We'll see you guys in 15 minutes.
Thank you.

Speaker 3 See you soon.

Speaker 1 So welcome back.

Speaker 2 For the second half, we are going to be delving into yet another panic that's going to start quite silly and then end up somewhere kind of dark.

Speaker 1 Back to silly.

Speaker 1 All right, all right.

Speaker 2 Bring it home. So this one is.

Speaker 1 Cops contract contact high.

Speaker 1 Say that 10 times fast. Yeah.

Speaker 1 These are the viral videos that police departments around the country

Speaker 1 put out over the first few years of the 2020s, purporting to show police officers experiencing fentanyl overdoses in ways that were deemed by clinicians physically impossible.

Speaker 3 Sometimes a cop just wants to wet his pants. You know how it is.

Speaker 2 That is a great moral panic. Cops not overdosing on fentanyl.

Speaker 1 These, yeah, spoiler alert, none of these police officers, in fact, overdosed on fentanyl, but many of them claimed.

Speaker 1 that was him not me all right

Speaker 1 many of them claim to there were a bunch of these viral videos and look these videos in which cops purported to experience overdose symptoms from like touching fentanyl or breathing in the vicinity of fentanyl area code kind of yeah yeah

Speaker 1 they uh like were kind of an explosion like a bunch of police departments made these they They became like a fixture of police departments in the first couple of years following the widespread adoption of body cams after the 2020 protests.

Speaker 1 I mean, my pet theory is that these were police departments having fun with their new technology. Like, let's do a skit.

Speaker 1 But the other thing is that these were the product of a lot of like pretty high-level misinformation about fentanyl that came, in fact, from the federal government.

Speaker 1 So this image was released by the DEA, the actual drug enforcement agency of the federal government in 2016, purporting to show a lethal dose of fentanyl.

Speaker 1 Ladies and gentlemen, that is not a lethal dose in fentanyl. This is a very good idea.
Looks like dandruff, to be honest.

Speaker 1 This one was put out by Vern Buchanan, which is a real name of a Republican congressman from Florida. And once again, this is not, in fact, a lethal dose of fentanyl, right?

Speaker 1 But the federal government was for a long time claiming that fentanyl in this quantity, even merely touched, could be lethal, right?

Speaker 1 And, you know, a lot of our moral panics, they come from like sort of folk tales or folk anxieties that then get picked up by traditional media or social media.

Speaker 1 And they're sort of like bottom-up anxieties, right? That get like originated among the people and then weaponized by those in power. This is almost the opposite, right? It's like really

Speaker 1 top-down, right? So the federal government was issuing this misinformation.

Speaker 1 And to be clear, almost immediately, actual doctors and scientists were trying to correct the record in like increasingly frantic ways.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 a 33-year-old addiction and like clinical opioid researcher published a paper in 2022 called Accidental Occupational Exposure to a Large Volume of Liquid Fentanyl on a Compromised Skin Barrier with No Resultant Effect.

Speaker 4 For those of you really rolls off the tongue.

Speaker 1 For those of you who don't speak academies,

Speaker 1 this guy spilled a huge amount of pure clinical-grade fentanyl on himself at work by accident

Speaker 1 and was fine.

Speaker 1 That's even the title of the paper.

Speaker 2 I'm fine, guys.

Speaker 2 I feel great.

Speaker 1 But like actual clinicians were working really hard to counteract misinformation put out by the actual federal government.

Speaker 1 This is like before any of the RFKs were even anywhere near the federal bureaucracy. This kind of thing was already happening, right?

Speaker 1 And, you know, you have joint statements from researcher groups saying, no, no, no, it is not physically possible to overdose just by touching fentanyl.

Speaker 1 And in fact, they knew that because those same researchers had been working for a long time to develop fentanyl patches that could distribute the drug effectively through the skin, and it had been very difficult.

Speaker 3 So that Elizabeth Gilbert could kill her girlfriend.

Speaker 1 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 But like, you cannot ingest fentanyl just by touching it, right? To get a pharmacologically significant result, you have to be... smoking, injecting, snorting, or eating.

Speaker 2 Actually, we're not advocating any of those things.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, don't do this after.

Speaker 1 But, you know, like the American College of Toxicology, the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology, their words for the kinds of overdoses that were purportedly shown in these videos were not clinically possible, right?

Speaker 1 However,

Speaker 1 none of those warnings stopped police departments from putting out these videos. So this is Officer Courtney Bannock of Taveras, Florida, who

Speaker 1 has

Speaker 1 starred in this video from December 2022.

Speaker 1 She recovered fully. You will all be greatly relieved to hear, I am sure.

Speaker 1 She said that she overdosed because it was a windy day and the wind blew the drugs into her system. Yeah.

Speaker 2 The so-called fentanyl fart.

Speaker 4 I really quite love the full glam look.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 she's really sharing.

Speaker 4 She's like if I'm gonna die of accidental overdose Val Wind, like I'm gonna have those lashes gone.

Speaker 1 I mean

Speaker 1 something that like has really kind of tripped me up about the logic such that it is of this particular moral panic is that it assumes that drug users and drug traffickers are like superhumanly strong in comparison to police officers.

Speaker 1 Like I'm sorry you want me to believe that this substance is being mass produced and mass distributed on like really quite an impressive scale, right?

Speaker 1 And also

Speaker 1 that merely being exposed to it in tiny infinitesimal amounts can be lethal, right? And I think this speaks to something you were talking about, Matt, with the myths around HIV and AIDS, right?

Speaker 1 This notion that a drug user is somebody who's so contaminated and dangerous that even touching them or their possessions or their body could kill you, right?

Speaker 1 That putting these people into a class of unpersons that makes it a lot harder, if you believe that, to then go and help them when they need you to, to go and administer Narcan, to go and like offer services and help that the police are nominally there to offer, right?

Speaker 1 And like, you don't have to make fentanyl scary. Like fentanyl addiction, opiate addiction, these things are, they kill you.

Speaker 1 slowly and painfully and they rob you of your self-respect and your dignity and of everything you love first, right?

Speaker 1 And what really like makes me think of this moral panic as not just like kind of funny and stupid, but like actually something that sort of offends me morally is that it's trying to take away the moral status of the people who are actually really being victimized by this.

Speaker 1 It's almost as if like, what if this was happening to somebody who matters? And I'm like, well, no, the people it's actually happening to are people who matter.

Speaker 2 I also think about the fact that like a lot of moral panics sort of depend on this kind of sense that there are very different kinds of people, right?

Speaker 2 If it were that easy to get higher off of fentanyl, why would people be injecting it? Why would you bother to fill a syringe if you could just stand down wind? Why would you bother purchasing it?

Speaker 1 You would just follow someone around and hope for a gust and be like, I'm set.

Speaker 2 I'm glad I saved that money.

Speaker 2 There's two kinds of people, right? Like there's the, there's the kind of people that you can trust with their cell phones.

Speaker 2 phones, they're the kind of people you don't trust with their cell phones, they're the kind of people who can be playing D and D and those who can't, right?

Speaker 2 Like there's almost like a biologistic kind of difference here. Like somehow the addict operates on a totally different like level than the cop.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, and not to harp too much on baby eating, but you know,

Speaker 1 one does.

Speaker 3 But you know, it does, it's eye-catching that it's your, 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 this 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 and 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 a you know the crock crock pot baby.

Speaker 2 I mean, if this were really happening in California and the Pacific Northwest, someone would be like, Well, I'm vegan, so

Speaker 2 there goes the coven.

Speaker 3 And I'm sure there are people who would say that it's very satanic to love. I mean, why else would they call it satan?

Speaker 2 Oh my god,

Speaker 2 that's a panic we need to make happen. They satanic panic.

Speaker 2 So, I think Matt has another one for us, another medical one. This is about

Speaker 1 masks.

Speaker 4 So 2020 was such an interesting time in the United States.

Speaker 1 Oh, it was great.

Speaker 4 I remember getting really confused with the panic around masking because it's like when it gets into vaccines and stuff, it's like we're talking about science and like a history of, you know, medical racism and medical misogyny that like I think people have like really understandable reasons of like mistrusting the health industry and the pharmaceutical industry.

Speaker 4 And it's like, of course, I love vaccines, but it's like I can understand that people want to have a conversation around that. When it comes to a piece of cloth on your face,

Speaker 4 I was like, why is this such a big deal? And I live by Central Park in New York City. And I was taking a walk one day in 2020, in the fall, and I came across this anti-mask protest,

Speaker 4 which was fascinating. And it really like plunged me into like, I just, I guess I didn't realize like the entire like warped worldview of people who were like really anti-mask at the time.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 Naomi Klein, not Naomi Wolf, wrote a whole book about this called Doppelganger.

Speaker 4 And one of the things that was so interesting about the anti-mask and anti-vax and sort of like COVID conspiracy stuff in general was the way it united all sorts of groups of people along a political spectrum.

Speaker 4 And at this one, there were like hardcore MAGA QAnon people, but then there were also like crunchy-crunchy hippies who were like dancing in the grass without shoes, like to like, it was bananas.

Speaker 4 And I was so confused. And I spent some time talking to the people who were at that anti-mask protest because I genuinely was like, what's the big deal?

Speaker 4 And the main argument that most of these people subscribed to was like

Speaker 4 the government is surveilling us and masks are like step one of their strategy to turn us into docile sheep.

Speaker 4 And I was like, but like when like masking mandates end theoretically, which like one day they will at the time, mask mandates were still a thing.

Speaker 4 I was like,

Speaker 4 will you drop this belief? And they're like, no, because it's never going to end. And this kind of plays to what one of you were saying earlier about like we kind of felt silly after.

Speaker 4 I do think a lot of these people, I think they just moved on to something else.

Speaker 4 But I also think it's so interesting because what I was hearing from a lot of the people in the anti-mask movement at the time was this real fear that I think is a valid one of like surveillance capitalism.

Speaker 4 But I think moral panics are a way for people to come up with these like much sexier narratives about like being a hero in a story against like spiritual rot in America when it's like really what you're mad about is like Palantir.

Speaker 4 But it's like, but once you find out how little power you have over like Alex Karp and Palantir,

Speaker 4 it's like, how do you, what do you do then with the feeling of like, I'm, I'm really small in this world that's like run by billionaires.

Speaker 4 And I think we're still figuring out what the answer to that is. But, you know, sometimes you just have to decide that the real problem is like masks and they're going to turn you into a sheep.

Speaker 4 What I mean to say is that a lot of these moral panics, they identify real concerns, but then manipulate the solution.

Speaker 2 The mask was so fascinating also because

Speaker 2 a lot of moral panics sort of tend to invest. They play to our narcissism, right? They invest really small things, right? Like I was almost kidnapped at the Kroger's parking lot, right?

Speaker 2 Like, what you actually did was you walked from the Kroger's to your car and you loaded your bottles into the car. But what you got to imagine yourself doing was narrowly escaping abduction, right?

Speaker 2 Or, or, like, or like someone flashed their high beams at you. It's like, oh, was I part of a sick gang initiation ritual? Like, no, probably not.

Speaker 2 You probably had your high beams on, or you didn't have your high beams on. Those are your two options, right?

Speaker 2 But no, it kind of takes the quotidian and the really really small, and it invests it with this great significance, this almost mythic significance.

Speaker 2 And I think that the masks are exactly a perfect example of this because, like, again, like, yeah, with the vaccines, as you say, like the fact that like a shot feels bad, and that you're like, God, if this doctor screws up, that's, that would be really bad, right?

Speaker 2 Whereas like a piece of cloth on my face, like, yeah, if it turns out that's useless, I can just take that off.

Speaker 1 But also, like, I don't know, COVID, I don't know about you guys. I sure felt pretty powerless, like personally then, right?

Speaker 1 I was suddenly made very dramatically aware of how little control I had over my own life and how vulnerable I was to something that was literally invisible. That was like genuinely quite freaky.

Speaker 1 I can really see people reaching for a sense of power in that moment, even if it's like the most frustrating, counterproductive fucking thing.

Speaker 2 Should we go on to your next one, which also has to do with substances that enter our body?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 The killer candy panic.

Speaker 1 This is one of my favorites. The annual moral panic.

Speaker 1 Every Halloween that the candy collected by children while trick-or-treating, like the ones that Adrian's daughter had that we've been eating in the green room.

Speaker 2 We literally just ate Halloween candy.

Speaker 1 Have been like poisoned, drugged, or like filled with like razor blades or needles or something sharp in a deliberate effort to buy strangers to hurt children.

Speaker 3 Just one razor blade per candy. Those are expensive.

Speaker 1 So like

Speaker 1 I went into researching this one thinking like this has been debunked for so long. This has been around for so long.

Speaker 1 And I thought, you know, this probably has a lot to do with like traditional moralizations of food, right? Particularly sweets, the danger of pleasure.

Speaker 1 So I was thinking of things like the poison apple in Snow White or like Hansel and Gretel, which is like weird house made out of candy, where she then like cannibalizes the children, or even the OG, my girl Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Speaker 1 I was like, this has got to be like deeply psychosexual and like really trenchant. And then I went researching and I found out that no,

Speaker 1 in fact, it was just the New York Times.

Speaker 1 So in 1970,

Speaker 1 the New York Times published Those Treats Maybe Tricks. This is from October 28th, 1970.

Speaker 1 And this is an article which like kind of itemizes all the ways that Halloween candy theoretically possibly could be contaminated or tampered with.

Speaker 2 That's demonic. It's like a how-to guide for like, are you a sociopath?

Speaker 1 It's like a list of things that it hadn't occurred to you to be scared of.

Speaker 1 So it says, these Halloween goodies that children collect this weekend on their rounds of trick or treating may bring them more horror than happiness.

Speaker 1 Take, for example, that plump red apple that Junior gets from a kindly old man down the block.

Speaker 1 It may have a razor blade hidden inside.

Speaker 1 The chocolate candy bar may be a laxative.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 The bubble gum may be sprinkled with lye. The popcorn balls may be coated with camphor.

Speaker 1 The candy may turn out to be packets containing sleeping pills.

Speaker 3 Most of those kids are just going to sleep really well and then

Speaker 3 poop themselves

Speaker 2 after a good poop. Exactly.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 This article seems to be more or less patient zero for what we know as like the annual Halloween candy moral panic, right? It lists a lot of ways that Halloween could like theoretically be bad, right?

Speaker 1 And one sort of theory of the case is that it came at a time of like mass desegregation and white flight at a moment when a lot of Americans were already maybe kind of scared of their neighbors, right?

Speaker 1 There was

Speaker 1 one preceding incident from 1969, to give the New York Times due credit. They at least seem to have reported on something the year before.
So on November like 1st, I think,

Speaker 1 1969, they reported on an incident in Oneida, New York, where a series of children, I think it was like three different children, were in fact given apples that they found sewing needles inside.

Speaker 1 My pet theory of this is that a woman was using the apples as a like pincushion, and then the trick-or-treaters rang her doorbell, and she was like, Oh shit, I don't have that.

Speaker 1 But you know, there is a decent amount of research on this because a sociologist at the University of I believe Delaware named Joel Best, he has been tracking the Halloween candy moral panic over decades.

Speaker 1 And he's gone back in the archive and accumulated all the news stories about like supposedly tampered with or poisoned Halloween candy.

Speaker 1 And he found 78 cases of alleged Halloween poisoning that have garnered media attention. In two of those cases,

Speaker 1 people who had accidentally, or in one case on purpose, so one accidental death, one on purpose death, killed their children, blamed it on Halloween candy to avoid the attention of authorities.

Speaker 1 So one guy deliberately poisoned his son. Another child died after eating heroin that his uncle had left around in their shared home.
And the parents blamed the Halloween candy to protect the uncle.

Speaker 1 The other 76 cases were teenagers pulling a prank.

Speaker 1 Which brings me to a local legend.

Speaker 1 A 15-year-old girl in Gilroy, New York, who this very month, not Gilroy, New York, Gilroy, California. Like very close to here.

Speaker 2 Garlic capital of the world.

Speaker 1 She claimed that on November 5th, she was eating her Halloween candy. And when she bit into an otherwise undisturbed Milky Way bar, she found a razor blade inside.

Speaker 1 This got picked up by the local news.

Speaker 1 It got picked up by the ABC affiliate. It got picked up by a local paper.

Speaker 1 The police talked about it totally credulously into a camera. And I just want to congratulate this queen

Speaker 1 because I can see exactly where she pushed that in there. And she seems to have fooled all of the adults around her.

Speaker 2 That's such a key thing that, like, a lot of these panics are centered around adolescence and childhood, but they assume that children are the objects of these actions when very frequently they're taking the piss, right?

Speaker 2 Like with the satanic panic or with the Dungeons and Dragons panic, you see this all the time that like part of the problem is that like these kids are having fun.

Speaker 2 And then like six months later, you see it on CBS and you're like, oh shit, like maybe

Speaker 2 that was a prank too far. But like there is so much where like the idea that like children are incapable of irony or of like

Speaker 2 wanting to be funny and then like, yeah, then this is what happens.

Speaker 1 A shocking amount of adult adult panic seems to stem from the inability to understand that like a kid might be joking or like like lying to you

Speaker 1 in like a benign, playful way.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean the attack helicopter panic, right? Like, oh, children are identified as attack helicopters. Like, yeah, that's a joke they make.

Speaker 1 And I was like, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I think our next one is

Speaker 2 supremely local. Drag queens, specifically reading.
And not that kind of reading, but reading, reading to your children.

Speaker 1 Combines two of the greats.

Speaker 2 I don't know if people know how hyper-local this is. Drag Queen Story Hours was started in San Francisco, I believe, by Michelle T, local legend.

Speaker 2 And the first one, I think, was at the Eureka Valley Branch, not two blocks from here.

Speaker 1 Shout out to the Eureka Valley Branch of the San Francisco Public Library, my library.

Speaker 2 It's a great place for elderly men perusing the internet and for drag queens reading to children.

Speaker 2 And it occasioned an immediate freak out by people who,

Speaker 2 as we find often to be the case, were nowhere near the Eureka Valley branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

Speaker 2 This 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?

Speaker 2 I feel like as a queer man living in San Francisco, and teaching at a university, like

Speaker 2 I come face to face with this phenomenon phenomenon all the time that people are very, very sure what my world is like. And when they describe it, they're like, well, did you know that on campuses?

Speaker 2 And it's like, well, no, that's not happening. Did you know that in San Francisco you can't?

Speaker 2 Right. Did you know that gay people are like, well, whatever.

Speaker 2 There is this incredible discounting of local knowledge.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think the gang panic is sort of a classic case of this, where the one group of people that they never asked about being in gangs were the people in gangs.

Speaker 2 It was always like, this nice cop says this stuff. It's like, there's a youth standing right next to him.

Speaker 2 You could point the camera at hitting his face and put the put the mic on him and see what he has to say and this is one of those cases where just like very rarely in the media hubbub which one should be fair was mostly confined to Fox News this wasn't this was just covered as more as like over curiosity and like the mainstream media but Fox News went hard on this and they never had what they otherwise love a concerned parent it's always like it was never anyone being like oh yeah my kid went it was great right like they just they just didn't want to do that I also love the fact that of course Satan has to show up.

Speaker 2 Drag him with demon-like horns reads sexually explicit book to children at Michelle Obama's public library.

Speaker 2 Got to bring in Michelle Obama and Satan.

Speaker 2 I'm not even sure they think that they're two distinct people. I think they just think Michelle Obama is Satan.

Speaker 2 The book, by the way, that is sexually explicit is this one.

Speaker 2 This is my daughter's copy. It's okay to be different.

Speaker 2 It is, and I need you to be very strong right now, not actually sexually explicit.

Speaker 2 Just shocking, yeah.

Speaker 4 It's just, it blows my mind even looking at these pictures and these headlines, how

Speaker 4 like,

Speaker 4 not how stupid conservatives are, but it's like,

Speaker 4 it's such a childlike understanding of like what is dangerous to children, where it's like, if you see someone with face paint and red horns as an adult, person working at a conservative media company you're gonna say that like we must save the children from someone with face paint on.

Speaker 4 It's like, that's, that is like, that's like, you believe in Santa Claus. But, but I also think that it's like all of these, right? Like, what are common themes with moral panics?

Speaker 4 Well, there's a scapegoat or a distraction, and it's also misinformation. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And so you say it's like, well, nobody's talking to the parents who went and enjoyed. No one's talking to drug queens.
No one's, and it's because it's like, well, they can't do that.

Speaker 4 Because they, especially when it comes to like the media that are running like profit mills based on on this stuff, a single conversation with, I mean, I think about this a lot lately as like, not to bounce around too much, but like I am a Jewish person who is alongside so many other Jewish people in New York who voted for Zoran Mandani.

Speaker 4 And the hand-wringing that has gone on every single day on

Speaker 4 all of the mainstream media networks, MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, like across the rather small political spectrum they allow on cable,

Speaker 4 that has gone on about Jews are scared of Zoran Mamdani. And it's like

Speaker 4 they will never talk to us.

Speaker 4 They will never ever talk to one of the one in three Jews in New York City who voted for Zoran Mamdani because like this whole sort of like anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism thing is its own moral panic, which I did not include in the PowerPoint because it's too long.

Speaker 1 It's too long.

Speaker 4 But it's, you know, they can't actually identify truth in any of this because

Speaker 4 then the whole thing breaks down and then what do they have to run, you know, campaigns on and Fox News segments on? What do they have to grift off of if they actually tell the truth?

Speaker 2 I was going to make a joke about how like it's funny that they think this circle can be sexually explicit, but literally that's the same channel that then went after the M ⁇ M for being too sexy.

Speaker 2 So I'm like, geometric shapes, famously, famously sexy.

Speaker 3 I think she wasn't sexy enough.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's right. She wasn't sexy enough.

Speaker 1 You're supposed to want to tuck her in. Stick in that MM.

Speaker 2 They don't want to fuck an MM.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Fellas visit gay to not want to have sex with an MM.

Speaker 2 That's another thing, right? Like that there's a prurience and kind of childlike innocence about these things.

Speaker 2 Like on the one hand, like there's like real investment in like the fuckability of things. And then at the same time, like, oh, but our children must not be exposed to this.

Speaker 2 And it's like, I kind of think think you put it there. I really think it's a book about like green shapes and blue shapes, and the kids all love it because it's got pretty colors in it.

Speaker 2 I think you made it weird.

Speaker 3 What I mean, and a lot of you know, conservatives espousing family values in this country are pretty much at least morally neutral on the idea of marrying or having sex with minors, you know, so they have to invent younger children for the left to theoretically be preying on.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, should we move on to the next one?

Speaker 1 so let's talk about makeup yeah

Speaker 4 okay this is mine

Speaker 2 clean beauty yeah walk us through this i actually don't know much about what is yeah

Speaker 2 i i can we just say how restrained we were that rfk hasn't made an appearance for like uh this is like slide 60 all right we were like we we were holding back

Speaker 4 i love

Speaker 4 clean beauty i well i don't love talking first of all, clean beauty is not real. When you go to Sephora or really any beauty store, there's always going to be a section out called clean beauty.

Speaker 4 There's going to be a clean beauty label, and you have to, as a brand, abide by certain ingredients to get the label on your product. And it's not real.

Speaker 4 There's no scientific or dermatological or any otherwise consistent definition for what it...

Speaker 4 clean beauty is, but it generally means like makeup that excludes certain dyes or like like certain things that it's like, well, why is that legal in America? But it's not legal in the UK or whatever.

Speaker 4 And so what I've done here is made sort of a continuum of how you get from the friendliest face of sort of your anti-science entry point

Speaker 4 to who is also like

Speaker 4 as a gay guy, like I'm buying what Gwyneth Paltrow is selling.

Speaker 4 And that's what makes her so dangerous.

Speaker 4 But, you know, a lot of people understand that sort of hysteria around ingredients in beauty products is, as they say, a pipeline entry for the far right.

Speaker 4 Because what it does is I went from the first image, which is clean beauty, then to beauty counter, which is.

Speaker 4 You don't technically have to flow from one to the next, but beauty counter is a clean beauty MLM.

Speaker 4 You've all gotten those Facebook messages before. Hey, girl, we haven't talked in 20 years, but I think you'd be so good at selling lipsticks.

Speaker 4 And it was actually an MLM that I was almost recruited into in college, but their whole thing was like all of their marketing is it's like, if you use that NARS blush one more time, you're going to get cancer.

Speaker 4 And that's how we're going to send you our blush, which is the same thing, but three times the price because we have to pay your consultant.

Speaker 4 Then, but, you know, there's this fixation with clean beauty in general, with like taking your health into your own hands.

Speaker 4 And like, you can't trust what's on the market because the FDA and all these researchers aren't doing what's best for you, which it's hard to talk about this now because now they're like, they're really not doing what's best for you.

Speaker 4 Thanks to the guy at the end of my chart.

Speaker 4 But then you flow from stuff that's being sold in Sephora under this clean beauty label to like, I'm going to continue to do my own research and take my health into my own hands and find the secrets of beauty that they don't want you to know.

Speaker 4 And that's how you get to beef tallow.

Speaker 1 Nice.

Speaker 2 Is that what it looks like?

Speaker 4 That's, yeah, that's beef tallow.

Speaker 4 Which is a cooking ingredient for frying things.

Speaker 1 It's just a fat, right?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's just a fat.

Speaker 4 But now it's also like sort of a right-wing dog whistle into like, this is the lotion they don't want you to know about.

Speaker 4 And all the dermatologists are like,

Speaker 4 if you want to put it on your face, like you can,

Speaker 4 but like you can also use like Ceravi and that's fine.

Speaker 4 I actually pulled a lot of right-wing beauty influencers, which is a huge class of TikTokers, sort of shill now for beef tallow because they're, for big beef tallow. Nice.

Speaker 4 Because they're like, this is, this is the thing that's going to prevent you from getting cancer.

Speaker 4 And there was an article in the Independent that I was reading earlier today when I were putting this together about beef tallow.

Speaker 4 And there was this influencer named Lauren who said, if you can't eat your skincare,

Speaker 4 then why are you putting it on your face?

Speaker 1 Which is just incredible.

Speaker 2 I've said that many a time, yeah.

Speaker 1 If you can't eat your clothes, then why would you put them on your body?

Speaker 4 But then sort of from beef tallow, you get into these like, well, then what can I put in my body and what can't I put in my body and what are they not telling me?

Speaker 4 And it's a pretty quick spiral for a lot of the beef tallow people to RFK Jr., essentially. I mean, beef tallow is like huge in the Maha movement.

Speaker 4 And I guess the serious conclusion that I come to with all of this is that, right, it's like, what are we distracting ourselves from when we're trying to find like the lotion that won't give me cancer or something because all the other lotions are going to give me cancer.

Speaker 4 And like, to me, the answer is like insecurity about healthcare in this country, where it's like you're not

Speaker 2 we're like

Speaker 4 you aren't guaranteed shit in this country because we have such bad social offerings compared to like other developed nations obviously um that

Speaker 4 your own health becomes this like capitalist gamble of like i have to figure out this solution that nobody else knows about

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 And they don't want you to know that.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Big tallow got us. Ah, shit.

Speaker 1 But it's also like, it becomes also something you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps about, right? Like, this is entirely my responsibility, and therefore,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You know, it's just like the amount. Martha Stewart would never.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 1 But, like, you know, the ballerina farm of it all, the sort of like conspicuous, laborious independence is, I think, also very American, right? Like, okay, you're not going to take care of me.

Speaker 1 Uncle Sam, I'll have to do it myself.

Speaker 4 These 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.

Speaker 4 And also, the only reason that the people at the top, whether they're Gwyneth, love her, or

Speaker 4 RFK,

Speaker 4 they all have the most to gain from it. And that's the thing that makes me really laugh about, especially like Gwyneth Paltrow.
I try not to think about RFK too much.

Speaker 4 Gwyneth Paltrow is just like easier for me to digest.

Speaker 4 She's so pretty.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 it's because like,

Speaker 4 you know, all of these people, explicitly or less so, will peddle this idea of like

Speaker 4 big makeup, L'Oreal, or big pharma. Like they, they don't have your best interest.
They're trying to scam you. So like here I am with my $90 essential oils.

Speaker 4 I'm purely in the business of doing what's good for you. Goop.com, Black Friday sale happening now.

Speaker 2 Make sure to use the affiliate link.

Speaker 2 So I think we have one more. Do we have one more in us?

Speaker 2 One more. Excellent.

Speaker 2 But trigger warning. This one's about trigger warnings.

Speaker 2 This is one that's near and dear 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 the sense that, like, yeah,

Speaker 1 it's a moral panic about moral panics. It's like all the kids are panicking.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's also this funny thing where, like, often with moral panics, like, the person who's frothing at the mouth is like, well, I'm the one keeping a level head. You're the one doing Satanism.

Speaker 2 And it's like, I don't know what to tell you. I think that kid was just rolling a die.
And like, this is, and this is sort of a classic version of this.

Speaker 2 I love this too, because

Speaker 2 it just becomes this kind of meta thing for people who truly are in the Jesse Waters

Speaker 2 cinematic universe.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, is he saying the woke mob won't even let you have your trigger warnings anymore?

Speaker 2 That is literally what he's saying. This is a reference to the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative

Speaker 2 list that a conservative group dug up at Stanford two years or three years ago, and which

Speaker 2 was reported first in the Wall Street Journal as having eliminated all these words at Stanford. And you're like, well, what does that mean?

Speaker 2 It's like, what it was was like some kind of Google Doc where a bunch of staffers had put in, like, what are words we should avoid? And it is

Speaker 2 a document they clearly looked at

Speaker 2 once and then never again, because like it is very clearly a first draft. But unfortunately, it's.

Speaker 1 Also, wasn't like, wasn't it like internal to the IT department? It was like only for like people doing, like, not for academics.

Speaker 2 No, and I mean, like,

Speaker 2 a university can't ban these kinds of words at all. So, like, it was just about, what do we put on our websites? And I was even, I think, about the code for the websites.

Speaker 2 It was an absolute nothing burger. I remember when someone sent it to me, he was like, What is the Wall Street Journal talking about?

Speaker 2 And I got to the word Karen, which apparently is offensive, one should avoid. And I was like, Yeah, I don't think this is

Speaker 2 more than a rough draft, you guys.

Speaker 2 But it's one that like

Speaker 2 the university got raked over the coals for for for for you know weeks and weeks of all the things to go after Stanford.

Speaker 1 I know like I'm sorry

Speaker 2 It's just yeah like look at the other things they've done

Speaker 2 Yeah, but they're like and now you can't even see trigger warning anymore So I looked into this a little bit like trying to figure out like well where where did this right-wing interest in in trigger warnings come from I did a LexisNexis search on this and this is the use of trigger warning or trigger warnings in articles from 2009 to 2025 You can see the clear spike there.

Speaker 2 And the interesting thing here is two things to mention. First, this is almost entirely critical, right?

Speaker 2 And you can usually tell, because like when was the last time you thought about trigger warnings or used that word? Probably a long time ago. But notice that it keeps going up and up and up.

Speaker 2 That's usually meta discourse, right? That means that people are like, and the young people with their trigger warnings, right? Like it just gets like lumped into these little like lists.

Speaker 2 And I think that's really key here, that this becomes kind of a discourse about, you know, lefties and campus wooksters, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 Never something, never a discourse of them themselves. It's also not actually about academia.

Speaker 2 Like, I looked at the earliest mentions of this word, and trigger warning was, it comes out of trauma discourse, it comes out of psychology, and it was actually an online word that then got sort of absorbed into people's syllabus design in some cases, right?

Speaker 2 And so, after 20, if you look look 2010 to 2012, you can just get mentions in online spaces.

Speaker 2 2012, 2014, you had some people sort of in the chronicle of higher education being like, is this a good idea? Is it not a good idea?

Speaker 2 And then from 2014 on, it's just right-wingers and like anti-wooksters sort of like as including it in their kind of like long lists.

Speaker 2 So this is again, this interesting thing where like, it becomes more salient and more present the further it is taken away from the people who ever used it intentionally, right?

Speaker 2 Like they don't get from it all anymore. Now it's Jesse Waters interpreting it all for you.
So I think that to me, that's just such a fascinating trajectory. I thought I'd read you this little thing.

Speaker 2 And I'm not going to tell you when this is from.

Speaker 2 Trigger warnings and safe spaces have gone too far, coddling students and making them less effective learners. And this is like an interview with a university president saying this.

Speaker 2 Do you want to guess when this is from?

Speaker 2 Last week.

Speaker 1 I pulled it last week. Right? Like,

Speaker 2 when in the last 10 years could you not have read that somewhere, right? Like, it just becomes this, it's like this magic formula.

Speaker 2 And it's, and it's so fascinating the way it, like, it becomes gristed for the discursive mill. And, and I love the fact that, like, yeah, that's the other thing about moral panics.

Speaker 2 You can sort of trot it out and, like, you don't have to update it at all. It's this nugget that's already polished.

Speaker 1 You're like, listen, I think we deserve better moral panics. Like, one thing I've noticed is about a lot of these have been like really repetitive.

Speaker 1 It'll be like, well, this started then, and now we've been doing it over and over again. We need to bring back the windshield thing.
Like that was

Speaker 1 windshielding. That was a good one.

Speaker 3 It's also very, like, speaking of the projection of it all, it's funny to me that like college students specifically, right, the class of people whose moral outrage is so upsetting to people who want to ignore it, that like they're the ones

Speaker 3 who we're claiming are coddled and don't want to hear the truth when in fact they're the ones who are forcing more conservative adults to actually listen to it for once.

Speaker 2 Exactly. And I think that, you know, one thing that would cut through a lot of these repetitions is accountability, right?

Speaker 2 If we knew what Lizon had peddled the last time around about queer people, trans people, whatever, right?

Speaker 2 We'd be like, well, okay, this one you're sitting out because you did a boo-boo the last time and we don't want to hear it, you know, 60 minutes, right?

Speaker 1 The mechanisms of accountability for the elites have completely crumbled, right? We can't hold people responsible for anything anymore.

Speaker 2 Partly, and not to sort of plug my own shit here, but like, because we've made accountability itself into a moral panic, right? That's what cancel culture is.

Speaker 2 We're like, oh, you know, you want to help people responsible for the fact that they were wrong in their predictions and

Speaker 2 horrible in their personal lives. Like, that's the thing.
We've made it.

Speaker 1 Have you heard of this book, Adrian? It's called The Cancel Culture Moral Panic.

Speaker 2 But it's this funny thing, right?

Speaker 2 Like we're in some way moving away from the kind of space that we would want to be in, where we're like, look, we read your work on the other stuff that didn't happen.

Speaker 2 We don't think we need to hear from you about the stuff that didn't happen this time.

Speaker 4 I just feel this way every time I see that Andrew Sullivan has published anything. I know.

Speaker 4 I'm just like, you've been wrong about everything. Why do you still get an article?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Sorry. Would be great.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Sorry.

Speaker 4 No, I'm not sorry. I never want to hear from that man again.

Speaker 3 Or, you know, why does the New York Times continue to have an op-ed section?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 We need to go into Venezuela, says a man who said we needed to go into Iraq. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Guys, I think we might be about to finish up. We do have time for a QA so we get to hear from you guys a little bit.

Speaker 2 Are there questions?

Speaker 1 Q ⁇ A, come on up.

Speaker 1 It seems like we're in a big moral panic about anti-Semitism right now.

Speaker 1 And I'd like any of you to comment on what it does or doesn't have in common with other moral panics.

Speaker 2 Matt, do you want to take this one? Because I know you just did a two-hour episode on this, essentially.

Speaker 4 I think, wow, I could talk about this for a really long time, so I'm going to try to keep it short. But what the anti-Semitism panic right now,

Speaker 4 which I did make an episode of my podcast called the anti-Semitism panic,

Speaker 4 has in common with all of these other panics is that, like,

Speaker 4 there is truth within it, and the truth is, like, more complicated than we would like to deal with. And it's also the truth oftentimes threatens power.

Speaker 4 So, it's something that we have to make up a distraction for.

Speaker 4 And so, what you have right now is like every media outlet in the country, like I said, manufacturing narratives about Jewish fear around Zoran Mamdani,

Speaker 4 who is not anti-Semitic.

Speaker 4 He's just not.

Speaker 4 He is 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.

Speaker 4 What we do have is an enormous spike in anti-Semitism right now in the right wing of this country and within the MAGA movement.

Speaker 4 More 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. He, just a couple years ago, had dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 4 He was recently embraced by the president of the Heritage Foundation, which is the biggest conservative think tank in America.

Speaker 4 And this is someone whose entire worldview and politics are informed by anti-Semitism and the belief that like the global Jewry are unraveling the social fabric of society.

Speaker 4 But we can't talk about the most important people in this country, not the people with the biggest microphones, because they are in bed with those people.

Speaker 4 You know, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, at the end of the day, are going to the parties in DC with the Heritage Foundation people.

Speaker 4 And also, you know, a lot of these people are Zionists and they conflate that with, you know, that as a battle against anti-Semitism, which it's not.

Speaker 4 And so I guess it's just much easier to channel fear about the real increase and rise in anti-Semitism in this country and in general.

Speaker 4 It's much easier to just filter that all into this like funnel of racism, which is entirely what the panic about anti-Semitism and

Speaker 4 Muslims and Zorah and Mamdani is really about. I don't know if that was comprehensive enough, but.

Speaker 1 Oh, hi. I'm sorry.
I don't want to why our dads this too much, but Sarah, have you seen weapons?

Speaker 3 I did see weapons.

Speaker 1 Would you share just like 10 seconds of your opinion on weapons?

Speaker 3 I'm so incredibly happy you asked because

Speaker 3 here is my note. This movie takes place in Pennsylvania.
There is not one accent in that movie that is a Pennsylvania accent. Thank you.
I really wanted to see just like a news broadcast.

Speaker 3 of like an area dad who also had a kid affected was like yeah turns out there was a witch and he was keeping all them kids down there just feeding them spaghettios

Speaker 3 thank you that's that's all I had I'm so I've been working on that bit for like months I'm so happy

Speaker 2 my question for you is

Speaker 2 what is the opposite of a moral panic or what makes a person or a society less susceptible to a moral panic

Speaker 2 that's a great question i mean one thing i would say is statistically informed kind of

Speaker 2 analyses, right? I also think that, I mean, like a lot of the moral panics, if you look at the things that they're trying to distract from, you get a pretty good sense.

Speaker 2 I think Black Lives Matter is sort of the opposite of a moral panic, right? Like everyone can identify what makes those cases so similar. Everyone can name the names, right?

Speaker 2 Like that is a pretty good indicator that you're not being misled. Like it'd be hard to be misled by those data points.

Speaker 2 Me too is another example of like a thing that combines specificity, attention to the human cost of something, and a broad-based sense of why this is a problem, right?

Speaker 1 I 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?

Speaker 1 Like 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.

Speaker 1 And 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, you know, quite devastating.

Speaker 1 And the actual ways it happens are not dealt with. What we get is like they're hiding them in Wayfair like warehouses.
It's like, well, no.

Speaker 1 And that there's kind of like a

Speaker 1 set of psychic and material mechanisms in play to like obscure a lot of violence that's actually happening. And I think that's like kind of what I think of as the opposite of the moral panic.

Speaker 3 I think tolerance of discomfort is important too, you know, because I think, and just in terms of something that you can practice individually, that there's a lot of information that I have really had to sit with over time and especially kind of learning to grow as a citizen.

Speaker 3 You know, kind of at the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, like that was information that felt radicalizing because as white Americans, generally, you didn't have to encounter it. And

Speaker 3 there is, I think, maybe something

Speaker 3 just in the act of empathy and of listening to someone's experience and

Speaker 3 believing that someone has had an experience and it's real just because you haven't had it.

Speaker 3 Because, you know, and one of the themes of what we've been talking about so much tonight is kind of the moral panic is almost protection against the often uncomfortable experience of empathizing with another human being.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I think I just want to reiterate how important like information and misinformation is in the line between like a moral panic and reality.

Speaker 4 All of these things are just reinforced by bad information that's often very easily disproved. I don't think I like shit on Bill Maher enough this evening.

Speaker 4 Another person who should have his microphone revoked for being wrong about everything for so many years.

Speaker 4 But for example, Bill Maher thinks that like Democrats started losing because of trans people, which is like a really common school of thought if you're like Ezra Klein, also.

Speaker 2 You're one of two people, right?

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 something really, really struck me about what he said on one of his shitty podcast episodes recently. Sorry.

Speaker 4 But he has this podcast called Club Random, and he was just like kind of of ranting about this again.

Speaker 4 And he said that California just introduced a law that you cannot have a gender marker on newborn's birth certificates. Now, what the law was actually

Speaker 4 was you have the option to not include a gender marker on a newborn's birth certificate. But that

Speaker 4 twist of the truth in order to convey this panic that he's saying about like, well, the wokesters are just out of control. And it's like, well, that's something that you can Google.

Speaker 4 And that's something that you can very quickly find is like not real.

Speaker 4 And I think it's hard because misinformation fuels so much of this.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But like, we're also in a time where like good information is more readily than it ever has been.

Speaker 4 And so I just think that like you, you have to keep seeking out good information and like sending it to your mom.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 2 Hey, what's up, Roof? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think that's all we got.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 Thank you again to Sarah and Matt. This was incredible.
Thank you.

Speaker 2 That was it. Well, there was more Q ⁇ A and there was more merriment and then we went out for Indian food and it was lovely.
But yeah, that was it.

Speaker 2 We appreciate all of you going on this journey with us. We often say that In Bed with the Right episodes are journeys and this one truly was one.

Speaker 2 Like you crossed the mountains and then the jungles and then you got bitten by some mosquitoes and here you are.

Speaker 2 We first want to thank Matt Bernstein and Sarah Marshall, of course, who were just such amazing guests and such great sports. We want to thank Angelica Martin, who organized this entire event for us.

Speaker 2 We also have to thank Graham LeBron and everyone at Swedish American Hall. It was just great working with them.
And we wanna thank Rowan Gibson, who came in that night to record us.

Speaker 2 And as always, of course, Mark Yoshizumi. And thank you to all of you who have been allowing us to do this work over the last two to three years.

Speaker 2 The final thing I wanna say is that we had a blast doing this. I hope that came through.

Speaker 2 We're kind of thinking about doing it again. So if you enjoyed this and you don't live in San Francisco and you think, well, why should I have to come to these assholes? Like, have them come to me.

Speaker 2 Let us know. We have Show Will Travel.

Speaker 2 All right, we'll catch you next time on Embed with the Right.