moral panic! at the disco
the lies at the core of moral panics past, present and future
Two points of order: I have a new essay out with Still Alive about LiveJournal and the past/present/future of the internet. I’m also teaching a few upcoming classes over Zoom: Exploratory Writing on 9/30, and Applied Hauntology for Writers on 10/28. Please reach out if you have any questions about either - hope to see you there!
I’ve been thinking a lot about moral panics lately — I imagine many of us are. They’re fruit from the same orchard as mass misinformation and conspiracy theories, all of which are seeing a very fertile season right now.
Most visible right now from my vantage point is a kind of many-headed obsession with gender and sexuality somehow harming children and, to a lesser extent, adult women (especially white women). It’s a panic about LGBT adults and drag performers “grooming” children; grisly, unfounded fantasies about “sex trafficking” that translate to real-life crackdowns on sex workers; a frenzy over even imagined representations of sexuality or gender diversity in books and vilification of librarians. It’s an urgent, deadly panic about trans people that’s found footholds in countless aspects of American society: sports, medical institutions, educational spaces, private homes via laws that try to prevent parents from raising their trans kids with support and care. It’s a complex and overwhelming tsunami of misplaced terror — that also isn’t really that complex at all.
The reasons for moral panics like this are not esoteric or complicated. In divided times, and especially divided times when systemic change is being inched forward from multiple avenues, it’s strategically useful to scapegoat an “other.” The focus on children, or on “saving” them from this other, is a time-honored favorite: it has the effect of cohering the bonds of the nuclear family by emphasizing the countless stranger dangers outside the home and the imagined safety of traditional domesticity. The 1980s Satanic Panic coinciding with women joining the workforce in record numbers and broader social mobility comes to mind — more on that later. (Or, more recent: was the “creepy clown craze” related to “concerns surrounding changing gender roles during the final push of the 2016 US federal election”?)
More than the why of this moral panic I’m interested in the how — the mechanisms that put a moral panic into motion and keep it there. To the degree that a moral panic involves many people fervently believing something that isn’t true, a moral panic requires someone to lie. We often focus on the other half of this dynamic — the believing — without a close examination of why this was presented to them to believe in the first place.
Maybe we assume that there isn’t a clear, concrete inaccuracy — that a series of misunderstandings snowballed into something greater than anyone could get control of. Or that if there was a wholesale lie, it was well-intentioned — the person telling it, at least, really believed it to be true. In hindsight, I think it often looks this way; maybe sometimes it is. From inside this particular moral panic, it feels excruciatingly obvious that wilful misrepresentations are being made.
Last week, Assigned Media spoke to some of the parents of trans children who were included in Azeen Ghorayshi’s NYT story on the St. Louis clinic where their children received gender-affirming care. The clinic has been in the spotlight since a former employee, Jamie Reed, made public claims that it was rushing children through irreversible transition-related procedures, coercing parents with regard to their childrens’ medical transitions, failing to provide appropriate mental health treatment, and that parents were outraged after transition-related care had had dangerous side effects for kids.
Many of the parents who spoke with the NYT hoped to clarify through their participation in the piece that their experiences contradicted Reed’s claims. They were dismayed by the piece that went to print, especially given the stakes for their kids and others. The published piece did not focus on a rigorous fact-checking of Reed’s accusations, although it included mentions that parents disagreed with her assertions, and spent significant column inches entertaining concerns about gender-affirming care. The piece earned the paper criticisms of “both sides-ism” at best and outright anti-trans sentiment at worst.
I’ve typed out and deleted several paragraphs on what I find lacking and potentially harmful in this article, but invite you to read it yourself and come to your own conclusions (link does not lead to the NYT). Or you can check out media watch group FAIR’s breakdown of the piece, which it describes as a “greatest hits” collection of trans coverage missteps. Most importantly for our purposes, the piece takes up Jamie Reed’s accusations as its premise without taking on the task of rigorously investigating or fact-checking them. Protestations from several parents that they disagree with Reed’s characterizations are included, but the core of her arguments (and those of many other critics of trans healthcare quoted) remain essentially unchallenged.
The Times’ statement in response to Assigned Media’s piece read: “The piece you’re referring to was rigorously reported and edited, thoughtful and sensitive to the moment. The Times stands behind its publication unreservedly.”
One way to shift a moral panic into drive: one person tells a lie. Even if they’re low on social capital or visibility, the lie just has to be considered in public by more powerful entity, one with a degree of legitimacy and reach — even if it’s in the form of “just asking questions.” This feeds the original misrepresentation to hundreds or thousands of others, who are each able to bring it up to their personal social circles — even if they, too, feel they are just asking questions. A high-stakes “question” with a powerful emotional trigger being asked over and over in the spaces you frequent by people you regard highly has a consequence: eventually, someone will say yes to the question, and then others.
Translash Media has published a series of questions to the New York Times that remain unanswered: number one is “How does The New York Times respond to our reporting that found the paper is laundering the myth of social contagion and other anti-trans disinformation in its pages?”
Almost exactly 40 years ago, the papers were also covering a mounting panic around kids’ safety: a mother whose child was attending a daycare in Manhattan Beach, California, made a police report documenting concerns that her son was being sexually abused there. The case would balloon into a seven-year criminal trial that attempted to prosecute 321 counts of child abuse allegedly committed against 48 children. More than that, it would snowball into a hallucinatory moral panic in which adults around the country genuinely believed that gruesome ritual violence and even murder were being committed at astronomical rates, enacted by a massive cabal of Satanists dedicated to tormenting and killing children.
The initial lie that kicked off the McMartin preschool trials arguably wasn’t malicious at all — Judy Johnson, the first Manhattan Beach parent to accuse daycare worker Ray Buckey of abusing her child, may have been experiencing genuine delusions. Her initial statement to police included assertions that Buckey “flew in the air and drilled a hole into [her] child’s armpit.” She passed away before the trial even began.
The aftermath of this first falsehood was another kind of “just asking questions.” Police released an infamous letter to other daycare parents telling them they were investigating child abuse at their daycare, which kicked off a wave of panicked parents interrogating their children about whether they had been harmed. An inexperienced but zealous social worker then questioned those children in ways now clearly understood to be manipulative and suggestive. The children, incentivized to ideate stories about being harmed and worried about letting down the adults in their lives who seemed to want to hear about all the violence they had suffered, ad-libbed rich and extremely wacky narratives that were taken deadly seriously. They included rituals in secret tunnels underneath the daycare, or children being flushed down toilets.
Although the defendants in the McMartin preschool trial were eventually acquitted, the case nonetheless spurred an absolute frenzy of panic over satanic ritual abuse, much of it concentrated around children and childcare. Not unlike we’re seeing today, it dovetailed with related moral panics and pop psychology, like the broader Satanic Panic and a fascination with claims around recovering repressed memories, to cause incalculable harm that spread far beyond the US. Dozens of people were convicted and incarcerated for satanic ritual abuse crimes; many remained in prison long after the broader culture had admitted their mistake. Like our current moral panic(s), its harms were distributed unevenly; while some pillars of the community were caught up, marginalized people were easy to target.
Despite a few remaining voices who argue that there was some original instance of real daycare abuse, if only a singular one, that led to roughly 12,000 claims of cult sexual abuse, it’s generally acknowledged now that the years of mass hysteria were completely baseless. Child sexual abuse does happen with alarming frequency — but it almost always occurs at the hands of trusted loved ones, within the domestic sphere of the nuclear family, not strangers in dark cult robes. How have the people who worked to convict dozens of their community members — many of whom spent decades in prison — tried to reckon with what they’ve wrought?
In a trend that’s concerning in light of the current climate, it seems that many of them haven’t.
At least some of the McMartin preschool parents still believe the ritual abuse narrative wholeheartedly; after the trial ended, an archaeologist was hired to try to find proof of the “secret tunnels.” “I know things happened there that were so terrible that it kept my daughter awake at night. It was horrific. I know some kids who’ve had a really terrible time because of what happened. My daughter [is] still in therapy. She’s 37,” said one parent.
What to believe now may be less simple for their children.
Several have have been clear that they were deeply traumatized by their involvement: by the circumstances of the case itself, by the moral injury of the demand to implicate someone who had never hurt them, and the disorienting helplessness of their parents’ refusal to believe their real experiences in favor of lurid abuse.
Most famously, Kyle Zirpolo wrote a seismic public apology published in the LA Times. He confirmed that while “I’m not saying nothing happened to anyone else at the McMartin Pre-School,” nothing had ever happened to him, nor had he seen anything else, and had consciously lied in his statements.
He talks about how it all happened, how clear it was what adults wanted him to say and how he came up with incriminating details: “I would try to think of the worst thing possible that would be harmful to a child. I remember once I said that if you had a cut, instead of putting a Band-Aid on it, the McMartin teachers would put on dirt, then put the Band-Aid over the dirt. That was just something in my head that was bad.” He was eight years old.
A striking aspect of Zirpolo’s statement, is how anguished he was over it at the time — and still is now. He describes practicing his statements to himself in bed at night, nervous that he’d get in trouble for straying from his original story at a grand jury hearing, breaking down and crying if he thought he was getting the details wrong. But most of all, how painful it was to try to come clean:
I was maybe 10 years old and I tried to tell my mom that nothing had happened. I lay on the bed crying hysterically--I wanted to get it off my chest, to tell her the truth. My mother kept asking me to please tell her what was the matter. I said she would never believe me. She persisted: “I promise I’ll believe you! I love you so much! Tell me what’s bothering you!” This went on for a long time: I told her she wouldn’t believe me, and she kept assuring me she would. I remember finally telling her, “Nothing happened! Nothing ever happened to me at that school.
She didn’t believe me.
Zirpolo has tried to talk to his parents as an adult, too; he says they aren’t open to hearing it. “It seems really strange, seeing their reaction to the fact that nothing happened to me. If I had gone my whole life thinking my child was molested, I would be elated to find out that he or she wasn’t.”
He isn’t the only adult grappling with this. John Parker says he was coerced into testifying that his father abused him as part of a Satanic cult, and met with junk science when he tried to push back: “Whenever I had any doubts that something happened, I was told by the therapist that this was because I had multiple personalities, that my dad had programmed me this way.” Parker and his three siblings were remanded to foster care while their father was incarcerated.
What does this mean for the kids in the crosshairs of today’s moral panic(s)?
They’re already being not believed by adults about what harms they are or are not experiencing, to their grave detriment. In Texas, the state is investigating families with trans kids, exposing kids to the trauma of forced family separation in the name of “protecting” them. Over 100 parents of trans kids just signed an open letter opposing the Kids Online Safety Act, a restrictive “moderation” bill designed to “protect” kids and which critics say will prevent queer and trans kids from accessing crucial information and connection to queer and trans communities. Some families with trans kids are relocating, forced to leave their communities and their children’s social context to avoid anti-trans legislation. The harm already being experienced is material and acute, to say nothing of what’s on the docket for months and years to come.
Looking at McMartin and its ripple effect shows us another valence of harm, however — one that runs parallel to the (significant, senseless) carceral violence it wrought. Zirpolo’s testimony points up the grave moral injury the McMartin kids sustained as they were interpolated into adult ecosystems of violence they didn’t understand, but were nevertheless put in the driver’s seat of. Although incapable of understanding the complicated layers of what was happening around them, they knew they were being coaxed to lie. They understood that serious consequences would result from their lies for people they knew — and also quickly learned that telling the truth also didn’t make a difference. Zirpolo describes being extremely distressed by the impossible position he was in even at the time, and his apology makes it clear it weighs on him as an adult in significant ways.
Children in our current moment are watching a public narrative being made from many directions that they’re in extreme danger, perhaps already being harmed, and often by people they know and love: their teacher, their librarian, the drag queen who reads them stories at the library, their own parents — when they know this isn’t their experience. It’s a situation with the potential to profoundly damage their ability to trust their own sense of reality, as well as damaging their sense of their role in community and, for trans kids, emerging sense of personhood.
Cis children are being leveraged for the sake of violence against queer, gender nonconforming and trans adults in the name of things that aren’t real, and they know this violence is being done in their name, even if they don’t understand all the specifics. Trans children in particular are in the excruciating position of hearing both that they are victims of sick sexual violence and perpetrators of it, as future trans adults — and above all, not believed about any aspect of their lived experience. Our obsession with manufacturing evidence that sexuality and gender difference are threats is being refracted through our children, and in the process hurting them in ways we can’t predict or understand.
It’s harmful for kids to try to metabolize the unhinged essentialist narratives about gender and sex hitting them like a firehose right now, but we’re doing more than that.
We’re telling kids that their primary relationship to the world and people in it is one of potential harm; that their vulnerability is at fault for their family, friends and community members being excommunicated from shared cultural life. We’re also teaching them that the desires and preconceptions of the adults around them take priority over what they know to be true from their own experiences — something that can ironically make them more vulnerable to actual abuse.
Even if the adults committed to this campaign don’t coerce their children into making specific false accusations — which I don’t think is out of the question — they’re still railroading them into a massive lie that they’ll have to watch play out helplessly for the rest of their lives, without ever really being able to make restitution for their role in.
From “Suggestive interviewing in the McMartin Preschool and Kelly Michaels daycare abuse cases: A case study,” SOCIAL INFLUENCE, 2006, 1 (1), 16–47:
“…in Behind the Playground Walls, a book on daycare abuse cases, Waterman et al. (1993; see also Kelley et al., 1993) reported on the substantial psychological problems of the McMartin children, which were supposedly the after-effects of horrendous ritual abuse. However, if the allegations of most or all of the McMartin children were false, then the psychological problems identified by Waterman et al. cannot be attributed to the effects of ritual sexual abuse. Instead, the children’s psychological problems may have been induced by the experience of being falsely diagnosed and treated as sexual abuse victims, accepting these suggested memories as true, or by the stress of repeatedly making false accusations against innocent people who were their friends.”