Moral panics are something. I started looking into them because of this nonsense about woke-ified M&Ms, and was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of imminent threats to our society, our children, and our Very Way of Life that I’d completely forgotten about. There were subliminal sex messages baked into Ritz crackers, kids making drugs out of their own shit, 5G towers and cell phones giving us brain cancer, killer bees, and more. If you go back in time, there are witch trials, the jarring rhythms in Bing Crosby songs, lightning rods affronting God himself, and on and on.
Moral panics tend to appear suddenly, horrify and shock some segment of the population, and then just as suddenly, they are gone, usually leaving little trace behind. (Although we sometimes end up with laws that make no sense, and occasionally innocent people die, or go to jail.)
Below is only a small smattering of the thousands of popular delusions that have burned through our nation’s collective consciousness, chosen because each illustrates something about the phenomenon itself or provides a lesson on what to look out for so you don’t waste your time on this nonsense ever again.
The Seattle windshield pitting epidemic: A cold war nuclear panic
The Washington windshield pitting mystery follows the classic timeline of a moral panic. The first reports came from Bellingham, Wash. in March 1954. Residents there noticed a proliferation of small nicks on their car windshields that seemed to have appeared overnight. This was no delusion: You could see the small marks right there. Reports soon spread to neighbouring communities, with more and more just plain folks seemingly targeted. Police suspected vandals with BB guns, and set up set up checkpoints to catch the culprits, but no one was apprehended. By the time the Seattle newspapers published front-page stories on the phenomenon on April 14, there were thousands of reports, too many to have been the work of petty criminals. No one seemed safe: Police cars were pitted. New cars. Old cars. Any cars. It was bad enough that Seattle Mayor Allan Pomeroy contacted president Eisenhower with an urgent call for help for his besieged city.
The leading theory was that the windshield damage was the result of nuclear fallout from recent offshore H-Bomb tests — everyone knew there was something bad about those bombs, and here was proof. The truth, though, was more mundane: Local scientists surmised that the pits were almost certainly the result of small particles hitting windshields during driving — a normal hazard of roads in the Pacific Northwest. They weren’t new, and only seemed to appear suddenly because people hadn’t really noticed them before — you look through your windshield, not at it. And then the entire thing was forgotten.
Sexy M&Ms and the tiresome profitability of outrage
While windshield pitting was a grassroots, politically neutral event — an honest mistake — the current imbroglio over M&Ms is a more modern incarnation of the moral panic that’s driven more by marketing than mystery. In case you missed this tiresome drama, the Mars Wrigley company recently redesigned their M&M corporate cartoon characters, lowering the high heels on the “female” M&Ms, changing their “flesh” from “generic white person hue” to colours representing their shells, and introducing a new, plus-size M. Apparently bereft of anything else to worry about, right wing commenters, especially Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, were performatively offended. “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous,” Carlson said on his show. “When you’re totally turned off, we’ve achieved equity. They’ve won.”
Putting aside how deeply weird it is to be turned on by candy, Mars responded by promising Maya Rudolph would be the candy’s new spokesperson, as we’re too immature as a nation to handle their “spokescandies.” We’ll be introduced to Maya in her new role during the Super Bowl, Mars promises.
Look, the fix is in. It’s easy to see this as another expression of Right Wing moral outrage like The War on Christmas, or anger over what they call “large” at Starbucks, but most of the people talking about it are ridiculing Tucker and company. Everyone posting “can you believe these people think this?” are playing their part by amplifying the message and spreading awareness about M&Ms before the big roll-out of their new marketing blitz. (Me too, I guess).
It’s extremely unlikely that Mars is rushing to put together a last-second advertising and marketing campaign in response to Tucker Carlson or any other media blowhard — I’m certain that SuperBowl commercial with Maya Rudolph was already shot and the overall plan approved by countless boardrooms full of rich guys months ago. Also: Tucker Carlson doesn’t really care about advertising cartoon characters; he’s just trying to make mouth-breathers watch his stupid show. It’s all fake, and like all moral panics, it will be fodder for late night comedians and Twitter dwellers for a couple days and be forgotten by next month.
Youth gone wild: Switchblades, juvenile delinquents and distorted guitars
Have you ever wondered why switchblade and “gravity knives” are flat-out illegal to carry in seven states, with careful federal regulations in place everywhere else, despite them being no more or less dangerous than any other kind of knife? Moral panic. Back in the 1950s, breathless media reports on the growing menace of “juvenile delinquents” were all the rage, stoking fear among the squares of wild youth in leather jackets and the gang fights they so loved — you can see echoes of the JD in the urban “super-predators” of the 1990s. The JD’s weapon of choice was supposedly the switchblade knife, so laws were put in place to regulate them, while leaving pocket knives and machetes alone.
One of the stranger manifestation of juvenile delinquent panic involved rock n’ roll pioneer Link Wray’s signature hit “Rumble.” Arguably the first song ever to use distorted guitars (Wray invented the sound by punching holes in his amp’s tweeters) the track was banned from radio stations in New York and Boston for fear that it would encourage gang violence. It sounded so dangerous it got banned.
Twenty years later, leather-jacket clad Fonzie was a cuddly national icon, beloved by all — apattern repeated with the Sex Pistols, NWA, Ozzy Osbourne, and others.
Drug panic: LSD tattoos, rainbow fentanyl, and shooting up peanut butter
In October 1969, in a speech at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Ernest A. Carabillo Jr., a lawyer-pharmacist in the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and Frank Gulich, a narcotics bureau official, dropped a bomb: The nation’s young people were getting high by shooting up a mixture of peanut butter and mayonnaise.
According to these two experts, an “underground recipe book” that kids sold each other for a dollar (and that no one had a copy of) gave step-by-step instructions for the new high. The practice had already killed kids, or so the experts said. The media breathlessly reported on this new front of the War on Drugs, and other officials came forward with tales of death tolls from mainlining PB and M too, including Rupert Salisury, associate dean of the Ohio State University College of Pharmacy, who said five people had died from the practice in Ohio alone. Then everyone forgot about it. After 1970, it was just dropped from the discourse. There isn’t any solid evidence of where it even originated. (Like could you even draw peanut butter into a syringe in the first place?) There is no case in published medical literature of anyone doing this, even though it would almost certainly kill anyone who tried it, but it’s indicative of the “believe anything” approach some take to drugs.
Another variant of drug panic that’s equally ridiculous but has lasted much longer is the idea that drug dealers are disguising their product to lure kids. It was LSD as temporary tattoos in the 60s and 70s; it’s fentanyl that looks like candy today. It’s not quite as ridiculous as shooting peanut butter, but it’s arguably even less likely to be true: Drug dealers do not have to work to find customers, but if they did, kids would be the last place they’d look for three reasons: 1) They’d put you under the jail if you killed a kid with Bart Simpson-branded acid. 2) Kids can’t keep their mouth shut if they got caught. 3) Kids don’t have money.
Teenage sex panic: Rainbow parties and jelly bracelets
“The kids are doing unspeakable things at parties!” is an enduring leitmotif in the history of moral panics, but once a little time passes, the bizarre rituals parents and blue-noses conure up begs the question of who the perverts really are.
The “rainbow party” came into the cultural consciousness when it was described on an episode of Oprah Winfrey’s show in 2003. It is, supposedly, a group oral sex act in which a number of teenage girls wear different colour lipsticks and all go down on the same guy leaving a lipstick rainbow on his junk. From Oprah, it spread to a novel (Rainbow Party, natch.) and was used as a plot device on at least one “ripped-from-the-headlines” TV drama. But rainbow parties don’t seem to have ever been thing. I’m not sure it would be possible to produce a rainbow effect in the way described, even if you were to try, and how would you decide who gets to wear which colour? And what the point even be? Who even thinks up this shit? I don’t want to say that no one has ever had a rainbow party, but if anyone did, you know it was a bunch of middle-age swingers in the midwest — those people get nasty.
Rainbow parties were one of two colourful sex panics in 2003. The other was about Jelly bracelets. The trend among the middle school set that year was colourful rubber bracelets, and the notion spread in the media and among parents that the different colours had sexual meanings in some sort of strange sex game. These are pre-teens at middle school we’re talking about, not 1980s gay cruisers with their handkerchief code. Anyway, trying to nail down the specifics of the “jelly bracelet game” is impossible, leading to the conclusion that it was never real to begin with but we do know the first time it was mentioned in the press. Even the first media report about it seems to suggest it was never more than some off-colour jokes told among seventh graders.
Online panic: The blue whale and slap a teacher challenges
“What are our kids doing online?” is the new “What are our kids doing at parties?” Maybe for good reason — there’s a lot of darkness on the interwebs — but that doesn’t mean people should make shit up.
The Blue Whale Challenge and the Slap a Teacher challenge are only two of the countless moral panics about life online that have circulated recently. The Blue Whale is an example of a grassroots panic, where the furor over “Slap a Teacher” seems to have been manufactured (or at least stoked) as corporate skullduggery.
In case you forgot, the Blue Whale Challenge frightened people for a few minutes in 2016. Originally “exposed” by a Russian newspaper, the challenge involved following a series of instructions from a mysterious social media account. (My kid tells me that the message always comes from the screenname “Joseph Galindo.”) The messaged begin as harmless, funny pranks and get more “serious” until the final challenge: Kill yourself. The Blue Whale was truly international. Reports of Blue Whale-related child self-harm came from China, Egypt, Brazil, Italy, the United States and other countries. But it seems to have been a case of kids spreading scary stories to each other as opposed to anything that was ever practiced. But hey, at least it was organic. Slap a teacher was a fraud perpetrated partly by a corporation.
The “Slap a Teacher” challenge set off a national panic in September of 2021. It started with a California teacher posting a Facebook message saying they’d seen a list of “challenges” kids were spreading on TikTok, including “Slap a Teacher” day. Facebook did its thing, the news spread, and it was soon picked up by media sources and police and school officials who all soberly warned kids not to participate in this new, dangerous viral challenge. But there was no viral challenge. There were no videos about slapping teachers on TikTok. There was no school violence connected to the “trend.” In this case, the nervous parents and cops freaking themselves out on Facebook had professional help spreading the word. A viral marketing firm hired by Meta, Facebooks’s parent company, was reportedly fanning the flames by seeding stories about The Slap a Teach Challenge to media sources, all to damage the market share of TikTok.
Schoolyard panic: The classroom litter box and satanic ritual abuse
Many American parents spend every waking hour with their children for the first four or so years of their lives, so there’s bound to be a little anxiety when the little ones are suddenly somewhere else, surrounded by strangers and out of reach. “What, exactly, goes on at that school?” parents ask themselves. Most of us conclude, “I’m sure they drink juice a lot and bother someone else for a change,” but for some parents, uncertainty manifests as the darkest fantasies imaginable. That’s how we end up with the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” allegations of the 80s and 90s, and also part of how we ended up with a large segment of the population thinking schools put litter boxes out for students who identify as animals.
This completely fake rumour percolated for a couple years in Facebook groups made up of the dumbest people you went to high school with and in emails your dad forwards to his friends. It was even attached to a specific school, but classroom litter boxes really entered the mainstream in October 2022.
At a campaign event, New Hampshire Senate nominee Don Bolduc told a crowd of Republicans, “We have furries and fuzzies in classrooms…They lick themselves, they’re cats. When they don’t like something, they hiss… and get this, get this, they’re putting litter boxes [in schools] for them.” Joe Rogan mentioned the litter boxes on his podcast. U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert mentioned them too.
To his credit, Rogan retracted his statement about the kitty litter, but the others mentioned here have not to my knowledge. Another hallmark of moral panic is people with power and platforms using them for their own political ends. It sometimes even works: Boebert was re-elected, although Bolduc lost his bid.
Liberals panic too: Genetically modified food
It’s not just conservatives who fall prey to moral panic. Plenty of leftist types cling to laughable beliefs — communism can work, rent control is a good idea — and they fall victim to popular delusions too. Example: GMOs.
Genetically modified foods, according to leftist conspiracy theorists, are a corporate plot. They pose a significant threat to human life, and someone, usually Monsanto, has suppressed the evidence that shows this by infiltrating the FDA and academia. Like the political actors on the right, cheerleaders from the left propagate unsupported theories about GMOs to get votes and donations, and further their own political ends (especially Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein). Like right wing moral panics, unrelated events are tied into the larger narrative about GMOs — the Zika virus was spread by genetically modified mosquitos; shadowy agri-business assassins were behind an outbreak of E. Coli at Chipotle as revenge for the chain no longer using genetically modified ingredients.
In the real world, genetically modified foods are tastier, more nutritious, and use fewer resources to grow than non-modified food, and there has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption. That’s not me saying that; it’s from this open letter signed by 109 Nobel-prize-winning scientists.
Political panic parties: Q Anon and the Know Nothing Party
Everyone knows about the weird beliefs of Q Anon followers (and it could be argued that the overwhelming reaction to their relatively small number is a moral panic of its own) but they aren’t the first fringe political group based on a weird conspiracy theory to gain prominence in the United States. Based purely on power and influence, the Know Nothing party of the mid-1800s puts Q Anon to shame.
Like many groups on the right, the Know Nothings were a proudly populist and nativist party who strongly opposed immigration. They also maintained the same kind of faux-secrecy that Q Anon seems to court — they got the name because they were instructed to say they “know nothing” when asked about their party’s beliefs. Refreshingly, though, the Know Nothings didn’t hate Jews! They hated Catholics. Like they really hated Catholics. Know Nothings believed that the Pope was behind a “Romanist” conspiracy to destroy civil and religious liberty in the United States and the influx of Irish railroad workers trying to escape a famine and Germans trying to escape Germany were actually the pontiff’s advance troops sent to undermine our nation. Before breaking apart due to internal differences on slavery, the Know Nothing party elected 43 representatives to Congress in 1855, and their defacto candidate, Millard Fillmore, earned over 20% of the popular vote for president.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.