What even is a moral panic? It’s essentially fear-mongering and conspiracism about a supposed cultural threat that’s ultimately overblown or outright false. Culture, as in the customs and habits of a particular group of population, resides in its adherents, so this is people trying to protect their culture. But as we’ll see, there’s always ulterior motives. Typically, it revolves around halting things children are doing or something that may affect children because they are the next generation – that which transmits culture into the future. The key factor is that these reactions are disproportionate to the threat, if not an outright lie. So while they may be used as a political tactic in the ever-ebbing culture war, moral panics as a whole have a much wider history to it than that. There’s a pattern to them and they’re well studied. As such, there’s a long history to them. So I made this episode in the hope that you can learn and be better prepared to identify them in the future. ————————————————————

Bibliography

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