Post by addisona on Nov 23, 2022 12:07:40 GMT
There’s a case to be made that Satanic Panic is back, only with more internet-era pacing.
This is true in a literal sense: In the past couple years, conservatives have begun increasingly describing their enemies and policies and concepts they dislike—or just find weird or foreign—as “satanic.”
But it’s also true in a deeply entrenched conspiracy theory sense: After all, what is QAnon if not a dark fantasy of evil debauchery and destruction? (A survey highlighted by NBC News found a good quarter of its respondents believed “satanic ritual sex abuse is widespread in this country.”)
This midterms cycle, there was the panic over “groomers”—a concept popularized by politicians such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and influential right-wing social media mavens, including “Libs of TikTok.” The panic, whether organic or manufactured, led to targeting of LGBTQ teachers or simply teachers who affirm LGBTQ students. (Other very real-world resuts of all this include the “don’t say gay” laws and the “hide the pride”-type book-banning.) The panic took on a somehow even more frightening edge when it narrowed its focus on gender-affirming care. Trans children were harassed; children’s hospitals faced violent threats; and Texas ordered state child welfare to investigate the parents of trans kids who received gender-affirming care for child abuse. Recently, the Daily Wire organized Proud Boys and other protesters in Tennessee for a “Rally to End Child Mutilation.” At the rally, the newly not-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard told the crowd “our kids are having their childhood stolen from them.”
The critical race theory panic of the past few years has been framed as a matter of innocence attacked, too. Those seeking to paper over the sins of American history did so for political reasons, but the stories that circulated were more personal: anecdotes about “brainwashed” liberal teenagers tearing apart previously peaceful families or, worse, traumatized white children who came home from school devastated to learn they were the bad guys.
And let’s not forget abortion, which has always been portrayed as a matter of saving unborn souls. You can’t hang out in right-wing conversations for long without reaching a mention of pure, devilish conduct by the other side. To take one recent example, while poking around the writings of a right-wing Alabama state senate candidate, I found this peculiar (but representative) gem in a June post the candidate had written about abortion: “This is essentially on par with human sacrifices like the ancients who sacrificed babies to Moloch for perceived blessing from a demon god.”
And let’s not forget abortion, which has always been portrayed as a matter of saving unborn souls. You can’t hang out in right-wing conversations for long without reaching a mention of pure, devilish conduct by the other side. To take one recent example, while poking around the writings of a right-wing Alabama state senate candidate, I found this peculiar (but representative) gem in a June post the candidate had written about abortion: “This is essentially on par with human sacrifices like the ancients who sacrificed babies to Moloch for perceived blessing from a demon god.”