moral panic

see also financial panics (uber1)?

generic for any fid culture indocrination? 1 24 on munchkins

merri ok

promoted to 2nd on CRT

see also CULT WAR wedge issue, polarization, hype fear (amplify algorithm)

see pink pill/ qanon

systemic?

see kid indoctrinate myth of liberal media bias (Jews?)

see demonization/ enemy (THOSE ppl are capable of any evil)

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RWW

10/01/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Vittoria Elliott @ Wired: Federal Workers Are Being Told to Blame Democrats for the Shutdown

Workers at one agency were given unhinged, partisan language to use when setting out-of-office replies.

Deepa Bharath @ The Associated Press: Worship leader Sean Feucht mismanaged millions in ministry funds, former associates say

Alongside his Christian rockstar status, revenue to Feucht’s ministry also skyrocketed, jumping from $243,000 in 2019 to $5 million in 2020 — the last year his ministry filed a Form 990 with the IRS. It’s that deluge of money, Feucht’s and his ministry’s amassing of expensive real estate in its wake and their lack of financial transparency, which has former ministry staff and volunteers now accusing the worship leader of mismanaging ministry funds.

Molly Olmstead @ Slate: This Is the Moment Christian Nationalists Have Been Waiting For

Some MAGA Christians see Charlie Kirk’s killing as the start of a “revival”—and the moment for remaking America.

Patrick Svitek @ The Washington Post: Madison Cawthorn, ousted from House in 2022, tries comeback in Florida

The Republican will run for Florida’s 19th Congressional District, where a seat is open because Rep. Byron Donalds (R) is seeking the state’s governorship.

Hemant Mehta @ Friendly Atheist: Liberty Counsel manufactured panic over "Witchy Wednesday" at a Florida high school

A Florida teen's segment during morning announcements became fodder for the Christian outrage machine.

Matthew Sheffield @ Flux: Trump’s mass censorship is what far-right Republicans have always wanted

Historian Seth Cotlar discusses how far-right Republicans like William F. Buckley and Ben Shapiro embrace authoritarianism and conspiracism.

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2 25

Not content with panicking about the teaching of critical race theory, conservative parents throughout America have now been gripped with fear about their schools trying to accommodate students who dress up in animal costumes.

The Daily Beast reports that in "Pennsylvania, Maine, Michigan, and Iowa in recent months, school board meetings have been disrupted by allegations that educators are giving special treatment to furry students."

The first notable instance of furry panic occurred when right-wing activists pushed a false claim about schools in Michigan placing litter boxes in bathrooms to allow furry students to use them, and the bogus rumors about furry infiltration into the public education system have only grown from there.

In York County, Pennsylvania, for example, Facebook rumors began swirling around among conservative locals warning that furries "could be in your child’s classroom hissing at your child and licking themselves."

Patch O’Furr, proprietor of the furry news site Dogpatch Press, tells The Daily Beast that many of the same people spreading bogus furry rumors are the same people agitating to ban books they don't like.

“It’s culture war, it’s control, and it’s not about protecting kids,” O’Furr explains. “If you actually look at who’s doing this, at some of the political groups getting involved, they’re all far right.”

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NOTE CULT WAR PIVOT TO CEO CORP

AN 1 25

While Republicans claimed a bill restricting transgender girls' participation in school sports was aimed at protecting "our culture and civilization" on Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the legislation benefits the corporate class as it distracts from true life-threatening emergencies faced by communities across the country.

"Thank you for your concern about women for the first time that I've seen," said the New York Democrat on the House floor, noting that Republicans have consistently voted against the Violence Against Women Act and backed abortion bans that have stripped women of the ability to control their own bodies proven deadly.

But contrary to the GOP's claims that barring transgender girls and women from playing on sports teams that align with their gender will protect girls from assault, Ocasio-Cortez suggested, the biggest beneficiaries of the legislation include corporate executives whose companies do far more harm to American families than transgender athletes.

"I know who loves this bill," said the congresswoman. "Yes, bigoted folks love this bill. Assaulters love this bill. But also, CEOs love this bill. Because Los Angelesis on fire right now, and this is the number one priority this majority has."

The bill passed 218-206, with the entire Republican caucus supporting it and all but two Democrats voting no. If the legislation is signed into law, schools that receive federal funding would be barred from allowing transgender girls from playing on girls' sports teams.

Republicans have poured $111 million on political ads regarding the issue in the past year, as communities in the Southeast have suffered catastrophic hurricane damage andhomelessnesshas soared by 18%.

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) agreed with Ocasio-Cortez's comments about the distraction caused by the transgender sports bill.

"Republicans fearmonger about the trans community to divert attention from the fact they have no real solutions to help everyday Americans," said Bonamici. "Transgender students, like all students, they deserve the same opportunity as their peers to learn teamwork, to find belonging and to grow into well-rounded adults through sports."

Ocasio-Cortez added that the bill, which lacks an enforcement mechanism, would open the door to "genital examinations" of student athletes as it would force schools to confirm the sex assigned at birth of each member of a school sports team.

"What this also opens the door for is for women to try to perform a very specific kind of femininity for the very kind of men who are drafting this bill, and to open up questioning of who is a woman because of how we look, how we present ourselves, and yes, what we choose to do with our bodies," said Ocasio-Cortez.

The so-called Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act was the subject of a letter signed by more than 400 civil society groups on Monday, who urged members of Congress to reject the "discriminatory proposal."

"Although the authors of the legislation represent themselves as serving the interests of cisgender girls and women, this legislation does not address the longstanding barriers all girls and women have faced in their pursuit of athletics," said the groups, led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "We firmly believe that an attack on transgender youth is an attack on civil rights."

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Transvestigation Nation: Right-wing media figures’ obsession with trans people is breaking their brains

06/25/24 mma

Candace Owens’ eponymous new show is only one week old, but the former Daily Wire personality has already returned to an old fixation: a conspiracy theory that the first lady of France is secretly a transgender woman. Similar false accusations, known informally as “transvestigations,” are raging everywhere on social media, targeting figures from Kyle Rittenhouse to Taylor Swift — an uncomfortable if inevitable evolution of a mass hysteria fixated on the bodies of trans people.

Prior to losing her jobat The Daily Wire, Owens proclaimed that she would stake her “entire professional reputation”” on the theory that Brigitte Macron, the longtime wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, was hiding the fact that she is a transgender woman. While heraccusation was met with derision, outrage, and concern, Owens made the claim in a new video on her YouTube channel, and then repeated it several days later.

Video

CitationFrom the June 13, 2024, edition of Candace

Two women in France are currently facing defamation charges for helping spread the claim. Macron’s husband has recently adopted strident anti-trans rhetoric in the run-up to new elections.

Accusations of a secret trans identity have been weaponized against women deemed insufficiently feminine or subversive for years. Lady Gaga was asked in multiple about rumors about her genitalia, and similar claims pushed by Infowars host Alex Jones dogged Michelle Obama during her husband’s time in office. Although Jones recently announced that he would have to liquidate his assets to settle claims over a separate conspiracy theory about the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, accusations that the former U.S. first lady and mother of two children is secretly trans have refusedto go away.

“Transvestigations” have been hard to miss on social media in recent years, targeting basketballstars Britney Griner and Caitlin Clark, pop stars outspoken in their supportfor LGBTQ equality like Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa, Man of Steel star Henry Cavill, and even former President Lyndon B. Johnson.

These false accusations come amid a broader “trans panic” encouraged by right-wing media and politicians. And right-wing media stars are not immune to this scrutiny, with similar accusations lodged against Laura Loomer, Riley Gaines, Kyle Rittenhouse, and others.

While these accusations are, on their face, an extremely funny result of a deeply unfunny moment in LGBTQ history, they come with dark precedents. The “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s grew partly from a widely covered and since-debunked memoir detailing the occult sexual abuse of children, and it eventually led to a string of false convictions for offenses ranging from sexual abuse to homicide. One couple, wrongfully convictedin Texas at the height of the panic, spent more than two decades in prison.

Although the particulars of these accusations may have changed — though not as much as you might think, with trans people frequently accused of being either sexual predators or dangerous killers — public enthusiasm for the punishment of people seen as a threat to children has not vanished, making such claims disruptive or even dangerous for their targets. Confirmation bias means that people with negative opinions about transgender people who are prompted to suspect that somebody is transgender are likely to find evidence for their claim, whether or not it exists. The right’s present fixation on trans people has led to accusations of secret trans people everywhere not because men and women are so different, but rather because we have so much in common.

In recent years, the idea that trans people either do not exist as a meaningful category or are a recent invention has taken hold in right-wing media — especially among Owens’ former colleagues at The Daily Wire. Owens herself has previously argued that trans identity is “all made up”in the heads of trans people, an assertion that would be contradicted by the seeming existence of a secret class of trans celebrities, athletes, and politicians, if consistency were a core value of the anti-transition movement. In their own way, “tranvestigators” are living in the aspirational fantasies of the trans community of today: a world where we are known not for the messy spectacle of the metamorphosis, but rather for what we accomplish in the happily ever after.

4 24

QAnon Was Born Out of Sex Ad Moral Panic Over Backpage.com

intercept no lnx

QANON WAS BORN OUT OF THE SEX AD MORAL PANIC THAT TOOK DOWN BACKPAGE.COM

For years, the political establishment opportunistically railed against sex trafficking. Then came Pizzagate.

Trevor Aaronson

April 27 2024, 6:00 a.m.

AMERICANS ADORE A moral panic.

During the Red Scare, we believed that Soviet agents were everywhere, having secretly infiltrated all levels of society. In the 1950s, the U.S. government banned switchblades over unfounded fears that we were in the throes of “West Side Story”-style knife violence. The Satanic Panic convinced Americans of the 1980s that absurd claims of ritual abuse and sacrifice were somehow credible. Around the same time, there was “stranger danger” — which was debunked like other moral panics, but never went away entirely.

At any given time, America is moving in and out of some moral panic or another. Harm to children is a persistent theme. In recent years, however, our national obsession with these moral panics has consumed our politics. We’ve come to believe that sex trafficking rings are all around us. The driving force may come as a surprise: a moral panic about consensual sex workers who advertised legally on the internet.

The far-right’s current obsession with “child sex trafficking” — the animating force behind such conspiracy theories as QAnon and Pizzagate, as well as coded political insults like “groomer” — has roots in this moral panic hyped by powerful Republicans and Democrats alike. The panic reached its crescendo with the 2018 federal indictments related to a sex ad hub called Backpage.com.

The Backpage story may stand as a cautionary tale not only of overzealous prosecutions, but also of the second- and third-order effects of moral panics.

A classifieds site that became known predominantly for “adult” advertising, Backpage was born of a more dispersed industry that used to operate in the back pages of local alternative weekly newspapers like the Village Voice, Chicago Reader, and LA Weekly — known as alt-weeklies. For a time, the sex ad industry had its central platform on Craigslist, the free classifieds website, which spurred large-scale campaigns against the ads. As the campaigns took hold, Craigslist buckled and effectively handed the mantle to Backpage — until eventually it, too, came under a sustained morality attack.

I spent four years reporting on this saga — the rise and fall of alt-weeklies, adult advertising, and Backpage — with fellow journalists Sam Eifling and Michael J. Mooney. The result, a documentary podcast series, now on Audible, titled “Hold Fast: The Unadulterated Story of the World’s Most Scandalous Website,” reveals how cynical politicians can take hold of a moral panic and exploit it for political gain.

One thing that struck me during my reporting was that the Backpage story may stand as a cautionary tale not only of overzealous prosecutions, but also of the second- and third-order effects of moral panics — in this case, conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon. If you look closely enough, you can trace a line from adult ads in alt-weeklies to escort ads on websites like Craigslist and Backpage, to conspiracy claims that Donald Trump is fighting to break up a global child sex-trafficking cabal run by Hillary Clinton and her malevolent minions.

Conspiracy theories don’t grow in isolation. They wrap themselves around kernels of truth. The truth here is that sex trafficking and sexual exploitation are horrific crimes, and no one should underestimate the harms experienced by survivors. For the last two decades, though, powerful politicians, breathless news media, and a host of ill-informed celebrities have conflated “sex trafficking” with “prostitution” — fanning a national hysteria that underpins the conspiracy theories now wracking American society.

Sex Ad Industry

A quick history: Starting with the Village Voice in the 1950s, alt-weeklies popped up in cities nationwide. These papers prized investigative reporting and magazine-style narrative writing; pioneered attitudinal pop-culture criticism; and published classified ads in their back pages that would make half the country blush.

The “adult” ads on the last pages of the tabloid-style papers promoted sex work. At first, they were written in coded language, which created enough ambiguity that federal judges had upheld the ads’ First Amendment protections. The legal doctrine was simple: The government couldn’t deprive a massage therapist or a dancer of their First Amendment right to advertise on mere suspicion that they might also provide an illegal sexual service behind closed doors.

For decades, wink-and-a-nod adult ads could be found in alt-weeklies nationwide. Publishers knew what was being advertised. Most readers knew. So did police and prosecutors. No one, however, seemed to holler about sex ads in newspapers that could be found at busy bus stops, crowded restaurants, or smoky bars. Society didn’t collapse. The kids were all right.

The Majority of Voters Now Support Decriminalizing Sex Work. It’s About Time.

Then came Craigslist, a simple website that slashed a gaping hole in the newspaper industry’s hulking money bags. Who would pay for an ink-smeared classified ad in a newspaper when you could get a more effective one for free, in minutes, on Craigslist? People selling cars, boats, guitars, whatever — they moved to Craigslist. And those sex workers advertising in the back pages of alt-weeklies? They did too.

In response to the migration of classifieds to the internet, the largest publisher of alt-weeklies launched a Craigslist competitor, Backpage. Essentially a knockoff, Backpage used a design and category scheme almost identical to Craigslist’s. Throughout its early existence, the alt-weekly-run Backpage never matched the popular site from which it was cribbing.

Then the government and the press turned on the burgeoning online classifieds industry. Public officials latched on to a study from the University of Pennsylvania that claimed 326,000 children in America were “at risk for commercial sexual exploitation.” The report analyzed data from the 1990s using methodologies so deeply flawed that the Washington Post described it as “bogus.”

The jaw-dropping stat — More than 300,000 children in the United States could be victims of sex trafficking! — nonetheless lodged itself in our national consciousness. Politicians trumpeted the claim. Actor Ashton Kutcher, fashioning himself an advocate against sex trafficking, announced unchallenged on CNN that there are “between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States today.” It sounded even then like an improbable total. But with kids’ lives reportedly at stake, few Americans pushed back.

Pressure Campaigns

The FBI, conditioned to view any national clamor as a federal funding bonanza, launched Operation Cross Country to investigate the supposed scourge of sex trafficking. The FBI’s ongoing efforts now include partnerships with 400 law enforcement agencies nationwide, but the feds still haven’t uncovered any sort of large-scale, highly organized trafficking ring as part of Operation Cross Country.

That’s because — while cases of sexual exploitation and trafficking do occur, many of them horrific in their details — the perception of a large-scale threat in the United States is perched on a mountain of distortions and exaggerations.

“If you believe that hundreds of thousands of kids are being trafficked, you have to believe your husband, your dad, your brother, your sons are the ones buying them,” Juliana Piccillo, a sex worker advocate, explained to me. “It’s not just a handful of guys buying 300,000 kids.”

For context, the union-covered employees of UPS, those brown-clad delivery drivers we see daily, number 300,000.

As America bought into myths of large-scale sex trafficking, individual accounts of sexual exploitation made headlines. Yet the more nuanced story of online adult ads went unreported. Put simply, the internet made sex work, on the whole, safer by giving consensual sex workers a marketplace away from the streets and the ability to screen potentially dangerous clients.

Sex Workers and their supporters protest a police raid on Oct. 25, 2016, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, saying shutting down sites like Backpage.com exposes them to more risk.

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These gains in worker safety benefited a large portion of Americans, and the reason is simple: The nation’s sex work industry is enormous. The National Institutes of Health estimate that sex work in the U.S. generates $14 billion per year in economic activity. That makes sex work a significant American industry, on par in revenue with the streaming music industry.

As police and politicians conflated sex trafficking with sex work, journalists dutifully followed along. A study from the University of Minnesota of 1,500 news articles from 1995 to 2014 found a dramatic increase in the media’s use of “sex trafficking” in place of “prostitution.” That trend hasn’t reversed. A local news report from Florida last year described a standard prostitution bust as being part of “a sweeping sex trafficking investigation.” Or consider a local news report from South Dakota, where an undercover cop posed as an underage sex worker in a prostitution sting. The TV anchor described it as “an undercover sex trafficking investigation,” even though no one involved was being trafficked. A right-wing sheriff in Florida fashioned a national profile by running prostitution stings and hosting chest-beating press conferences that promote how he’s bravely fighting “human trafficking.”

Backpage became the world’s internet brothel. It was the same legal business alt-weeklies had been in for decades, now operating at an industrial scale.

In August 2010, 17 attorneys general banded together in a letter pressuring Craigslist to take down its adult ads. It wasn’t a legal threat; federal judges had upheld the legality of such ads since their days on the back pages of alt-weeklies. Instead, the attorneys general were mounting a coordinated pressure campaign. And it worked. Bowing to the coercion, Craigslist shuttered its adult section, slapping the word “CENSORED” across it on the website.

Suddenly, adult ads flooded into the also-ran, Backpage, and the company’s annual revenue skyrocketed from $11.7 million to $78 million in just a few years. Backpage became the world’s internet brothel. It was the same legal business alt-weeklies had been in for decades, now operating at an industrial scale.

Backpage’s owners, Arizona newspaper moguls Michael Lacey and James Larkin, believed they could withstand what the nerds at Craigslist couldn’t. After all, they were career alt-weekly publishers, owning 17 papers nationwide, including the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and Miami New Times. They’d printed adult ads in the back pages of their papers for decades. How could the internet be any different?

Political Opportunism

As the world’s largest platform for adult ads, Backpage became the target of withering scrutiny and sensational claims that it was encouraging child sexual exploitation. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof led the charge with stories headlined “When Backpage.com Peddles Schoolgirls for Sex” and “Google and Sex Traffickers Like Backpage.com.”

Protestors gathered outside the Village Voice’s office in New York. They held up signs reading “End Sex Trafficking” and “Women and Girls Will Not Be Silenced.” An anonymously run website, VillageVoicePimps.com, aggregated reports of violence and sexual exploitation.

The drumbeat drowned out a more complicated reality. Backpage, whose owners and employees knew large amounts of its ads were using ambiguous language to promote illegal sex work, was minting money by cynically pushing First Amendment protections and internet laws to their legal limits. Backpage, though, didn’t turn a blind eye to possible harm. One of the company’s executives had received an award from the FBI for working proactively with law enforcement. Prosecutors at the Justice Department had even advised against filing criminal charges involving Backpage after concluding, in an internal memo, that “Backpage genuinely wanted to get child prostitution off of its site.”

Politicians, on the other hand, saw blood in the water.

FILE - In this April 25, 2014 file picture California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who as a prosecutor once specialized in child sexual assault cases addresses the Domestic Human Trafficking symposium in Los Angeles, Trafficking, forced labor and modern slavery are big business generating profits estimated at $150 billion a year, the U.N. labor agency said Tuesday May 20, 2014. The report by the International Labor Organization finds global profits from involuntary workers an estimated 21 million of them have more than tripled over the past decade from its estimate of at least $44 billion in 2005. ILO Director Guy Ryder said his agency?s report Tuesday calls attention to the need ?to eradicate this fundamentally evil, but hugely profitable practice as soon as possible.? (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes,File)

Then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris addresses the Domestic Human Trafficking symposium in Los Angeles on April 25, 2014. Photo: Damian Dovarganes/AP

Vice President Kamala Harris, then the ambitious attorney general of California, boasted of being tough on human trafficking. In 2016, while running for U.S. Senate, she filed criminal charges against Backpage’s owners. The case garnered Harris national headlines — What politician doesn’t want to be seen as tough on child sex trafficking? — but a judge threw out most of the charges shortly after the newly elected Harris was sworn into the Senate. Her case hadn’t helped end exploitation at Backpage, but it had launched her into national politics.

Around this time, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s think tank, the McCain Institute, focused its efforts on human trafficking. His wife, Cindy, became a self-appointed expert in the subject. McCain Institute reports circulated in Washington, pointing the finger at Backpage for sex trafficking cases in the United States.

The McCains had a wounded history with the owners of Backpage, who started their publishing company in Arizona with the muckraking alt-weekly Phoenix New Times. The paper had written unflatteringly about the McCains for decades and in the mid-1990s revealed how Cindy McCain was stealing painkillers from her medical charity — a story headlined with the very alt-weekly pun “Opiate for the Mrs.” Cindy spun the scandal as a story of addiction and redemption, but it dogged her husband through his failed presidential bids.

Political chicanery and sensational news reports about sex trafficking fueled each other, creating a media environment by 2016 in which Americans had been inundated with reports about sex trafficking and online classifieds. Just as Americans had come to believe that strangers were abducting thousands of children in the 1980s, we came to believe that child sex trafficking was endemic, with hundreds of thousands of our kids at risk.

In April 2018, bowing to pressure from Harris, McCain, and other elected officials, the Justice Department seized Backpage and filed criminal charges against its owners. None of the charges alleged sex trafficking — of either children or adults. The government accused Backpage’s owners and executives of money laundering and facilitating prostitution. Because prostitution is not a federal crime, the Justice Department filed charges under the Travel Act, which outlaws interstate activities intended to violate state laws.

In the first Backpage trial, federal prosecutors repeatedly referred to “child sex trafficking” — even though none of the charges alleged such activity — forcing the judge to declare a mistrial. In November 2023, a federal jury in Arizona convicted Backpage’s principals following a second trial. Lacey was convicted on one count of money laundering, acquitted on another, and no verdict was reached on the other charges, many of which were thrown out by a judge this week ahead of an possible retrial. He faces sentencing in June. Larkin took his own life in 2023, on the eve of the second trial.

Any of the nation’s alt-weeklies — which published the same types of adult ads that Backpage did — could have faced the same charges decades earlier, but prosecutors had deferred to First Amendment protections.

Until the political pressure ramped up on Backpage.

IS SOUND OF FREEDOM A QANON MOVIE?

Sound of Freedom never mentions QAnon by name, but many critics say it has a lot in common with the dangerous conspiracy theory, which in many forms has suggested that there’s a secret cabal of evil elites around the world controlling global events and running a massive human trafficking and pedophilia ring (despite a lack of substantive evidence to support that belief). And that’s because the legacy of QAnon has formed an aura around Sound of Freedom that exists beyond the actual movie.

Both Ballard (the real person) and Caviezel (the actor playing him) each have their own connections to QAnon conspiracy theories. Caviezel has publicly voiced his QAnon beliefs, and spoken about it at a QAnon conference. Ballard, who founded the anti-trafficking organization Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), has become a particularly big figure in conspiracy minded groups for the work his organization is doing to fight trafficking. While OUR certainly does work to combat trafficking generally, according to a 2020 Vice report, the group is often subject to self-aggrandizing — making its missions, impact, and importance to local law enforcement out to be far greater than it actually is.

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ref

https://www.vox.com/culture/23794355/sound-of-freedom-controversy-true-story-qanon

no lnx many

Sound of Freedom wants to raise awareness about child trafficking. Here’s what it’s really doing.

Is a movie still just a movie if it becomes a culture war battleground?

By Aja Romano@ajaromano Jul 14, 2023,

A black-and-white image shows two men standing together, one holding a child, with a light shining brightly from behind them.

A promotional image for Sound of Freedom. The movie has been an unexpected box office hit thanks to word of mouth from conservatives. Angel Studios

Aja Romano writes about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.

Usually when the culture war comes to the movies, it’s in the form of conservative backlash to films they perceive as too liberal. Increasingly, however, conservative filmmakers, often working outside of Hollywood’s studio system, are grabbing the spotlight with unexpected hits, some packed with ideology and tinged with hallmarks of the modern right-wing worldview: moral panic, hints of vast leftist conspiracies, and a sense of persecution.

The latest surprise right-wing hit to tick these bingo squares is Sound of Freedom. The film stars Jim Caviezel in the very (very) loosely true story of Tim Ballard, who founded the controversial anti-trafficking organization OperationUnderground Railroad, or OUR. Coasting on word of mouth and a mountain of free publicity from influential supporters like Elon Musk and Mel Gibson, Sound of Freedom went head to head against Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in its July 4 opening weekend and wound up reportedly out-earning the Harrison Ford-led sequel by several million on opening day (if its maker Angel Studios’ on-site accounting is to be believed). It’s since gone on to earn nearly $50 million. Not bad for an indie outsider.

But Sound of Freedom has also generated a considerable amount of scathing left-wing backlash, aimed at both the movie itself, with its QAnon-adjacent rhetoric, and the film’s target audience. Multiple left-wing critics have spent parts of their reviews of the film itself denigrating the way its fans are watching it, with one critic seemingly appalled that audiences “acted like they were at Top Gun.” For their part, those audiences have flocked to the theater with the zeal of parishioners. Some fans have described attending the movie as a “duty,” while others have spun conspiracy theories that movie theaters are trying to prevent them from seeing the film — which, of course, just generates more determination to watch the film to spite the libs.

Clearly, there’s a lot happening around this film — and while Sound of Freedom ostensibly wants to create awareness about child trafficking, that theme has mostly gotten lost in all the noise.

Sound of Freedom is its own, highly effective, hype machine

Sound of Freedom was filmed in 2018 by director Alejandro Gómez Monteverde, but its release was delayed after Disney acquired its original distributor, Fox — a fact that has led to false rumors that Hollywood tried to shut the film down. When the film languished in Disney limbo, Angel Studios, a small independent film company based in Utah, stepped in. Angel has had a string of recent Christian hits like the 2019 streaming series The Chosen, which landed on Netflix, and His Only Son, 2023’s other Christian box office success. Angel partly crowdfunded the film’s $5 million distribution budget from “angel investors”, i.e., studio superfans likeTony Robbins.

With all that indie outsider energy combined with the long delay in release, Sound of Freedom was primed to feed a meta-narrative about the right’s sense of oppression at the hands of the left. Still, while most mainstream media reviewers have either been dismissive of the film or ignored it altogether, Sound of Freedom has its unexpected champions. Variety called it a “solid,” “disquieting” thriller and praised Caviezel’s performance as his finest since The Passion of the Christ.

At the root of the film’s power seems to be its “urgency” toward its subject matter; fans apparently leave the theater galvanized to proselytize on its behalf, spreading the word about the dangers and rampant devastation of child trafficking — and, most of all, about OUR and its all-important rescue missions.

IT’S A HYPE MACHINE THAT’S NOT JUST A HYPE MACHINE, BUT A PATRIOTIC, PERHAPS EVEN DIVINELY MANDATED, RESPONSIBILITY

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That evangelism plays right into film studio Angel’s marketing strategy, which encourages moviegoers to buy tickets for other would-be converts — in fact, after the film’s end credits, Caviezel himself urges fans to buy more tickets at the studio’s website in order to “make Sound of Freedom the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of 21st century slavery.” In the lead-up to its release, Angel anecdotally piggy-backed on a long tradition of Christian film marketing by targeting churches and encouraging block ticket sales in order to engage entire communities and spread word of mouth. (Some of the film’s detractors have disputed the movie’s box office success, noting that some theaters appear to be sold out when they aren’t, that user reviews on websites like IMDb read like bot spam, and that the online ticketing system Angel encourages fans to use may be vulnerable to manipulation.) In June, for the film’s July 4 release, Elon Musk offered the production free publicity; on July 1, Mel Gibson went viral for promoting the film. “The first step in eradicating this crime is awareness,” he intoned solemnly. “Go see Sound of Freedom.”

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A post shared by Sean Wolfington (@seanwolfington)

It’s easy to see how emotionally charged all of this is — it’s a hype machine that’s not just a hype machine, but a patriotic, perhaps even divinely mandated, responsibility. Adjacent to this urgent, awareness-raising narrative, however, sits QAnon — the baseless extremist conspiracy theory that high-powered liberals and elites are trafficking children and harvesting their adrenalin in order to attain eternal life. Sound of Freedom doesn’t explicitly reference QAnon or any of its most common narratives, and Ballard has brushed off the connection — but in the same breath he speaks of liberals “running interference” for traffickers by creating such rumors.

Arguably more damning: Caviezel’s open embrace of QAnon. The actor has repeatedly referenced QAnon rhetoric; he recently promoted Sound of Freedom on former Trump-admin and extremist Steve Bannon’s podcast by referencing the aforementioned (false) adrenalin harvesting, a.k.a. “adrenochroming.” He also recently defended QAnon by comparing its detractors to Nazi and Klan apologists.

None of this directly links the film to QAnon. But it doesn’t help that reviewers who’ve been less than charitable about the film have been deluged with harassment from people calling them pedophiles and groomers. Rolling Stone’s Miles Klee, who, in his review, highlighted numerous examples of Sound of Freedom fans linking themselves to QAnon, told journalist Marisa Kabas that “the intensity of the death threats and pedophile smears outstripped any previous hate campaign I’ve experienced in my career.” (Disclaimer: Both Klee and Kabas are former colleagues and friends.) Still, Klee also noted that to the film’s fans he was just “a convenient embodiment” of evil for “a demographic that thinks child abusers and groomers make up the entire government, entertainment industry, and media, and all run cover for each other.”

These two competing meta-narratives about the film have overshadowed the film itself. But if the primary objection to Sound of Freedom is that it’s a giant dog whistle for QAnon recruitment, then, the counterargument from its supporters usually goes that the film’s subject matter ought to transcend politics, despite how politically charged it is. After all, everyone should want to protect children, right?

So the question then becomes: Is that what Sound of Freedom is really valorizing?

The real organization behind Sound of Freedom is also its own hype machine

Sound of Freedom heavily fictionalizes the real-life figure of Ballard, a Mormon with a self-reported history of work with the CIA (unconfirmed per a Vice investigation) and Homeland Security, who founded OUR in 2013 out of a desire to do more to fight human trafficking. The group quickly made a splash via dramatic self-promotion, including producing a movie, The Abolitionist (2016), and a podcast, In the Trenches. In 2017, MAGA whisperer Jon McNaughton produced an infamous painting which depicts Ballard and a bevy of white people as modern-day Harriet Tubmans, carrying trafficked victims to freedom while Abraham Lincoln and a crowd of American patriots look on approvingly. OUR filmed at least one of its early sting operations, a faux house party which reporters actually attended and which Ballard has used to bolster his claims to expertise. This is one of the glitzier heroic moments that Sound of Freedom depicts onscreen.

CALLS TO PROTECT CHILDREN ARE REALLY ABOUT ATTACKING LEFT-WING IDEOLOGY

In reality, however, OUR has come under repeated scrutiny for making false claims about its exploits, including taking credit for missions and rescues it had no part in, failing to give adequate support to rescued survivors, falsely claiming partnerships with other rescue organizations, and being vague and obfuscatory about what its missions are and where its sizeable donor funds are going. (The organization claims this is to protect the safety of victims.) One Utah prosecutor spent years pursuing criminal charges against the group, though without ultimately bringing a case. In 2014, Ballard, then the CEO of OUR, allegedly used a psychic medium as his “source” for trying to locate a missing child. “He’s not making decisions tactically,” an anonymous source told Vice in 2021 about their experiences with Ballard. “He’s making decisions like a reality TV producer.”

That sensibility might not be very useful for finding trafficked children, but it’s perfect for capitalizing on a cultural moment in which public concern about trafficked children is arguably at an all-time high. The ongoing spread of QAnon as well as the recent reappearance of classic homophobic “groomer” rhetoric have given conservatives the ultimate perfect excuse to demonize liberalism. Just as Ballard’s real goal seems to be less about protecting children and more about promoting Tim Ballard, calls to protect children are really about attacking left-wing ideology, no matter how bizarrely unfounded such attacks are.

Ballard himself has leaned all the way into these murky elisions; in 2020, he described QAnon to the New York Times as a positive development, helping people to “open their eyes” to the reality of human trafficking.That same year, he seemed to affirm a false conspiracy theory, created in QAnon communities, that the furniture retailer Wayfair was facilitating child trafficking.

More recently, while promoting Sound of Freedom on Fox & Friends, Ballard claimed that allowing trans teens to transition would somehow lead to lowered ages of consent and implied that American immigration policies were leading to increased child trafficking. It is true that reports of illegal labor exploitation of migrant children have increased dramatically since the pandemic; however, reports of a widespread child sex trafficking phenomenon are false, a straightforward, old-school “think of the children” moral panic. Like all moral panics, this one gets used to justify hatred against perceived outsiders, in this case immigrants and queer and trans people.

Can any of this just be about going to the movies? (Alas, probably not.)

None of this should erase the horrifying reality of human trafficking or its impact on victims and survivors. Director Monteverde’s father and brother were both murdered by drug traffickers in 2015, so if anyone has a personal interest in making a film about the dangers of trafficking and the elite corruption that enables it, it’s him.

Yet all of this debate erases another quirk surrounding Sound of Freedom — that without the film’s meta-narratives, it’s just a passably entertaining action thriller, a la Taken. If you don’t think too hard about it (why does Caviezel’s Ballard, as Klee observes, spend the whole movie talking about protecting children while fully ignoring his own?), it’s just a good time at the movies.

But is that allowed? Are conservatives allowed to simply have fun at the movies, even if they’re having fun watching a film that reifies the extremist rhetoric in which they are steeped? Are liberals allowed to have fun at the movies if the dumb action flick they’re watching is also doubling as a conspiracy theory recruitment tool? Can the answer to both of these questions just be “yes,” simply because it’s summer and we’re all very tired, without some vital existential fight being lost?

CAN FAITH-BASED CULTURAL PRODUCTS EXIST WITHOUT ALSO FOMENTING EXTREMISM — AND WOULD THEIR TARGET AUDIENCES EVEN WANT THEM?

Uncertainty over these concerns might be why some reviewers have been so harsh on audiences at Sound of Freedom for merely watching the film. Slate lowkey fat-shamed the audience (“The audience toted jumbo buckets of popcorn and trash can–sized sodas”) while Rolling Stone high-key age-shamed them. (“Nonetheless, the mostly white-haired audience around me could be relied on to gasp, moan in pity, mutter condemnations, applaud, and bellow ‘Amen!’ at moments of righteous fury ... not even the occasional nasty coughing fit — and we had no shortage of those — could break the spell.”) Meanwhile, the audience can’t decide if they’re being oppressed because the theater is too hot or because the theater is too cold — but many of them seem convinced they’re being oppressed.

And if, as one analyst told Variety, “The strong response to faith-based films reflects a demand by an underserved audience who are hungry for entertainment that reflects their values and beliefs,” then the question becomes one that many people of faith have grappled with: Can such faith-based cultural products even exist at this point, let alone serve their specific malnourished target audience, without also fomenting extremist rhetoric, bigotry, and attacks on progressive ideals? If such works can somehow manifest, would their target audiences even want them?

It’s arguable that for many evangelicals and other conservatives, the answer would be no. The controversy and the sense of persecution that accompany these films only increases the dopamine high many get from rebelling against the evil mainstream media by ... watching this fairly mainstream movie. These are conservatives, after all, whose worldview frames patriarchal norms as synonymous with strength and leadership, which is again synonymous with patriotism. The rugged individualism and masculine rogue operatives on display in Sound of Freedom are precisely tailored to cater to their views of idealized America; it must be profoundly validating to see such a fully formed conservative image of masculinity draped in the trappings of a typical glossy blockbuster.

Still, that masculine heroism is by no means unique to Sound of Freedom; it’s not as though Hollywood has ever missed the opportunity to cater to conservative audiences with a strong male archetype. And it’s hard to feel too much pity for an “underserved” faith-based populace, given that conservative ideology, from Yellowstone to Green Book, still permeates mainstream Hollywood narratives. If audiences acted like they were at Top Gun, that’s arguably because they basically were.

Just as films like Top Gun serve to keep us from criticizing America’s military-industrial complex, Sound of Freedom aims to keep us from scrutinizing hyperbolic, alarmist cries about child trafficking too closely. That, ironically, helps shut down useful conversation about the best way to effectively help curb trafficking. The point of such myths, after all, isn’t really to save children, but to create shrill narratives with which to demonize the left and other perceived outsiders. Just as OUR itself is something of a smokescreen, Sound of Freedom is ultimately a form of extremist propaganda — and that extremism is at least as dark and dangerous as the very thing Sound of Freedom wants to combat.

---

faulkner f?

https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-hosts-lego-characters/

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mma 1 23

The week between Christmas and New Year’s tends to be a somewhat quiet news cycle, as people celebrate and rest through the holidays. But the conservative audience’s hunger for outrage demands feeding, leaving right-wing media desperate for scraps as several outlets harped on a singular tweet from theCenters for Disease Controland Prevention to manufacture a scandal over LGBTQ-inclusive education policies.

On December 27, the Twitter account for the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health promoted a document titled “LGBTQ Inclusivity in Schools: A Self-Assessment Tool.” Published in October 2020, it is a voluntary guide for school administrators, educators and health staff to scope out their own strengths and weaknesses in serving their LGBTQ students.

[twts]

several right-wing outlets took offense to this message, consistent with the ongoing conservative campaign to demonize LGBTQ students, teachers, and allies. An article from Blaze Media took a swipe at the CDC’s role in promoting the assessment, with language that echoed harmful and debunked social contagion rhetoric suggesting youth are being pressured by their peers into becoming transgender.

“As its name suggests, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tasked with preventing the spread of diseases,” the December 29, 2022 article noted. “One CDC division is, however, working to help facilitate the spread of LGBT activists' radical social agenda in schools.”

All too eager to dogpile over a single tweet promoting the two-year-old guide, a few right-wing outlets incorrectly reported the document as new.

The Daily Wire’s December 31 article was headlined “CDC Promotes New Tool To Increase Schools’ Acceptance Of Gender Ideology,” while PJ Media’s December 30 headline warned of “The CDC's Radical Plans for Your Children.” While both outlets were incorrect about the timing of the document, PJ Media made perhaps the most egregious error by outright claiming the guidance was “released mere days after Christmas.”

The outlet also went on to say the tool was really for “assessing how brainwashed educators are by the transgender cult.”

The Published Reporter,a South Florida-based outlet known for having its Facebook ads about the “Plandemic” documentary removed, repeatedly called the guidance a “new tool” developed by the Biden administration, despite the document being published before the 2020 election.

Breitbart and Just the News did not address the age of the document at all, leading readers to assume this guidance was new.

Worse yet, American Greatness combined its vagueness about the original publication date with doubt about whether the CDC’s guidance is really optional, playing into the idea that the guide’s inclusive policy suggestions could soon be federally enforced — a notion with little to stand on if the original publication date of the document was explained.

Citing Breitbart, the article claimed the CDC “has been forcing teachers across the country to follow certain guidelines demonstrating their commitment to ‘LGBTQ inclusivity’ in their classroom instructions.”

The Breitbart article used the same fearmongering tactic, saying, “While the CDC says the guide is not mandatory at a national level, it appears entirely possible that a school administrator could make it mandatory for their school.”

Right-wing organizations are picking up on this false narrative, too.

The Herzog Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to “the development of quality Christ-centered K-12 education,” published an article on January 4 titled “CDC announces new disease: conservatism.” The piece, which also incorrectly dated the document, bemoaned that the guidance did not align with the CDC’s goal of eradicating disease, “unless the disease in question is conservative values. In that case, the CDC is certainly doing its part to eradicate it.”

Moms for Liberty is a conservative “parental rights” group that has been behind campaigns against LGBTQ representation and so-called critical race theory in schools. On Twitter, the group also attacked the CDC guidance:...[libs of]

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an 12 22

Far-right Republican culture warriors have a long history of becoming deeply upset over things that, unlike health care, the economy or foreign policy, have absolutely no effect on voters’ lives.Fox News’ Sean Hannity, in 2009, was relentlessly mocked by his critics after throwing a temper tantrum because then-President Barack Obama put Dijon mustard on a hamburger. During the 2012 GOP presidential primary, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich insisted that now-Sen. Mitt Romney (who ultimately won the nomination) wasn’t a true conservative because he spoke French.

In 2014, Fox News pundits were outraged because Obama wore a tan suit during a news conference.

The U.S. has had two different presidents since Obama left the White House, but one thing that hasn’t changed since then is the ability of far-right GOP culture warriors to become outraged over unimportant things. In a late December edition of the Daily Beast’s podcast “The New Abnormal,” host Andy Levy and Media Matters’ Andrew Lawrence look back on some of the “dumbest” and “silliest” things that “triggered” and outraged Republicans and right-wing media pundits in 2022.

“Conservatives get triggered over the darndest things,” the Daily Beast says in a description of the podcast. “From Lizzo playing a Founding Father’s flute to a gay PDA in a Disney movie, 2022 was full of right-wing outrage so dumb that ‘The New Abnormal’ politics podcast host Andy Levy and Media Matters’ deputy director of rapid response Andrew Lawrence decided to round up the most ‘offensive’ instances in the show’s latest episode.”

Levy and Lawrence noted that a long list of right-wing media figures, including Ben Shapiro, became furious when R&B/hip-hop star Lizzo played James Madison’s flute. Lawrence explained, “She’s incredibly talented, and all it was just a Black woman playing James Madison’s flute that no one knew existed. It just sent them off the deep end…. Three or four days that we waste just talking about this nonsense.”

Levy noted that Fox News’ Tucker Carlson was outraged over an M&Ms commercial, angrily claiming that the commercial was making the female cartoon characters more “androgynous.” And Lawrence interjected, “It’s so silly. It’s so ridiculous. But it feeds into — you know, especially withTucker Carlson — the whole gender roles and masculinity is disappearing is such a huge part of his program. And those kind of insecurities are what he feeds into to draw viewers to his show.”

Lawrence added, “For the rest of us, it’s just silly…. The rest of the country is: Who cares?.... But if you’re a conservative and you’re looking for something to get angry about, this fits. It gives them something to be angry about.”

Levy and Lawrence both stressed that as “silly” and “dumb” as right-wing media pundits can be, their “nontroversies” fit into the us-versus-them narrative that Fox News and other media outlets are pushing.

Lawrence told Levy, “All of these things are dumb and they’re silly, and they’re good to make fun of. But they all have sort of a deeper cultural meaning and a much more dangerous cultural meaning.”

---

10 22

"Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver focused his main story Sunday on "problems" that Republicans create so that they have something to solve.

Republicans are desperately trying to take over the House, Senate and a slew of offices that allow them to control elections in an effort to usher in restrictive election laws to put in more Republicans and eliminate any policy delivered by a Democrat for the past century.

Republicans pledged for almost ten years that Obamacare must be repealed and replaced, only to be outed for being unable to come up with the replacement. They have placed judges in top posts to eliminate the personal freedoms and medical privacy of women. They invented an idea that Kindergarteners are being taught they are evil for slavery and were convinced that any mention of LGBTQ should be banned from schools in Florida and other states that have followed.

Oliver focused on another top issue for the GOP: transgender sports. While there are many, many issues facing Americans, indeed the world, Republicans are concerned that one or two transgender people could bring down sports.

He began with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who ran a campaign ad claiming that she personally saved girls' sports in the state. There was one trans student about ten years ago in South Dakota, but Noem zeroed in on the possibility that one person ten years ago could one day be millions of trans students in the sparsely populated state.

Oliver pointed out that there were more girls playing sports in the Noem ad than there were trans kids in all of South Dakota sports. So, while Republicans like Noem complain about failures around inflation, healthcare and other problems they blame on Democrats, their solutions are focused on transgender sports.

Noem isn't the only one. A whopping 18 U.S. states have spent the past few years passing legislation to regulate who can urinate in a stall next to each other. While most people simply enter a bathroom, do their business and get out, in the mind of Republicans, restrooms are nefarious places where liberals are ushering in a plot to bring down society. They have yet to find any evidence of it, but they can't stop their minds from turning to anarchy as a result of a kid using the restroom.

The positive piece of Oliver's report is that he first reported on transgender rights nearly a decade ago and things have gotten a lot better. The crisis for the right-wing is that the American public has decided that they are accepting of same-sex marriage, eliminating a key issue that they have desperately clung to for years. Trans rights have now taken over that same desperate attempt to create a villain, make people afraid of him and then pass laws to protect children from him.

See Oliver's full segment in the video below:

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breitbart categorizations? started as Left term for large entrenched power? the establishment? co-opted mirror

big tech soc media bias BS, pharma // vax?

ties in with conpiracy/ agenda: there is ONE secret bad entity trying to take our freedom/destroy USA

SPARKED BY, I SHIT YOU NOT:

BIG GENDER?!

jon s salon an 7 22

A right-wing group in Missouri has launched a "woke heat map" documenting instances of "wokeness" in an attempt to fight back against "critical race theory" and alleged "grooming" in schools across the state.

The group, dubbed "Liberty Alliance," says it is "committed to fighting back against the Woke agenda that is permeating all across Missouri."

"The first step in fighting back is uncovering their crazy ideas – from Critical Race Theory to grooming toddlers with sexually explicit books," the organization states on its website. "That is why we have officially launched the Woke Heat Map – an interactive tool designed to expose the insane actions of the radical Left. This map will alert Missourians of craziness happening in their own communities."

"‘Liberty Alliance’ has launched a ‘Woke Interactive Map’ to warn MAGA about instances of woke behavior in a particular community. The site will alert people if either: 1. CRT, 2. Woke Extremism, or 3. ‘Action by a Crazy Leftist’ has taken place," Ron Filipkowski tweeted.

"This is the “Genderbread Person” & the latest example of the insanity that’s in Missouri schools," Eric Schmitt tweeted. "We launched The Students First Initiative to empower parents & bring transparency back to Missouri schools. This was submitted by a Fox C-6 parent We’ll keep exposing the extremism."

Another Twitter user added, "A reminder that on college campuses, anyone that doesn’t fall in line with the left are censored Where are you at @SLU_Official? These actions continued into the night and no one has been punished for vandalizing a peaceful #prolife @SLUSFL display #FreeSpeech [Students for Life]"

Liberty Alliance's map isn't the first of its kind. Over the years, numerous right-wing groups have created rankings, watchlists, and cluster maps to keep track of the left's alleged influence in healthcare and education as well as Corporate America.

Last October, Salon reported on a custom Google map created by trans activist Erin Reed that provides those seeking hormone replacement therapy with the names and locations of nearly 800 informed consent clinics throughout the country.By February of that year, Reed told Salon, her map was repurposed by anti-trans activist Alix Aharon as a resource for organizing protests against doctorswho provide gender-affirming care. That new map, called "The Gender Mapper," was quickly taken down over apparent copyright infringement. However, a new one has since appeared in its place, cataloging roughly 200 clinics in total.

On its website, The Gender Mapper accuses "Big Gender" of testing "experimental medication" on "confused and vulnerable children."

"GenderMapper volunteers work in secret, around the world to collate evidence and document what is occurring," the site adds. "Gendermapper volunteers are unsung [sic] heros- and data is our truth."

Right-wing groups have also sought to crack down on left-wing "indoctrination" on college campuses.

Notable among them isTurning Point USA, a conservative youth advocacy group, which runs a "Professor Watchlist" designed to keep right-wing students abreast of "college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom."...

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===

it's a spiritual/ culture war? kids are target?

aha/hmmn gop /troll backlash against woke corps (nfl, sedition caucus) but mickey an odd enemy? just recycle of smurf commie moral panic BS? the big lie relies on outragousness? qanon cannibal pedophiles? wedge issues pink pill work well 2022, all they have?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/ted-cruz-complains-lesbian-toys/

buzz disney

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/republicans-enemies-pedophiles-stochastic-terrorism/

beyerstein

Supporters of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law have dusted off the vintage lie that gay men, trans folks, and their allies are child molesters.

The word of the day is “grooming.”

Much has been written about how dangerous this rhetoric is to LGBTQ communities(see John Stoehr’s interview with Gabriel Rosenberg), but the threat extends further. Republicans have opened a new front against political opponents, insinuating or downright alleging that all Democrats and even dissenting Republicans are pedophiles.

This rhetoric crosses the line from spirited debate to eliminationist rhetoric.Falsely labeling one’s political enemies as pedophiles is a tacit incitement to harassment and even to violence. If the campaign is waged from huge media platforms over a sustained period of time, as we’re seeing now, it crosses the line into stochastic terrorism.

Actual grooming is a form of manipulation.

Abusers ingratiate themselves into the victim’s life and wear down their defenses so they submit to sexual abuse. Proponents of these anti-gay bills claim that teaching kids about sex and gender is the same as grooming them for abuse, if not child abuse in itself. That’s preposterous, as are allegations that supporting a trans child’s identity or providing gender-affirming medical care is child abuse.

The rightwing is cynically collapsing the distinction between sexually abusing children, teaching ideas they falsely claim make children vulnerable and supporting the teaching of these ideas, thus exposing a large segment of the population to reprisals for alleged pedophilia.

“If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of four 8-year-old children,” wrote Ron DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw on Twitter.

US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene proclaimed “the Democrats are the party of pedophiles,” adding that "either you are pro-pedophile and pro-transgender biological men or you defend children and women.”

Greene’s comments might be the ravings of a crank if not for the rightwing uniting behind her. The moral panic over child porn extends from the lowliest 8chan poster to the halls of the United States Senate.

A bizarre conspiracy theory alleging that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was soft on child porn became the centerpiece of GOP objections to her confirmation. Greene accused three senators of her own party of being “pro-pedophile” for voting to confirm Judge Jackson.

Not to be outdone, Tucker Carlson told viewers the Walt Disney Corporation was behaving like a sex offender by including gay characters in its movies and for belatedly opposing “Don’t Say Gay.”

This strategy of equating political opponents with child molesters and pedophiles in order to legitimize violence against them may be more recognizable when seen in a totalitarian regime overseas.

When protests erupted against the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian state media responded by branding the organizers of the demonstrations as “political pedophiles,” whom they baselessly allege to be sexually exploiting young activists who joined their cause.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin famously equates homosexuality and pedophilia with the west. In his speech outlining his motives for invading Ukraine, Putin claimed he was invading in part to stop the west from imposing values “contrary to human nature” on Ukraine.

The term eliminationism was coined by political scientist Daniel Goldhagen in his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners to describe the kinds of rhetoric used to utterly dehumanize a segment of society and mark them for forcible exclusion, expulsion or even elimination.

More recently, journalist and scholar Dave Neiwert has written extensively on eliminationist themes in US right-wing rhetoric.

Eliminationist rhetoric asserts that a group of people is so depraved and debased that coexistence is impossible. The group is thought to be a menace that must be crushed, expelled or otherwise eliminated.

At its core, eliminationist rhetoric is tacit permission for violence. That is exactly what branding your political opponents as pedophiles does.

“Pedo” is eliminationist rhetoric. It’s the logical bridge that explains why people who claim to be the biggest proponents of democracy and freedom don’t want democracy or freedom for Democrats.

Allegedly, we’re too depraved to engage in normal politics.

We must be crushed, literally.

These spurious allegations can also be viewed as a form of stochastic terrorism that involves a group with a big media platform picking a target, blaming them for a social ill and flooding the zone with inflammatory rhetoric until the target is inundated with harassment.

A stochastic terrorist need not intend their demagoguery to end in violence. It is enough for such violence to be reasonably foreseeable.

Who can say whether disgraced former Fox host Bill O’Reilly wanted someone to shoot Dr. George Tiller by he incessantly calling the Wichita, Kansas, abortion provider a “baby killer”? Maybe O’Reilly’s intent was simply to scare Tiller or drive him out of the abortion business, but the fact remains that someone did assassinate him.

Stochastic terrorism unfolds in predictable phases:

demonization,

dehumanization,

desensitization and

denial.

A group with a mass communication platform sets out to demonize a person or a group of people as the cause of a major social ill whether it’s child sexual abuse, a global pandemic or an electoral defeat.

The target is repeatedly and falsely labeled as deviant, criminal, diseased and dangerous. The target may be called pedophiles, psychotics, drug addicts, Nazis, communists and murderers.

The despised group is frequently described as dirty, diseased or even as vermin that must be exterminated for the health of the body politic.

The audience comes to think of the target as subhuman. At this point, it becomes easier to imagine violence as acceptable and necessary.

If these messages are disseminated widely enough, it’s virtually guaranteed the target will be harassed and threatened. And, in a country awash with guns and angry people, there’s a non-trivial chance that someone will eventually attack the target.

The certainty of harassment and the possibility of violence can easily drive the target out of public life, ruin political careers and terrorize families. When the target complains or law enforcement begins asking questions, the stochastic terrorist can deny all responsibility.

After all, they didn’t tell their followers to harass abortion providers, Jews, trans kids, public health officials or female tech journalists.

After all, they just blamed these groups for major social ills and implied that they are too debased and dangerous to be engaged with politically, and normalized violent rhetoric about them.

Legally, they have a point.

Morally, we all know the score.

Moral panics over pedophilia can escalate into real-world harassment and violence. In 2016, an assailant fired a gun into the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor, a beloved family restaurant in Washington, DC. He believed the restaurant was the center of a child sex trafficking plot.

This so-called Pizzagate conspiracy, a forerunner of QAnon, grew out of baseless online speculation about Hillary Clinton campaign emails hacked by Russian spies and dumped onto the internet.

As a result of the conspiracy, the owner of Comet Ping Pong was deluged with death threats even before the shooting incident.

Extremists protest outside his restaurant to this day.

The concerted Republican attempt to label enemies as pedophiles is a disgusting and dangerous display of homophobia and transphobia, but the threat extends to all of their political enemies.

They are trying to construe anyone opposing their agenda, whether by supporting gay kids, voting for the wrong Supreme Court nominee or even watching a Disney movie with their family, as a pedophile.

This is stochastic terrorism by a major political party.

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how much is (legit? felt?) fear and how much devil term cudgel // commie?

stop steal and coup fueled by qanon wingnuttery? that in turn spawned by (russian) disinfo?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/gop-qanon/

Over the last few years, QAnon has slowly infiltrated the Republican Party, replacing its traditional conservative values with far-right conspiratorial theories that have nothing to do with reality.

Now, NY Mag's Jacob Silverman is explaining how QAnon has practically overtaken the Republican Party. While the radicalized beliefs were previously verbalized among factions of the political party, Silverman notes how those beliefs are progressively becoming more mainstream.

"QAnon’s adherents tend to espouse some selection of bizarre beliefs from the conspiracist’s buffet that includes accusations of pedophile politicians eating children, secret political tribunals in Guantanamo Bay, a great bloodletting, and Donald Trump swooping in to free us from evil. One day. Or maybe the day after. The prophecy is flexible, which is why it has evolved and endured."

Explaining the timeline of the political party's downward spiral, Silverman noted how the actions of Ginni Thomas, wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, are an example of the radical shift in Republican values and belief systems.

"The latest exemplar of the GOP’s descent into anything-goes nuttery is Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a well-connected conservative activist who recently admitted to attending the January 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington, D.C.," he writes. "Ginni’s right-wing beliefs have long been known, but leaked texts between her and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows revealed Thomas’ commitment to overturning the election, based on an apparently sincere belief that Joe Biden had stolen the presidency. She encouraged Meadows to help put a stop to Democratic perfidy. 'The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,' went one message to Meadows, encouraging him to stand strong."

Silverman is also highlighting Republican lawmakers' latest actions that signal the party's shift toward more extremist beliefs.

"The signs of the Republican slide towardfull epistemic crackup are all around us," Silverman writes. "One can see it everywhere lately, not only in the 'why do you want to hurt children?'-type questions hurled by Republican senators at Jackson, but also in the revanchist anti-LGBTQ laws being introduced in Texas and Florida and in fearful talk of teachers 'grooming' children on Fox News. Theginned-up moral panic, centered around the child exploitation themes that helped give life to QAnon, is now a regular part of Republican political rhetoric."

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pink pill hype fear conspiracy qanon

https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/fox-news-chyron-liberals-are-sexually-grooming-elementary-students

3 22

fox News propagandist Laura Ingraham has been called a “monster” by her own brother, who is gay.

“Our father was a Nazi sympathizer, racist, anti-Semite and homophobe,” Curtis Ingraham wrote, as NBC News reported in 2018. “Like father like daughter?”

Last year the highest-ranking Republican elected official in North Carolina came under fire for declaring LGBTQ people are “filth.” Not only was it vile and anti-American, but it was also done by dredging up an old trope, a disgusting lie, suggesting that gay people are pedophiles.

Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, a Christian nationalist, said: “there’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth.”

Last week the taxpayer-paid press secretary to Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis went all-in on the pedophilia lie, defending the anti-LGBTQ legislation her boss is expected to soon sign.

“The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill,” Christina Pushaw announced.“If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of four eight-year-old children. Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules.”

The anti-LGBTQ and anti-left lies are back, being promulgated now by some of the most powerful propagandists in the country. Things are getting dangerously worse for LGBTQ people across America.

Freedom for All Americans, a “bipartisan campaign to secure full nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people nationwide,” lists dozens of anti-LGBTQ bills currently in state legislatures across the country. Their passage becomes increasingly assured when propagandists like Laura Ingraham promote vile, hateful tropes about LGBTQ people, even when they mask them by extending it to “liberals.”

Wednesday night Ingraham once again proved her brother right.

“LIBERALS ARE SEXUALLY GROOMING ELEMENTARY STUDENTS” read the chyron on an “Ingraham Angle” segment.

Watch:

Ingraham began by airing clips of two people who viewers likely were expected to believe are school teachers, even though they apparently aren’t. One is just someone on a streaming service who never says she’s a teacher. The other says she’s “in pre-school,” so not a public elementary school teacher.

Those facts don’t matter to propagandists, like Ingraham, who ran those clips then immediately says:

“When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals?” Ingraham asks (video below), as Media Matters reports. “As a mom, I think it’s appalling, it’s frightening, it’s disgusting, it’s despicable. Florida just passed a bill to keep this type ofsexual brainwashing out of schools. Democrats, though, claim the bill is bigoted, branding it as the ‘Don’t Say Gay Bill.’ Well, nice try. The real controversy, though, isn’t this bill. It’s that schools are peddling gender ideology when our international rankings in math, science, and reading are down across the board.”

As she introduces her guest, the chyron changes to read: “DEMS HAPPY TO RUN ON PRO-GROOMING PLATFORM.”

No facts, nothing to back up those claims, just outrageous, dangerous defamation.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/book-burners/

The moral panic currently sweeping America about Critical Race Theory (CRT) has been covered ad nauseum by the press and commentators across the political spectrum. That’s what typically happens with moral panics (more on that in a moment).

What nobody is talking about, though, is thewhyof this particular issue at this particular time. As a result, we’re mistaking thetoolfor thegoal.

Moral panics, when driven by politicians, are usually just tools. This CRT moral panic is a tool being used by a coalition of interests to achieve their own goals, none of which have anything to do with teaching or not-teaching the history of race in America.

Here’s how it works:

Imagine you’re part of a group of libertarian billionaires who don’t believe in public education and who see any such sort of taxpayer-funded effort to improve “the underclasses” as an absurd waste of the tax dollars you “worked so hard to earn” and the “gummint” now wants to take away from you “at the barrel of a gun.”
Imagine you’re a leader in the Republican Party who’s seeing the average age of the Fox audience — 70 — as a threat to your own political longevity because old white people don’t go into politics and you need 30- and 40-year-olds to learn their basic political skills locally (like on a school board) so you can groom and propel them up into state or federal politics.
Imagine you’re a multimillionaire white evangelical preacher who’s looking for an issue you can use to more tightly bind your congregation — your donors — to you by portraying yourself as a crusader who’s going to save their children from a horrible fate.
Imagine you’re a white supremacist militia leader who’s looking to expand his base by bringing in white middle-class adults and therefore you need an issue to get yourself into the headlines “taking on authorities” but that won’t also end with you going to jail.
Imagine you’re a Republican politician who’s looking at a serious challenge in the upcoming primary elections and you need an issue that’ll be both popular and energizing for your base voters, even if the larger population doesn’t much care, because base voters are all you care about in the upcoming primary.

These are the goal-oriented “crisis actors” who’ve brought us the moral panic around Critical Race Theory that has now morphed into a book-banning frenzy.

It has deep roots.

The movement to entirely privatize public education in America began in a big way after the 1954 Brown v Board Supreme Court decision that ended legal racial segregation in our public schools. Entire counties shut down their schools and a new industry of all-white “Christian academies” popped up all over the country.
Talk radio in the 1970s (I was in the business then) was often dominated by arguments against unionized public schools funded by property taxes, with the mantra of “I understand about paying taxes for police and fire, but I don’t have kids so why should I pay?” or “My kids are grown now, why should I pay?”
The Charter School industry evolved out of this with Reagan’s encouragement and in some parts of America now dominates the education scene. And a moral panic about CRT is made-to-order to take down what’s left of our taxpayer-funded unionized-teacher-run public schools.
This is now big business. In Washington, DC, for example, there are now as many charter schools making profits for their investors as there are public schools. The continuing existence of free public education represents a lost profit opportunity.

As billionaire former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos recently wrote for Fox “News,

” it appears she believes the best solution is just to kill off unionized public education because it can never be reformed:

“Because wokeness is the left’s religion, ‘banning’ critical race theory or the 1619 Project won’t fix the problem. The liberal education establishment will simply rename, rebrand, or repackage these insidious ideas to get around so-called bans.”

These are the very simple and easily identifiedgoalsof the Republican movement to “ban Critical Race Theory.”

Thetoolthey’re using is a new moral panic.

If you’re old enough to remember the 1980s, you can recall when Tipper Gore and James Baker’s wife Susan were worried that song lyrics were going to corrupt a generation of Americans (tell that to Ari Melber). Or the McMartin pre-school satanic ritual abuse hysteria, that ran for much of the decade.
In the 1990s, after a young British girl died of an ecstasy overdose, there was a moral panic around “Rave Culture,” and much of the multi-million-dollar advertising campaign that kicked it off was funded by alcohol companies that saw the upswing in drug use by young adults as a threat to their bottom lines.
Since then we’ve seen national panics that just happened to politically or financially (or both) benefit Republican politicians ranging from Islamophobia to Trump’s Birther claims against Obama to Southern border caravans to the “bathroom hysteria” directed against trans schoolchildren just a few years ago.

In this context, we can understand how a disparate group of billionaires,

Republican politicians, televangelists, media outlets and white supremacist militias might find common cause around a new and exciting moral panic.

Thus, today’s Critical Race Theory hysteria.

Each group wins something substantial — particularly the billionaires and Republicans, as is usually the case — and the only losers are Black people and schoolkids. And, of course, objective real history, which is just a throwaway casualty to the people funding and promoting the hysteria.

Because “history” and schoolkids don’t vote, and Republicans have figured out how to make it very, very hard for Black voters to overcome everything from being purged off voting rolls to having to stand in line for hours to being given “provisional ballots” that are never counted.

By December of 2024 — and maybe December of this year — the elections will be over and the whole freak-out around reinventing American history will have gone away, the same way nobody today is seriously working to push “bathroom bills” in state legislatures.

But don’t worry: it’ll be replaced by a brand new Republican moral panic that targets another convenient and vulnerable group.

Will it be Hispanics (race)? Sikhs (religion)? Lesbians (gender/sexuality)?

You can bet that today’s version of Newt Gingrich/Frank Luntz is focus-grouping it right now

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02**/furries**-in-high-schools/

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can't make it up, you da thunk the wd have learned from prev ridicule? BB sacred?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/ted-cruz-2655516694/

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a niche for anyone who has procreated?

https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/professional-conservatives-find-path-victory-ginned-outrage-over-critical-race

Born in a constellation of right-wing think tanks, the outrage against “critical race theory” spent over a year in the metastasizing embrace of right-wing media, churning up hatred against discussions of race in schools.

As this deceptive marketing reached a fever pitch, there was an explosion in Facebook groups being formed or shifting their focus to opposing critical race theory in schools. These groups were a nexus for supporters to organize in-person disruptions at school board meetings.

This astroturfed frenzy against supposed CRT in schools led to threats and harassment against school board members nationwide, and, in Virginia, helped propel Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin to the governor’s mansion.

Assigning national importance to a statewide election can be reckless; anti-CRT outrage did not prevail everywhere in the 2021 election. But for the effort and money that conservative activists and media put into defining the Virginia gubernatorial race with critical race theory, it is clear that these charlatans will attempt to export the Virginia playbook nationally in 2022 and beyond[twt.]

as Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, who helped launch the campaign, has explained, the goal is to “put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category” so that people “read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” Other right-wing institutions and groups, like the Heritage Foundation, joined in the fray with events, activist toolkits, model legislation, and pushes for bans made in concert with lawmakers.

From there, advocacy groups use this think tank framework to generate local outrage against critical race theory.[IT'S A FRANCHISE MODEL?! MLM?] According to an NBC News analysis, there are now “at least 165 local and national groups that aim to disrupt lessons on race and gender,” and several of the most prominent ones are headed by Republican activists and strategists. These groups cram local controversies into the CRT framework established by Rufo and others, disrupt school board meetings, and place spokespeople in media appearances -- sometimes professional spokespeople, who are instead described as local parents.

The noise and attention from these professionally operated, think tank-inspired groups then generates coverage from an obsequious and obsessive right-wing media, champing at the bit for any angle that will hurt Democrats and help Republicans. Empowered by the outrage suddenly all over TV -- to the tune of hundreds of Fox mentions per month, plus loads more from OAN and Newsmax -- GOP politicians find incentive to take legislative action to drastically limit the teaching of civil rights, sometimes even banning books altogether. [AND WORDS]

This feedback loop is a concerted strategy whose first trial run was the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election. It is not a grassroots movement, it is not a natural response to alleged left-wing excesses, and it is not about what is best for children. It is a top-down attempt by professional political operatives to morph political landscapes to suit their racially regressive needs. And, at least in Virginia, it seems to have worked. [twt.]

as Rufo promised, the professional outrage against critical race theory has only just begun. As the next election looms, critical race theory (or similardog whistles like “parents’ rights”) will suddenly get thousands of TV mentions again, and professional GOP operatives will again call themselves mere concerned parents. Think tankers may even publicly discuss their exact plans again, because they know it won’t cause any harm; enough of the mainstream media will still cover these anti-CRT outrages as grassroots “education” issues, instead of what they are: a think tank astroturf project.

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satanic panic 80's mcmartin daycare

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an 721

fox News is furious at the latest storyline from Marvel's Captain America, with two guests declaring the comic book publisher has turned the hero who has fought fascism and Nazism since 1941 into "Captain Woke."

For those unaware, Captain America was created in the middle of World War II, just before America officially entered the war, as an instrument to help Americans in the fight against the Axis powers. He's been called a "patriotic supersoldier," his entire foundation is literally about fighting fascism and the far right, and his popularity over the decades has only increased.

Until today, when Fox News launched an assault on the American hero.

"Dean Cain slams Marvel for new 'woke' Captain America comic: Bashing USA is now 'the cool thing to do'," is the title of a Fox News article that claims "Marvel is facing backlash for its latest comic, 'The United States of Captain America,' which says the American dream isn't real."

Here's how Fox News presents a quote from the comic book:

"…The first American dream is the one that isn't real. It's one some people expect to just be handed to them… When the truth is, it never really existed in the first place… other cultures. Immigrants… We're at our best when we keep no one out. A good dream is shared. Shared radically. Shared with everyone. When something isn't shared, it can become the American lie."

Fox News adds, "Cain said wokeness is becoming pervasive, affecting the media, actors, and celebrities and indoctrinating children in schools."

Marvel is literally just saying America has to be actively reinvented every day, and to do that we need and should want immigrants to share in our dream.

To Fox News, that's wokeness and propaganda.

On cable, Fox News guest Michael Loftus ranted about Captain America.

"It's sad, really, it's so sad when Captain America is now like Captain Woke, or Captain Propaganda. Did I miss an issue where he was kidnapped by liberal arts professors and was forced to move to Portland?" Loftus lamented. "It's the absolute worst, and it's it's just more proof that the left is going to come after everything that real Americans hold near and dear, they're in, after baseball they tried to cancel apple pie. And now, Captain America. Maybe they'll change his outfit, maybe now instead of a shield, he'll be armed with a laptop, and they'll have exciting adventures where he sits in coffee shops and and tweets mean things, and he's an active fact checker on Facebook. It's horrible."

Loftus says Captain America "has a huge impact" on children, calling the declaration that America is a land of immigrants "pretty insidious," while complaining the left doesn't "want the right to have any heroes."

He went on to "cancel" Captain America, declaring him "dead," at least to him: "I'm done with Captain America. He's dead."...

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anti-gay law portray on TV where kids could see? 621 hungary?

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msnbc moral panic: you raise kids w/ right values/american and univ makes them into liberals[and/or gay?]

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/ron-desantis-2653505905/

Florida goes full fascist': Ron DeSantis sparks furious backlash with ‘authoritarian’ campus political surveys

Raw Story June 23, 2021

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation requiring Florida students, faculty, and staff to register their political views in surveys in an effort to promote "intellectual diversity" at colleges and universities, and the measure set off backlash across social media.

Critics decried the law, which DeSantis claims will promote freedom of speech, as a "thoroughly Orwellian" attempt to gain control over academic debate at institutions of higher learning.

Well, this is thoroughly Orwellian. ?? Faculty and students of Florida, you know what to do! Freep Mini-Trump's stup… https://t.co/N2nEE5UzuM

— Betty Cracker ?? (@Betty Cracker ??)1624454881.0

Well that's got to be unconstitutional: Florida students required to register political views with the state to pro… https://t.co/b1Bh8p98uN

— David Rothkopf (@David Rothkopf)1624455537.0

DeSantis wants to survey university students and staff, with the threat of budget cuts if he doesn't get his way???… https://t.co/IWfcM8nGhI

— Witty Librarian In a Mask (@Witty Librarian In a Mask)1624455089.0

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see evans behind bastard 1020 on blood libel roots

satanic panic 80's mcmartin daycare

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