Tag: moral panics

Texas Dept. of Health and Human Services Refuses to Answer Questions About Anti-Porn Law’s Mandatory ‘Warnings’

The Texas Department of Health and Human Services has declined to confirm or deny whether the “health warnings” mandated by the state’s recent anti-porn age verification law are supported by any official documentation or statement produced by that office.

As XBIZ reported, the Republican-authored HB 1181 was passed by the Texas legislature with bipartisan support in May and will go into effect September 1.

The new Texas age verification law — part of a state-by-state campaign by religious conservatives and anti-porn activists to outlaw all sexual material online — compels adult websites to post pseudoscientific anti-porn propaganda disclaimers declaring that “pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses and weakens brain function.”

HB 1181 is a much-augmented version of Louisiana’s age verification law and its many copycats, and echoes the debunked “porn addiction” language of faith-based anti-porn groups.

XBIZ asked the Press Office of the Texas Department of Health and Human Services if the department could provide any documentation or statement pertaining to those warnings, and clarify whether the language of the warnings has its basis in any documentation or statement produced by the Texas Department of Health and Human Services.

After requesting several days to provide a reply to the query, Press Officer Tiffany Young declined to answer, deflecting the questions with an invitation to contact “the authors of this bill for information about how it originated.”

XBIZ also contacted Texas Department of Health and Human Services Chief of Staff Kate Hendrix and the bill’s main sponsor, Rep. Matt Shaheen (R), but received no reply to the same questions.

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Southwest Airlines Falsely Accuses Mom of Trafficking Biracial Daughter

A woman is suing Southwest Airlines after flight staff accused her of trafficking her child. Mary MacCarthy was flying with her 10-year-old daughter, “MM,” in 2021 when Southwest Airlines staff called the Denver Police Department and reported her as a suspected child trafficker.

MacCarthy is white, and her daughter is biracial. In a lawsuit against Southwest, MacCarthy alleges that she was suspected of trafficking her own daughter “for no reason other than the different color of her daughter’s skin from her own.”

“There was no basis to believe that Ms. MacCarthy was trafficking her daughter,” states the complaint, filed August 3 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, “and the only basis for the Southwest employee’s call was the belief that Ms. MacCarthy’s
daughter could not possibly be her daughter because she is a biracial child.”

MacCarthy and her daughter wouldn’t be the first multiracial family to find themselves facing human trafficking allegations at the airport. We keep hearing about flying families or couples falsely accused of being involved in trafficking because they don’t appear to be the same race or ethnicity.

It’s happened with interracial couples and with parents of mixed-race or adopted children. Cindy McCain, wife of the late Sen. John McCain, infamously fabricated catching a child trafficker when she reported to police a woman traveling with a child who was “a different ethnicity” from her.

This situation isn’t occurring in a vacuum. It comes amidst a decades-long moral panic about sex trafficking generally and child sex trafficking in particular. The panic has taken many forms, including the Department of Homeland Security encouraging War on Terror–style citizen surveillance campaigns (“if you see something, say something”) to stop trafficking; states requiring airports to post human trafficking hotline numbers and awareness signs; and government-sponsored programs to train airline and airport staff to spot alleged signs of trafficking.

Most of the “signs” these people are trained to spot are nonsense—impossibly vague or broad. For instance, Airline Ambassadors International trains airline and airport staff (using a training program approved by Homeland Security) to keep an eye on “children, those who accompany them, and young women traveling alone” and people who seem “nervous.” Training materials also tend to tell people to go with their gut instincts. Unsurprisingly, this leads to a lot of racial profiling, with ill-informed instincts about what a family “should” look like coming into play.

The wider campaign to “stop sex trafficking” via vigilance on airplanes and at airports is itself based on the faulty idea that human trafficking (a category that includes both labor trafficking and sex trafficking) is mostly done by brazen cabals of international traffickers ushering victims into the U.S. and Americans victims out, or shipping victims around the country. But in the U.S., labor trafficking tends to be concentrated in specific industries and to involve various forms of worker exploitation more than the covert importation of human beings. And in the sex trades, exploitation tends to take place at a much smaller scale, with individuals or small groups—often people the victim knows—perpetuating it. It also tends to take place in the communities people live in or with victims and traffickers traveling by car, not using commercial airlines.

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Sunday School Scapegoats: How D&D And Heavy Metal Became Targets For Satanic Panic

The Satanic Panic started in 1980 with a book, Michelle Remembers, co-written by Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist (and future husband) Lawrence Pazder. Claiming to be the true tale of Michelle’s childhood – as remembered through the now-discredited practice of recovered memory therapy – Michelle said that she was abused by the Church of Satan, starting at the age of five. Among her claims were that she witnessed human sacrifices, was rubbed with blood and body parts of those sacrificed, tortured, and forced to take part in a non-stop, 81-day ritual in an underground room in a cemetery that summoned Satan, removed visual evidence of the abuse she had undergone, and hidden the memories until “the time is right.”

Almost immediately, the debunking began. Most notably, during the alleged 81-day ritual, Michelle still attended school and showed no signs of abuse. Michelle was unable to identify any of the hundreds of alleged participants in the ritual, except for her mother. There was no historical record of a car accident as described in the book. Pazder also never attempted to contact the police to investigate any of the alleged crimes Michelle “remembered.” Despite this, Pazder and Smith became celebrities in their “field.” Pazder was used as a consultant in the McMartin preschool trials, and Smith appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s daytime talk show. Michelle Remembers was used in training material for law enforcement and social workers.

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David Stockman On The Parallels Between The COVID Hysteria And The Salem Witch Trials

It would not be going too far to say that the eruption of irrationality and hysteria in America during the COVID-19 period of 2020-2021 most resembled not 1954, when Senator McCarthy set the nation looking for communist moles behind every government desk, or 1919, when the notorious raids of Attorney General Mitchell were rounding up purported Reds in their tens of thousands, but the winter of 1691-1692. That’s when two little girls—Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams of Salem, Massachusetts—fell into the demonic activity of fortune-telling, which soon found them getting strangely ill, having fits, spouting gibberish, and contorting their bodies into odd positions.

The rest became history, of course, when a malpracticing local doctor claimed to have found no physical cause for the girls’ problems and diagnosed them as being afflicted by the “Evil Hand,” commonly known as witchcraft. Other ministers were consulted, who agreed that the only cause could be witchcraft and since the sufferers were believed to be the victims of a dastardly crime, the community set out to find the perpetrators.

Within no time, three witches who were famously accused —the Parris’ slave, Sarah Good, an impoverished homeless woman and Sarah Osborne, who had defied conventional Puritan society. Many more followed, and as the hysteria spread, hundreds were tried for witchcraft and two dozen hanged.

But there is a lesson in this classic tale that is embarrassing in its verisimilitude. Namely, one of the best academic explanations for the outbreak of seizures and convulsions which fueled the Salem hysteria was a disease called “convulsive ergotism”, which is brought on by ingesting rye grain infected with a fungus that can invade developing kernels of the grain, especially under warm and damp conditions.

During the rye harvest in Salem in 1691 these conditions existed at a time when one of the Puritans’ main diet staples was cereal and breads made of the harvested rye. Convulsive ergotism causes violent fits, a crawling sensation on the skin, vomiting, choking, and, hallucinations—meaning that it was Mother Nature in the ordinary course working her episodically unwelcome tricks, not the “Evil Hand” of a spiritual pathogen, which imperiled the community.

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Satanic panic is making a comeback, fueled by QAnon believers and GOP influencers

On June 1, David Leavitt, the prosecuting attorney for Utah County, stood behind a lectern in his windowless Provo office before a gaggle of reporters. Wearing a gray suit and an exasperated look, he wanted to make something categorically clear: Neither he nor his wife were guilty of murdering or cannibalizing young children.

It was, by all accounts, a strange declaration from the progressive Republican prosecutor, a Mormon and younger brother of a former Utah governor, Mike Leavitt, who had earned a name for himself by prosecuting a well-known polygamist in 2001. But David Leavitt was up for re-election, Utah County voters would start casting ballots the next week, and the allegations, ridiculous as they may have sounded, had started to spread online and throughout the community. 

Some of Leavitt’s most high-profile political opponents were willing to at least wink at the allegations against him: Utahns for Safer Communities, a political action committee opposing Leavitt’s re-election, posted his news conference to YouTube with the caption, “Wethinks He Doth Protest Too Much,” and on their website, the group wrote that Leavitt “seems to know more than he says.” 

Leavitt lost the election, most likely not just because of the allegations against him but because of his liberal style of prosecution in a deeply conservative county where opponents labeled him as “soft on crime.” But the allegations’ impact on Leavitt was clear. After decades of serving as a city and county attorney with grander plans for public office, Leavitt now doesn’t think he’ll run again. 

“The cost is too high,” he said recently in an interview from his home.

Leavitt’s experience is one of a spate of recent examples in which individuals have been targeted with accusations of Satanism or so-called ritualistic abuse, marking what some see as a modern day version of the moral panic of the 1980s, when hysteria and hypervigilance over protecting children led to false allegations, wrongful imprisonments, decimated communities and wasted resources to the neglect of actual cases of abuse.

While the current obsession with Satan was boosted in part by the QAnon community, partisan media and conservative politicians have been instrumental in spreading newfound fears over the so-called ritualistic abuse of children that the devil supposedly inspires, sometimes weaving the allegations together with other culture war issues such as LGBTQ rights. Those fears are powering fresh accusations of ritual abuse online, which are amplified on social media and by partisan media, and can mobilize mobs to seek vigilante justice. 

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No Treats, Only Tricks: Republicans Try to Ruin Halloween With Fake Rainbow Fentanyl Threat

A group of Republican senators has released a video warning parents that Mexican drug cartels have begun targeting children by disguising fentanyl as candy, despite actual experts claiming its bogus.

The public service announcement, a portion of which was aired on Fox News Friday morning, said that “by working together and being on high alert this Halloween, we can help put an end to the drug traffickers that are driving addiction.” 

Halloween this year falls exactly 8 days before the November midterms, and what better way is there to drive home your tough-on-crime, war on drugs-electoral messaging than to convince parents that the cartels are in the house down the block and are handing out synthetic opioids to your kid? 

“Rainbow fentanyl comes in a variety of bright colors, shapes, and sizes, including pills powder and blocks that resemble sidewalk chalk,” said Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy. “Even just handling these pills or powders…can kill a person,” added Senator Steve Daines (R-Mon.), alluding to the myth that touching fentanyl can cause an overdose. 

Nebraska Senator Deb Fisher warned that “according to the DEA, these pills are a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults.”

However, experts, who at this point are exasperated at the “poisoned Halloween candy” myth’s yearly resurgence, are again reiterating that drug dealers are not handing out narcotics to children en masse. In fact, the use of colors is typically a way for producers to distinguish their products from other manufacturers and to make them identifiable to existing consumers, not a way to market them to children. Mariah Francis, a Resource Associate with the National Harm Reduction Coalition, criticized the GOP lawmakers misrepresentation of the ways drugs circulate in communities. “Drug markets are based off profit gain and profit margins,” explained Francis. Drug dealers “are not making money giving free fentanyl tablets […] to small children.”

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How a Fake Anonymous Diary Helped Launch the 1980s Satanic Panic

In 1971, the YA book Go Ask Alice hit shelves and almost immediately set off a firestorm. Purportedly the real-life diary of a straitlaced teen girl who lost her life to drugs, it was an instant hit, touted by critics across the country as a must-read for parents and teenagers alike. Over the ensuing decades, it sold tens of millions of copies — beloved by teens for its frenetic entries about taboo subjects, and by adults because it was a text they could point to as proof of the ills of drugs. But by the early 21st century, questions had arisen about the book’s veracity, as well as the true identity of its “anonymous” author — something only known by the book’s editor, a supposed child psychologist named Beatrice Sparks.

It was Sparks who captured Rick Emerson’s imagination one day back in 2015. Driving home from lunch, Emerson — who wasn’t born when the book came out, but lived through the Reagan-Era D.A.R.E. classes and War on Drugs it helped to fuel — began wondering about the mysterious author. Who was she, really? Where could he find out more about her? When he got home, he realized that the book he wanted to read didn’t exist, so he set out to write it himself. What he discovered was more shocking than he could have imagined. “Go Ask Alice was the bright, shiny object that started the story,” he tells Rolling Stone. “But then it got much bigger, much faster.” 

In short, Emerson found something that one of her follow-up YA books, Jay’s Journal, an equally suspicious “diary” of a teen boy’s descent into occultism and suicide, may have helped ignite that other late-20th-century moral freak-out: the Satanic Panic, a two-decade span of Americans blaming the devil and occultists for everything from depression to suicide and murder. “As I worked my way from the outside in, [I realized] the shadow and the scope and the scale that these books had, especially combined,” he says. “It went literally from Hollywood to the Oval Office to Quantico, and then into high schools in small towns throughout America.”

Seven years since that idea popped into his head, Emerson has finally published Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries, out this month from BenBella Books. Based on intensive research — scouring Sparks’ personal letters; conducting dozens of interviews with those who knew the real families who lost children, and with the families themselves; meticulously picking through Sparks’ other books, as well as their source material — he’s created a portrait of a fabulist so intent on spinning her legend that she stole the stories of others for her own gain. But in telling the real stories, he also brings a sort of justice for the kids and their families whose experiences had been exploited for profit.

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DID ANY MUSICIANS ACTUALLY PUT BACKWARDS SATANIC MESSAGES IN THEIR SONGS?

“Here’s to my sweet Satan. I sing because I live with Satan. He will give those with him 666. There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.”

 These are the disturbing words which appear when the 1971 Led Zeppelin masterpiece “Stairway to Heaven” is played in reverse – or so it is widely claimed. In the 1970s and 80s, a moral panic spread among American Evangelical groups about rock bands hiding satanic and other subversive messages in their music. These messages, they claimed, were subliminally inserted by recording them backwards, a technique known as back masking. This panic reached such hysterical heights that churches across the United States held record smashing and burnings, several bands found themselves in court over corrupting lyrics, and the legend of backwards satanic messages became an indelible part of music culture. But did any artists actually hide backwards messages in their music? Well, yes, but not for the reasons their Evangelical critics believed.

The practice of back masking is as old as sound recording itself. Shortly after patenting the phonograph in 1877, Thomas Edison experimented with playing recorded music backwards, noting that the result sounded “novel and sweet but altogether different.” The first association between back masking and satanism came in 1913, when British occultist Aleister Crowley, in his treatise Magick: Book 4, recommended that those interested in black magic listen to phonographic records in reverse in order to learn how to think and speak backwards. Coincidentally, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page would later purchase Crowley’s former mansion, giving plenty of ammunition to the evangelical satanic panic crowd. Over the following decades, avant-garde composers like John Cage and Edgard Varèse experimented with reversed recordings to create bold new soundscapes, a technique which was later adopted by various rock ‘n’ roll groups starting in the 1960s – including the Beatles. According to John Lennon, after coming home from a party in 1966, he accidentally played a take of the song “Rain” backwards. Lennon, a fan of avant-garde music, was so enamoured by the sound that he included a reversed version of the song’s opening line in the fadeout. This is widely considered the first use of back masking in a pop song. The technique was also heavily featured in the song “Tomorrow Never Knows” from the band’s 1966 album Revolver, as well as throughout 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

 Unfortunately for the Fab Four, this experimentation would lead to the first great back masking controversy, as the technique formed a cornerstone of the infamous “Paul is Dead” urban legend. For the uninitiated, “Paul is Dead” was a popular conspiracy theory started in 1967 which held that Paul McCartney had in fact died in a car crash on November 9, 1966, and was subsequently replaced with an impostor. The theory further held that the remaining Beatles attempted to reveal Paul’s fate by planting subtle clues in their songs and album covers. Among these supposed clues are the lyric“the walrus was Paul” from the 1968 song “Glass Onion” and the cover of 1969’s Abbey Road, on which Paul is barefoot and walking out of step with the rest of the band. But the most definitive clues, the theorists claimed, were revealed by playing Beatles records backwards – particularly the 1968 White Album. For example, “Revolution 9” supposedly contains the message “turn me on, dead man,” while “I’m so Tired” yields “Paul is dead. Miss him, miss him.” Of course, the entire “Paul is Dead” rumour is complete nonsense, and while the Beatles did pioneer the use of back masking, none of the aforementioned examples were intentional uses of the technique. Rather, these supposed “secret messages” are merely cases of pareidolia – the tendency of the human brain to perceive patterns in otherwise random data. Other famous examples pareidolia include the “face” on the surface of Mars seen by the Viking 1 spacecraft in 1976, the face of the Devil seen in the smoke billowing from the World Trade Centre on 9/11, and the endless reports of Jesus and the Virgin Mary appearing on slices of toast and other objects. Research has also shown the strong influence of the observer-expectancy effect, as few listeners will perceive the supposed hidden messages unless they have already been primed to do so. Nonetheless, the fact that the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and other musicians did intentionally use back masking for fun or artistic effect was enough to convince moral guardians that the technique could also be used for nefarious purposes.

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Is Fentanyl-Tainted Marijuana ‘Something Real’ or ‘Just an Urban Legend’?

Taken at face value, recent reports of fentanyl-tainted marijuana in Connecticut highlight the hazards inherent in the black market created by drug prohibition. Consumers who buy illegal drugs rarely know for sure exactly what they are getting, and the retail-level dealers who sell those drugs to them may be equally in the dark. But even in a market where such uncertainty prevails, opioid overdoses among drug users who claim to have consumed nothing but cannabis—like earlier, better documented reports of fentanyl mixed with cocaine—raise puzzling questions about what is going on.

One thing seems clear: The official warnings prompted by those reports are more alarming than the evidence justifies.

The proliferation of illicitly produced fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute during the last decade or so has helped drive opioid-related deaths to record levels. Fentanyl is roughly 50 times as potent as heroin, and its unpredictable presence has increased drug variability, making lethal errors more likely.

According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United States saw a record number of drug-related deaths last year: more than 93,000. Three quarters of those deaths involved opioids. “Synthetic opioids other than methadone,” the category that includes fentanyl and its analogs, were involved in about 83 percent of those opioid-related deaths, up from 14 percent in 2010.

Fentanyl and heroin have similar psychoactive effects. And since fentanyl is cheaper to produce and easier to smuggle than heroin, it makes sense that drug traffickers would use the former to fortify or replace the latter. But the idea that dealers would mix marijuana and fentanyl, two drugs with notably different effects, is much less plausible. Until now it amounted to nothing more than scary rumors.

Last week, however, the Connecticut Department of Public Health (DPH) announced that it has received 39 reports since July of “patients who have exhibited opioid overdose symptoms and required naloxone for revival” but who “denied any opioid use and claimed to have only smoked marijuana.” The most obvious explanation for those cases is that the patients falsely denied opioid use, which carries a stronger stigma than cannabis consumption. But the agency also reported that a lab test of a marijuana sample obtained in one of those cases detected fentanyl.

“This is the first lab-confirmed case of marijuana with fentanyl in Connecticut and possibly the first confirmed case in the United States,” DPH Commissioner Manisha Juthani said. Based on that finding, her department “strongly advises all public health, harm reduction, and others working with clients who use marijuana to educate them about the possible dangers of marijuana with fentanyl.” It says “they should assist their clients with obtaining the proper precautions if they will be using marijuana.” It also “recommends that anyone who is using substances obtained illicitly…know the signs of an opioid overdose, do not use alone, and have naloxone on hand.”

These warnings seem overwrought, given the meager basis for them. If the hazard Juthani describes were significant enough that it would be rational for cannabis consumers to “have naloxone on hand,” you would expect to see many more suspected cases in a state with more than half a million marijuana users. Assuming the single lab test result was accurate, it is not clear how fentanyl ended up in the marijuana sample. Did a dealer intentionally add the fentanyl, and if so why? Could the sample have been contaminated accidentally by the dealer, his customer, or the lab? Did the patient, contrary to his denial, deliberately dose his pot with fentanyl?

Forbes writer Chris Roberts posed those questions to Robert Lawlor, an intelligence officer who works for the New England High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), an interagency drug task force. “We have some of those same questions,” Lawlor said. “From a business standpoint, it doesn’t make sense to put fentanyl on marijuana. So why is this happening? What is the purpose of behind putting it in marijuana? Those are some of the questions that are still out there.”

Notably, HIDTA is not telling marijuana users they should be on the lookout for fentanyl in black-market cannabis. “Marijuana [mixed with] fentanyl has been sort of an urban legend for a couple years now,” Lawlor said. “To try and decide whether it’s something real or just an urban legend is important for public safety and public health.”

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