I remember in the early 2000s there was a similar reaction to Harry Potter. My family attended a rather extreme church at the time. One day the pastor started the sermon with: "We need to talk about Harry Potter". I thought "Ohhh nooooo, here we go".
He proceeded to berate the congregation, reminding every one that Harry Potter is a fictional children's book. Witches aren't real. Wizards aren't real. You know who is real? Satan and he's coming for ya, but not thru this fairytale book. Always thought that was pretty funny.
"Harry Potter Books Spark Rise In Satanism Among Children"
LOCK HAVEN, PA—Ashley Daniels is as close as you can get to your typical 9-year-old American girl. A third-grader at Lock Haven Elementary School, she loves rollerblading, her pet hamsters Benny and Oreo, Britney Spears, and, of course, Harry Potter. Having breezed through the most recent Potter opus in just four days, Ashley is among the millions of children who have made Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire the fastest-selling book in publishing history.
And, like many of her school friends, Ashley was captivated enough by the strange occult doings at the Hogwarts School Of Witchcraft And Wizardry to pursue the Left-Hand Path, determined to become as adept at the black arts as Harry and his pals.
"I used to believe in what they taught us at Sunday School," said Ashley, conjuring up an ancient spell to summon Cerebus, the three-headed hound of hell. "But the Harry Potter books showed me that magic is real, something I can learn and use right now, and that the Bible is nothing but boring lies."
Hah, an Onion article and it's based around where my dad grew up/grandparents still live and where I spent many summers. Never thought I'd see Lock Haven (or the real "Jersey Shore", right up the street) here.
A family friend told me about ten years ago that she thought Harry Potter had occult elements. I pointed out to her that JK Rowling is a Scottish Episcopalian and compared it with the Narnia story cycle, which is also the work of a Christian. Didn't go down that well.
(There is a chain of toy stores in the UK that will not stock anything Harry Potter-related because of this kind of belief.)
It fits the fictional subjects the fictional characters are taught, sure.
But that doesn't make Harry Potter occult literature!
If it did, so are Superman comics. And the X-Files. And James Bond.
Fictional stories about occult figures are at least two steps removed from occult literature. One, they are written about other people studying such material, two they are explicitly fictional. (Three, perhaps, so are the people doing the studying.)
There is actual, primary source occult material out there; confusing this with Harry Potter is precisely what the looney fringes want.
When I say that my family friend thought Harry Potter had occult elements, I do not mean that she thought the content of the stories was about the occult. Of course they are.
I mean that she believed the stories themselves to be as dangerous as primary source occult material: that fiction about the occult is at some level interchangeable with the occult; that it's a primer on the occult.
Which is why the Lewis comparison wasn't well-received. Because it punctures the notion that making up stories about witches invites Satan in.
Christianity would be so much cooler if they left in more of the esoteric apocryphal texts with wizard battles, mysticism and demon summoning, and cut out Paul's misogynist bullshit.
The revelations book fits this description. And we already have a religion that bases itself around it: the Jehovah Witnesses. While your idea sounds cool in theory, in practice the results is a crazy cult which no one in their right mind would want anything to do with.
QAnon is rather like this, as other commenters are pointing out; people who believed in or amplified the Satanic Panic are present in the QAnon "faith" too.
... in that a series of prophecies has been made and not come true, and like the Millerites, Q believers have experienced a great disappointment and branched off into other further-splintering schools of belief around Covid vaccinations and The Great Reset.
While attending church camp the summer after Prety Hate Machine released, the preacher started quoting some of the lyrics. My friend and I got in trouble for singing along. My fondest memories of church was when the hypocrisy just popped out and smacked you in the face.
I remember hearing "While the devil wants to f** me in the back of his car" and thinking, "wow, I'm sure as a 12 year old, I'm supposed to find this thrilling... such aggression , such anger... this guy seems really mad at things he doesn't even believe in." I just wasn't interested in it. Not saying Trent isn't a genius. Or that I don't appreciate all the cool experimentation he was doing back then (sending instruments and vocals through an ARP 2600!!). That lyric just felt like a cop-out to me.
Church camp did get me listening to Metallica though! Fade To Black was such an amazing song... and no amount of "this song was written by the devil to make kids kill themselves" could ever change that.
I appreciate PHM for what it was - important from a technical perspective and a precursor for what was to come. But Trent was in his early 20s so not his most emotionally complex work ;)
I was always amused at the amount of flak Harry Potter got when His Dark Materials came out about the same time period. The young adult book series that very explicitly is about killing God, how evil the church is and even has gay angels as side characters!
I think few people read past the first book. I’ve almost stepped in it talking to religious people that say they love this series and I thought it was some kind of coded message. Like, me too, what was your favorite part?
Plenty was written about the message in the third book, in particular. The Pullman books just haven’t had as much cultural staying power so the debate about them isn’t being reinforced.
I don't see that in the articles you linked. Can you quote the evidence that she equates trans-ness with rape?
I _do_ see something about her questioning whether gender self-identification should affect whether someone is allowed to be tried for rape (since, if I understand correctly from the article you linked, the UK seems to not allow women to be tried for rape). It's difficult to follow to the original quote because some of the linked articles and original sources are paywalled.
Article includes no JKR quotes, but lots of quotes from enraged twitterati. She uses an Orwell quote which doesn’t refer to rape at all, just to doublethink. Please provide evidence, not smear campaigns.
Not sure if it backs up the original "freaking out about..." claim [...]
Not at all. This quote is from a JKR tweet that she made referring to a Times article on the praxis of UK police recording rape crimes as being committed by a women when the perpetrator identifies as female (even if they have male genitalia).
So, neither did JKR (in that quote) equate trans people with rapist nor did she bring up the whole topic. Rather, she reacted to a newspaper article on the topic, and certainly not in a way that could by any stretch of the imagination be characterized as "freaking out".
You are pushing the moral panic in question, and it will age even more poorly than the previous panic since it's targeting and smearing a woman instead of a story.
My great grandmother wasn't a terribly religious person, but towards the end of days, she decided it would be prudent to go to church. She picked one of the fire and brimstone sort, and Harry Potter was the subject of their intense ire. She wouldn't talk about it, even when prompted. Our sense was that she was seeking some sort of closure in going to church; it didn't matter much what they had to say.
I grew up in a Jehovah's witness household and my dad burned my harry potter books after a particularly zealous talk about harry potter and the association books had with the occult and satan. Fun times
I think some folks confused Dungeons and Dragons with Lovecraftian role playing games that were popular at the same time.
Those were demonic.
That’s not a value statement or judgement. They were literally based around demons taking over the world and killing all goodness. And there were was nothing anyone could do to stop it.
D&D was ultimately based on Lord of the Rings, so there were demons in it. But it wasn’t demonic in the Cthulhu sense.
> I think some folks confused Dungeons and Dragons with Lovecraftian role playing games that were popular at the same time.
No, the latter were never anywhere close to as popular; the deliberate propaganda was targeted at D&D because it was fringe enough that people wouldn't know it was lies and popular enough that it would have impact.
> Those were demonic.
No, they weren't (the in-game fiction may have been, but that was often true of D&D which was like an order of magnitude more popular than anything else in the TTRPG market at the time of the Satanic Panic.)
In fact, using the Lovecraft mythos in D&D, for which it was written up, was more popular than the purpose-built games.
> D&D was ultimately based on Lord of the Rings, so there were demons in it. But it wasn’t demonic in the Cthulhu sense.
D&D was pretty distant from LotR, and had the Cthulhu mythos literally started up in one of the major supplements.
The panic always seemed like a bunch of smug people looking down on others about how "they could lose touch with reality while playing D&D." It was a condescending moral high ground they stood on where they didn't think other people could handle themselves and should be denied the opportunity to do things on their own.
You see the same attitude in a lot of "think of the children" restrictions on whatever. Even in discussions about what should be allowed on facebook, some people apparently shouldn't be allowed to be wrong on facebook.
I would like to also point out:
* We haven't caught all those satanists who were holding ritual sacrifices in the 80's
* Apparently now, repressed memories of trauma are staying repressed and we aren't uncovering them as well anymore
* We haven't caught those damn clowns in the forest who were stealing children
* Vaping apparently hasn't killed everyone who touched one
* The prius's out there seem to have stopped accelerating unintentionally
I played DnD when I was a kid around this time, I remember the satanic panic very well. I thought it sounded so cool, that I thought I was playing the game wrong ... there was far less satan worshipping than I had been led to believe.
Since this was before the era of Internet in the home, I went to the library, and the librarian helped me look through the microfiche archives. We tracked down the original reported incidences that were most likely to be referenced by the people driving the panic reporting. I distinctly recall discussing with her "that's it? wow, they're blowing this all way out of proportion." She nodded in agreement.
Most of the kewl satanic rules were in the splatbooks, like the dark ritual to lower your THAC0. That’s probably why you missed it. Also, Tomb of Horrors. Pretty sure that’s what inspired the Chick Tract.
well they did have a big recall push to fix about 3.5 million toyotas so that's probably why.
if the problem was with the car cpu bit flipping like the one report said was possible it's possible that those cpus were just defective and more susceptible to that error. either way the issue got aged out by attrition.
The put a hook in to hold the floor mat. If that was the problem, the throttle was still being pressed and the brakes weren't being applied, contrary to the media's hysterical reporting.
I'm not sure I buy that explanation fully. one of the guys driving was a CHP officer and the acceleration was stuck wide open... the mat could have been a contributing factor but there were software issues that could have caused it too. The witnesses said the car was surging in acceleration immediately prior to the accident. there were also some components changed in the accelerator assembly too.
The large majority of these are either someone getting the throttle stuck with junk in the floor space (including the mat), or someone hitting the wrong pedal.
I'm not saying that nothing ever broke and there was never a stuck throttle or two. But it is portrayed in the media as the cars pressing the throttle on their own, and the brakes suddenly not working (though they work in the wrecked car afterward). The media goes right along with this hysteria and plays it all like it is true. A very large percentage of these "stuck throttles" with "brakes that don't work" are people pressing the wrong pedal. It's that damn simple.
With the Audi 5000 in the 80's (same hysteria) it was possible because the pedals were shaped a bit different. This also led to requiring the brake to be pushed when shifting from park.
That barr report directly rebuts that NASA report. I don't know the ins and outs of any of these and i'm sure some floor mats have caused it but i highly doubt that hundreds of deaths are attributed to it without there being some kind of manufacturing defect.
the guy was a chp officer that had to take really intensive high speed driving courses and also had car issues before that eye witnesses attested to. if anyone was well equipped to drive a car it was him and the extenuating circumstances seem to point to other factors than a floor mat. I've never bought that since the floor mat had to do two contradictory things at once... both pin the accelerator down and also simultaneously prevent the brake from engaging. for that to happen more than once is very hard to believe. it really seems like a canard thrown out by toyota so it wouldn't cause panic about their car software.
> The panic always seemed like a bunch of smug people looking down on others
This is far far too simplistic a take, and frankly understates what was going on at the time while failing to appreciate the actions and motivations of those involved.
The D&D scare was part of the broader satanic panic collective delusion, which you mention here, that led to literal, real-life witch hunts that ruined lives. The Martensville panic in Saskatchewan, Canada, is a perfect example of this:
To this day these exact same hoaxes are found in things like QAnon.
Many of the folks who are obsessed with this kind of thing genuinely believe that there's people engaging in satanic ritual abuse. There are folks who get emotionally distraught when they talk about things like pizzagate because they really believe it.
Yes, there's no shortage of grifters and so forth. But many folks taken in by this stuff are genuine and well-meaning, and to just paint them all as "smug" not only does those folks a disservice, it fails as a constructive starting point for figuring how to deal with these types of issues.
Yeah the "satanic panic" era was part of an attempt by churches groups to "take us back to an era of good people". Sound familiar?
Church leaders get "worried" about their people. But really its about the loss of power, control, and influence. So they target various things in society they deem evil and weaponize their congregants.
To this day, my mom still thinks D&D is satanic worship. Even though I have explained the game, and shown her the setup.
> The underpinnings for the contemporary moral panic were found in a rise of five factors in the years leading up to the 1980s: the establishment of fundamentalist Christianity and the founding and political activism of the religious organization which was named the Moral Majority; the rise of the anti-cult movement which accused abusive cults of kidnapping and brainwashing children and teens; the appearance of the Church of Satan and other explicitly Satanist groups which added a kernel of truth to the existence of Satanic cults; the development of the social work or child protection field, and its struggle to have child sexual abuse recognized as a social problem and a serious crime; and the popularization of post-traumatic stress disorder, repressed memory, and the corresponding survivor movement.[16]
It was a deeply multifaceted phenomenon. To assume it was just a bunch of nefarious church leaders deliberately stoking a hoax in order to gain power is deeply reductive and once again misleading about both the causes of, and solutions for, these types of moral panics.
There's some excellent books and podcasts about the topic that dig into the hoax, including a fantastic CBC series about the Martensville panic which is worth listening to if only to get a better understanding of what people went through at the time.
This is important! Recognizing the many and varied root causes that lead to phenomena like the satanic panic help us better understand modern movements like QAnon, and critically, how to deal with them, both at the individual and at the broader societal level.
I would not lay the blame entirely at church leaders. The media loves their child sex abuse scandals, missing children and pedos. They are good for ratings.
It seems like a lot of the people who thought the D&D players could lose touch with reality had already lost touch with reality. It's just there were so many of them going to their churches that it was normalized.
There is something conspicuously missing in this article that deserves a mention: fantasy themes were also prominently featured in some kinds of heavy metal music (basically, still are), which is something that also raised the ire of conservative parents.
Also, some times fantasy themes appeared in metal videos, even if the content of the song had nothing to do with it. I believe the bands or their promoters were just playing into this to piss of the parents (even more).
For example, Mötley Crüe's video for "Looks That Kill":
Mötley Crüe was basically just a party band: more about sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, than about any fantasy nonsense. The song "Shout at the Devil" on the same-named album, and the Satanic imagery and whatnot, was almost certainly likewise just to piss of conservative Christian parents.
Which is best described as "magnificently unlistenable" [0]
I got the flexidisc to play only a couple of times, and mercifully never in the presence of my mother (who was also an RE teacher, though not the one I mention in my other comment)
[0] to repurpose a review quote that was on the shrinkwrap cover of Guns by the British indie-prog-punk-marvel, Cardiacs
If we're talking about Warhammer, are we ignoring the bank Bolt Thrower, an early 90's death metal band devoted to 40k, who included cover art from Games Workshop itself, and included such albums as "Realm of Chaos", and the songs "Profane Creation", "Lost Soul Domain", "Drown in Torment", and "Prophet of Hatred"?
IIRC the Bolt Thrower association goes back to before 40K, but my memory is hazy.
40K is, if you ask me, the first hint of the beginning of the end of Warhammer (quite early on). Though I did have a go at the Adeptus Titanicus stuff.
The high point for me was WFRP. I found my 1986 hardback first edition of that the other day.
GW must have specifically designed the Warhammer RPG/canon to match the nightmares of religious parents. When we found it, we were done with D&D. Now we had a table to roll on to find out specifically what our critical hit did to the enemy in gory detail.
Warhammer (and to some extent the Fighting Fantasy universe) was also funnier -- more irreverent, bleaker humour, more provocative. Anyone who was offended by the content was doubly offended by the trolling.
While one of my secondary school teachers was telling us we were dabbling with the occult, another (a beloved english teacher) enjoyed the imagination of it and wanted to be taught how to play Chaos Marauders so that he wouldn't lose to his nephew.
I think the moral crusaders gave up about 25 years ago. All of these black, death, and stoner metal variants started coming out and no one seemed to care enough to start public campaigns to try to ban it.
The stories of the moral crusaders is so funny... at some point Rob Halford (Judas Priest vocals) was asked to sing in court because some crazy people argued that his discs had subliminal messages telling their fans to kill themselves.
And nowadays we've got stuff like Children of Bodom (RIP Alexi) and others that are pretty in your face.
Monsters from the past would have a stroke if they listened to these bands.
My personal favorite Electric Wizard track has always been "Legalise Drugs & Murder." They have never been accused of being subtle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zNG63rf9LQ
>> The song "Shout at the Devil" on the same-named album, and the Satanic imagery and whatnot, was almost certainly likewise just to piss of conservative Christian parents.
Pretty much:
This was written by Motley Crue's bass player Nikki Sixx. In the band's biography The Dirt, Tom Zutaut, who signed the band to Elektra Records, explains that Sixx was exploring Satanism at the time, and wanted to call the song (and the album) "Shout With The Devil." Zutaut was having a hard enough time getting the label to promote the band, and he knew the title would make it an even harder sell, but Sixx was determined to go with the devil theme, telling Zutaut: "It just looks cool. It's meaningless symbols and s--t. I'm just doing it to piss people off. It's not like I worship Satan or something."
When Zutaut saw Sixx two nights later, he witnessed a knife and fork rise off the table and stick into the ceiling. Zutaut writes: "I looked at Nikki and freaked out. 'There is no more 'Shout With The Devil.' If you keep shouting with the devil, you're going to get killed.' I truly believe that Nikki had unknowingly tapped into something evil, something more dangerous than he could control that was on the verge of seriously hurting him. Nikki must have realized the same thing, because he decided on his own to change the album title to Shout At The Devil."
There's also an old TV interview that predates their autobiography where they ask Nikki outright if he was a devil worshiper or satanic and he just laughs and tells them "Pssssshhh no! The album is called "Shout AT the Devil" not "Shout WITH the Devil!""
The panic over D&D is the only safe part of the "Satanic Panic" to look back on and laugh about, partially because a basic understanding of the silliness of fantasy role playing games has filtered through the culture since, but mostly because the panic over them didn't hurt very many people.
The rest of the Satanic Panic was egged on by the mainstream media, the justice system (especially in the horrific McMartin trial), and local politics and police forces aggressively targeting weird teens. You still can't make a documentary about McMartin that treats it as obviously false, even in retrospect. So many people in authority lent their reputations to a witch hunt. It's very similar to Iraq.
Mazes and Monsters is quite the trip down memory lane.
I vividly remember being told that my interest in Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, Warhammer and the Warlock and White Dwarf magazines was a gateway to the occult, by my form tutor/RE teacher.
Mind you the precise issue of Warlock that provoked that outburst was this one:
Can't remember if this one or another issue is the one that contained quite a neat, viable Fighting Fantasy tabletop ruleset. Wish I still had these; they were so very British.
> Mazes and Monsters is quite the trip down memory lane.
Ironic that when I was heavy into D&D and drawing the monsters I was seeing in the handbooks, guides and Dragon magazines, my parents didn't care at all - it was just me and my cousins and friends being sociable and using our imaginations.
Then we heard about Mazes and Monsters and we all huddled up to watch it and it wasn't at all what we thought it would be. My parents were like, "No more Dungeons and Dragons for you young man!" Thinking I would go crazy like Tom Hanks character did. After some intervening from other friends parents who got them to relax and just let us enjoy the time using our imaginations, they relented.
It was a pretty traumatic time to have to hand over my Dungeon Master Guide to my parents, feeling like my whole life was over at 10. Only to have them give it back to me and seeing me jump around like I just won the lottery must have been pretty funny to them.
My favorite quote applies again, if you consider games one of the technologies:
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
> They were wearing silken robes in pale, iridescent colors, and every one of them looked just like him.
That made me laugh. Other than that it sounded more like a self-hypnosis script overall. I could see people using it to get better rest...maybe even navigate a really hard day. IMO it's OK to involve fantasy that really works on that awkward self-hate/self-love dichotomy.
I have been reading some of Palladium Books' RPGs from the era lately. They all have notices disclaiming the occult, loudly proclaiming they are just a game, etc.
Personally I was raised by religious fundamentalists who would rather let me buy GDW's Twilight:2000 and dream of nuclear combat than get into the dragon fantasy & magic stuff. And dad was very highly educated...it's weird to think about this now but I guess even Aum Shinrikyo had recruited a bunch of amazing Ph.D.s, doctors, etc.
The exception to the rule was if I was trying to get someone to go to church with me. Then I could play their dragon games all I wanted (the 'darkest' among my friends were more into GURPS though). My goal according to my parents was to make them feel accepted, then they'd give it all up and get involved in church!
I was later able to leverage this strange missionary-minded satanic-approval into the purchase of a bunch of Led Zeppelin cassette tapes, which warped me forever.
TTRPGs are still a lot of fun though. I mean just yesterday I was using [1] again, can hardly believe that amazing resource exists.
I experienced this first-hand. In the 80s I want to a Christian high school in Ohio[0] (funnily enough, I was classmates with Brian Warner aka Marilyn Manson). We had chapel once a week with some visiting preacher/lecturer. Several of them railed very explicitly against D&D.
One told us that at the Dungeons and Dragons “factory,” there was a witch’s hut in the forest nearby. Before each set was packaged for shipping they were all sent out to her, where she personally dedicated them to Satan.
There was a series of books some of us read, young adult fiction (can’t recall or find the title), where some of the characters played D&D, lost their minds due to the devil’s curse, and died in awful ways.
I played anyway, of course, just not with friends from school.
> Before each set was packaged for shipping they were all sent out to her, where she personally dedicated them to Satan.
I am envisioning a scenario where the game starts to get popular quickly and McKinsey is called in to help scale up the satan dedications, because the witch is low on bandwidth.
That’s a great image. I can almost see the brochure selling it to middle managers.
It reminds me of this Neal Stephenson & Nicole Galland novel — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_D.O.D.O. They posit time-traveling witches as a service in the context of a tech startup. It’s a fun idea, but not a great book; middle-of-the-road even for Stephenson’s later work.
That's a cool anecdote, he seems like a very resilient character from that era.
I'm very surprised he hasn't been canceled[0] though, considering he had many relationships that would not pass the #metoo test and literally used the N-word in his songs.
[0] Not that I would necessarily wish that on him, it's just that him having a career is fascinating in the same sense a dinosaur who somehow survived an extinction event would be.
But as other comments have pointed out, he is being sued (again). So maybe that will do it.
I’m mystified at what some people are able to get away with, and what gets other cancelled for life. I wonder of MLK or Gandhi could survive the climate today. And then wonder again how sociopaths like Trump seemingly get away with it forever.
>One told us that at the Dungeons and Dragons “factory,” there was a witch’s hut in the forest nearby. Before each set was packaged for shipping they were all sent out to her, where she personally dedicated them to Satan.
I'm always saddened by people who so very desperately want something - attention, to feel in power, to feel better informed than others, etc - that they'll buy into and repeat these conspiracy theories. In the 80s I used to play D & D at a game store that hosted an event and we'd start Friday night and on a really rollicking session go through until dawn. It was amazing. IMHO the camaraderie, friendship and entertainment that came from a bunch of people playing pretend for a few hours was what D & D was meant to be. That some people projected their own weird fantasies of darkness and evil onto a game just makes me what goes on in their heads. The only darkness and evil in our game was occasional bad guys. Except that one guy who played a Chaotic Evil wizard. Eventually the GM added game rules that warned everyone prior to his casting anything, particularly behind the party. But even that was all in good fun.
This is why D&D was kind of underground where I lived in the rural south as a kid in the 80s and early 90s, and that's on top of of the very severe social stigma associated with it and other 'nerd' activities.
At least Trekkies, when outed, weren't accused of Satanism.
I had always been (pretty much) a straight-A student up until the point at which my (increasingly conservative, Christian) confiscated some D&D alike books which I had bought with my own money around the age of 14. It broke our relationship, I’ve never achieved what I could have done (although I’m OK by most measures) because I lost all motivation and we communicate occasionally, acrimoniously once every decade or so. Really I don’t give a f*k about them any more.
I just don’t understand why people put such unnecessary barriers between themselves and their children. It’s just a sodding book.
High school in Ireland, 1983 or 1984. A few of us started an after school D&D club. The school allowed us to use a classroom. It was great until a parent complained that we were "devil worshipping". The vice principal was very apologetic but said the school had to shut it down.
Widespread recognition of the phenomenon of the moral panic has spawned the "moral panic panic", where legitimate concerns about the safeguarding of children have been swept aside as "just a moral panic", combined with the mockingly sarcastic use of the Simpsons quote "won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!"
Yes, we know there aren't really gangs of pedo-satanists out there. Yes, we know it's manipulative to use children as an excuse to push an ideology. But knowing these things breeds complacency - as if no concern at all is necessary. Vulnerable people do still face the prospect of real harms every day, and it is still worth defending them, regardless of whether previous attempts at defence have been overwrought.
I played Heroes Unlimited with a friend who's religious parents let him play the game, but required him to avoid any and all magic mechanics in the game, since magic is in contradiction with religion and God's ultimate power.
I've never encountered this. Just curious, does that mean your friends couldn't read Harry Potter too? Or is there different standards between different forms of media?
Here's another good article on the phenomenon. I think the underlying theme is more about the fact that 'worlds of the imagination' is a tricky subject for religious evangelists of any stripe.
My favourite anecdote about this has to do when locally they started printing the halal icon on the packets of potato chips (in the early 80's). I was only about 8 years old at the time, but my mom and aunt started freaking out about it. It was only after I had a good laugh that I told them what it meant.
Times have certainly changed when the media panic was about D&D instead of war, pandemic, existential environmental change and the future of democracy. Though back then the threat of nuclear war hung over everyone all the time, so maybe not so different.
there is a group of people that had no cool, and were subjected to constant duress, i was shocked going to my first D&D session and seeing all these kids there together.
the game didnt cause the dysfunction, it was already present.
one of the worst insults one could hear from the cool crowd was along the lines of being:
"such a morphadite, that you have to play D&D by yourself"
i almost forgot to mention, that was about the time we started spinning vinyl records backward by hand to decrypt the subliminal programming messages, of destruction and damnation
The tragic story of Egbert that seems to have given rise to a lot of the panic left me bothered. He made one suicide attempt by pill but survived, disappearing for a while, and then several months later his second attempt (gunshot to the head) resulted in him being taken to the hospital, where he died 5 days later. Honestly, the fact that they tried to save his life, putting him on life support at the hospital, after he had shot himself in the head was absolutely cruel IMHO.
Occasionally, I found out that friends' kids are getting into D&D of some stripe. Fortunately, I bought a handful of those "Dark Dungeons" Chick tracts and slide one in with every manual I buy them.
The D&D Chick tract is a great cultural artifact. I was into D&D during that era and thought that particular Chick tract was hilarious, probably more for the number of girls who were playing the game than anything else. The gender balance in D&D now is much more equal than it was in the 80s. That Chick tract alone was enough to make me know to put no weight in any other one that got placed under our car's windshield wiper.
Oh I remember this. There's one positive I take from this.
A lot of people are understandably upset at, say, the GOP's latest wedge issue: health care for trans children [1]. It's one of many from gay marriage to trans athletes to bathrooms to mask mandates to vaccine mandates to abortion to guns.
The positive I take from this is that manufacturing issues like D&D and Satanism is nothing new and despite these continued and deliberate attempts at stoking the fires of a culture war, things have gotten better. White exceptionalism and the lasting echoes of slavery continue to this day, for sure, but it is better. Back in the 1980s people talked openly about how if Black people moved into their neighbourhood it would lower home prices. There was even a Family Ties episode about it [2] (objecting to the irrational fears, to be clear).
Here's another positive actually: in the 1980s it kinda sucked to be a nerd. Now at least it's more accepted and the Internet gives lots of people (not just nerds) access to communities and likeminded people that just wasn't possible then.
Of course there's a downside: cyberbullying, the envy culture of Instagram (eg hundreds have died taking selfies [3]) and so on but there's a ton of good too.
People fall into a trap where they'e nostalgiac for the past. Our memories are selective. This contributes to people getting trapped into the idea that things are simply getting worse. Even if it's true (which I don't believe it is), it doesn't help you to believe that and this kind of pessimism is no way to live.
You even see it with people stressing about the threat of nuclear war as a result of the war in Ukraine. To anyone who was alive in the 1980s, this is really old hat. We lived with this threat for literal decades with a much more aggressive Soviet Union.
Discrimination against D&D playing has a much different impact than discrimination against trans children. One sucks, the other crushes children ad ruins lives. The sanguine philosophical perspective does nothing for those children.
> What are examples of moral panics on the "left" (American interpretation) end of the spectrum?
Centrism.
It is the universal moral panic of the far left in any democratic country. There's nothing that upsets the left more (I speak as someone largely on the centre-left; it's a reviled position)
That's is not a moral panic. It is a continual, ongoing policy disagreement. Leftier-than-thou types may yell at you, but they're not taking your children away or trying to throw you in jail.
(Come to think of it, it looks an awful lot like Republicans vs. RINOs, except the numbers are reversed there.)
Same, center left here too. It feels like a cult trying to purify itself. We're impure and must be cast out. I believe, however, that it's a very loud minority that is scaring the rest of us into silence. So it appears larger than it is.
I consider myself center-left. It is hard to encapsulate the left as a monolith because it is a diverse group of people who have different values and goals.
The left could include:
- People who want to reduce the price of medical care so people can have a higher quality of life
- People who are environmentalists who want to regulate pollution
- Vegans who want to end animal abuse
- Transgender people who want their rights and status respected and protected by the law
- People who do not want homeless camps in their city, but also do not want the government to open up open-air prisons for people who are at the lowest point in their lives and may never recover.
- People who want women to have access to abortions.
- Literal delusional communist wonks who have no idea what they are talking about.
So, when you look at the "left" like that, you can see why the two-party system is so important for the United States to keep in place. This superset of "the left" needs to agree on policy and win an election. Good luck.
But to answer your question:
- Races in dungeons and dragons being stand-ins for actual races. This is questionable, but people made some good points and I think at the end of the day WoTC was just like: "Eh, if it makes people more comfortable who cares." NOBODY played the characters that way anyway.
- Genetically modified foods / the organic movement. GMO DOES have its problems in that they dump TONS of pesticides and herbicides on copyrighted plants that are designed to survive them, which then flow into our rivers and kill off biodiversity. However: They are perfectly safe to eat and people misunderstood the concept.
- Anti-vax was originally a hippie-dippie "left mommy" thing before it was adopted by the right.
Free speech. Strangely that has somehow inverted in recent years. It wasn't long ago that censorship was the domain of the right who were in a panic about what's acceptable speech and actively trying to police it.
"master branch" and "grandfathered code" and "sanity check" are just a few of the terms suddenly deemed unacceptable.
Joe Rogan says dangerous things and must be silenced. Who is a Bernie supporter smeared as alt-right for saying unapproved things.
All kinds of campus panics about "unsafe" words and ideas. One example is a professor that said a word that sounds like another word during a lecture. It made some students uncomfortable and the professor was put on immediate leave.
People being cancelled for jokes they made a decade ago.
>All kinds of campus panics about "unsafe" words and ideas. One example is a professor that said a word that sounds like another word during a lecture.
While this is much more common now, it's not new either.
One specific example might be recent panics over "misinformation" (e.g. covid misinformation), what I would call the idea that incorrect, contrarian, or offensive speech online isn't just bad, but fundamentally dangerous. Even if you believe this is true, there is absolutely a powerful moral panic movement that exaggerates the terribleness of misinformation, and generally places itself in opposition to free speech in its solutions that call for more and broader censorship of online platforms.
Of course this perspective relies on a few base assumptions, such as: 1) free speech exists as an ideal aside from legal protections, 2) corporate censorship is a threat to this ideal, and 3) misinformation isn't as bad as the alarmists claim it is. If you don't agree with those points, it might not appear as a moral panic to you, which may explain some of the confusion.
I think you're making a mistake, here, by looking at this through a partisan lens (which, unfortunately, seems to be the default way of seeing the world for a lot of folks these days; one need only look at some of the other low quality replies to your question to see that in action).
The Satanic Panic, for example, was not, as far as I'm aware, a partisan conspiracy theory. Unlike QAnon, which is clearly aligned with the far right, the Satanic Panic was very widely reported in media and believed by the public and law enforcement.
The same is true of many other urban legends that lead to moral panics (e.g. "rainbow parties").
Some believe the US is full of actual Nazis and white supremest groups. I'm not saying white supremest don't exist, but it's way overblown in the moral panic people's minds.
Everything is somehow racist. Again, not saying racism doesn't exist, but the word seems to have been redefined in recent years. Example, the OK hand gesture now means white power and everyone who uses it is a white supremest, syrup is racist, etc.
Some were very anti-vaxx pre-covid, particularly out of California. That took a really weird turn where now the moral panic is anyone who is unvaxxed for any reason doesn't deserve to buy food, work or travel. (The mass firing of ~30K NY hospital workers is an example).
Many (like 41% according to the NYT) believed COVID had a 50% hospitalization rate (probably related to the above)
Censorship and misinformation is a big one.
Cancel culture. This certainly exists in both political extremes too.
Ecoterrorism and meat is murder.
Koch brothers were running the country (the right's version of this boogeyman is Soros).
There's many more, these are just recent ones I could think of.
It seems extreme politics of the left has replaced the hole that religion would have taken and therefore has the same moral panic traits that extreme religious people also show.
Well that's what was asked, the moral panics of the left, of course they are fringe. Almost all moral panics are fringe, thank goodness. Equating D&D with satan was also fringe. I had exactly 1 friend who's parents wouldn't let him play D&D because his mom thought it was satanist, or close to it. They weren't an overly religious family either, she just got sucked into the fear mongering propaganda.
I'd like to know which examples you don't believe exist.
Do you believe the moral panics I listed don't exist? It might be because of your biases. If you support left culture, you might be blind to them. I've switched sides so many times, I'm more aware of all the BS of both tribes.
This is so far down my comment chain I might not see your reply. Here's a link to the NYT article where 48% of Democrats believed if you catch COVID, you have a 50%+ hospitalization rate (actual is 1-5%). 28% of Republicans and 35% of independents believe the same thing. If that many people believed this was true, the result would be exactly what we saw, ostracization of not only people who don't want to get vaccinated but people who dared want to talk about the costs and benefits of vaccination. If that's not a moral panic, I don't know what is. You can google the others at your leisure, or not.
Paywalled, so I can't actually see that, but if anything the fact that I know my personal bubble leans very left and yet I have never met a single person whose beliefs are that extreme that makes me doubt those numbers.
Even the most Covid overreacting people I know aren't anywhere near believing it's a 50% hospitalization rate: they get tested constantly and are aware of multiple cases of Covid among their circle with no hospitalizations. Paranoia about after-effects comes up much more.
Is it just a moral panic? Because these kids, who are bright enough to build their games and virtual worlds in Roblox's arcane tools, are spending hundreds of hours to create content for a multi-billion company and seeing nothing for their efforts. (In fact, many spend money to promote their worlds, so they are paying to work.)
I think one is that a lot of left-wingers imagine that the majority of police are also members of explicitly fascist/racist organizations. A significant minority are, but lefties imagine that they basically all are. For most cops, the police unions are enough, and minority cops are usually even at odds with those.
I was never allowed to play D&D back in the 80's. My mom believed witchcraft existed and I was never able to convince her otherwise after a lifetime of arguing and so many psychological strategies. She recently died, taking her ignorance with her to the grave.
You can't convince these people. The "marketplace of ideas" is a failure. It doesn't work. Some wounds never heal. Once someone gets some stupid and wrong idea in their brain they will never be free of it. Like lead poisoning, it will never go away.
I've never understood why people believe the marketplace of ideas is the only marketplace that shouldn't be regulated.
We don't allow companies to sell poison and call it medicine under the belief that rational, self-interested consumers will always choose medicine even if the poison is sweeter. Yet we have to allow disinformation and lies to spread like an untreated cancer and just hope that somehow the truth will prevail.
Whether something is poison is relatively objective. Whether something is disinformation or lies is often a matter of perspective or too difficult to determine. Furthermore, the control of information is about power and manipulation just as disinfo is, which is a can of worms I'm not prepared to write an essay on right now, and does not exist in your poison analogy.
How about we amend the analogy. You're not allowed to sell unpasteurized milk. Many say unpasteurized milk is better, and healthier. Others say it's dangerous. We (FDA) have collectively decided that despite its health benefits we don't like the risks and have therefore banned it. The can of worms is open. Squiggly worms are all over the place.
> Whether something is disinformation or lies is often a matter of perspective or too difficult to determine.
On the other hand, it often isn't too difficult to determine, as with the various videos floating around that allegedly show the Russia-Ukraine war but are readily identifiable as predating it, showing an entirely different location, and/or having audio dubbed over from another source.
I mean that's the whole point of witch hunts, to fabricate a casus belli to abuse people in ways that would otherwise be illegal or at least frowned on by the community at large.
...which is where I fail to understand why people compare the moral panics of the "left" to these quasi-conspiracy events among right-leaning and evangelical types. the difference is huge when you compare the actions taken in the interest of their fabricated causes.
It's not that hard to see where they are coming from. If someone calls you a racist for the very reasonable opinion that all black people should go back where they came from then it feels like they're just making up a reason to hate you.
I mean people keep calling you a racist it must be their problem. Introspection is not allowed, being right always is divine, anything else is weakness.
QAnon is a conspiracy theory singularity, and the very same ideas that were running rampant in the 80s--particularly satantic ritual abuse--are represented in the QAnon movement today.
Not a stretch at all. The origin story of these panics have major parallels:
A DnD game gone wrong, which lead to a man killing himself since he lost touch with reality.
A Black teenager gunned down in the street by a racist White cop after running away and holding his hands up.
Both of these stories are absolute fiction. The former had a history of suicidal thoughts and substance abuse. The latter assaulted a police officer and tried to wrestle his gun away just minutes after he committed strong armed robbery of a corner store.
Don't think so. You made it sound like the base of the whole BLM movement was a fake incident, while racism is still very real, which is the real base. While on the other hand D&D had nothing to do with satanism or occultism.
>You made it sound like the base of the whole BLM movement was a fake incident
It... Was... Michael Brown's murder by a racist cop was a fake incident. George Zimmerman the White supremacist gunning down a Black teen who was just walking home was a fake incident.
>while racism is still very real, which is the real base.
While Satanism is still very real, which is the real base.
>While on the other hand D&D had nothing to do with satanism or occultism.
While on the other hand Michael Brown's death had nothing to do with racist cops or White supremacy.
I watched a great documentary about D&D... a bunch of kids played it, and one of them got kidnapped,.. then they met this girl with superpowers, and a jock, and something something monsters, other worlds, etc... it was really scary, 1/10, would not recommend playing D&D just because that might happen to you too!
He proceeded to berate the congregation, reminding every one that Harry Potter is a fictional children's book. Witches aren't real. Wizards aren't real. You know who is real? Satan and he's coming for ya, but not thru this fairytale book. Always thought that was pretty funny.