"The Teddy [bear] craze was followed by a moral panic, as crazes involving kids inevitably are."

"Students in a New York University sewing class were forbidden to make Teddy bears, lest they 'breed idleness among children.' A Catholic priest in Michigan went further, preaching that if little white girls were allowed to play with 'the horrible monstrosity' instead of dolls, they would fail to develop their maternal instincts and doom the race to suicide...."

From "The Race to Give Every Child a Toy/For most of history, parents couldn’t buy their kids dolls, action figures, or the like. Then playtime became big business" (The New Yorker).

Before the Teddy bear, the toy market did not exist in the sense that it does now. For much of the nineteenth century, dolls were made at home from corn husks, clothing scraps, and the like, or produced from expensive, fragile bisque porcelain and kept high up on shelves to be admired by grownup collectors, not pawed by clumsy kids. Most children had marbles, hoops, balls, and little else. Few people bought toys from stores. The success of the Teddy bear changed that...

Here's the book under discussion: "Playmakers: The Jewish Entrepreneurs Who Created the Toy Industry in America" (commission earned).

The news of "moral panic."

1. "The conservative moral panic over a new California bill on children's toys" (SF Gate): The purported "moral panic" is criticism of a bill that requires toy stores to have a "gender neutral" section. Who's closer to a condition that can be called "moral panic" — the people who push through legislation like this or the people who don't appreciate the regulation? 

2. "The BBC and The Times are accused of stoking a 'moral panic' against the trans community" (Insider). A trans person asserts "I now feel like I'm a disease, a problem, something that needs to be gotten rid of, because every story that features in the British press about trans people is negative." There was a BBC article recently, "We're being pressured into sex by some trans women" about lesbians objecting to being called transphobic because they only want to have sex with people who are biologically female. (Isn't this Insider article itself raising a moral panic — about attacks on transgender people?)

3. "Steven Pinker: Danger of moral panic over 'fake news'" (Global Herald). 

4. "A Frenzy of Book Banning" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT). "[T]he paranoid belief that liberalism is a front for pedophile cabals is a staple of the QAnon conspiracy theory. This spreading moral panic demonstrates, yet again, why the left needs the First Amendment, even if the veneration of free speech has fallen out fashion among some progressives." (But isn't there also a moral panic about QAnon?)

5. "Election guru Rachel Bitecofer: Democrats face '10-alarm fire' after Virginia debacle Democrats could still win midterms and stop Trump's coup, says election forecaster — if they actually had a plan" (Salon). Republicans are using "the bogeyman of 'critical race theory' to mobilize white voters anxious about demographic change and overly eager to protect their children (or other people's) from the truths of American history" and Democrats lack "anything close to an adequate defense against these racist moral-panic attacks." (Isn't this idea of "Trump's coup" also a moral panic?)

6. "‘Traditional Values’ Unite Both Sides in a New Ideological Cold War/Republicans and global authoritarians around the world from different political, cultural and social contexts use alarmingly similar tactics" (Moscow Times). "Far-right demagogues from Moscow to Texas increasingly incite moral panic to stir up tensions and deflect from domestic troubles.... [Putin] did not address public health measures and instead chose to rail against 'cancel culture' and gender-segregated bathrooms in the West."

7. "How Did Paul Gosar Become Such a Deranged Meme Lord?/'You are a dentist, for God’s sake. You don’t need to be tweeting these "Attack on Titan" memes'" (Daily Beast)."You’re seeing these weird shades of conspiracy theories—there’s a softer, leftier tinge to all of these. I’m seeing people with, like, anime avatars using astrology to argue [Travis Scott's Astroworld concert] was a Satanic ritual... There is sort of a soft spiritualism, I think, among certain Gen Z and millennial cohorts… I think that these audiences are a little bit more receptive to moral panics than older folks might realize."

8."How France's ‘great replacement’ theory conquered the global far right" (France24). 'The people who watch that interview and who may fall for this moral panic, this idea that they’re going to be replaced ethnographically... don’t want to be called racist and will say they’re defending civilisation."

"Students and professors, editorial assistants and editors in chief—all are aware of what kind of society they now inhabit. That’s why they censor themselves..."

"... why they steer clear of certain topics, why they avoid discussing anything too sensitive for fear of being mobbed or ostracized or fired without due process.... Many people have told me they want to change this atmosphere, but don’t know how. Some hope to ride it out, to wait for this moral panic to pass, or for an even younger generation to rebel against it.... Anonymous reports and Twitter mobs, not the reasoned judgments of peers, will shape the fate of individuals. Writers and journalists will fear publication. Universities will no longer be dedicated to the creation and dissemination of knowledge but to the promotion of student comfort and the avoidance of social-media attacks. Worse, if we drive all of the difficult people, the demanding people, and the eccentric people away from the creative professions where they used to thrive, we will become a flatter, duller, less interesting society, a place where manuscripts sit in drawers for fear of arbitrary judgments. The arts, the humanities, and the media will become stiff, predictable, and mediocre....  There will be nothing to do but sit back and wait for the Hawthornes of the future to expose us."

 
From "The New Puritans/Social codes are changing, in many ways for the better. But for those whose behavior doesn’t adapt fast enough to the new norms, judgment can be swift—and merciless" by Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic).

Hawthorne = Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of "The Scarlet Letter."

"[T]he sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites... has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation."

"It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of 'white supremacy,' which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.... The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a 'social justice reckoning' these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences. Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that 'the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.' She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.... The reason 'critical race theory' is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity ('intersectionality'). A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable 'systems' and 'structures' and 'internal biases' arrived to hover over the world...."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "What Happened To You?/The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism" (Substack).

"That was very offensive to me. I’m not putting in myself, my hard work, his hard work, for you to tell me that he’s at second-grade reading."

Wrote the mother of a 5th grader, quoted in "Does It Hurt Children to Measure Pandemic Learning Loss? Research shows many young children have fallen behind in reading and math. But some educators are worried about stigmatizing an entire generation" (NYT).

[Some people] are pushing back against the concept of “learning loss,” especially on behalf of the Black, Hispanic and low-income children who, research shows, have fallen further behind over the past year. They fear that a focus on what’s been lost could incite a moral panic that paints an entire generation as broken.... 

Jesse Hagopian, a Seattle high school teacher and writer, said testing to measure the impact of the pandemic misses what students have learned outside of physical classrooms during a year of overlapping crises in health, politics and police violence. “They are learning about how our society works, how racism is used to divide,” he said. “They are learning about the failure of government to respond to the pandemic.” 

Mr. Hagopian said he believed that “learning loss” research was being used to “prop up the multi-billion-dollar industry of standardized testing” and “rush educators back into classrooms before it’s safe to do so.” 

Is this a fear of learning the truth, a questioning whether standardized tests reveal the truth, or dedication to the more important truth that knowing the truth discourages people. But is that true — does knowing that your 5th grader reads at a 2nd-grade level make it harder to move him forward in his reading skills? Does knowing that black and Hispanic students are further back than ever undermine the education efforts?  We ought to at least be truth-focused as we try to understand whether knowing the truth helps.