A Moral Panic Runs Its Course

I mentioned yestrday that the bad-clown-in-the-day-care moral panic, which began about1983, didn't end until the Waco massacre ten years later. This is because Janet Reno, who was Bill Clinton's attorney general from 1993 to 2001, built her career as Florida state attorney by bringing well-publicized day care toddler rape cases, and she approved the FBI's disastrous final raid on the Branch Davidian compound when she was told children were being abused inside.

The McMartin preschool case in California sticks most prominently in memory of that period, but the moral entrepreneurs and prosecutors in that case never prospered. Janet Reno was a different matter. According to Wikipedia,

During Reno's tenure as state attorney, she began what the PBS series Frontline described as a "crusade" against accused child abusers. Reno pioneered the "Miami Method,""a controversial technique for eliciting intimate details from young children and inspired passage of a law allowing them to testify by closed-circuit television, out of the possibly intimidating presence of their suspected molesters." Bobby Fijnje, "a 14-year-old boy, was acquitted after his attorneys discredited the children's persistent interrogations by a psychologist who called herself the 'yucky secrets doctor'." Grant Snowden was acquitted, retried, convicted, and eventually freed by a federal appeals court after 12 years in prison."

Reno's "model case" was against Frank Fuster, co-owner of the Country Walk Babysitting Service in a suburb of Miami, Florida. In 1984, he was found guilty of 14 counts of abuse and sentenced to prison with a minimum of 165 years. Fuster was convicted based in large part on the testimony of his 18-year-old wife, Ileana Flores, who pleaded guilty and testified against him, after allegedly being tortured. In a 2002 episode of Frontline, Flores maintained that she and her ex-husband were innocent, and that Reno personally pressured her to confess. But the number and timing of Reno's visits are in dispute. As of 2020 Fuster remains imprisoned.

In 1989, as Florida state attorney, Reno pressed adult charges against 13-year-old Bobby Fijnje, who was accused of sexually molesting 21 children in his care during church services. The charges were driven by the testimony of children interviewed by mental-health professionals using techniques later discredited. Fijnje refused plea-bargain offers. During the trial, the prosecution was unable to present any witnesses to the alleged abuse. After two years of investigation and trial, Fijnje was acquitted of all charges.

Accounts of the process by whch Reno was induced to approve the final FBI assault on the Waco compound suggest that FBI actors were aware of Reno's very recent history of exploiting child abuse and were able to use this as a lever to secure her approval. According to The Hill,

Janet Reno, the nation’s first female attorney general, approved the FBI’s assault on the Davidians. Previously, she had zealously prosecuted child abuse cases in Dade County, Fla, though many of her high-profile convictions were later overturned because of gross violations of due process. Reno approved the FBI assault after being told “babies were being beaten.” It is not known who told her about the false claims of child abuse. Reno’s sterling reputation helped the government avoid any apparent culpability for the deaths of 27 children on April 19, 1993. After Reno publicly promised to take responsibility for the outcome at Waco, the subsequent Justice Department investigation was so shoddy that even the New York Times denounced the “Waco whitewash.”

The Wikipedia article on the McMartin case indicates that by 1990, the media was having second thoughts about how it handled things, since by then the prosecution had experienced acquittals and hung juries, and the DA lost his bid for reelection. But nothng like this happened in Florida, possibly because those cases weren't as well publicized. Efforts to raise the issue during Reno's confirmation hearing as US attorney general were ineffective.

But after 1993, there were no more bad clowns killing rabbits in secret rooms. Nevertheless, a number of people had their lives destroyed in the panic, and a few remain in prison.

The McMartin and Reno toddler rape cases have provided a paradigm in discussions of recent moral panics. As I've said already, a feature of moral panics is that the perceived threat is disproportinate to the actual threat in some measurable way. But even when the perceived threat is absurd and easily disproven, like Satanic sacrifice on the altar of a local Episcopal parish, the story is remarkably stubborn and enthusiastically endorsed by media. (The rector of that parish, despite forensic tests showing no blood on the altar, had to go on disability retirement, another life destroyed by the moral entrepreneurs.)

Again, I think the COVID crisis is a moral panic with parallels to the day care toddler rape panic. In the 1980s, people drove around with "I Believe The Children" bumper stickers. Face masks amount to a similar, and much more compulsory, virtue signal, when statistics available every day show that in the affected states, well over 90% wear masks, while "cases" increase at exponential rates notwithstanding.

COVID statistics are generally acknowledged to report hospitalizations and deaths due to other causes if the patient either tested positive for COVID or was even a "probable" infection -- this includes drug overdoses, suicides, auto accidents, and deaths in hospice. Thus it likely will never be possible to make comparisons with earlier epidemics -- and this leaves out the question of how many "cases" are false positives or asymptomatic.

A very powerful indicator that this is a panic promoted in many ways cynically is the number of moral entrepreneurs, including credentialed "experts", who disregard their own draconian prescriptions. The most recent case is Dr Birx:

The infectious disease expert, 64, was outed on Sunday for not following her own travel guidance when she was joined by three different generations of family at one of her vacation properties on Fenwick Island in Delaware the day after Thanksgiving.

She was roundly criticized for not following her own orders after publicly urging Americans in the days leading up to Thanksgiving to limit gatherings to “your immediate household.”

As in all these cases, we must assume that if Dr Birx, a credentialed infectious disease expert, seriously believed that her elderly mother would be infected with COVID if she traveled to see her, she would not have done this. But violations of COVID protocols by the moral entrpreneurs and politicians are ubiquitous -- and somehow, none of them, nor the others with whom they associate, while traveling, while maskless, while partying inndoors, ever contracts COVID. If they had, the media would report it as eagerly as if it were the boy who skipped Sunday school to go swimming and drowned.

As was the case in the 1980s, panics persist stubbornly for years even after the measurable discrepancies between the perceived threat and reality become increasingly absurd. And many more businesses, careers, and lives will likely be destroyed in the current crisis than were in the 1980s. But it's encouraging that the crisis now does appear to be running its course.