"Lord of the Flies" Meets "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

Scenes from a Moral Panic, Part 1

If you’ve ever wondered about those scenes of mass hysteria from history—early Christian iconoclasm, witch trials, that thing in the 1980s when they thought preschools were being run by Satanic cults—if you’ve ever wondered how they could have happened and how they spread so quickly out of control, take a good look around you. You are living through one…