Scenes from a New Moral Panic

First an administrative note: One of the downsides of being on Substack is that I don’t see or design all of the renewal notices you get, so I got a question from a subscriber recently who asked why he was getting notices that his “gift subscription” was expiring tomorrow. This is an artifact of this newsletter’s transition to Substack. If you get that notice, it is a “gift” from me to you—but it’s not really a gift. I was just extending your subscription to match what you had already paid for under the old system. All of this will eventually work its way through and become more normal as you renew subscriptions in the new system that were carried over from the old system.

The upshot of this subscriber’s questions was “Do I need to renew?” Yes, if you are getting these messages, you need to renew, and I will be personally very grateful if you do.

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Another note, before we get to the material I was working on when some breaking news hit: In the least surprising development ever, a grand jury has voted to indict Donald Trump. He was bound to get indicted for something, sooner or later, and given his record, it’s frankly kind of shocking this didn’t happen decades ago.

In this particular case, Trump has been indicted for the Stormy Daniels affair. If you need a refresher, I wrote about this a few years back when I ruefully described it as “The Clinton Impeachment Rerun We Didn’t Want But Probably Deserve.” I described why prosecutors couldn’t just let this one lie.

There's plausible evidence that the payoff to Clifford/Daniels was made by [former Trump lawyer Michael] Cohen with the goal of aiding Trump's campaign, yet it was not disclosed as a contribution. That implicates Cohen, and if Trump was aware of it, that implicated him, too. Moreover, 2016 was a very close election, and it's quite possible that the Stormy Daniels story, if it had broken then, might have kept enough conservatives at home to tip the outcome. So investigators have no choice but to look seriously at this case, just as they couldn't give [Bill] Clinton a mulligan on perjury.

As my title implies, I was pretty unenthusiastic about the prosecution back then. I won’t say I’m exactly enthusiastic now. But Donald Trump getting indicted for something, and probably for several things, seems inevitable. A lifetime of lying his head off is finally catching up to him. And while I am on record calling for Trump to be indicted for much larger and more consequential crimes, I’m not going to complain too much if they do the equivalent of nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. Given that Trump campaigned on the chant of “Lock Her Up,” I am cutting him absolutely no slack here.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

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Scenes from an Old Moral Panic

A few years back, I offered you some “Scenes from a Moral Panic,” highlighting a mania over “systemic racism” and a Puritanical compulsion to find evidence for it everywhere.

Today, I’m going to offer you some scenes from a new moral panic, but I first want to acknowledge that the old moral panic that has become known as “wokeness” or “wokism” hasn’t gone away yet.