Moral panic
About
Moral panic is a social phenomenon in which a significant number of people are induced to become enraged over something harmless and previously of no concern (be that pool tables, LGBTQIA+ people, or The Beatles), usually because they have been led to believe that the rage-target is somehow responsible for something terrible. (The terrible thing itself is often not actually real either, and is being used to distract from real problems that powerful people don't want to acknowledge).
It might also be called the "Trouble in River City Effect", as the same phenomenon occurs in The Music Man when "Professor*" Harold Hill (*not a professor) convinces the good people of River City to be enraged about the presence of pool tables, and that the only way to solve the problem is to give him lots of money.
Examples
- book banning
- Islamic cultural invasion
- McCarthyism: "communist" witch-hunts
- musical satanism: campaigns against rock music, including the "backwards masking" hoax of the late 70s / early 80s
- transmisia includes the bathroom safety and trans athlete moral panics
- voter fraud (distracts attention from electoral fraud)
