I’ve been studying moral panics since I was in high school, and I’ve noticed something a bit odd about the current one over “sex trafficking”. Normally, as I’ve written before, such panics tend to get more and more hysterical until they implode; that is certainly happening with this one, as anyone knows from following my “Widening Gyre” columns chronicling cop attempts to regain control of the narrative from the “sex traffickers followed me in Ikea!” crowd. But the “official” hysteria, that is the kind vomited out by cops and politicians and eagerly lapped up for re-regurgitation by the media, has since FOSTA taken on a very tired, perfunctory tone. For example, this recent USA Today iteration of the same old ridiculous, repeatedly-debunked “statistics” contained the following disclaimer:
…Law enforcement has ramped up it’s [sic] tough-on-trafficking language in recent years, touting raids on illicit spas as proof of crackdowns. Yet…the outcomes don’t match the rhetoric. Only one woman in the raids that saw Kraft arrested faces a charge related to trafficking. And in other cases…business at sex spas returned to normal within months of police activity…
The rest is the typical farrago of lies about “the enormity of the global sex trade”, billions of dollars and millions of victims “hidden in plain sight” and somehow “growing”, yet it’s almost as though the reporter is saying in an aside, “I’m sorry y’all, I know you’ve heard this a thousand times but I need to obediently parrot this if I want to be paid.”
And here’s one which starts with politicians bloviating about “pervasive evil” while pompously calling their propaganda “educating the public”, but quickly degenerates into a bunch of professional “survivors” and other “rescue” profiteers on the make. After some demands for more government handouts and complaints about how the cops can’t find “pimps” and “traffickers” who only exist in “rescue” fantasies, the politicians almost sheepishly follow their initial bluster with empty promises to “do better” while loons like “Cuckoo Clock” McCain and the head of Polaris spout incoherent nonsense about why decriminalization is bad. You can look at the resulting dog’s breakfast if you care to, but I honestly can’t even imagine most “sex trafficking” fetishists making it to the end.
So what’s going on here? Why do these media outlets repeatedly publish the same tinned nonsense over and over, even in outlets such as the Washington Post that employ their own fact-checkers? Why are the cracks in the narrative spreading so slowly, despite repeated debunking and the total inability of cops & FBI to produce more than a handful of “pimps” when we’re told they’re lurking around every shopping mall, bus stop, school and Facebook page in the country and magically home in on runaways in under 48 hours? The answer, I think, is evident in the sources of most of the disinformation: Government. This is no ordinary moral panic, but one manufactured and maintained by government as an excuse to expand its own power and feed the carceral system; it is, as I have said before, the replacement for the dying War on Drugs (another campaign of terror started and fed by relentless government propaganda). But even though the mainstream media joined the fascist establishment decades ago, individual reporters are still individuals and not everyone can effectively turn off their brains and obediently parrot the propaganda they’re ordered to dish up. As the popular hysteria dries up and the War on Whores is maintained only by state money and misinformation, we can expect to see reporters growing ever wearier of the nonsense, and that it will become inceasingly noticeable in the tone of their articles.
