I have very mixed feelings about the source for this article but the author makes some very pertinent points about moral panics, or more accurately folk devils, both terms from Stanley Cohen’s classic and still very relevant study Folk Devils and Moral Panics | Stanley Cohen | download
The media moral panic arose after last weekend’s demos and is based on a scene in which Prof Chris Whitty is manhandled into having his photo taken with two young men. The first question I had was who filmed this and more to the point how did it make it into the public domain?
At the level of the obvious, the short video was filmed selfie style by one of the two individuals. However, are they who they seem to be? I was convinced not. Whitty seems genuinely harassed and I would have been too. But the outcry and language used to characterise the incident as an assault, an outrage, typical of Broken Britain, blah blah we’ve heard this so many times before.
What is the real agenda here, other than ruthless patrolling of social norms and the threat of complete disgrace, and worse, for those who deviate? Not forgetting the online harms Trojan Horse.
I still think it’s a piece of propaganda, from the same class as the footage of an anti-Semitic convoy driving through Golders Green at the height of the latest Gaza massacres. The scenes shown may be genuine but it is the cynical and always so timely framing that gives the game away.
What I saw when viewing this footage was two ‘lads’ - probably a bit the worse for alc or canna wear - goofing about and ‘avin’ a laff’. They didn’t ‘attack’ Whitty; they were just hazing him cheerfully. And there was a third party primed to catch it with a phone camera. Whatever its provenance, the incident was certainly presented by the two lads as a joke. The were grinning foolishly the whole time.
A set up, pretty obviously. Whitty - who never struck me as a particularly convincing actor - seemed genuinely rattled, and presumably wasn’t in on the planning of the joke.
Who else was though? Just the three deplorables, having a bit of fun at some po-faced haut-bourgeois’s expense; or some deeper state operatives? Little attention-diverters like this are always useful to those playerz at moments when their scams are wavering, and need a bit of boosting. Whoever engineered the incident, that’s certainly how it was used by the mediawhores - presumably at the egging on of their political string-pullers.
It had its effect too: a neighbour of mine who is a convinced sceptic about the whole covid scam nevertheless said that it was no way to behave and she couldn’t condone it - as a result of seeing a lamestream TV report of it earlier. Only when she showed me the gone-viral images on her phone did she notice what I saw a once: that it was a rag rather than an attack, and Whitty wasn’t actually assaulted at all in any meaningful way.
1 Like