(Actually, a few: besides moral panics, the “Los Angeles is singularly accursed” thing.)
Not sure how JOOOOO!!!!-y the comments will be.
For now, they’re mostly average-IQ men who are hurt and confused by the presence of these weird things called “hyperlinks,” and are also b’scared of catching girl cooties.
I’ve tried and failed to concoct a quick ’n’ easy, Kevlar-coated formula to distinguish diabolical low-fact pitchforking (remember “Joe the Plumber”?) from legitimate lynchings (Jian Ghomeshi, as it turned out awfully quickly).
A formula more sophisticated than gut instinct or the smell test would be handy. Even a raving Islamophobe like myself stupidly refused to write about those “Rotherham Muslim/schoolgirl grooming” stories at first, especially when confronted with headlines like “Missing girl’s body ‘put into kebab.’” They all sounded too “Maria Monk” to be legit.
Except, as I’m forced to acknowledge, the Awful Disclosures hoax of 1836 was factually inaccurate, but weirdly, intuitively right; while no such “gruesome graveyard under the convent for the slaughtered babies of the nuns” existed beyond nativist fever dreams, we now know that the abuse of many Catholic children—although not as many as we were told—was buried throughout the following century.
