KOSA is Another PMRC
Are you familiar with KOSA, the bill currently moving through Congress with bipartisan support? If not, follow the links below, get familiar.
22 Democrats Sponsor a Bill That Could Censor Abortion Info From the Internet
Congress Amended KOSA, But It's Still A Censorship Bill
Despite wide support, the Kids Online Safety Act will not fix the youth mental health crisis
Elizabeth Warren Just Backed an ‘Online Safety’ Bill That Will Harm LGBTQ Youth
Here’s How to Actually Keep Kids and Teens Safe Online
The young activists shaking up the kids’ online safety debate
It strikes me that as someone who has spent roughly the last ten years, trying in my own stumbling, imperfect, sometimes stupid way to alert the public to the way the internet was being used as a tool of mass radicalization, by a disorganized but well funded movement whose central principle is genocidal, enabled by monolithic tech corporations and their unquenchable greed, that we have collectively learned nothing. Some tech billionaire goes before Congress or issues a statement, and despite repeated evidence that they're not doing what they claim, everyone nods solemnly, mumbles that moderation is very hard, and goes back to acting like these tech billionaires aren't getting even more vulgarly wealthy from the fact white nationalists use their platforms organize things like an attack on the US Capitol to prevent the certification of a legitimate election, after spending months decrying the lack of legitimacy to said election, despite all evidence to the contrary. You can't post picture of your baby in a diaper, because nudity, and a pedo somewhere might harvest it for their spank bank, but darn it, it's really hard to stop genocidal ideologues from recruiting via social media.
I spent a good portion of this year researching a book I intended to write about The Satanic Panic. It was going to be a series of essays about growing up during The Panic, and how the strategies of the people who pushed and profited from it are so clearly the same as so much of today's various moral panics, especially those related to "protecting the children." I had to make this book a side project, instead of my primary project, because the parallels between the Panic and our current socio-political moment were too strong, and the degree to which we’ve learned nothing from the recent past a majority of us (including those who have ACTUAL power) lived through, was too depressing. It was genuinely effecting my mental health, so it's now a side project, and a new novel is my primary project, because it's far more fun and doesn't invoke the image of a caravan of buses being driven over a cliff. We still think about The Panic as a weird, quirky period in time where weird people said weird things, some of us laughed about it, and it all ended without much harm done. That is genuinely ahistorical. Harm was done to people, by the thousands, and if you recognize it as the test run for the newly re-empowered authoritarian zealots among us, you can see the way it's influenced our politics and the public square since.
Anytime there’s been any proposal to start addressing the failure of these tech monoliths, now shaping the 21st century public square, the response has been “we all have to tolerate speech we don’t like.” Yet, again, when we’ve seen weaponization of “protect the children” by religious zealots twist institutions meant to be in place to provide public good. It twists the legal system, the medical field, journalism, and we again fall for the claims that they want to “protect the children.” Considering something like hate speech regulation intended to force these tech giants to prevent genocidal ideologues from using their platforms is dead on arrival, despite the many millions of children whose lives are effected. They're just not the right children. Double entendre absolutely intended.
The degree of harm and injustice done during The Satanic Panic, in the combined rush to "protect the children" and to silence anyone who questioned the methods or asked for evidence beyond the claims of the self appointed protectors was significant, and long lasting. People spent decades in jail for crimes without evidence. People who questioned the reality of the moral panic unfolding around them had their lives ruined. One of the things we rarely think about is the number of children who were coerced into giving testimony that loved ones or teachers committed some kind of abuse against that has since been recanted. Those children weren't protected. They were manipulated and exploited for the cultural and political gain of an authoritarian movement. Few of the people responsible for that exploitation faced any accountability, unsurprisingly.
I’ve been unable to see it, until now, but these things are related in a way we’re not comfortable talking about. We say, ”We’re trying to prevent exploitation and manipulation of children.” Are we though? Is this entire controversy around books and the more general hysteria around gender identification not intrinsically about exploiting and manipulating children? When we put a child in a position where their entire environment, from their home, to their churches, to the schools they attend and as a result, the whole of the world they experience in person is designed to insure they cannot recognize the humanity of other human beings, to provide a future for a sociopolitical movement which has been rejected by science and caused repeated atrocities, not exploitation and manipulation? When we deny a child their full humanity, because they happen to have some characteristic that falls into one of these categories we find acceptable to allow zealots and bigots to put at risk or we deny a child their humanity by requiring they deny other childrens humanity, isn’t that exploitation and manipulation? I have no love for him, but I also can't ignore that Kyle Rittenhouse was exploited, long before he took to the streets armed with a rifle, and is still being exploited today. How much of a choice does someone in his position have about becoming the person who participates in their own exploitation, the Rittenhouse is now?
It's a tough, spiny question, isn't it? Ensconcing our children in this politics and culture of hate clearly isn't what we'd consider exploitation and manipulation, and it's clear why.
I’ve been clear over time that my respect for James Baldwin is close to bottomless. One reason for that is that more than any other writer, thinker, speaker, so-called leader, he made clear to me those questions, “What does bigotry do to the bigot? Why do you need this? How does it affect your humanity, to harbor and live with this bigotry? What does it take from you? What could possibly be enough to keep allowing it to rob you of the experience of living with each other, to keep protecting the ignorance that allows horror to be enacted in the name of your well being, while it so clearly eats away at your well being simultaneously?” They’re questions about what was taken from us, before we were even given the ability to understand it could exist. It was most simply expressed when he said, “White people need to start asking themselves why they invented the n*gg*r.” If we begin to engage Baldwin, and his question, we're not far from asking why straight people invented the f*gg*t too. When you see the question for how profound and fundamental it is, you can see the number of different places it applies. The importance of these questions is that it puts the impetus on the place where the power is, not on the people who are being targeted because of their perceived difference. It's not asking of people who are the targets of bigotry, 'Why are you like this?" it's asking us, what these bigotries do for us, not just personally, but collectively too. The answers to that question, politically, socially, culturally and economically are what this movement of authoritarian zealots, in all their bigotries, have attempted to obscure, through our national history, and are exactly what they are interested in protecting children from.
I think I see it now, more clearly. Between the Panic, the refusal to substantively address the mechanics of mass radicalization, the refusal to even substantively discuss the ramifications of letting hate speech run amok or imposing some kind of legislation as European countries we still consider democracies have, and the current clear attempt to empower an authoritarian, neo-fascist minority, it’s frighteningly clear.
We will sweep aside the concerns of the people who are outlining who KOSA will be used to further the aims of those authoritarian zealots against, be they religious or secular in their rhetoric. We will do it in the name of protecting the children, when really, anyone with any interest at all can see it’s purpose is quite the opposite. We’ll say it’s in the name of “compromise.” The familiar refrain, “This is the best we can do now. It will protect some children,” even as it will clearly be used to harm other children, not to mention adults, because this is America, and if you can’t protect yourself from being harmed as an adult, it’s because you didn’t pull hard enough on your bootstraps, you didn’t say no loudly enough, you were wearing that, why you didn’t fight harder, why you weren’t born in another zip code, why were you being so flamboyant, or our now favorite, why you didn’t have a gun and take the fight to those who sought you harm. We have a million excuses for not confronting what arises from the question Baldwin posed, and a million more for why our “compromises” always seem to involve the same people being excluded from consideration of protection. We always compromise with the bigots, because to compromise with their targets would mean answering those questions first. It's about protecting the right kids (and also, persecuting adults who pose no threat to children, but that make us feel icky, for whichever irrational reason).
KOSA, and it’s bipartisanship, are just another iteration of the PMRC Senate Hearings. During the Satanic Panic, it was an easy and simple way for people who wanted to avoid being lumped into the same group as the authoritarian zealots to signal to the people who supported that authoritarian vision of the world that they were taking their concerns seriously. The simple way of putting it is, “I agree it’s a problem, though I don’t agree with why you think it’s a problem or what you propose to do about it.” Then they turn around to the people who very clearly know, because of our history, they will be targeted using exactly the solution zealots have proposed, and say, “Well, I can insure it’s going to do the least harm, if I’m there to make sure there is a good compromise.” Somehow, the harms they’ve been warned about by the people who know what it is to be targeted, come to pass. Ten years later, as the data to just how harmful it was rolls in the, the quote becomes, "How could we have known? No one was saying that back then." Well, the people most at risk were saying it, but they were called radicals and whatever other thing we come up with the marginalize those voices, the one's we avoid having to come to any compromise with, because they're icky, and we feel weird about them. We're not bad people, of course. We can't help it. It's how we were raised. No one knew any better, right?
It seems like quite a reach to pronounce it a coincidence that Tipper Gore, whose husband was on the committee the PMRC's targets eventually had to testify before, was the one spearheading the PMRC, and finding "common ground" with authoritarian zealots during The Satanic Panic. Tipper Gore had a B.A. in psychology from Boston University, and a masters in psychology from Vanderbilt. I find it hard to believe a conversation with her daughter about the references to female masturbation in lyrics to a Prince song, caused such psychological and emotional stress that she had to make common cause with Christian nationalists, and make that conversation a national problem. Maybe I've been listening to feminists, for too long, and I don't see an intelligent woman with the equivalent of an elite education being so thoroughly unprepared to talk about flicking the bean that both she and her daughter were psychologically and emotionally damaged to the degree it rose to being a national problem. Maybe it really is a coincidence, and Tipper and her newfound frenemies were just really, really dedicated to the protecting the children, and Al Gore just happened to be on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which ended up having the hearing. I'm sure it's also a coincidence that the PMRC had no members, only founders, all of whom were the wives of prominent politicians. Now, and even at the time, it sure seemed like Gore was exploiting her own daughter, as well as that sweet, sweet privilege of eternal innocence extended to white women (always under circumstances beneficial to Christian white nationalist ideological framing) to engage in some political opportunism her husband was going to and sure as hell did benefit from.
Maybe I'm also suspicious of "protect the children" because Janet Reno, who would go on to be Attorney General, also prosecuted a Satanic Panic case that brought evidence free claims about Satanic Cult activity into a case related to child sexual assault, and used her power as then DA to get a man's wife to testify to a slew of claims about Satanic Cult activity that had no evidence to back them up. The evidence of child sexual assault was there, and strong. Evidence of anything related to Satanic Cults was non-existent, but it was part of the deal offered the man's wife and part of the case Reno argued. Funny thing, when she made it to Attorney General, Reno ordered the raid on Mount Carmel, that we've come to know as Waco, in the name of protecting the children inside. After fifty-one days of negotiations, during which the Branch Davidians had sent out a number of women and children, and were communicating with FBI negotiators, Reno and the FBI Hostage Rescue Team came to the conclusion that the compound needed to be raided, immediately, to protect the children remaining inside from some combination of further abuse and what the FBI later claimed were the death wishes of the adults inside. Everyone in that compound died, including the children still inside, and Waco became a rallying cry that finished the process of unifying the far right that had begun with the raid at "Ruby Ridge." Timothy McVeigh commits the bombing in Oklahoma City in retaliation for Waco and Ruby Ridge. Inextricable from this is McVeigh's avowed white supremacist world view. We now know he received support from a white supremacist survivalist community members FBI investigators were denied the approval to conduct a raid on, when an informant tipped them off to their excitement about a plan in progress. The agents pushing for the raid did so because of growing evidence of cooperation in a far right movement which had been prone to splintering and in fighting. Their superiors who were skeptical of the change in behavior by these far right groups, were worried about the public relations blowback of "another Waco," and denied them the approval to seek a warrant.
The evidence of sexual assault against the man Reno convicted was strong. The Satanic Panic was a moral panic sweeping the country, and it certainly didn't hurt her case to include it, in spite of a lack of any evidence to back those claims up. It gave further credence to the Panic as it swept the nation, and resulted in false convictions. That a witness was given a deal, based on the inclusion of false testimony was never addressed. The evidence that David Koresh and the people still inside the Mount Carmel compound were going to kill themselves and any children inside is also questionable. The FBI would claim this was learned from a bug inside the compound, but no corroborating evidence was ever presented, including tapes of those conversations. It would have been standard procedure to keep the tapes of any conversations recorded. Koresh was certainly a child predator, but the kids in that compound ended up dead because Reno and the FBI were tired of being perceived as ineffective on national T.V. The medical examiner would conclude the by members of Koresh's cult who killed each other inside were mercy killings, in an attempt to prevent them from dying in the fires started by FBI tear gas canisters.
The point being, maybe the rush to "protect children" without a thorough look at the evidence and the methods being proposed produces as much harm as it prevents. A quick look backward at history that's still recent makes it inevitably clear. Today's far right does not become what it is without The Satanic Panic and the debacle at Waco, both of which were committed under the auspices of protecting the children.
All of this conveniently skips over the fact that those who’ve spent their lived dedicated to preventing us from answering the questions put forward by people like James Baldwin, Angela Davis, bell hooks and so many others, are the ones we always find a way to compromise with, instead of pushing them to the fringes, and calling them what they are, authoritarian zealots. It ignores that answering those questions is exactly what they are trying to prevent, and that from the time we’re children, we’re manipulated, exploited and indoctrinated to see other people’s humanity as something we can come to compromise about. It's exactly why they're fighting to protect children from books, in school board meetings and libraries across the country. It's about protecting children from understanding exactly what kind of manipulation and exploitation is fundamental to the vision of life these zealots are trying to enforce on all of us. “I’m a good person, and if I’m a good person, and this is how and what I learned, what I learned, it’s good enough.”
We’re not good people though, are we? Few of us really are, and that’s the thing they desperately need to keep from becoming clear, isn’t it? I'm not holding myself above anyone here. I'm just as much a mess as anyone else, maybe even more so, because I've actually heard those questions, and can't square their answers with what everyday life is for the majority of us. We're all a mess of contradictions, and if we stop giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt, look dispassionately at it, chances are we've done a fair amount of harm, even to people we love, just trying to get by. If we were able to consider, for too long, too thoroughly, what we would need life to look like to be what we really believe to be “good,” we’d have to confront how much we’re all asked, everyday, to compromise that humanity. The humanity that is as much our selfishness as it is the desire to live peacefully with each other, to experience the companionship and be community with and compatriots to our fellow human beings. We spend our lives being fed the utopian fantasy of the hand of the market sprinkling fairness dust over the whole of society, when inequality grows, but to ask, “What would my life be like if no person I met had reason to worry if I harbored some petty bigotry toward them or if they harbor one toward me? How many beautiful people have I been denied the chance to love and be loved by, because we do things this way? What have we all been denied because we think we can compromise on each other’s humanity, and how much do our everyday decisions, decisions made out necessity, compromise our own?” It’s not a mistake that we’re consistently asked to make compromises where those “better angels” we love to invoke either aren’t in consideration at all or have to lose for our own well being to be served. It’s part of the entire concept of well being that we’re taught, that it’s necessarily in competition, first and foremost.
They’re utopian questions, certainly, but we have no problem asking utopian questions or making utopian assertions in the contexts that fuel the fantasies we harbor already. We have no accepting the failures of those utopian visions. We do it consistently where free speech is concerned. It’s not perfect. It is riddled with pitfalls, and given to failure, but we hold up the “principle” as inviolable, despite how clearly violable it is. In theory, we do this because it is good to aspire to the principle, which is undoubtedly true. I wouldn't argue otherwise. What we fail to confront, is the regularity with which those violations and failures consistently fall on the same people, and aren’t just the necessity of principle meeting reality, but are designed to fall where they do. We build our compromises so that intent is possible, because we choose to always compromise with those to whom it is the whole intent. We can't compromise on free speech to address hate speech, because of who it might effect negatively, but we can compromise on free speech to "protect the children," because we know who it will effect negatively.
We’re going to push KOSA through, as Elon Musk has turned one of the most far reaching communication platforms in human history into a machine for radicalization, dehumanization and disinformation, with a presidential election around the corner. KOSA will pass in the name of compromise with exactly the people who benefit most from Musk’s actions, and despite what will be claimed in the future, that's not an accident. It's by design.
It tells us more about our priorities than we’re willing to confront. There are going to be consequences to members of the Democratic Party making common cause with authoritarian, neo-fascist zealots. The people who will pay those consequences won't be the ones responsible, they'll be the ones pointing this fact out.