While re-reading Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic over the City by Steve Macek, I came across two quotes that could not be more relevant:
To put it crudely, the “moral panic” appears to us to be one of the principal forms of ideological consciousness by means of which a “silent majority” is won over to the support of increasingly coercive measures on the part of the state, and lends its legitimacy to a “more than usual” exercise of control.
–Stuart Hall
The cancer of fear has taken over. We have government by fear. We have a fear economy. We have a landscape of fear. We have a mass media that sells it.
–William Upski Wimsatt
