Stirring parents up into a paranoid mob is an American tradition, and it’s one of our lousiest.
The poorly-researched anti-comic book tome “Seduction of the Innocent” led to a public comic book burning in the 1950s and decades of oppressive self-censorship within the publishing world.
Violent video games like “Mortal Kombat” were accused of corrupting our children in the 1990s, leading to congressional hearings and a video game rating system.That these waves of mob mentality are almost universally viewed, years later, as embarrassing ignorance and/or obvious manipulations doesn’t seem to stop the cycle from starting up, over and over again.
Apparently, nobody ever learns anything.
Even when we finally admit that there was nothing terribly sinister about the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons — which was also accused of corrupting kids for many years — and transform it into a family-friendly fantasy movie (for the second time), we find ourselves
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