A new generation of stone-cold homicidal "super predators" was a folk devil cooked up by a University of Pennsylvania sociologist and brandished by political elites up to and including Hillary Clinton.
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According to them, their bombs kill only terrorists—and since 9/11, the Muslim terrorist has become a folk devil in the international imagination, whose existence justifies any torture, military aggression, or crime.
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Sometimes the campaign against the folk devil influences a nation's politics and legislation.
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Though the incident only resulted in some property damage without any serious physical injury to any of the individuals involved, several newspapers published sensationalist articles surrounding the event. Cohen examined articles written about the topic and noted a pattern of distorted facts and misrepresentation, as well as a distinct, simplistic depiction of the respective images of both groups involved in the disturbance. He articulated three stages in the media's reporting on folk devils: # Symbolisation: the folk devil is portrayed in one singular narrative, their appearance and overall identify oversimplified to be easily recognizable. # Exaggeration: the facts of the controversy surrounding the folk devil are distorted, or fabricated all together, fueling the “moral crusade”.
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The concept of the folk devil was introduced by sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972, in his study Folk Devils and Moral Panics,Cohen, S. (1973). Folk Devils and Moral Panics. St Albans: Paladin which analysed media controversies concerning Mods and Rockers in the United Kingdom of the 1960s. Cohen’s research was based on the media storm over a violent clash between two youth subcultures, the mods and the rockers, on a bank holiday on a beach in England, 1964.
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He worked with Anrhefn, Wales' seminal punk band and with the ill-fated Hack Hack on the album Despite Amputations. He left the band midway through a gig at The Fridge in Brixton unhappy with the band, their label (Shout Records), and musical direction. A fight ensued and Mark became a Folk Devil. The sound was a bastardised blend of punk, blues, and amphetamine fuelled angst with the music often walking a fine line between a patchwork of brilliant musicianship and violence.
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Folk devil is a person or group of people who are portrayed in folklore or the media as outsiders and deviant, and who are blamed for crimes or other sorts of social problems; see also: scapegoat. The pursuit of folk devils frequently intensifies into a mass movement that is called a moral panic. When a moral panic is in full swing, the folk devils are the subject of loosely organized but pervasive campaigns of hostility through gossip and the spreading of urban legends. The mass media sometimes get in on the act or attempt to create new folk devils in an effort to promote controversy.
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The influence of the D. Lewis brands Aviakit and Lewis Leathers spread beyond the UK to Europe and Japan and to wherever there were British motorcycle scenes.Motorcycle Jackets: Ultimate Biker's Fashions A Schiffer Book for Collectors Series by Rin Tanaka, Schiffer Publishing Limited, 2003, It advertised widely in the USA, selling via mail order, becoming popular amongst leading motorcycle journalists,Leanings 2: Great Stories by America's Favorite Motorcycle Writer, Peter Egan, MBI Publishing Company, Cycle World Magazine - Jan 1979 - Page 88Cycle World Magazine - Jan-Feb 1977 - Page 90Cycle World Magazine - Jan 1976 - Page 94Cycle World Magazine - Jan 1980 - Page 82Cycle World Magazine - Jan 1975 - Page 124 and others and achieved a legendary status for its connection to the 'folk devil' Ton Up Boys and the 59 Club.Lewis Leathers. Dice Magazine, Saturday, 29 December 2012.
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The fear of disease (or the fear of threats to public health) and the spread of panic dates back many centuries and it continues to exist into the 21st century due to the existence and spread of diseases such as AIDS. Cohen's idea of the "folk devil" and epidemics may be synonymous in their role in spreading mass panic and fear. Prior to the 20th century, an intense concentration on hygiene emerged with a medical belief which is referred to as the miasma theory, which stated that disease was the direct result of the polluting emanations of filth: sewer gas, garbage fumes, and stenches polluted air and water, resulting in epidemics. The Great Stink of 1858 was blamed on miasma, along with reoccurring cholera epidemics during the Victorian era.
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After a series of high profile dog attacks on children in the United Kingdom, the British press began to engage in a campaign against so-called dangerous dog breeds, especially Pit Bull Terriers and Rottweilers, which bore all the hallmarks of a moral panic. This media pressure led the government to hastily introduce the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 which has been criticised as "among the worst pieces of legislation ever seen, a poorly thought-out knee-jerk reaction to tabloid headlines that was rushed through Parliament without proper scrutiny". The act specifically focused on Pit Bulls, which were associated with the lower social strata of British society, rather than the Rottweilers and Dobermann-pinschers generally owned by richer social groups. Critics have identified the presence of social class as a factor in the dangerous dogs moral panic, with establishment anxieties about the "sub-proletarian" sector of British society displaced onto the folk devil of the "Dangerous dog".
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The basic pattern of agitations against folk devils can be seen in the history of witchhunts and similar manias of persecution; the histories of predominately Catholic and Protestant European countries present examples of adherents of the rival Western Christian faith as folk devils; minorities and immigrants have often been seen as folk devils; in the long history of anti- Semitism, which frequently targets Jews with allegations of dark, murderous practices, such as blood libel; or the Roman persecution of Christians that blamed the military reverses suffered by the Roman Empire on the Christians' abandonment of paganism. In modern times, political and religious leaders in many nations have sought to present atheists and secularists as deviant outsiders who threaten the social and moral order. The identification of folk devils may reflect the efforts of powerful institutions to displace social anxieties. Another example of religious and ethnic discrimination associated with Cohen's folk devil theory would be Islamophobia, the discrimination of Muslims and those perceived as being Middle Eastern in origin.
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In a 2014 study, the media reaction to the Columbine massacre was applied to Cohen’s folk devil theory. On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, two students from Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, went on a shooting spree which resulted in the deaths of 15 people. News reports in the weeks following the tragedy labelled the shooters as being “obsessed” with gothic subculture, and suggested a link between Harris and Klebold’s alleged identification with gothic subculture and their acts of violence. In their attempt to make sense of the Columbine shootings, journalists and other media commentators linked goths to terrorism, Charles and Marilyn Manson, self- mutilation, hostage-taking, gang culture, the Waco cult, the Oklahoma City bombing, Satanism, mass murder, ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, suicide, the Internet, video games, skinhead music, white extremism, and Adolf Hitler. The ABC news program 20/20 aired a special entitled “The Goth Phenomenon” in which it reinforced claims that the shooters were heavily submerged in goth culture, and suggested that individuals of gothic subculture were to blame for homicidal activity in the past. The hostility and hysteria over the perceived ‘evil’ goth culture amplified in the years following the shooting.
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Paul Joosse has argued that while classic moral panic theory styled itself as being part of the 'sceptical revolution' that sought to critique structural functionalism, it is actually very similar to Émile Durkheim's depiction of how the collective conscience is strengthened through its reactions to deviance (in Cohen's case, for example, 'right-thinkers' use folk devils to strengthen societal orthodoxies). In his analysis of Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 United States presidential election, Joosse reimagined moral panic in Weberian terms, showing how charismatic moral entrepreneurs can at once deride folk devils in the traditional sense while avoiding the conservative moral recapitulation that classic moral panic theory predicts. Another criticism is that of disproportionality: there is no way to measure what a proportionate reaction should be to a specific action. Writing in 1995 about the moral panic that arose in the UK after a series of murders by juveniles, chiefly that of two- year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys but also including that of 70-year-old Edna Phillips by two 17-year-old girls, the sociologist Colin Hay pointed out that the folk devil was ambiguous in such cases; the child perpetrators would normally be thought of as innocent.
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