question: have you seen THE LITERALISTS?
Added 2025-05-16 19:25:59 +0000 UTCToday’s highlighted report explores the recent history of LITERALISM –a way of willfully misinterpreting culture in the most bad-faith terms possible– as a common thread linking moral panics from the 1980s to today. It begins with the Satanic Panic, when Christian conservatives saw demons in kids’ games and pop culture, using metaphor-blind paranoia to reassert moral control during a time of social change. That same mindset reemerged decades later in the Campus Crusades of the 2010s, as liberal millennials applied the language of harm and trauma to ever-smaller infractions, redefining language itself as violence. As children of the 80s and 90s, millennials grew up during a time when it became normal to believe that all ambiguity is dangerous and that culture must explicitly affirm a moral consensus to be safe, then modernized that concern from defending Christianity to defending liberal orthodoxy.
Today, literalism functions more as kayfabe than conviction: outrage is performed knowingly, less to express earnest belief than to affirm group identity, whether you’re defending Lil Nas X or boycotting Bud Light. In this environment, provocations are strategic and reactions are scripted. Culture becomes a mirror, not a challenge, valued less for what it says than for which team it signals allegiance to.
