"Moral panics are nothing new in America. "We ought to learn by our mistakes,” President Harry Truman bitterly complained in 1950 as Senator Joseph McCarthy accused him and his administration of knowingly harboring communist subversives. “We’ve repeated this sort of hysteria over and over in our history,” Truman continued, reeling off a series of dates referring to the Salem witch trials, the Alien and Sedition Acts, an Anti-Masonic Party presidential campaign, the cresting of the anti-Catholic Know Nothing movement, the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, and the first Red Scare."
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Harry S. Truman. quoted in "The Long, Sordid History of the Gay Conspiracy Theory", New York Magazine (May 31, 2022).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Moral_panic
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Moral panic
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