Dear paranoid parents of America,

I hate to break it to you, but here goes: No one wants to f– your kid.

There aren’t actually any kids trapped in a DC pizza parlor. Wayfair isn’t sex trafficking children inside furniture. Teachers aren’t grooming third graders into turning trans. Balenciaga isn’t going to trick your tot into the S&M life. And liberal elites aren’t harvesting the blood of kidnapped children in order to…ugh, I can’t even finish this sentence because it’s all so goddamn dumb.

Your child is annoying and makes no one horny. In fact, no one even wants to hang out with your kid. That’s why it’s so hard for you to find a babysitter. Again: The only way an adult that isn’t a family member will spend time with your child is if you pay them. The rest of us just want your screaming brat as far away from us as possible.

And a special note to the Qooks: I realize this may be tough to believe considering how much you “do your research.” But the truth is you’re not gonna #SaveTheChildren from a high-level global sex cult, you’re just participating in an elaborate alternate reality game that has no winners – only losers who don’t even know they’re playing a game.

“But the children!” you scream. Whatever. “But the children” is exceedingly used as a bogus trump card that lets delusions run roughshod over rationality. Even the slightest fraction of a threat, whether real or imagined, is the gateway to a hysterical response smuggled inside a patina of smug parental nobility.

Of course, no one wants bad stuff to happen to kids. And sure, you should be a vigilant parent who protects your kids against reasonable threats. But that doesn’t mean our entire society needs to keep yielding to the most irrationally fearful among us. Yet that’s what keeps happening…

The latest outrage: “’Ped*philes' banner hung in front of Texas Balenciaga store after controversial ad campaign.” I didn’t want to know anything about this dumb Balenciaga campaign. Yet the algogods flooded the zone, elevating it to IT MUST BE SEEN status. Fine, I conceded and figured I’d at least discover how a luxe brand somehow managed to outrage even fashionistas, the immoralist of the coastal elites.

Turns out all the hubbub is over a campaign featuring kids clutching teddy bears dressed in bondage gear. It’s eyebrow raising in a piss crucifix kinda way, I suppose. And obviously, it’s perfect for stoking outrage on social media: Elites are sexually exploiting kids! It’s a conspiracy to traffic children! Are you not entert– er, I mean upset?

It’s certainly tasteless, but c’mon, it’s not even hardcore bondage gear. It’s basically some light strapwear like Tobias Fünke might wear on Arrested Development. 

Heck, I was a kid when I saw that same outfit worn by the patrons of the Blue Oyster bar in Police Academy…

…and somehow I survived.

This whole Balenciaga thing was just dumb shockvertising meant to stir outrage in order to generate free PR. So, way to give ‘em exactly what they were hoping for, Pavlovian suckers. They rang the bell and you came running to the “rescue.”

Vooza @voozahq

So #balenciaga makes more money after all this, right? Which means the campaign was a "success," no? My answer to a lot of controversies nowadays: "It seems bad, but I think they're just doing capitalism right."

3:15 PM ∙ Dec 5, 2022

“Well, as a father of daughters, I…” Shut up. No one cares if you’re a father of daughters. That doesn’t make your opinion more worthwhile than non-breeders. Someone can be childless and still explain why Harvey Weinstein is a monster. You know who responded to the Weinstein scandal by saying, “I have three daughters”? New York’s then-Governor Andrew Cuomo. Guess having daughters isn’t some superpower after all. Hunter Harris on why men need to stop using that preface:

Your wives gave birth to a baby girl, not a moral compass…Only a sociopath needs a daughter — or a sister, a girlfriend, a wife, or even just a lady standing in front of him at Starbucks — to make him queasy enough at the thought of a sexual predator in his industry to do something about it. You don’t need a daughter to feel guilty about working with a man who preys on young women, or about not acting to stop him. You just need a conscience.

School teachers aren’t “groomers,” either. They’re not seducing kids into an LGBTQ lifestyle, they’re just trying to teach your little rugrats how to do long division. The reason Tucker et al keep showing ‘em to you is because its psychosis catnip that gets Viking helmet viewers riled up.

Want a real school scandal? 94% of teachers wind up paying for school supplies with their own money. Crazy. If you care about kids so much, increase school funding. At the very least, try offering some gratitude to those working a mostly thankless job instead of continually dumping misguided paranoia fueled by Libs of TikTok onto the few adults willing to spend an entire day babysitt– er, teaching your kids. After all, one thing lockdown taught us is how much most parents do NOT want anything to do with that.

In similar wackadooness, furniture sold by Wayfair led to allegations of child trafficking. See, Wayfair cabinets are 1) expensive and 2) listed with girls' names so, obviously, the furniture actually has children hidden inside as part of a child trafficking ring, according to an army of moronic Columbos. Way to crack that case, couch detectives. “My spidey senses are tingling.” That’s not your spidey senses, that’s your misguided desire to give your life a sense of purpose.

“Look what they’ve done to Mr. Potato Head!” Seriously? Your kid can handle a gender fluid Mx. Potato Head (or whatever they did to that damn potato – I don’t care enough to find out). No one even knew that toy still existed until the tater haters showed up.

And then there’s the big meshuga: Pizzagate. First time I heard about it, I thought it was a joke. Deep state Satan-worshipping ped0 liberals are behind an international child sex trafficking ring headquartered in the basement of a pizza place in DC, eh? It’s like a Mad Libs of madness. My fave part is how the evildoers need to worship Satan. As if otherwise, we’d just let it slide. “Hey, international sex trafficking is one thing, but everybody knows you gotta draw the line at satan worshipping.” In comedy, we call this putting a hat on a hat. (Though in this case, I guess it’s a dunce cap on a dunce cap.)

Don’t get me wrong, QAnon is brilliant in its way, rolling up gameplay components from decades of game design to make something clearly compelling.

Almost everyone who discovers QAnon uses a phrase like, “I did my research.” This research is, basically, typing things into Google but when they do, they go down the rabbit hole. They open a fascinating fantasy world of secret wars and cabals and Hillary Clinton controlling things, and it offers convenient explanations for things that feel inexplicable or wrong about the world. It reminded me specifically of how people get to alternate reality games. Through these research rabbit holes.

But if you’re a Q fanboi, you’re not unraveling a sinister conspiracy, you’re on a treasure hunt. You’re not saving the world, you’re playing a video game that has convinced you its reality. You’re like a Dungeon Master who thinks 18-sided dice will decide whether or not the Orb Of Dragonkind will cause all evil-aligned dragons within a forty-mile radius to fly. Ah jeez, I shouldn’t have mentioned “Dungeon Master” around you freaks. You’re liable to get all worked up again.

But seriously, look in the mirror. What’s with the neverending fixation on all this stuff? Are you, like, doing OK?

I guess it’s no surprise since America loves a good ol’ moral panic. See: witches/Communists. When I was a kid, it was “stranger danger.” Abducted kids appeared on milk cartons making breakfast extra creepy (and that frog who loved Sugar Smacks was already creating a weird vibe). Clearly some stranger was gonna CHILD SNATCH us from the streets; after all, millions of kids were abducted every year, right? 

Actually, no. Children were (and still are) much more likely to be abducted by a parent than by a random passerby. And the millions of kids thing was way overblown. Missing kid milk cartons didn’t do anything except create a hysterical exaggeration of the threats children faced.

“These figures were wildly inflated, as journalists, social scientists, and government officials had made clear by the mid-1980s,” writes Paul Renfro in his new book Stranger Danger. But it didn’t matter. Panic had clenched the nation’s psyche, and its grip was tightening.

After that came dread over “sex bracelets.” Schoolkids were signalling their sexual availability through the use of jelly bracelets. The horror! Except, nah, they weren’t.

Almost without exception, the middle- and high-school kids from all across the U.S. express shock that adults would think they were actually obeying this "code" and disappointment that their elders fail to understand the bracelets are no more than a cool fashion accessory that has attracted a silly rumor.

While we’re debunking stuff, Bubble Yum never contained spider eggs, there weren’t satanic messages embedded in heavy metal records, and Richard Gere never had a hamster up his keister.

So why do we keep seeing all these things that stir up fear, anger, and hysteria re: children? The question partially answers itself. In an attention economy, those toxic emotions are the ultimate way to attract eyeballs. No one wants nuance or “Look, your kids are fine.” That’s all trés yawn. The way to get clicks is to go to extremes and “the children are in danger” is the Michael Jordan of rhetorical heightening. It lets clueless loons imagine themselves as selfless heroes, truth be damned. And if you argue against this nonsense, well then you’re probably a groomer too, right? (Man, I feel bad for pet groomers nowadays. “No, NOT that kind…”)

It’s likely correlated to the uptick in anxiety and mental health issues too. Joel Best, a professor of criminal justice known for dispelling the Halloween myth that people were poisoning candy, theorizes our crusade to save the children is a product of how helpless we feel nowadays.

“We take our anxieties about the future and we translate them into efforts to protect children,” he said. “We have this sense that the future is uncertain. Children are the walking, talking future. There is a sense of powerlessness and a sense of fear. We seize on protecting children as a way of, ‘We can do this.’”

But that fear isn’t actually improving anything or saving anyone. It’s just offering an illusion of control over a chaotic future.

All that said, let’s not pretend large-scale sex rings that systematically abuse children never exist. There is actually a secretive cabal of robe-clad evildoers who’ve been abusing kids right under our noses for decades. They’re called priests. So consider that your local church might be a better place than a pizza parlor to go crusading. Come to think of it, they love crusades and hate Satan too.

Comedy

😈 I post clips of my standup at Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Recently:

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Quickies

🎯 You don’t have depression, you’re just intermittent happy. Voila, rebranded!

🎯 A lot of "self-care" is just rudeness in disguise. Canceling plans at the last minute isn't wellness, it's just inconsiderate.

🎯 I literally don't understand how anyone can be a TV or podcast critic. What, you consumed 8,987,365 hours of content this year and now you're gonna give us your top 10? At this point, you need a critic just to know what to watch to be a critic.

Vooza @voozahq

I often block but I never block and report because…

5:54 PM ∙ Dec 2, 2022

Up ahead: Musings on Elon, Ye, astrology, Goodfellas, trauma, long walks, Neil Diamond, and the American dream…...