When the Right Tried to Cancel the Turtles
In the 1980s and ’90s, successive moral panics about hooliganism and violence on TV culminated in a right-wing campaign against a dangerous social phenomenon: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
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Evan Smith is a Visiting Fellow in History at Flinders University in South Australia. His latest book is No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech (Routledge, 2020).
In the 1980s and ’90s, successive moral panics about hooliganism and violence on TV culminated in a right-wing campaign against a dangerous social phenomenon: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.