Moral panics,conservative contrarianism,and the polarizing debate about missing children,unmarked burials,and residential school denialism in Canada

Introduction

On May 27 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation issued a media release claiming that the remains of 215 missing children (prior students) had been confirmed on the grounds of a former Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada (tweeted the same day by the local newspaper, Kamloops Today). Social reaction to the media release was swift. Canadian and international news outlets reported on the discovery of an unmarked mass grave as the material manifestation of cultural genocide. Federal, provincial, and municipal politicians expressed shock and horror at the revelation. Statues of historical figures were vandalized. Dozens of Christian churches were burned. The late Pope Francis expressed sorrow for the traumatic discovery in early June and apologized for the role that the Catholic Church played in the residential school system the following year. Then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags on all national buildings to be lowered to half-mast (remaining there until November), created a new national holiday (the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation), and appointed a Special Interlocutor to make recommendations for a federal legal framework to ensure the respectful and culturally appropriate treatment of unmarked graves and burial sites of children at former Indian residential schools and associated institutions. By summer’s end, memorials peppered with small shoes signifying the lost children were common in cities across the country.

The overlapping social reactions to the claim that the remains of 215 children had been confirmed by ground penetrating radar (subsequently amended to the identification of potential unmarked burial sites) can be interpreted using theoretical and conceptual developments in contemporary moral panic studies. Studies in moral panic have moved beyond the conventional assumption that moral panics only consist of socially conservative reactions to comparatively minor threats. Tracing to the early 2000s, moral panics have otherwise been explained as normatively ambivalent moral boundary violations—both liberally progressive as well as socially conservative in orientation—that function to shore up support for diverse social norms and cultural sensibilities. In this way, the conventional interpretation of moral panic as a polemical rhetoric associated with the cultural, political, and intellectual right has been supplemented with a more analytical and politically agnostic understanding of moral panic as a form of moral regulation in everyday life (see Hier, 2017).

Contemporary studies in moral panic also emphasize that moral panic episodes consist of polarizing social reactions that take place in the context of proliferating media systems, competing social norms, and the cultural politics of identity (Carlson, 2016; Garland, 2008; Zielinska and Pasamonik, 2020; and see Iyengar et al., 2019). In fact, it is something of a truism in moral panic studies today that folk devils and their supporters fight back against moralizing claims by using a variety of mainstream and alternative print and digital media to challenge primary definitions of social problems (Hier, 2018; McRobbie and Thornton, 1995). This article builds on the established wisdom of contemporary moral panic studies by examining the consolidation of a contrarian conservative reaction to the mass grave moral panic. Drawing on contemporary moral panic studies and the sociology of denial, the article demonstrates how conservative contrarians engage in a form of interpretive denial by feeding on and extrapolating from the mass grave moral panic to cast aspersions on the broader politics of post-colonial reconciliation. A central part of their strategy consists of manipulating the rhetorical idiom of denialism itself to pre-emptively disrupt anticipated charges of racism and hate. In doing so, however, they incite progressive counter claims that also manipulate the rhetorical idiom of denialism. The latter inadvertently emboldens conservative contrarianism as it prolongs and reshapes the life course of the panic.

The analysis is presented in four sections. The first section explains how the focus of moral panic studies has shifted from singularly conservative to normatively ambivalent social reactions. This first section also links theorization on good moral panics to the sociology of denial by explaining how denialism is not just an analytical concept used by criminologists to explain the different ways that proportional responses to suffer and harm are thwarted. It also represents a vernacular idiom that plays an important role in polarizing claims and social problem frames.

The second section describes how reconciliation as a form of everyday moral regulation became institutionalized as a master symbol (De Young, 2004) in Canada. It also provides an overview of the initial inventory of claims that developed in reaction to the announcement in Kamloops.

The third section examines the consolidation of a contrarian conservative reaction to the mass grave moral panic. Whereas moral panic scholars primarily investigate polarizing moral panics on social media (e.g. Zielinska and Pasamonik, 2020), this third section discusses the contents of articles appearing in a print and online conservative periodical, a documentary-style video produced for and posted on YouTube, two websites dedicated to challenging mainstream narratives on residential schools, and the publication of a controversial edited volume. The third section does not present a systemic content or discourse analysis of these different media sources, and the presentation of data is not representative of all conservative reactions to the mass grave narrative. Rather, the data sources are used purposefully to demonstrate how (1) reactions to good moral panics (just like bad ones) develop in multi-mediated contexts, (2) good moral panics (just like bad ones) are routinely composed of polarizing narratives, and (3) resistance to primary definitions in good moral panics (just like bad ones) can subvert the language and logic of moral panic and denialism to undermine dominant framings. The third section also extends what we know about the dynamics of contemporary moral panics by demonstrating how contrarians engage in a form of interpretive denial by portraying Indigenous leaders and their allies as purveyors of panic as they attempt to sow seeds of doubt about the broader aims and motivating forces underscoring post-colonial settler-Indigenous reconciliation in Canada.

The final section uses the consolidation of conservative contrarianism to reflect on the relationships among moral panics, polarization, and denialism. Moral panic scholars have paid a good deal of attention to the ways that folk devils and their supporters fight back against moralizing claims with the aim of bring moral panic episodes to a close. This final section explains that the consolidation of conservative contrarianism did not mark a moment of closure in debates about missing children and unmarked burials. Instead, it prolonged and partially reshaped the life course of the panic by spurring on socially progressive counter-rhetoric that, paradoxically, emboldened rather than quashed contrarian criticism.

It is important to close this introduction with the following disclaimer. There are ongoing cultural, political, and economic struggles in Canada aimed at articulating the multidimension and intergenerational harms caused by the residential school system. These struggles carry historical, political, personal, and emotional significance for settler Canadians and Indigenous Peoples alike. The aim of this article is not to discredit the claim that unmarked burials will be discovered in and around former residential school grounds. Nor is the point of the article to call into question or diminish claims about the harms caused by the residential school system specifically or settler colonialism generally. Writing from the normative-social position of a settler-scholar, my intention in this article is threefold: first, to conceptualize and explain the claims and counterclaims about missing children and mass graves using developments in moral panic studies and the sociology of denial; second, to examine the consolidation of conservative contrarianism across several media sources not commonly considered in debates about polarizing moral panics; third, to draw attention to the potential unintended side effects of resisting conservative contrarianism in a multimediated and highly polarized political and cultural environment.

Moral panic and the sociology of denial

Conventional moral panic studies is guided by the logic of mass mediation (see Altheide and Snow, 1979). The logic of mass mediation is premised on the assumption that information flows in an asymmetrical direction from mainstream commercial media institutions to wider audiences. Tracing to Cohen’s (2001) canonical study on the mods and rockers, moral panics are conventionally explained as influential claims-making episodes, whereby structurally advantaged moral entrepreneurs gain control over mainstream mass media narratives by providing information to journalists and bolstering the agenda-setting priorities of commercial (print) mass media outlets (Hier, 2018). Regardless of whether the focus is on Cohen’s (2001) developmental stages (i.e. inventory, diffusion, innovation), Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s (2013) definitional attributes (i.e. concern, consensus, hostility, disproportion, volatility) and motivations (i.e. interest group, elite engineered, grassroots), or Hall et al.’s (2013) conjuctural crises, the purpose of conventional moral panic studies is to explain how moral entrepreneurs create exaggerated images of deviance that align with and reinforce conservative norms and hegemonic worldviews.

The conventional logic of moral panic started to attract critical attention in the 1980s. As Waddington (1986) explained in his critique of Hall et al.’s (2013) influential study on social reactions to street crime in Birmingham, the analytical limitation found in most studies of moral panic is that they are driven by socially progressive normative biases held among moral panic scholars themselves. This is problematic because normative biases condition a pattern of engagement, whereby researchers do not establish the scale of the problem they are investigating (the actual events or activities that precipitate social reactions) before they make authoritative claims about the disproportionate overreactions of conservative moral entrepreneurs.

Waddington’s critique of Hall et al. (2013) laid the groundwork for a sequence of attempts to rethink normative bias in conventional moral panic studies. Inspired by insights into the multi-mediation of moral panics (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995), contemporary moral panic scholars have pursued a specific line of inquiry into the ways that moral panics are liberally progressive as well as socially conservative in character (Cohen, 1999; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2022; Hier, 2017). Cohen (1999) was among the first to comment on the prospect that moral panics can be good (liberally progressive) as well as bad (socially conservative). His specific interest was focused on how the dynamics of conventional (bad) moral panics could be applied to progressive (good) causes: anti-denial movements aimed at breaking the silences on human hardship. In this way, Cohen imagined anti-denialism as a progressive strategy for using what is known about the dynamics of bad moral panics and apply them to virtuous causes.

Hier (2017) subsequently extended Cohen’s argument that moral panics can be good by conceptualizing moral panics as normatively ambivalent social reactions. Rather than starting from the conventional assumption that moral panics are singularly conservative in orientation, Hier supplemented Cohen’s original framework with a broader range of subjectivities, social obligations, and caring relations. What this means is that good moral panics not only function reactively as anti-denial mechanisms designed to break the silences on human suffering and injustice, as Cohen surmised. They also function proactively by expressing contemporary cultural and political norms that are driven by liberally progressive interests—such as the politics of truth and reconciliation that have gripped Canada since 2015.

The shift from anti-denialism to normative ambivalence matters. The primary purpose of the sociology of denial is to expose the veils of silence that conceal privation. Aiming to demystify rhetoric that thwarts proportional recognition of and attention to underacknowledged harm, denial scholars apply Cohen’s (2001) influential threefold framework on literal, interpretive, and implicatory denial to a variety of injustices. A special interest addresses the relationship between moral panic and denial. Whereas one line of inquiry envisions good moral panics as ways to expose denial (Cohen, 2001), others lament how the absence of panics helps to maintain the status quo (Wicks, 2011), how interpretive and implicatory denial actively discourages moral panics (Hier, 2021), and how the social organization of denial is perpetuated by moral panics in reverse (Brisman and South, 2015). What is shared across these different lines of inquiry into the relationship between panic and denial is an understanding of denial as a mechanism that stifles proportional recognition of misery and anguish. Comparatively less attention has been granted to how denial is not just an academic/analytical concept that helps to problematize the absence of proportional engagement with harm, but also a vernacular idiom that can play a role in prolonging and reshaping the life course of a moral panic.

The mass grave media inventory

The inventory of a moral panic routinely begins with unorganized responses to injury, death, or destruction that is presented in a wider social setting that informs the unfolding drama (Cohen, 2003). The relevant social setting for the claim that 215 burials had been discovered in Kamloops was the cultural politics of reconciliation. Although Indigenous grievances against the residential school system trace back to at least the 1950s (Neizen, 2017), it was only when Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) presented its multi-volume report on the impact of residential schools in 2015 that reconciliation became institutionalized as a master symbol in Canada.

Master symbols are simple, familiar, and easily recognizable cultural signifiers that stand as proxies for deeper strains, challenges, and contradictions that define an era (De Young, 2004). Master symbols capture the common sense about the causes, conditions, and solutions of social problems. Before 2015, residential schools and residential school survivors of physical and sexual abuse were primarily framed in individualistic terms. Although the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2006—a class-action suit filed by the Assembly of First Nations against the Canadian government and the various churches that ran the schools—drew some public attention to the history of residential schools in Canada, public narratives on reconciliation focused on individual victims, specific perpetrators, financial compensation, and harmony (James, 2017).

The TRC’s final reporting did not entirely displace the individualistic framing of reconciliation. In fact, because Canada’s TRC was set off by civil litigation rather than a widely understood and commonly acknowledged set of human rights violations, the Canadian public was neither collectively aware of the historical events in question nor even of the TRC itself (Neizen, 2017). One of the main cultural transformations ushered in by the TRC’s national disclosure and witnessing events (2010–14) was that the individualizing frame was supplemented with a wider recognition of the collective harm (e.g. intergenerational trauma, language loss, and attempted cultural genocide) caused by the residential school system. If nothing else, reconciliation has, since 2015, become institutionalized as a master symbol that informs the moral regulation of settler-Indigenous relations across a wide range of social institutions.

It was in the context of the cultural politics of reconciliation that the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation (hereafter Ttes) claimed to have confirmed the remains of 215 former students who attended the Kamloops Residential School by using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). Based on preliminary findings from a survey of an apple orchard at the Ttes Museum and Heritage Park conducted between 21 and 24 May 2021, Chief Rosanne Casimir announced that the First Nation was able to verify a knowing in the community that missing and undocumented children were buried within the Ttes community.

The survey was conducted by conflict anthropologist Sarah Beaulieu. Informed by oral histories provided by knowledge keepers and cultural monitors, the stated aim of the survey was to provide spatial specificity to community knowings to detect subsurface anomalies in the soil requiring further investigation. In Beaulieu’s words, the preliminary assessment was conducted to gather GPR signatures in “prospection mode” based knowledge keepers’ claims that conditioned an “index of suspicion” (CTV News, 2001). Although the preliminary assessment neither identified nor confirmed missing children buried in the apple orchard, the survey was informed by information pertaining to soil disturbances detected by archeological impact assessments and construction activity in the area.

In the days and weeks following the announcement, mainstream Canadian news outlets reported on the discovery of an unmarked mass grave in print, online, and breaking news television formats. Based on their review of 386 news items published between 27 May and 15 October 2001 in 5 Canadian media outlets, for example, Gerbrandt and Carleton (2023) found that 35% of news items contained some level of inaccurate reporting—especially in the first few days of reporting. A main inaccuracy in the media framing was that 215 bodies were discovered, detected, and/or recovered using GPR even though actual GPR imaging was tied to neither the number of children nor GPR reflections (Wadsworth et al., 2024). Media narratives nevertheless fostered the impression that GPR operates like X-rays by producing images of skeletons in graves.

Inaccuracies in mainstream news reporting were not limited to Canadian news outlets. The day following Chief Casimir’s media release, New York Times veteran correspondent Austen (2021) set the tone for international framing when he published an article under the headline, “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.” The article claimed that a mass grave containing the remains of 215 children had been discovered in Kamloops. Claims to the effect that the remains of more than 1000 people, mostly children, were discovered on the grounds of 3 other former residential schools appeared in subsequent articles under headlines such as “Hundreds more Unmarked Graves Found at Former Residential School in Canada” (Austen and Bilefsky, 2021) and “How Thousands of Indigenous Children Vanished in Canada” (Austen, 2022).

The mainstream news narrative centering on missing children and mass graves was bolstered by claims circulating on social media. In the days following the original media release, for example, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joined other Canadians and political leaders on social media to lament the discovery of 215 murdered children. Indigenous leaders and academics, in turn, called for protection of the Kamloops site, claiming that 215 graves represented a small portion of the graves that remained to be discovered. As potential unmarked graves were announced at other former residential school sites through June, social media posts claimed that upward of 12,000 graves had been found (Supernant, 2022).

As mainstream and social media claims about the discovery of 215 graves escalated, the Ttes issued a second media release (on 15 July 2021) explaining that the area surveyed by GPR between 21 and 24 May was selected because (1) knowledge keepers’ oral histories recall children as young as 6 years old being woken in the night to dig holes for burials in the apple orchard, (2) a juvenile rib bone surfaced in the same survey area, and (3) a juvenile tooth was previously excavated from a shovel test pit. ¹ The media release not only encouraged searches at other residential school sites but also contributed to an emerging storyline that centered on secret burials and murdered babies. This storyline came to a head on 13 January 2022, when The Fifth Estate, an investigative documentary television program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), aired “The Reckoning: Secrets Unearthed by Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc.” The episode featured interviews with former students who relayed memories of other students vanishing, mass hangings, and a baby being thrown into a furnace. The following year, after at least a dozen geographical surveys had been conducted at former residential schools across Canada, Manitoba’s Pine Creek/Minegoziibe Anishinabe First Nation took the unusual step of excavating the basement of a Catholic church based on former students’ claims that the bodies of children were stored and buried in the basement when the ground outside was too cold to dig (Hamilton, 2023). Despite detecting 14 soil anomalies, the excavation in Manitoba provided no evidence of human remains.

The different social reactions to the announcement in Kamloops culminated in a good moral panic. There is a tendency in moral panic studies to equate moral panics with a defined set of substantive (conservative) issues, but moral panics—be they good or bad— are properly conceptualized a style of claims-making that is conditioned by a distinctive discursive logic that can be contrasted to processes of moral regulation in everyday life (Carlson, 2016; Hier, 2008, 2018). Unlike everyday forms of moral regulation that encourage people to proactively act on their own character and conduct in ways that align with dominant social norms (e.g. through rituals such as reciting land acknowledgments or donning orange shirts), moral panics invert the individualizing discursive logic of moral regulation. Because moral panics represent a form of complaint or grievance, they operate reactively as defensive gestures to constrain rather than proactively encourage certain activities, identities, and life ways (i.e. moral panics are about “them” rather than “us”). In this way, moral panics temporarily invert the discursive logic of moral regulation by allocating responsibility for causing harm to folk devils (which can be a condition like colonialism) as they call for collective solutions to address perceived threats.

Conservative contrarianism

As the mass grave moral panic gained momentum, a sequence of contrarian conservative reactions started to appear in niche print and online digital media. McRobbie and Thornton (1995) were first to point out that the diversification of analog and early digital media in the 1990s opened opportunities for a broad range of unconventional claims-makers to participate in and challenge moral panics. Their specific interest was in the ways that conventional folk devils and their supporters fight back against mainstream media reporting, sometimes subverting the language and logic of moral panic itself to undermine conservative claims. Yet, the ongoing diversification of analog and digital media sources since the time McRobbie and Thornton wrote, combined with the growing number of participants involved in public claims-making and the normative ambivalence that drives contemporary moral panics, has contributed to the development of polarizing moral panics: sudden and recurring media-amplified discourses that pit competing normative visions against one another (Zielinska and Pasamonik, 2020). In contrast to the tacit conventional argument that (bad) moral panics are cultivated by a small number of structurally advantaged moral entrepreneurs associated with the cultural, political, and intellectual right, often attracting resistance from marginalized folk devils and their supporters, polarizing moral panics reveal how good moral panics can also be challenged by a wider range of moral entrepreneurs with allegiances to different moral communities (Garland, 2008).

Conservative contrarianism initially took the form of sporadic social media posts and mainstream newspaper stories lamenting vandalized statues, the cancelation of Canada Day celebrations, and the discontents of cancel culture. Online posts also proliferated across forums such as 4chan, RUTube, and Truth Social when other Indigenous groups in the provinces of Saskatchewan and British Columbia, for example, announced the discovery of potential unmarked burial sites (Wadsworth et al., 2024). By September 2021, however, a more coherent, organized form of contrarianism designed to challenge the mass grave narrative specifically and the integrity of reconciliation politics generally was emerging.

Organized contrarianism was introduced in a short article published in The Dorchester Review. The Dorchester Review is a biannual print and online periodical aimed at publishing historical, polemical, and often politically incorrect commentaries. On June 17, 2021, publisher and editor Christian Champion presented a short commentary titled “From Katyn to Kamloops,” where he set out the general parameters for conservative contrarianism. The gist of Champion’s argument is that mainstream journalists and members of the political class distorted what happened in Kamloops particularly and at residential schools generally to the detriment of the country’s broader truth and reconciliation mandate. The derelict graveyards on the grounds of former residential schools are a sign, Champion acknowledges, that too many Indigenous children died of diseases far from home. But the lost cemeteries, he continues, have been wrongly interpreted as evidence that government and religious leaders murdered small children and buried them in mass graves. Champion attributes the narrative on mass graves to “a multibillion dollar grievance industry that has metastasized since the 1970s” and that has since manifested in contemporary claims about cultural genocide. Anticipating his critics, Champion dismisses claims about residential school denialism as nothing more than activist propaganda designed to propagate a single interpretation of history.

Champion’s commentary in The Dorchester Review contains the fundamental elements of conservative contrarianism. It uses the mass grave moral panic as a rhetorical point of departure to cast aspersions on the motivations behind Indigenous activism and post-colonial reconciliation. Conservative contrarians such as Champion do not literally deny the tragedies and injustices associated with Canada’s residential school system. In fact, contrarians routinely acknowledge the tragic and horrific conditions that existed at residential schools. Yet, by cultivating doubt about the politics behind reconciliation—sometimes even subverting the language of moral panic and pre-emptively circumventing or anticipating charges of denialism— contrarians aim to disrupt public confidence in and support for reconciliation as it is currently articulated and pursued. In this way, contrarianism is a paradigmatic example of what Cohen (2001) calls interpretive denialism: a form of denial that does not literally disavow the basic facts of a particular event, but rather consists of rhetorical strategies and idioms aimed at redefining the terms used to understand the facts.

The Canadian Mass Grave Hoax, 32-minute documentary-style video posted on YouTube in September 2021, is a case in point. ² The Canadian Mass Grave Hoax was produced by Lauren Southern and Keean Bexte. Southern is a Canadian conservative YouTuber/activist/influencer who achieved “micro celebrity” (Tuters and Burton, 2021) status as a reporter for Rebel News (an online media outlet i.e. often compared to Breitbart News in the US). Bexte was also a reporter for Rebel News before he created The Counter Signal, an alternative media service presented across several formats (postcasts, video, print) and platforms (a dedicated website, YouTube, Spotify, Instagram).

Four overlapping themes run through The Canadian Mass Grave Hoax. The first theme focuses on complicity and deception. Following a brief overview of how the national and international media inventory on the discovery of mass graves deceived the Canadian public, a frustrated Southern is featured making repeated (unsuccessful) attempts to contact the Ttes for comment (including Chief Casimir). At one point in the video, Bexte travels to the Ttes’s office in Kamloops only to encounter a fence barring access to the grounds. The documentarians’ inability to gain access to representatives of the Ttes, combined with failed attempts to receive any comment from local church representatives, is interpreted as the Ttes’s complicity with the deceptive media frame and church representatives’ fears of reprisal.

The second theme focuses on the mainstream Canadian media’s misinterpretation of GPR imaging. Standing outside a fence erected in front of the Ttes’s office and burial investigation site, Southern and Bexte fly a drone over the grounds. Speculating that flags in the ground are too close together to represent burial sites, the next scene features Bexte examining the abstract of an article on the merits of GPR published in Journal of Applied Geophysics. Combined with featured comments that originally appeared online in Washington State University Insider about the limitations of GPR, the documentarians conclude that mainstream Canadian journalists wrongly interpreted reports of ground anomalies detected in the Kamloops survey as a mass grave.

The third theme pertains to a broader coverup. In late June 2021, Canadian news media started reporting on the discovery of 751 unmarked burials on the grounds of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Marieval, Saskatchewan. Canadian journalists and representatives of the Cowessess First Nation were clear that the unmarked graves (containing the remains of residential school students and members of the community) were located in a known community cemetery where some of the headstones had been removed by the Catholic Church in the 1960s. The documentarians emphasize how the announcement was nevertheless interpreted by politicians, journalist, and the Chief of the Cowessess Nation as the discovery of 751 children whose deaths were concealed by the Catholic Church (reinforcing the other themes running through the documentary).

The thematic counternarratives on complicity and deception, misinterpretation of GPR imaging capabilities, and a broader coverup came together to condition a fourth theme running through The Canadian Mass Grave Hoax: moral panic. Although the language of moral panic is not explicitly used by the documentarians (hoax is the preferred signifier), the insinuation found in the final minutes of the documentary is that mainstream media and the political class colluded to create a moral panic about mass grave in a federal election year. An interesting part of the critique is that it is rationalized in the interests of Indigenous peoples and Canadian unity. In contrast to Wadsworth et al.’s (2024) argument that the documentarians discuss GPR ambiguity to downplay the experiences and testimony of residential school survivors—something they equate to residential school denialism—the documentarians are clear that the removal of children from their homes, and the attempted destruction of their culture through the residential school system, was horrific and tragic. They even acknowledge the tragedy of neglected graves and stress the urgency to repair neglected burial sites. Still, the primary aim of the documentary is to sow seeds of doubt about wider aims of and interests behind post-colonial reconciliation by subverting the logic of moral panic and critiquing the dominant frame on the discovery of mass graves.

Discussion

The consolidation of conservative contrarianism poses at least three implications for criminological understandings of the relationships among moral panics, polarization, and denialism. First, conservative contrarianism provides a unique example of how good moral panics, not unlike conventional ones, experience resistance through a variety of media sources. While studies of moral panics have focused on the ways that folk devils and their supporters fight back to resist moralizing claims, conservative contrarianism adds an additional dimension to our understandings of how moral panics can be resisted. It does so by showing how good moral panics rooted in historical injustices can be resisted through polarizing counter narratives that aim to cast aspersion on the broader politics that fuel (good) moral panics in the first place. In other words, the target of resistance is not just the panic itself but rather the wider norms from which the panic derives.

Second, the consolidation of conservative contrarianism lends empirical support to the argument that moral panics are increasingly composed of polarizing claims in multimediated environments. It also extends our understanding of polarization by showing how the latter can prolong and reshape the life course of a moral panic. In this way, conservative contrarianism bears a resemblance to the ways that academic controversy over the putative threat posed by violent home movies (i.e. video nasties) after the murder of James Bulger in Liverpool influenced the direction of moral panic. As Davies (2013) explains, an academic publishing industry built up around media reporting on the horrific murder. Notable about the many books, reports, articles, and commentaries that continue to adjudicate the case is that much of the academic commentary avoids discussing either the crime itself or how child murders should be dealt with. Instead, the literature is consumed by academic controversy over media censorship, media effects, and the nature of childhood innocence, thereby prolonging and reshaping the focus of the panic.

Third, the consolidation of conservative contrarianism poses implications for sociological understandings of denial. What is unique about contrarians’ reactions to the mass grave moral panic is that they use the language of denialism to pre-emptively neutralize anticipated charges of racism and hatred. In other words, denialism is not simply an academic concept designed to expose cultural and psychological mechanism of avoidance. It is also a vernacular idiom that is strategically used to problematize the politics of reconciliation in Canada. Moreover, even though ideological divisions pit different social groups against one another, competing interests often rely upon a common rhetorical idiom to launch contrasting claims and social problem frames (Ibarra and Kitsuse, 1993). One implication of relying on an idiomatically compatible rhetoric is that the life course of a moral panic can be extended.

Indeed, contrarian reactions to the mass grave narrative did not mark a moment of closure in the panic, but rather exacerbated polarization by provoking a set of socially progressive counter reactions that also drew on the language of denialism. The irony of the different progressive reactions is that they did not simply mount a challenge to but also inadvertently emboldened conservative contrarians.

Consider three brief illustrative examples. First, caught up in the heightened levels of emotion and outrage after the announcement in Kamloops, members of Canadian Parliament gave unanimous consent to a motion declaring that what happened at residential schools was tantamount to “cultural genocide”—a motion they had rejected the previous year. As cultural genocide became an increasingly common way to characterize the residential school system, Leah Gazan, a Member of Parliament representing the New Democratic Party, proposed legislation to treat residential school denialism as a form of hate speech. The proposal, which invited contrarian criticism on the grounds that it violated constitutional protections guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, was nevertheless endorsed by the Ministers of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Justice (Stefanovich, 2023). In fact, when Kimberly Murray, the Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools, released her first interim report in June 2023, she placed a priority on government to give urgent consideration to legal mechanisms to combat residential school denialism (Murray, 2023).

The progressive reaction was not limited to government. The second example traces to 2003, when Reid Gerbrandt and Sean Carleton published an academic report aimed at debunking what they identify as the mass grave hoax in Canadian news reporting as an example of residential school denialism. They define the mass grave hoax in terms of claims made by priest, pundits, and politicians who downplay and question the TRC’s finding that more than 4000 Indigenous children died at residential schools. To be sure, Gerbrandt and Carleton’s media analysis provides useful insights into the ways that some media reporting inaccurately reported on the discovery of 215 bodies in Kamloops. Yet, they go beyond analyzing the mass grave hoax by downplaying the significance of the inaccurate media reporting that set off the panic in the first place. The reason why this is problematic is because whatever ulterior motives conservative contrarians might have for critiquing the mass grave moral panic, their arguments concerning the sensationalism of the mass grave narrative are neither unconvincing nor fundamentally wrong. But Gerbrandt and Carleton gloss over the sensationalism and factual inaccuracies in media reporting on mass graves by engaging in their own claims-making rhetoric to downplay the impact that the initial media inventory had on the ways that Canadians reacted to the Ttes’ initial media release in a wider attempt to frame contrarian critique of the mass grave moral panic as residential school denialism.

The latter had the unintended effect of emboldening conservative contrarianism. In 2023, for instance, Michelle Stirling, a conservative writer and researcher who has contributed several critical online and print commentaries on residential schools, self-published Confronting Indian Residential School Confabulation and Media Irresponsibility on Amazon’s Kindle Edition (the book was listed on Amazon as Mass Grave Mass Psychosis: Responding to Gerbrandt and Carlton’s Debunking the Mass Grave Hoax as of May 2024). ⁸ In addition to rehearsing standard contrarian arguments about mass graves and residential schools, the book adds an additional layer to conservative contrarianism by directly challenging Gerbrandt and Carleton’s claim that news media corrected inaccuracies in the mass grave narrative over time. It also takes the additional step of critiquing Carleton’s wider work on residential school denialism in an effort to conceptualize the academic response to conservative contrarianism as a moral panic itself.

The final example of how conservative contrarianism prolongs and reshapes the mass grave moral panic by exacerbating polarization took place in the city of Quesnel, British Columbia. On March 19, 2024, city council heard that Pat Morton, the wife of Mayor Ron Paull, distributed several copies of Grave Error to acquaintances in the community (City of Quesnel, 2025a). A letter of complaint was subsequently filed with the city on behalf of the Lhtako Dene Nation, an Indian Band in British Columbia’s Northern Canyon region, insinuating that the mayor had been distributing copies of a book that disputes the claim that placing Indigenous children in residential schools was tantamount to cultural genocide (City of Quesnel, 2024b). Mayor Paull responded by explaining that he had never read the book, that it was his wife who distributed copies of Grave Error, and that he did not agree with her actions (City of Quesnel, 2025a).

On April 2, city council hosted a large contingent of chiefs, elders, and community members. ⁹ As the minutes of the previous meeting were reviewed, city councilors accused the mayor of lying about his participation in distributing denialist literature and that he had promoted Grave Error around town under the guise of a good read (as the large audience gasped and chanted “shame”). After nearly an hour of testimonials from Indigenous spokesperson and residential school survivors, none other than Frances Widdowson used the speakers’ forum to challenge council’s implicit endorsement of the claim that 215 children’s bodies were discovered in Kamloops. In other words, the city’s attempt to counter residential school denialism inadvertently provided a platform for one of the most outspoken critics of Indigenous activism to amplify contrarian narratives. ¹⁰

Suffice it to say, one of the ramifications associated with progressive reactions to conservative contrarianism—be they government, academic, or community-based—is that they run the risk of transforming the imperatives that underscore settler-Indigenous reconciliation into polarizing controversies over claims-making rhetoric, free speech, and media sensationalism. In other words, the polarization that characterizes claims-making about mass graves and residential school denialism can have the unintended effect of narrowing the broader social problem frame on settler-Indigenous reconciliation as it changes the terms of engagement, thereby threatening to reduce its overall impact (conditioning a kind of social problem fatigue).

Such might have been the case in August 2025, when the shíshálh Nation announced that GPR imaging had identified 81 potential unmarked gravesites on the grounds of the former St. Augustine’s Residential School in Sechelt, British Columbia. Informed by survivors’ truths, public claims were made about children being led by staff into the forest in the middle of the night, about newborn babies being dumped in the ocean, and about bodies thrown into a furnace (Lo, 2025). Despite making front page coverage in at least one Vancouver Island newspaper, however, the new item quickly lost momentum. The announcement, in other words, failed to produce the kinds of reactions that followed the Kamloops announcement in 2021.