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

On 27 May 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. The announcement set off a socially progressive (good) moral panic centering on missing children, mass graves, and cultural genocide in Canada. This article examines the consolidation of a contrarian conservative reaction to the mass grave moral panic. Drawing from 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 narrative 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. The consolidation of conservative contrarianism is used to glean insights into the relationships among moral panics, polarization, and denialism.