My favourite is the story that there was mass panic over a radio broadcast of War of the Worlds where everyone thought a real alien invasion was happening. I heard this story as a kid and really thought this was a cruel prank played by the radio station.
In reality, they made it clear at the beginning of the broadcast, and twice during, that it was fictional. Not that many people were listening and most of the people who were, were aware it wasn’t real. A few idiots freaked out and it somehow turned into a story of mass panic. It was propaganda by newspapers to discredit radio.
They fought for their states’ rights to dictate what other states were or were not allowed to do. Something that’s closely mirrored with similar debates today.
That’s pretty much universally the view on freedom and rights that today’s neo conservatives have.
They cry states rights and freedom when someone else wants to ban them from doing anything at all, but the instant someone else is doing something they don’t like, they suddenly make up moral panics to justify federally banning those things.
That is to say, conservatives by and large don’t have any principles beyond being selfish and hateful towards minoritied. Everything else, including fundamental freedoms and human rights is negotiable so long as it doesn’t negatively affect them OR negatively affects the people they hate more than them. They just use terms like freedom or rights to virtue signal when it suits them, but are just as happy to drop the pretence the millisecond doing so becomes beneficial to their goals.
A good example is the free speech screeching of conservatives in the heyday of fact checking, Vs. Their tortured justifications and dismissals of Trump’s blatant attacks on free speech and press today.
Or alternatively, many TERFs and their open willingness to draw support, and work together with misogynistic conservative groups and even straight up open Neo Nazis, just because those groups also hate trans people, all whilst turning around and claiming with a straight face that they’re doing this for women.