Speaker 1: Hmm, what alleging networks of child abuse that don't really
Speaker 1: exist my entire world now, Jesus Christ, that was a
Speaker 1: bad introduction. Um, thank you, Sophie, thank you for your
Speaker 1: relentless positivity. Uh, this is behind the Bastards. I'm Robert
Speaker 1: Evans and my guest today is my my friend and colleague,
Speaker 1: Jake Hanrahan. Jake, how you doing man good? Thanks to me,
Speaker 1: Thank you having me on again. Yeah, and you, Jake,
Speaker 1: you have a podcast now, another podcast. You've always had
Speaker 1: a podcast, another one, Yeah, only doing Q Clearance. Sophie's
Speaker 1: been hoping. We've moved me with a podcast about Q
Speaker 1: and On uh, and about you know, the the searching
Speaker 1: for the person or persons behind it, right, Yeah, trying
Speaker 1: to trying to kind of lay out for people that
Speaker 1: are not one familiar as well. Like I kind of
Speaker 1: realized that a lot of the Q and On media
Speaker 1: is refocused on either like for Q and On people,
Speaker 1: or it's kind of for the community. They're research and
Speaker 1: I kind of want to bring everybody together to be like,
Speaker 1: let's make everyone understand it. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: And so far, so good, you know, Jake, I I
Speaker 1: admire what you're doing. I think it's important and I
Speaker 1: wanted to help you out. And the way I wanted
Speaker 1: to help you out was by lending a bit of
Speaker 1: historical context because what we have with Q and On,
Speaker 1: I think it's it's fair to say, in brief, is
Speaker 1: like a massive, almost now international delusion about networks of
Speaker 1: Satanic child murderers and traffickers. Right, M have you figured
Speaker 1: it out yet, Jake? Q and On is not is
Speaker 1: not the first time this happened. And today, Jake, we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about the Satanic panic. Okay. I couldn't
Speaker 1: have guessed that one man. Um No, it's interesting, it's interesting,
Speaker 1: it's perfect for me. Thank you so much. I just
Speaker 1: can't believe you haven't listened to episode two of Q
Speaker 1: Clearance where we talk about syntantic this, this is it's
Speaker 1: it was enormous. I don't I didn't know most of
Speaker 1: this stuff when I started reading about it. It's a
Speaker 1: fucking nightmare. And uh, you're gonna hate this episode. I
Speaker 1: hated writing it. Um. It involved a lot of reading lurid,
Speaker 1: lengthy stories of child molestation that never happened, but that
Speaker 1: children were convinced had happened. To them, which is somehow yeah,
Speaker 1: more disturbing almost than actual child molestation, like the idea
Speaker 1: that like a kid, people convincing them it happened to them, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like why would you make someone feel the worst thing
Speaker 1: ever if they didn't actually feel it. You know, it's
Speaker 1: completely fucked. I can't believe this is what you picked for, Jake.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Yeah, we're gonna talk about some fun ship.
Speaker 1: We're gonna go dungeons and dragons. We're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: the West Memphis three. We're gonna talk about the mcmarh
Speaker 1: in preschool scandal. It's gonna be fucking terrible. Um. But
Speaker 1: first we're going to go back in time a little bit, Jake,
Speaker 1: because the ideological soil that Q and on and the
Speaker 1: Satanic Panic grew in didn't start with either of those things.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about A hundred and seventy seven A
Speaker 1: D or c E or whatever we're supposed to say Europe.
Speaker 1: Let's let's let's talk about that. This is about you know,
Speaker 1: A hundred seventy is about a century or so before
Speaker 1: Emperor Constantine was like, you know, brought Christianity to the
Speaker 1: Roman Empire and stuff. So things are still pretty pagan
Speaker 1: in Roman society, but Christianity exists and the Pagans do
Speaker 1: not like it. They've got these like weird people, um,
Speaker 1: who are kind of on the fringes of society, and
Speaker 1: they start making up ship about them. So in the
Speaker 1: city of Lyon in modern day France, rumors started spreading
Speaker 1: that members of the Christian community there were secretly raping
Speaker 1: and cannibalizing their own children. Angry and probably drunken, mobs
Speaker 1: of pagan Romans chased the Christian community out of their homes,
Speaker 1: beat them, stone them, and tortured their households slaves until
Speaker 1: the slaves admitted that their masters had been eating and
Speaker 1: molesting babies. With confessions in hand, the mob than massacred
Speaker 1: the entire Christian community of Leon. So like when you're
Speaker 1: it was cool, basically rads. So that massacre was an
Speaker 1: example of what anthropologists call demonology. So not demonology, demon
Speaker 1: o I O G y um. And Yeah, the authors
Speaker 1: of Satan's Silence, which is have you read that book,
Speaker 1: It's fucking Satan Silence. Yeah, it's really good, the defining
Speaker 1: work of the Satanic Panic era, and the authors of
Speaker 1: that book define demonology as the narrative specific to every
Speaker 1: culture that identifies the ultimate evil threatening the group. During
Speaker 1: periods of social turmoil and moral crisis, societal preoccupation with
Speaker 1: its demonology intensifies. So in Pagan Rome, the ultimate evil
Speaker 1: was like the the ultimate outsiders. The Christians at this point,
Speaker 1: like the people saying, now there's only one got right,
Speaker 1: So they get demonized and people start telling stories of
Speaker 1: about the molesting and murdering children. Now, once Christianity became
Speaker 1: the dominant religion in Europe, its adherents found their own
Speaker 1: evil to oppress in the way that they've once been oppressed.
Speaker 1: In the twelfth century, a myth began to spread across
Speaker 1: the English countryside, initially about Jewish rabbis murdering Christian babies.
Speaker 1: That's quickly spread all over Europe, and you start having
Speaker 1: this like it's still around yeah, yeah, they of course, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're always yeah, this kind it's kind of like it
Speaker 1: was an early meme and it's spread that way around Europe,
Speaker 1: and like pamphlets and even like you can still find
Speaker 1: churches in Europe that, like in stained glass reliefs will
Speaker 1: have like images of what's called the blood libel rabbi's
Speaker 1: murdering Christian babies to make mods that. Yeah, um, and
Speaker 1: it's the same kind of thing, right, myths that this
Speaker 1: this group of social outsiders is gathering up and murdering
Speaker 1: and probably molesting children. Um. And Christians like killed so
Speaker 1: many Jews during this period as a result of the
Speaker 1: spread of this myth that later during the Reformation, there
Speaker 1: weren't like any Jewish people left in a lot of communities,
Speaker 1: so they had to find a new ultimate evil inside
Speaker 1: their community to go after. And this is where we
Speaker 1: get the witch hunts, right like that everybody knows vaguely
Speaker 1: the story, and these two they took different forms over
Speaker 1: the centuries, but the gist of the threat was always
Speaker 1: the same. Satan is real, and he's trying to destroy
Speaker 1: our community via some member on the fringe of our
Speaker 1: community who's working with the devil, right Like, that's the
Speaker 1: the idea, and it happens a bunch of times. It
Speaker 1: happens in Europe, it happens obviously in the United States.
Speaker 1: You get the Salem witch trials, and you have different
Speaker 1: groups of people targeted. Right. Sometimes it's midwife. Sometimes it's
Speaker 1: just like members of the community like in Salem, who
Speaker 1: start accusing each other of things. Um, and kind of
Speaker 1: one of the things that always marks witch hunts is
Speaker 1: that like there may be initially a specific group that's targeted,
Speaker 1: but once a real good witch hunt gets going, pretty
Speaker 1: much everyone winds up accusing everybody, right, Like that's what
Speaker 1: we do. Yeah. Yeah. I remember reading the Weird Story
Speaker 1: where like a guy like pronounced something like differently to
Speaker 1: the rest of the town and they were just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a witch exactly. You know, people go fucking it
Speaker 1: is one of those things. You know, I'm a I'm
Speaker 1: a pretty staunch fan of the concept of democracy, um,
Speaker 1: but man, reading too much about witch hunts makes you like, we're, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: they voted, yeah yeah, drowning. Um. Yeah. So once the
Speaker 1: United States became a thing, it showed a marked talent
Speaker 1: for witch hunts. And I have to say, like, y'all
Speaker 1: over in Europe and ship can do some pretty good
Speaker 1: witch hunts, but the USA, like, who, we are good
Speaker 1: at mass murdering each other over rumors of the devil? Um, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're fucking great at it. And of course, like we
Speaker 1: you know, Jewish people got blamed for a variety of things,
Speaker 1: but also Catholics um. During the eighteen thirties and forties,
Speaker 1: Protestants in America were so frightened of Catholics that rumors
Speaker 1: started to spread about nuns consorting with the devil and
Speaker 1: Moleste murder ring a bunch of little kids. And the
Speaker 1: quote again from Satan's Silence here, because this is some
Speaker 1: ship that sounds exactly like the ship happening now. Several
Speaker 1: books were written by women claiming to be x Nuns
Speaker 1: who had escaped from convents where they witnessed orgies, torture,
Speaker 1: witchcraft in the slaughter of infants. One account was so
Speaker 1: popular that in the years before the Civil War, it's
Speaker 1: sales were surpassed only by Uncle Tom's cabin. During the
Speaker 1: same period, X Nuns and Priest real or Famed made
Speaker 1: a handsome living touring the country and testifying about the
Speaker 1: slaughter of innocence at the hands of Mother's superior and bishops.
Speaker 1: It's the same fucking thing, Like they're going around and
Speaker 1: making money off it. You've got like fucking pre medic
Speaker 1: types in eighteen forty. Yeah, it's kind of funny though.
Speaker 1: It's like later the Catholics did do a lot of
Speaker 1: the kids, but oh absolutely, but not the Devil's yeah no,
Speaker 1: and like, yeah, you have to assume that some of
Speaker 1: this started from like well, yeah, a bunch of preestar
Speaker 1: molested kids, right, just throwing the devil as well, Like
Speaker 1: why not they eating them as well? Yeah, now they're
Speaker 1: eating them yeah my peoples. Man. Yeah. So that's kind
Speaker 1: of the backstory of this really weirdly consistent thing that
Speaker 1: humans do, which is accused groups on the margins of
Speaker 1: murdering and molesting children. Right, It's like very consistent that
Speaker 1: it's always like, if you're going to really demonize a group,
Speaker 1: you accuse them of going after little kids. Um, and
Speaker 1: it's it goes back way more than a thousand years.
Speaker 1: I think it's like the Oats and the Evil, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's the worst thing you can do. Like I'm
Speaker 1: a kid, let's go with that. Yeah, let's fucking go
Speaker 1: with that. Um. Now, we're gonna have to cover a
Speaker 1: lot of other backstory in the United States before we
Speaker 1: actually get to the Satanic Panic because the reason that
Speaker 1: the Satanic Panic was able to get so bad, and
Speaker 1: the reason that like, like one of the things you
Speaker 1: have with the Satanic Panic is you have all of
Speaker 1: these like lurid stories of devil worship and these kids
Speaker 1: testifying that they've been raped because they've had false memories
Speaker 1: and planted in them and stuff, and all of that
Speaker 1: was only possible because of a shipload of things that
Speaker 1: happened in the United States that made it the perfect
Speaker 1: soil for something like this. So we're gonna explain kind
Speaker 1: of all of different things that made it possible. First.
Speaker 1: So one factor in the Satanic Panic being a thing
Speaker 1: that could happen was the fact that starting with our
Speaker 1: old buddy l Ron Hubbard in the nineteen fifties, colts
Speaker 1: started to get super mainstream in the United States in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties and seventies um and one of the
Speaker 1: ones that like got the most public perception was the
Speaker 1: Manson Colt, which carried out a string of grizzly murders
Speaker 1: in August of nineteen sixty nine. The most famous Manson
Speaker 1: killing was the murder of Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, and
Speaker 1: several other less famous people. I think they killed five
Speaker 1: people at once in this like big compound that was
Speaker 1: like Roman Polanski's house, but he was out at the time.
Speaker 1: And these murders were incredibly grizzly, and they had elements
Speaker 1: that police at the time described as ritualistic. I don't
Speaker 1: know that they actually were ritualistic murders, but it was
Speaker 1: described as ritualistic murders. So you have these cults. Is
Speaker 1: that great book Chaos O'Neill, and it just dispels all
Speaker 1: of that, like it was just again they just rolled
Speaker 1: with it exactly. Yeah, yeah, and it is bullshit, but
Speaker 1: people at the time believe it. So you've got suddenly
Speaker 1: number one, cults are all to the place, um. And
Speaker 1: then you've got this cult murdering people. And then in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies you get the Zodiac Killer and the
Speaker 1: Son of Sam and the Alphabet Killer, and all of
Speaker 1: these were mass murderers whose slayings had like weird ritualistic
Speaker 1: and occult seeming overtones to them. So people start to
Speaker 1: like get like really convinced that that this is a
Speaker 1: thing that actually happens, right that like, and they have
Speaker 1: some you know, if you are a person who reads
Speaker 1: the news in this period, you've got what you think
Speaker 1: is solid evidence that this is a problem, that there's
Speaker 1: ritualistic cults out there murdering people for a cult you know, purposes. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies also happened to be the decade where
Speaker 1: Satanism went I don't know, mainstream is probably saying too much,
Speaker 1: but it became like it became like an organized thing, right.
Speaker 1: Anton the Vey publishes the Satanic Bible in nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: which became the central text for the Church of Satan,
Speaker 1: which probably had its heyday in the nineteen seventies. Now,
Speaker 1: the reality is that the Satanic Bible was both largely
Speaker 1: plagiarized and more or less just a self help book
Speaker 1: with an g rapping to it. This did not stop
Speaker 1: people who hadn't read it from flipping the funk out.
Speaker 1: So the Church of Satan, again fundamentally pretty peaceful thing,
Speaker 1: has maybe five thousand members in the US at its
Speaker 1: height during this period. But all of this ship happening,
Speaker 1: like you know, with the Mansons and with these ritual murders,
Speaker 1: and then all the ship that's happening in Hollywood in
Speaker 1: terms of like the movies that are coming up, kind
Speaker 1: of cooks it into the center of a conspiracy. So
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy three you have the best selling novel
Speaker 1: The Exorcist adapted into a film. We all know about
Speaker 1: the Exorcist, big part of it is demonic possession. Um
Speaker 1: And in order to improve ticket sales, its producers claim
Speaker 1: that it was based on a true story, which was
Speaker 1: a lie. Um. They were like, some elements were taken
Speaker 1: all out of a story of an actual priest who
Speaker 1: had an x an exorcism, but like it had bore
Speaker 1: no resemblance to anything that happened in the book. Priest. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: priests once existed and he was a little off. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Demonic possession hadn't been a massive topic in American culture
Speaker 1: in this period, um, but after the Exorcist, it becomes
Speaker 1: like a huge topic of discussion. For one thing, there's
Speaker 1: hundreds of like movies that come out that are based
Speaker 1: on like similar premises, right. The thing that all that
Speaker 1: that like little bitty shitty b movie producers always do
Speaker 1: like they rip off the big popular movie. Um. And
Speaker 1: for most Americans, obviously, this just meant that we got
Speaker 1: a bunch of fun horror movies that involved demonic possession.
Speaker 1: But among the nascent Christian right, which in this period
Speaker 1: was starting to form into a political block for the
Speaker 1: first time in the United States, the Exorcist was seen
Speaker 1: as a deadly warning. This was helped along by a
Speaker 1: new species of evangelical Christian grifter themselves inspired by the
Speaker 1: Church of Satan, the fake former Satanist. So you start
Speaker 1: having former former Satanists kind of like these former Catholic
Speaker 1: nuns popping up in this period and lecturing about things
Speaker 1: they had supposedly done. Now, the most prominent of these
Speaker 1: guys was Mike Warnkey, who published his book Satan Seller
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy two. Uh Satan Seller recounted a childhood
Speaker 1: and young adulthood that Warnkey claimed had been spent like
Speaker 1: as a a hardcore devil worshiper. He claimed that he'd
Speaker 1: been a Satanic high priest and that he'd been involved
Speaker 1: in ritualistic sex orgies. He went into detail about ritual murders,
Speaker 1: child murder, and mass rape, claiming that he'd participated in
Speaker 1: a variety of capital offenses until Jesus saved him by
Speaker 1: sending him to Vietnam. Um that's what he Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: horrible guy. Yeah, there were a lot of Satanists back
Speaker 1: in the sixties and seventies. We had to get him
Speaker 1: all off phenomen to clear that ship out. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty wild because all of these guys like Warren
Speaker 1: Key would like they would all claim to have taken
Speaker 1: part in like serious crimes that never got investigated. So
Speaker 1: you'd think people would be like you said you murdered
Speaker 1: a bunch of babies, Like, oh, like, yeah, he's just
Speaker 1: admitted it in right, Yeah, it's it's it's just absolutely
Speaker 1: it does. And Warren Key, Mike Warrenkey is kind of
Speaker 1: the biggest person, like who starts this avalanche, and he's
Speaker 1: within the bubble of Christian media, which was a lot
Speaker 1: smaller back then. He was a huge celebrity and he
Speaker 1: actually cracked over in the mainstream to an extent. He
Speaker 1: showed up on Oprah, on Larry King and telling lurid
Speaker 1: stories about his supposed past as a devil worshiper. He
Speaker 1: also used his past as a Satanist to launch a
Speaker 1: career as a Christian stand up comedian. Yeah it's story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very funny now. For reasons I will never be
Speaker 1: able to explain, Warren Ca saw massive success hybridizing his
Speaker 1: stand up routine with his claims about child like sex
Speaker 1: abuse and satanism um, which led to some really baffling
Speaker 1: recordings like the one I'm About to play you from
Speaker 1: his nineteen eighty nine stand up routine, Do you hear
Speaker 1: me in it? He starts with incredibly lame jokes, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna play you a selection of his jokes just
Speaker 1: so you can get an idea of what the tenner
Speaker 1: of his stand up act is. Like, told me this
Speaker 1: is gonna be a Christian playing and I tell you
Speaker 1: right now that bow up our own stage. He is
Speaker 1: not a Christian because he's got that long hair. Why
Speaker 1: do people drive on parkways and park on driveways? What
Speaker 1: is daylight savings time? And if we're saving so much
Speaker 1: of it, who's got it all? How do you know
Speaker 1: when yogurt's gone bad? How do you get tehlone to
Speaker 1: stick to a skillet when nothing sticks? To tell I'm
Speaker 1: not hearing you laugh, Jake. Do you not enjoy his comedy?
Speaker 1: I mean, you know when you're Christmas you get like
Speaker 1: a joke in the crack up like it's that it's
Speaker 1: that level of like sun Cracker jokes into like stand up.
Speaker 1: He looks like he just I don't know, man, he
Speaker 1: looks actually kind of like the devil worshiper from like
Speaker 1: Three Detectives. You know, does he does look like a
Speaker 1: Satan's right, like like like a movie satan it's not
Speaker 1: a no offense to the actual Satanists in the audience.
Speaker 1: He would cast him as one, right, Yeah, like this
Speaker 1: guy looks evil, yeah, and he definitely so. Like You've
Speaker 1: got those jokes, which are like the most milk toast
Speaker 1: nonsense that you could possibly put in a stand up routine,
Speaker 1: And then in the middle of them, he starts talking
Speaker 1: about deadly serious anecdotes about ritual genital mutilation and sacrifice.
Speaker 1: And again this is in the middle of a stand
Speaker 1: up set to a bunch of kids. Christian kids are
Speaker 1: Christian kids and their families. I'm talking about a little
Speaker 1: girl who was murdered last year in the state of
Speaker 1: Louisiana by having her sexual organs cut out while she
Speaker 1: was still A lot a lot of you think that
Speaker 1: when a Satanist kills, they do so because they want
Speaker 1: to spill blood. You've seen enough late night movies to
Speaker 1: think that. But if a Satanist or any other kind
Speaker 1: of occultist kills an animal or a human sacrifice, it's
Speaker 1: not to spill blood. It's to release the life force.
Speaker 1: Because when the life force is released and you've done
Speaker 1: the right incantations and rituals. You can absorb that force,
Speaker 1: they say, and it makes you a stronger wizard, warlock
Speaker 1: or whatever. The death, more reorganizing the death, the more
Speaker 1: force is released. So they took this little girl and
Speaker 1: they killed her by cutting her sexual organs out while
Speaker 1: she was still alive. Yeah, okay, really wait to lighten
Speaker 1: the mood. So you know, I've done some stand up
Speaker 1: by a friends who did it. That's a definite choice
Speaker 1: in terms of how to end your set. Yeah. By
Speaker 1: the way he's saying, he's yeah, yeah, it's not it's
Speaker 1: complete nonsense. Why isn't he being investiga. I'm mean you
Speaker 1: listened to that though, and like the audience is deadly quiet.
Speaker 1: You have to assume they were all buying this ship.
Speaker 1: Like there seemed to be taking him very soon, and
Speaker 1: he was taken very seriously. Um, which is a problem
Speaker 1: because he was a preposterous liar. Actual journalists sat down
Speaker 1: with Warrenkey's family and friends to ask them about his claims,
Speaker 1: which included the fact that he lived in a witch's
Speaker 1: coven with fift other people, um, and that he'd been
Speaker 1: a horrible drug addict and all of his like family,
Speaker 1: everyone who knew him laughed at all of this, like,
Speaker 1: of course, like we fucking grew up with him. He's
Speaker 1: like he's he's just a nerd exactly. Uh. And there
Speaker 1: were a bunch of obvious holes in his story. For example,
Speaker 1: he claimed that Charles Manson had attended one of his
Speaker 1: deadly ritual sacrifice parties in nineteen sixty six. Unfortunately, the
Speaker 1: exact time that he claimed the party happened occurred during
Speaker 1: concurred occurred at the same time as one of manson
Speaker 1: stints in federal prison from a parole violation, so he
Speaker 1: could not have been there. There's actually a whole book
Speaker 1: that like was published proving beyond a shadow of a
Speaker 1: doubt that Warren Key was a liar. And in fairness,
Speaker 1: the journalists were too, Christian journalists who worked for like
Speaker 1: an evangelical news site, who were like, this guy is
Speaker 1: like fucking full of ship, clearly, and yeah, like you know,
Speaker 1: there's nothing wrong with Christians, is like even taking advantage
Speaker 1: of like, yeah, evangelical who you know exactly, He's he's
Speaker 1: grifting these people by staring at them. Like it's very
Speaker 1: horrible what he's doing. Not only is his comedy bad,
Speaker 1: but he's he's frightening people, and it's bad to frighten
Speaker 1: people for no reason. I would say, yeah, so unless
Speaker 1: it's funny, unless it's funny, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: funny that Yeah, he's absolutely not. Yeah. Um but yeah.
Speaker 1: The fact that Warrenkey was like he had a private
Speaker 1: jet at one point, like he's he was at least
Speaker 1: he claimed he had a private jet. I don't know,
Speaker 1: but he was very popular like it, and he was
Speaker 1: a huge deal for a while. Um. Now, right around
Speaker 1: the same time Warnkey was starting to preach about ritual
Speaker 1: satanic murder, which is again in the midst of all
Speaker 1: these cults and zodiac killers and ship something else was
Speaker 1: happening in Americans, I d people were starting to accept
Speaker 1: that child sexual abuse was a thing and was a
Speaker 1: major problem, which is a good thing, right obviously, and
Speaker 1: for a long time, like people, you know, it is
Speaker 1: one of those things when you go back in time
Speaker 1: like they were. It was kind of people really didn't
Speaker 1: give as much of a ship about kids as you
Speaker 1: might expect back in the day. It was the same
Speaker 1: in the UK, yeah, absolutely, people like, oh, we used
Speaker 1: just let our kids out and play anytime you could
Speaker 1: do that back then, like as if poptos didn't exist.
Speaker 1: Yeah it was. It wasn't like ignoring kids yeah back
Speaker 1: then either. But yeah, they people start to accept that
Speaker 1: it's a thing, and there starts to be like an
Speaker 1: industry starts to build up with people who are our
Speaker 1: child protection advocates, which again is a good thing, but
Speaker 1: aspects of it go terribly wrong. Um yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: really messed up. Because getting people to accept that child
Speaker 1: sexual abuse was a problem was one of the first victories,
Speaker 1: major victories of the modern feminist movement, right, not talking
Speaker 1: about like the suffragets, but like people like Glorious Steinam
Speaker 1: and stuff like like like so it is like and
Speaker 1: this is like a really big victory that they that
Speaker 1: they getting people to take this seriously. And initially their
Speaker 1: understanding and the understanding of most people was that most
Speaker 1: abuse victims were young girls, primarily daughters, who were violated
Speaker 1: by incestuous fathers. Um. And it's it is absolutely true
Speaker 1: that most kids who are molested are molested by a
Speaker 1: close family member that or afraid of the family. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: as a result, the problem of child sexual abuse was
Speaker 1: generally referred to as a problem with incest during this period,
Speaker 1: So you'll see a lot of people talking about incest,
Speaker 1: and they're not talking like when we talk about incest today,
Speaker 1: it generally means something different. They're talking about child sexual
Speaker 1: abuse as a rule when they talk about incest in
Speaker 1: this period. So, feminists argued that the solution to this
Speaker 1: was greater gender equality, which would enable girls to more
Speaker 1: effectively say no to the demands of their abuse of
Speaker 1: male relatives, and it would allow wives to stand up
Speaker 1: to their husbands. And they also argued that part I
Speaker 1: don't think is accurate, But they also argued that it
Speaker 1: would give mothers the option of taking their kids out
Speaker 1: of the house because they'd be able to have a
Speaker 1: job at a checking account. And that part actually does
Speaker 1: seem like a realistic remedy. So again, yeah, right, like,
Speaker 1: there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, um, it does make sense.
Speaker 1: It's a good thing to do. But like everything that
Speaker 1: people do, there were problematic and and faulty aspects of it,
Speaker 1: including the fact how people began to sort of look
Speaker 1: at the problem of the men who were doing the molesting.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote again from Satan's Silence here, these
Speaker 1: feminist visions were obscured however, by an inTransition by an
Speaker 1: intransigent society, White insistence that the problem lay merely in
Speaker 1: the minds of a few troubled men. Accordingly, the cure
Speaker 1: for sex abuse was psychotherapy coupled with family counseling. And
Speaker 1: if treatment was all that was necessary, sex abuse was
Speaker 1: not so much a crime as an illness. Hence, rather
Speaker 1: than calling for careful and partial investigation by the police,
Speaker 1: accusations demanded intervention by psychotherapists prepared to take the side
Speaker 1: of the grief daughter and to heal the perpetrator, even
Speaker 1: if he insisted the charges were false. Um, so again
Speaker 1: this we'll talk about some of the problems that the causes.
Speaker 1: Obviously good that it's being taken seriously, but also yeah,
Speaker 1: well we'll cover the aspects of this that are problematic.
Speaker 1: So the first comprehensive legal remedy to the problem of
Speaker 1: child sex abuse was Walter Mondale's nineteen seventy three Child
Speaker 1: Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act or CAPTA and captives set
Speaker 1: aside money to reach research child abuse for the first time,
Speaker 1: which is great, definitely a good thing researching like the
Speaker 1: causes of it. It also gave money to states, so
Speaker 1: they could set up treatment programs, which was more of
Speaker 1: a mixed bag because in order to get the Act
Speaker 1: through congressional Republicans and get it approved by President Nixon,
Speaker 1: Mondale had to water down some things. See the data
Speaker 1: suggested that the most significant driving factor behind child abuse
Speaker 1: of any kind was poverty, but Republicans didn't want to
Speaker 1: hear that, so out the door it went. Corporal punishment
Speaker 1: was also understood to be a major part of child abuse,
Speaker 1: but talking about that was seen as undermining the authority
Speaker 1: of parents, so instead the Act focused on physical abuse
Speaker 1: and the idea that abuse of parents were suffering from
Speaker 1: a psychological illness, one that could strike any parent and
Speaker 1: one that could be cured quote. By the time Senate
Speaker 1: hearings for Captain convened, this medicalized interpretation of child abuse
Speaker 1: was so firmly established that experts like Brandeis University professor
Speaker 1: of social policy David Gill found it impossible to promote
Speaker 1: a different analysis to the politicians. After doing a groundbreaking
Speaker 1: national survey of child abuse in the nineteen sixties, Gil
Speaker 1: had concluded that neglected battering were intimately tied to poverty,
Speaker 1: and that the federal government's reluctance to correct social and
Speaker 1: economic inequality made Uncle Sam the country's worst child mistreator.
Speaker 1: But Mondale interrupted Gil and reminded the audience during the
Speaker 1: hearing that this is not a poverty problem. It is
Speaker 1: a national problem. So again, the biggest part of child
Speaker 1: abuse is not child molestation, it's neglect and physical abuse,
Speaker 1: which is primarily driven by poverty. But nobody wanted to
Speaker 1: hear that in Congress, so instead they just focused on
Speaker 1: child sexual abuse. Sorry, as I said, you know what
Speaker 1: that kind of like reminds me of, Like, so I've
Speaker 1: done research on all this kind of child abuse stuff,
Speaker 1: and it is true that there are there have been
Speaker 1: like communal child abusage, absolutely for sure. Yes, And then
Speaker 1: but then when they bring the devil in tweet, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: get the priest to sort it out, and it just
Speaker 1: completely flies out the window and it isn't taken seriously anymore.
Speaker 1: It's so annoying. Yeah, it's it's very frustrating. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that you see here too
Speaker 1: is people who have no experience in like investigating cases
Speaker 1: being assigned to these cases because they stopped being seen
Speaker 1: as a criminal problem. Um. Yeah, So Congress didn't like
Speaker 1: Professor Gill's testimony, but they really enjoyed the testimony of
Speaker 1: a woman named Maureen Litvin, a southern California mom who
Speaker 1: went by the pseudonym Jolly Kay. Now Jolly told a
Speaker 1: heartbreaking story about how she'd been abused as a child
Speaker 1: and how this abuse had led her to abuse her
Speaker 1: own kids. She testified. She testified that she had once
Speaker 1: tried to strangle her daughter and had thrown a knife
Speaker 1: at her daughter on another occasion. Now Jolly k described
Speaker 1: her long process of seeking treatment until finally her therapist
Speaker 1: advisor to start a self help group, which she eventually
Speaker 1: called Parents Anonymous. Now, a group like this being sort
Speaker 1: of touted as a cure for child abuse was a
Speaker 1: dream come true for Congress because Parents Anonymous Number one
Speaker 1: put the responsibility on abuse of parents themselves for fixing
Speaker 1: the problem, and it costs basically nothing to support as
Speaker 1: opposed to alleviating poverty. Right, That's exactly right, Yeah, pan
Speaker 1: on Um, So Congress did give federal support to Parents Anonymous,
Speaker 1: but it was a hell of a lot cheaper than
Speaker 1: like fixing the broken social safety net or raising the
Speaker 1: minimum wage or any of the other things that might
Speaker 1: have actually done a real like significant help. Uh. Not
Speaker 1: that it's a bad idea to have support groups for
Speaker 1: parents like this, but I would say that that shouldn't
Speaker 1: be your first priority when parents are throwing knives at kits,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, yeah, So Captor was enacted in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four, and among other things, that made therapists, teachers
Speaker 1: and school administrators mandatory reporters. I don't know what you
Speaker 1: have if you have this in the UK, but basically,
Speaker 1: if you're a mandatory reporter and someone discloses child abuse
Speaker 1: to you, you have to report it to the authority,
Speaker 1: which is again a thing that makes sense on paper
Speaker 1: and sometimes is a good thing, but also is sometimes
Speaker 1: a bad thing because the police often do a very
Speaker 1: bad job of handling these cases, and it makes the
Speaker 1: kid not trust whatever authority figure they'd confided in about
Speaker 1: the abuse in the first place. Like it's a very
Speaker 1: mixed bag, you could say, um, But the first thing
Speaker 1: that happened when they you know, Captive gets past is
Speaker 1: it leads to a massive search and reported child abuse.
Speaker 1: Suddenly it goes from something that like very rarely got
Speaker 1: reported to something that fucking all over the place which
Speaker 1: is because child abuse was all over the place, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's not a bad thing that suddenly people are like, oh, ship,
Speaker 1: a ton of people are abusing and molesting their kids.
Speaker 1: But this led to a massive problem for federal and
Speaker 1: state governments because an awful lot of working men were
Speaker 1: revealed to be abusive to their children. Locking these guys
Speaker 1: up would force the state to pay for their care,
Speaker 1: and it would remove like tax money from the state,
Speaker 1: and it would force them to like pay in welfare
Speaker 1: to support the family. This was unacceptable. Thankfully, self help,
Speaker 1: the self help therapy group models solved this problem because
Speaker 1: instead of going to jail, abusive fathers were sentenced to therapy,
Speaker 1: which their families were often mandated to attend with them,
Speaker 1: including the children they've been fucking or hitting, like the
Speaker 1: way to like destroy the victim even more, right, like
Speaker 1: like you couldn't come up with a better way of
Speaker 1: doing it. How horrible, it's so fucked up, um, And
Speaker 1: it's yeah, it's it's it's yeah. This is not to
Speaker 1: say that the situation for abused children was better prior
Speaker 1: to this, because like for girls, and it was nearly
Speaker 1: always girls who reported abuse back in the early nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: the standard procedure before captive would be to make a
Speaker 1: report to the police, who would then force you to
Speaker 1: undergo an invasive genital exam, and then the cops would
Speaker 1: usually do a follow up interview which they would they
Speaker 1: would like, show up at your school to interrogate you
Speaker 1: and ship um and you'd be sent to a foster
Speaker 1: home or a juvenile home, while your abusive dad stayed
Speaker 1: with the rest of your family so that he could
Speaker 1: threaten them into getting their stories straight, and the charges
Speaker 1: against him would inevitably hit the local news, which means
Speaker 1: he would lose his job, which with the family would
Speaker 1: fall in the It was just a whole fucking it's
Speaker 1: always been bad, right Like when criticizing captain, I don't
Speaker 1: want to pretend that like it was good before, because yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's it's like putting salt in the wound a
Speaker 1: little bit more, you know what I mean. It's like
Speaker 1: trying to bail out the ship with the thimble exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: So the self help therapy group option allowed police to
Speaker 1: keep these kind of cases quiet, which saved on embarrassment
Speaker 1: for everybody. It also allowed the fathers to stay employed
Speaker 1: and it avoided breaking up the family, which religious right
Speaker 1: wingers considered to be as much of a priority as
Speaker 1: treating battered kids. Jake, do you like weddings? Have you
Speaker 1: ever been at a wedding and been like, boy, I
Speaker 1: wish I could find a way to get several dozen
Speaker 1: grams of hexogen explosives delivered to this wedding, but I
Speaker 1: just don't have a missile guidance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: Well the good people at Raytheon can help you out
Speaker 1: with that, Jake, because the missile guidance chips they make
Speaker 1: are guaranteed to hit weddings, school buses, mostly those two targets. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, no, no, it does help if you're in Yemen.
Speaker 1: Raytheon big presence and all right, here's the the actual ads.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, we're back. We're talking about bettered kids.
Speaker 1: Kind of deflated a little there. So the self help
Speaker 1: therapy group option was was considered great by everybody but
Speaker 1: the actual kids who were being abused. Um And oddly enough,
Speaker 1: one of the things that's weird about it in this
Speaker 1: period is that both kind of like a lot of
Speaker 1: left wing folks and feminists and the religious right kind
Speaker 1: of all get on board this idea for very different reasons. Right,
Speaker 1: the religious right likes keeping the family together, um, and
Speaker 1: it likes you know, they want to avoid divorces and
Speaker 1: and what and whatnot at all costs. Feminists like it
Speaker 1: because all of these groups do involve these men talking
Speaker 1: about like they're like the things that the horrible things
Speaker 1: that they've done, like they're horrible sexual fantasies and stuff,
Speaker 1: which was seen as like a use whole thing at
Speaker 1: the time, right, like there, So it is this weird
Speaker 1: kind of situation. And there's also you can find some
Speaker 1: writings from some people who are like advocate like child
Speaker 1: defense advocates and very left wing at the time, who
Speaker 1: also like that kind of the confessional nature of these
Speaker 1: things mirrors like what you see in certain like left
Speaker 1: wing political movements, the self criticism sessions. So it's weird
Speaker 1: you get all these different like like, all these groups
Speaker 1: who should who normally are at each other's throats all
Speaker 1: get on board of a very bad idea for wildly
Speaker 1: different reasons. Yeah, a very different tech mil you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah exactly, Yeah, a very different one. Yeah, it's bizarre. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a really strange period to study So if you're
Speaker 1: starting to say, boy, it seems like all these new
Speaker 1: programs prioritize the feelings and security of male abusers over
Speaker 1: their female child victims, you would be right. Uh. And
Speaker 1: the growing field of child protection was rife with misogyny.
Speaker 1: The best example would be Dr Roland Summit, who was
Speaker 1: a massive piece of ship. He went on to be
Speaker 1: a major Satanic ritual abuse expert, and obviously everything he
Speaker 1: ever said about Satanic ritual abuse was nonsense. But before
Speaker 1: that he was an incest expert, and in his expert opinion,
Speaker 1: child sexual abuse by fathers was largely the fault of
Speaker 1: their wives. So this guy, who was again one of
Speaker 1: the most prominent doctors in the field and this time
Speaker 1: describes the behavior of child molesters as family romance. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: did you have any siblings? He had some daughters that
Speaker 1: you have to worry for them. Um. He believed that
Speaker 1: fathers who molested their daughters would never molest a stranger's daughter,
Speaker 1: which obviously is wildly untrue. In his argument was that
Speaker 1: the attraction of these fathers was purely two in his words,
Speaker 1: the delicious little creatures that the father had helped to create.
Speaker 1: So somem It felt that basically all men considered their
Speaker 1: daughters to be delicious, and that the impulse to commit
Speaker 1: incest was nearly universal from middle aged men who were
Speaker 1: anxious about the end of their own youth men and
Speaker 1: healthy man projecting a little bit. Yeah yeah, So since
Speaker 1: all men clearly want to suck their daughters, the only
Speaker 1: reason that most men don't is because they have healthy
Speaker 1: marriages that let them deal with their horny nous by
Speaker 1: fucking their wives. So when incest happens, it's the fault
Speaker 1: of the abuser's wife who was quote absorbing herself in
Speaker 1: a job rather than fucking her husband hard enough to
Speaker 1: stop him from raping their daughter. She's it's the right
Speaker 1: wing like defense. It's like outrageously fucked up. And he
Speaker 1: said this officially, like yeah, yeah, he was very open
Speaker 1: about this, and no one went, hang on, like, this
Speaker 1: guy is up to something. I would argue the right
Speaker 1: response when someone tells you that is to just start
Speaker 1: hitting them and not stop. Just just immediately started punching,
Speaker 1: but no one did. Instead, he was taken seriously. So
Speaker 1: these beliefs were unfortunately quite common, and one of the
Speaker 1: most popular abuse treatment programs at the time was called
Speaker 1: Child Sex Abuse Treatment Program or c sat UP, SAT UP,
Speaker 1: CASSETTAP s A C C S A T P. I
Speaker 1: don't know how to acronymic CASSATTAP, so you did not
Speaker 1: do great. Cassett UP first launched in the Bay Area,
Speaker 1: and it was geared towards preserving nuclear families. That because
Speaker 1: basically what happened is in the Bay Area because of
Speaker 1: a number of things, including affluence, it's one of the
Speaker 1: first areas that starts getting like really good reporting about
Speaker 1: child sexual abuse. And it turns out that a bunch
Speaker 1: of fucking dudes in the Bay Area we're raping their
Speaker 1: kids um, which created a problem because these guides were
Speaker 1: pretty high income. So again, the state doesn't want to
Speaker 1: lose tax money, doesn't want their parents to go on
Speaker 1: the doll or their their families to go on the
Speaker 1: doll um. So c sat UP was geared towards preserving
Speaker 1: nuclear families, and it taught that the of sexual abuse
Speaker 1: of children was a dysfunctional marriage. Part of the repair
Speaker 1: work mandated by the therapy involved the mother apologizing to
Speaker 1: her daughter for her husband's sexual abuse and saying you
Speaker 1: are not to blame daddy and I did not have
Speaker 1: a good marriage. That is why Daddy turned to you. Wow,
Speaker 1: it's just unbelievable, unbelievable. That's like, I can't believe that
Speaker 1: when the Yeah, this is the fucking like the late seventies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you, you know what I mean? Like, no, no, really,
Speaker 1: fucking pretty recently. Um, we'll probably get at least one
Speaker 1: person who as a kid like went through Sea sat
Speaker 1: up and stuff with their family. In the comments in
Speaker 1: this episode from I wouldn't be surprised. Um, it's it's
Speaker 1: so fucked um, it's so fucking wild. So, starting in
Speaker 1: San Jose, se sat up was increasingly mandated for father's
Speaker 1: accused of sexual abuse. Courts often made fathers what became
Speaker 1: known as the god fought their offer because it was
Speaker 1: an offer they couldn't refuse. So you get caught, you
Speaker 1: go to therapy, take probation, and avoid jail. Almost overnight,
Speaker 1: the confession rate among accused child molesters went from very
Speaker 1: low to nine And again, I don't wanna. This is
Speaker 1: a really flawed system. So we're going to cover all
Speaker 1: the ship that's bad. It's also the aspects of it
Speaker 1: were good because most of these guys at this point,
Speaker 1: very few sexual abuse allegations made by children against parents
Speaker 1: were false, right, So the vast majority of these guys,
Speaker 1: you have to assume some innocent people took the basically
Speaker 1: the equivalent of a police bargain just because they didn't
Speaker 1: want to go to trial. But the vast majority of
Speaker 1: these guys were guilty, and at least something happened um
Speaker 1: but c sat up led to a number of very
Speaker 1: unsettling changes in the way these problems were dealt with.
Speaker 1: For one thing, police shifted away from interviewing the child
Speaker 1: in these cases and instead started talking to their teachers,
Speaker 1: their mother, and other adults who knew the kid. And
Speaker 1: these second hand accounts of people who knew the child
Speaker 1: were considered to have the same legal weight as if
Speaker 1: they'd come directly from the child. This is problematic for
Speaker 1: a number of reasons. I think that as a journalist
Speaker 1: we want to stand right, yeah, a little bit, yeah,
Speaker 1: And it feeds into the satanic panic stuff we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about later. When the child was eventually questioned, the
Speaker 1: work was done by a social worker rather than a detective.
Speaker 1: And this may not sound like a problem because, like,
Speaker 1: if you have a social worker who specifically trained for
Speaker 1: this ship. That sounds good because cops are not great
Speaker 1: at talking to kids all the time, right, right, But
Speaker 1: there was a crime committed, right, So it's like you
Speaker 1: need more than the social worker, right like us, one
Speaker 1: would say. And also the social workers were not well
Speaker 1: trained to do this. They were well trained on how
Speaker 1: to interrogate someone without asking leading questions, right, Police are
Speaker 1: at least in theory, taught not to do that. Like,
Speaker 1: obviously that's a problematical yeah, But theoretically, a detective who's
Speaker 1: questioning a child is number one, not supposed to assume
Speaker 1: the allegations are true. They're not supposed to ask the
Speaker 1: leading questions. They're just supposed to try to have the
Speaker 1: kid talk about what happened, and the accused enjoys the
Speaker 1: presumption of innocence. And the social workers questioning these kids
Speaker 1: weren't trained that way. They were trained to believe that
Speaker 1: it's always the case that like this is this is
Speaker 1: this per and is guilty, which is a problem for
Speaker 1: the person interrogating the kid in this situation because they
Speaker 1: tended to push the child to talk about like things
Speaker 1: that the child might not otherwise have talked about. Now, again,
Speaker 1: not a huge problem at the time because virtually all
Speaker 1: of these allegations of child sexual abuse were true. But
Speaker 1: when the Satanic panic came about, the allegations were false,
Speaker 1: and the social workers still did the same thing. They
Speaker 1: pushed kids. Yeah, you're seeing all of this infrastruction their
Speaker 1: own thing against them. So yeah, forward right exactly, Like
Speaker 1: so you're seeing all this kind of infrastructure that created
Speaker 1: that allows this to happen later. So, by nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 1: c sat UP had become so popular that the entire
Speaker 1: state of California adopted as the standard. Our friend. Dr
Speaker 1: Summit attended c sat UP training and was so taken
Speaker 1: by it but that he wrote a manifesto titled the
Speaker 1: Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome. In it, among other things,
Speaker 1: he pushed the idea that children never fabricate the kinds
Speaker 1: of explicit sexual manipulations they'd divulge in complaints or interrogations.
Speaker 1: As a result, they should always be believed, even if
Speaker 1: their story included fantastic, wild details that seemed impossible. Again,
Speaker 1: like you're seeing the groundwork get laid here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: By nineteen eighty, child sexual abuse was no longer a
Speaker 1: dark national secret. It was a topic widely discussed by
Speaker 1: Americans and featured in the media, and I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: again from Satan's Silence. Thanks to an alliance among feminists, therapists,
Speaker 1: and law enforcement officials, it was becoming possible for daughters
Speaker 1: to disclose their victimization and for fathers to admit their guilt,
Speaker 1: and national media from The New York Times to Playboy,
Speaker 1: The and Landers Encyclopedia and Donna Hue testimonials abounded from
Speaker 1: repentant fathers, newly asserted wives and girls regaining their dignity.
Speaker 1: Yet later research would reveal that many incest defenders also
Speaker 1: rebeless children outside their families, and they rape grown women
Speaker 1: as well. Further, there is evidence that, regardless of what
Speaker 1: kind of treatment, sex abusers get, as many as one
Speaker 1: in seven goes on to offend again. Ironically, then politicians
Speaker 1: and child protectionists further to keep fathers in families left
Speaker 1: many youngsters and women at risk of further abuse, and
Speaker 1: by pushing godfather off for confessions, the therapy attle of
Speaker 1: sex abuse intervention replaced skilled forensics personnel with social workers
Speaker 1: and others who knew nothing about how to test the
Speaker 1: validity of criminal sex abuse charges. And who unstintingly believe
Speaker 1: them all. So by nineteen eighty, all of the infrastructure
Speaker 1: we're going to need to let a satanic panic happen
Speaker 1: and had to have the legal system in Like, further,
Speaker 1: it is in place, right, didn't just come out of
Speaker 1: nowhere built on without them, I guess, without trying to
Speaker 1: do that. But like I can see what you're saying,
Speaker 1: like it just became the perfect ground for it, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And obviously like fun dr summit, But the vast majority
Speaker 1: of the people involved in the setting this system up
Speaker 1: are people whose motivations are the purest it could possibly be.
Speaker 1: They want to protect kids right there trying it's a problem,
Speaker 1: but it's a new way to tackle it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And again probably up to this point the system still
Speaker 1: does more harm than good because it was it replaced
Speaker 1: basically nothing, right um, But it's about to stop being
Speaker 1: a system that does more good than harm, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's that's about to change. So there's some more background
Speaker 1: we have to lay. In nineteen seventy nine, Jerry Fallwell
Speaker 1: and some other assholes founded the Moral Majority, which was
Speaker 1: the first large scale Christian right wing political organization. This
Speaker 1: is the first time that the Christian right is like
Speaker 1: a block in politics and it has been ever since.
Speaker 1: The Moral Majority was initially formed due to an opposition
Speaker 1: to Rove Wade and to force an opposition to force
Speaker 1: integration of Christian schools. They didn't want black people to
Speaker 1: be able to go to Christian colleges. That was a
Speaker 1: big part of the Christian of the very Christian of them,
Speaker 1: extremely love the neighbor, and it was Jerry, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: very surprising stuff, um so, and like yeah, there's there
Speaker 1: were other a lot of other people obviously, but yeah,
Speaker 1: the Moral Majority was fueled also by a sense of deep,
Speaker 1: deep anxiety because women are starting to work at this point,
Speaker 1: like full time, Like it's becoming a very major thing.
Speaker 1: One of the things I didn't realize until I was
Speaker 1: doing this research actually is that during this period, from
Speaker 1: like the seventies to the eighties, women it becomes the
Speaker 1: norm for women to work, but the average income of
Speaker 1: households doesn't really raise because like this is also at
Speaker 1: the time that workers protections and right are collapsing, and
Speaker 1: like Reaganomics starts to take over in the eighties, so
Speaker 1: like more people like you would think that having two
Speaker 1: incomes in a household would increase the amount of any
Speaker 1: like disposable income people have, but it really didn't. And
Speaker 1: again yeah, yeah, great countries. So in nineteen eight, a
Speaker 1: psychologist named named Lawrence Pastor published a book about his
Speaker 1: wife and former patient, Michelle Smith, which you know, if
Speaker 1: your wife is a former patient as a therapist, you
Speaker 1: might not be a great therapist. So her memoir, Michelle Remembers,
Speaker 1: detailed a childhood of horrific a cult sex abuse. Pastor
Speaker 1: claimed to have used hypnotic regression therapy to help his
Speaker 1: wife uncover buried memories of abuse at the hands of
Speaker 1: the Church of Satan. Pastor also claimed, with no evidence
Speaker 1: that Anton LaVey's church wasn't the real Church of Satan
Speaker 1: and the one that molested his patient wife had existed
Speaker 1: for centuries. So and Michelle Remembers is basically so. The
Speaker 1: claim she's making is that she became the victim of
Speaker 1: a Satanic cult for several months during nineteen fifty five,
Speaker 1: when she was a five year old, she was imprisoned
Speaker 1: by them. She she like, had all these recollections being
Speaker 1: tortured in houses and mausoleums and seminitaries, of being raped
Speaker 1: and sodomized with candles and being forced to shoot on
Speaker 1: a bible. Uh, and on a crucifix, of seeing babies
Speaker 1: and adults murdered. It's awesome because you know that two
Speaker 1: Christians of the day like her being like, I help,
Speaker 1: I watched babies get murdered was the same as like
Speaker 1: and I pooped on a Bible. Like both equally bad
Speaker 1: devil things like the guy like with their memories like
Speaker 1: a little bit more a little bit more offensive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she also had memories of having a devil's tail and
Speaker 1: horns surgically attached to her um. Yeah, she there. She
Speaker 1: had memories of a cult attempt to kill a child
Speaker 1: and make it look like an accident by placing her
Speaker 1: in a car with a corpse um and then crashing
Speaker 1: the vehicle. And this is said to we have gone
Speaker 1: on for close to a year until her faith, the
Speaker 1: fact that she was so Christian made the Satanists give
Speaker 1: up because they just couldn't couldn't turn her. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then she him that she forgot the experience for twenty
Speaker 1: years until she entered therapy with Dr Pastor, who then
Speaker 1: became her husband. Now this was all lies. I feel
Speaker 1: like the therapy he was like weak, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you remember, we can sell a book. And I
Speaker 1: don't know, there's a There's been a lot of writing
Speaker 1: on this too. I haven't done enough research to know
Speaker 1: how you know the con Michelle was, but I'm almost
Speaker 1: certain her her husband was in on the con or
Speaker 1: it was a con on his behalf. Incredible. People debunked
Speaker 1: the book immediately. For one thing, there's a picture of
Speaker 1: Michelle in her grade school yearbook that was taken during
Speaker 1: one of the months when she was supposed to be
Speaker 1: hidden like locked in a house by Satanists, which you know,
Speaker 1: all of her names and family members who knew her
Speaker 1: during this period basically say like, nothing out of the
Speaker 1: ordinary happened during her childhood. Uh, certainly nothing satanic ritual molesti.
Speaker 1: The only abuse that Michelle endured, for certain was at
Speaker 1: the hands of her therapist husband. The whole idea of
Speaker 1: repressed memories, which now we got, we're laying a lot
Speaker 1: of groundwork here, so let's talk about the fucking idea
Speaker 1: of repressed memories comes from. It goes back to the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds when early psychologists decided that hysteria, which is
Speaker 1: what they called women having emotions in those days came
Speaker 1: from someone suffering a childhood trauma that was so terrible
Speaker 1: that they developed amnesia to dissociate from the event. And
Speaker 1: this is a mix of because like Freud is involved
Speaker 1: in this and it's not all bullshit. Dissociation is a
Speaker 1: thing that happens when you under begin with PTSD, right,
Speaker 1: Like we've all dealt with it, Like it's a fucking thing,
Speaker 1: But it doesn't involve forgetting the horrible thing that happened, right,
Speaker 1: Memories become blurry. Yeah, yeah, I don't know, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't sound very real. Yeah. Yeah, Like I definitely have
Speaker 1: had memories like that, like periods I don't remember during
Speaker 1: the the dealing with PTSD itself, but the actual trauma
Speaker 1: that caused it I remember pretty darn well. Uh. And
Speaker 1: the fact that I don't remember other things was probably
Speaker 1: because I was like drinking and abusing drugs massively. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there. Yeah, and you know you have to assume
Speaker 1: everyone was drunk in the eighteen hundreds too, and they
Speaker 1: were definitely on cocaine because that's how Freud did all
Speaker 1: of his psychotherapy, So yeah, that may have influenced the Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Freud decided that hysteria was inevitably caused by childhood's
Speaker 1: sexual violation, and he pressured his female patients to tell
Speaker 1: him detailed stories of their abuse. And again a lot
Speaker 1: of these were probably true, um, but also a lot
Speaker 1: of them weren't, and he convinced himself that these stories
Speaker 1: were hidden memories, at least for a while. He did
Speaker 1: eventually realize that a lot of the abuse stories his
Speaker 1: patients told him were like physically impossible because they were
Speaker 1: just like the outlandish fantasies um. And he kind of
Speaker 1: dropped this idea that child that like emotional issues like
Speaker 1: mental illness as an adult was inevitably caused by like
Speaker 1: some sort of sexual trauma as a child. He did
Speaker 1: kind of drop that idea. But in the late nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: therapists started reviving his old theories, and among an influential
Speaker 1: subset of the field, repressed memory therapy became the go
Speaker 1: to explanation for things like eating disorders and depression. Right like,
Speaker 1: you go to the psycho psychotherapist because you've got intorectually
Speaker 1: there or whatever, and he's starts trying to recover memories
Speaker 1: of you being raped as a kid, because you must
Speaker 1: have if you have intorectsia, right, it couldn't be caused
Speaker 1: by anything else. Um, and yeah, this was basically nonsense.
Speaker 1: And the problem about trying to recover implanted memories is
Speaker 1: that generally what actually happens is the therapist creates memories
Speaker 1: of things that never happened from a write up in
Speaker 1: the conversation. Now, experimental psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated with ease
Speaker 1: which false memories can be implanted in a sizeable proportion
Speaker 1: of the population under well controlled laboratory conditions, but it
Speaker 1: is undoubtedly the case that such false memories can arise
Speaker 1: spontaneously as well. In the context of psychotherapy, one of
Speaker 1: the techniques that has been shown to result in false
Speaker 1: memories is asking people to imagine events that never actually
Speaker 1: took place. It appears that eventually, and especially in people
Speaker 1: with good imaginations, the memory of the imagined event is
Speaker 1: misinterpreted as a memory for a real event. The use
Speaker 1: of hypnotic regression is a particularly powerful means to implant
Speaker 1: false memories. So this became before though, Like as a kid,
Speaker 1: there were things that I was certain was like what happened?
Speaker 1: And then I get old on I think that must
Speaker 1: have been a dream. Was like, no way it would have,
Speaker 1: especially as a child, Like there's all sorts you could
Speaker 1: get confused about, absolutely, and like a lot of this
Speaker 1: is like this is part of the problem. This is
Speaker 1: part of why. Also, if you look at like eyewitness
Speaker 1: testimony like generally sucks. Actually, like people are very bad
Speaker 1: at being eyewitnesses because our brains it all starts a
Speaker 1: wild ship. Yeah yeah, especially when there's like a traumatic experience,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, important exactly. That's why reporters take notes,
Speaker 1: and it's why you should never listen to anything anyone
Speaker 1: ever says. Just fucking put on headphones to block out
Speaker 1: all noise, fucking put on blinders so you can't see,
Speaker 1: and just stumble through the world and you will not
Speaker 1: believe anything untrue. You will probably bump into things a
Speaker 1: lot though. Yeah, yeah, yes, here's an ad for a product. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back, so yeah. Hypnotic regression and repressed memories mostly nonsense,
Speaker 1: basically all nonsense, but it was considered to be pretty
Speaker 1: settled science at the time, not by like an overwhelming
Speaker 1: number of scientists, but by cops and judges and TV
Speaker 1: hosts and the kinds of psychologists who are good at
Speaker 1: talking to cops and judges and TV hosts, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's the group of people to whom this has settled
Speaker 1: science for will actually incredible researchers like, there seem to
Speaker 1: be problems with this. Um. So, Michelle Remembers was a
Speaker 1: hugely influential book. Uh, it was treated as gospel by
Speaker 1: a terrible number of people, and it actually became a
Speaker 1: standard textbook for social workers in the United States. Um, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not good man. So Lawrence Pastor became a recognized
Speaker 1: legal expert, and Satanic ritual abuse, which exploded into the
Speaker 1: mainstream is a real problem thanks to his book. So
Speaker 1: what we have in nineteen eighty is a situation where
Speaker 1: evangelical Christian paranoia over the devil and the black arts
Speaker 1: leaps over and starts to infect mainstream society. This would
Speaker 1: come to have a terrible impact first on two families
Speaker 1: in Bakersfield, California. And now we're finally into the satanic panic.
Speaker 1: Ready excited? Yeah, yeah, I'm so excited. It's it's fucking awesome.
Speaker 1: So these two families are the mccuen's and the knife
Speaker 1: Ins or Niffins. Uh. And I'm gonna quote from a
Speaker 1: write up in Religious Tolerance dot Org that kind of
Speaker 1: goes over the basics of the case. The triggering incident
Speaker 1: occurred in nineteen eighty when Becky mccouhen disclosed that her
Speaker 1: grandfather Rod Phelps had touched her inappropriately. The family doctor
Speaker 1: confirmed the abuse, no charges were late. Becky's mother, Debbie mccuhen,
Speaker 1: arranged for her daughter to obtain counseling, but Debbie's stepmother,
Speaker 1: Mary Anne Barber, who is believed to have had a
Speaker 1: history of mental illness, felt that her stepdaughter granddaughters were
Speaker 1: not being sufficiently protected. She obtained the assistance of the
Speaker 1: Mothers of Baker's Field, a group concerned about child abuse.
Speaker 1: Jill had dad took particular interest in the case. She
Speaker 1: was the spokesperson for the group and had many relatives
Speaker 1: working for local police forces. Miss Barbara claimed that Alvin
Speaker 1: and Debbie mccuhen were not good parents and that Debbie's
Speaker 1: daycare license should be revoked. She asked the Social Services
Speaker 1: Department to make a surprise inspection. The social worker, Betty Palco,
Speaker 1: found no major infractions and took no action to revoke
Speaker 1: the license. So again, no actual evidence of serious child
Speaker 1: abuse here, although I will say that mcwan's weren't exactly
Speaker 1: ace parents, because later that year they did take their
Speaker 1: two daughters on a supervised visit to see their allegedly
Speaker 1: abuse abuse of grandfather, and this caused Marianne to have
Speaker 1: a psychotic episode which sent her to the psychiatric ward
Speaker 1: at a local hospital. She eventually succeeded in getting custody
Speaker 1: of the kids and convincing county officials to file child
Speaker 1: endangerment charges against the mccuen's, But because she was not
Speaker 1: at all well, Marianne took things a step further, and
Speaker 1: she had begun believing that the mccuhans were part of
Speaker 1: a massive, insidious, satanic sex ring in Kern County. As
Speaker 1: she told social workers, there's a group of people involved
Speaker 1: in molesting the girls. They're all in on it. So
Speaker 1: you have one in a case of actual abuse to
Speaker 1: some parents who probably are not being as careful as
Speaker 1: they need to be around, a guy who's dangerous and
Speaker 1: a woman who's maybe schizophrenic, definitely is mentally ill, and
Speaker 1: his hospitalized as a result. That who becomes convinced that,
Speaker 1: as opposed to a just a single act of of
Speaker 1: child molestation by one guy there's a massive conspiracy to
Speaker 1: molest all of the kids in town. Um And unfortunately
Speaker 1: for a shipload of people. The social workers in Baker's
Speaker 1: Field had been trained using the textbook Michelle remembers. So
Speaker 1: when this very ill woman starts claiming that there's a
Speaker 1: massive network of satanic sex abusers in town, they believe her. Um.
Speaker 1: And by the time the social workers sat down with
Speaker 1: the kids, Becky and Don, both kids had spent months
Speaker 1: listening to their very, very sick stepgrandmother tell them they
Speaker 1: had been the victims of a ring of ritual abusers.
Speaker 1: So these kids get repeatedly questioned and they confirm what
Speaker 1: there's They basically parent what their step grandmother had told
Speaker 1: them to say, and over the months their disclosures become
Speaker 1: like weirder and weirder. They claimed that they had been
Speaker 1: hung from sealing hooks, beaten with belts, rented to strangers
Speaker 1: and motels, and had been forced to act in kittie
Speaker 1: porn movies. They claimed they were abused by a sex
Speaker 1: ring which involved their grandparents, their parents, their father's brothers,
Speaker 1: friends of their parents, uh and the social worker who
Speaker 1: did the inspection, a coworker of their father, and to
Speaker 1: one named welfare workers, and all these fucking people start
Speaker 1: catching charges and getting arrested and ship um, and their
Speaker 1: life just dynamites these people's lives, right, like, just just
Speaker 1: based on this one testimony. Yeah, yeah, based on this
Speaker 1: woman and these kids who had been in her care
Speaker 1: listening to her talk about But it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: the thing I always think about things like this is
Speaker 1: like racism. Right, No one is born a racist. Kids
Speaker 1: become racist from hearing what they from parents usually, So
Speaker 1: it's the same kind of concept, right, they'll just repeat
Speaker 1: that exactly their kids, Like if you tell them as
Speaker 1: you tell your if you tell you're like three year old,
Speaker 1: over and over you were raped by the devil, like,
Speaker 1: they will look I guess I was. Yes. So the
Speaker 1: social worker and their father's coworker eventually had their charges
Speaker 1: dropped after their lawyer introduced Marianne's medical records into the trial.
Speaker 1: Was like, this woman has psychotic episodes and as paranoid
Speaker 1: and probably schizophrenic. Perhaps we need more than just your testimony, right,
Speaker 1: Not that those people can't testify when they're the victims
Speaker 1: of abuse, but if you have them making lurid, wild
Speaker 1: allegations and there's no physical evidence for any of it.
Speaker 1: Perhaps you should not trust those allegations. Maybe, yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: So this convinced the DA to try to drop those
Speaker 1: two people's charges. But then the medical records were sealed
Speaker 1: and forbidden from being used by the defense for the
Speaker 1: mccuen's and the Niffins, which is something else because again
Speaker 1: all of the cops have bought into this too. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote again from that that right up uh
Speaker 1: in Religious tolerance dot Org quote. The Niffin's sons, Brian
Speaker 1: and Brandon, were repeatedly and suggestively interrogated. The interviewers would
Speaker 1: describe a sex act and then act that asked the
Speaker 1: child to confirm or deny that it happened. When questions separately,
Speaker 1: each was old falsely that their brother had disclosed abuse
Speaker 1: by both the parents and the rest of the sex ring.
Speaker 1: Brian and Brandon claimed that they were yelled at and
Speaker 1: terrorized by the interrogators. They were told that they could
Speaker 1: go home again if they testified about the abuse. These
Speaker 1: manipulative and coercive interrogation methods are now known to generate
Speaker 1: false allegations. No fucking dar right yeah. Questioning in Baker's
Speaker 1: field went far beyond the definition of leading and was
Speaker 1: in fact coercive, threatening and brainwashing of young children's is
Speaker 1: like a legal finding later. Unfortunately, in early nineteen eight three,
Speaker 1: basic research into child interview techniques was in its early stages.
Speaker 1: Direct questioning and manipulation of children was common practice. The
Speaker 1: Niffin boys finally caved in under the pressure and said
Speaker 1: that abuse had occurred. So yeah. During a surprise supervised visit,
Speaker 1: Brandon Niffin was asked by his grandmother whether the charges
Speaker 1: were true. He answered, no, none of those things ever happened.
Speaker 1: The grandmother was arrested for discussing the case with her
Speaker 1: grandchild when she brought this up. When she said, like, hey,
Speaker 1: he told me that he was lying because the interviewers
Speaker 1: terrorized him. It's like, he tells his grandmother they made
Speaker 1: me give a false confession. She goes to the judge
Speaker 1: and she gets arrested and is banned from testifying at
Speaker 1: trial and has her right to having custody visits like
Speaker 1: terminated for years. Because again, all of the people in
Speaker 1: the legal system believe all this ship and have to
Speaker 1: seem like, oh, she's got to be part of it,
Speaker 1: because she's trying to like there. It's so it's unbelievably
Speaker 1: fucked up. They just they just with each other, right,
Speaker 1: it's amazing. Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. Actually, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: incredibly like there's a lot that like that is and
Speaker 1: should be studied about this period of time because it
Speaker 1: says so much that's very frightening about human psychology. It's
Speaker 1: that crowd like it's very scary. Yeah, yep, exactly, Like
Speaker 1: it's a lot of the same stuff that makes fascism work, right,
Speaker 1: it's just like the way people are and the way
Speaker 1: people act in groups, um, and the way people act
Speaker 1: when they are in a group and all get scared
Speaker 1: of the same thing, right, Yeah. Uh so both Niffin
Speaker 1: boys later recanted entirely and stated that they've been coerced
Speaker 1: to testify, and they testified again in nineteen ninety six
Speaker 1: after the end of the Satanic Panic, and we're able
Speaker 1: to convince a judge to overturn both sets of convictions.
Speaker 1: But again, like the Niffins, like their parents, has been
Speaker 1: like a decade plus in prison along with the mccohen's
Speaker 1: like like four people in prison for years and years joking. No,
Speaker 1: it's like it's unbearably fucked up. There's a partial happy
Speaker 1: ending here because the Niffins, like once the kids like
Speaker 1: realized what had happened to have been done to them
Speaker 1: and testified, like they got to be a family with
Speaker 1: their parents again. The mccohen's never did, because both Becky
Speaker 1: and Down continued to maintain that their testimony was true,
Speaker 1: and it's almost certain that both children had false memories
Speaker 1: forced on them as a result of improper interrogation methods.
Speaker 1: But the family never fucking healed. Um, it's deeply bad.
Speaker 1: That's the side of the Satanic panic. You don't really
Speaker 1: hear a lot about. It's like it's kind of funny
Speaker 1: the whole things, Like, oh yeah, it's so stupid. But
Speaker 1: then like I was doing research for this this podcast
Speaker 1: episode the other day and it's like wow, Like, I mean,
Speaker 1: one woman in the Italian case I was looking at
Speaker 1: like a mother, she just killed usself. And it's just
Speaker 1: like you just couldn't handle it, right, It's like all
Speaker 1: based on literally nothing, nothing at all. It ruins people. Um,
Speaker 1: I mean, the same thing in a different way is
Speaker 1: happening with Q and on. Right, Like you have hundreds
Speaker 1: of families at least that have been torn apart by
Speaker 1: this sort of stuff. It's fucked it's super fucked um
Speaker 1: and it kind of if you kind of look at
Speaker 1: what happens with the book Michelle remembers and how it
Speaker 1: helps both spark the satanic panic and how it infests
Speaker 1: you know, this this system for dealing with child to
Speaker 1: bease that we talked about, it's almost like an infection
Speaker 1: that comes into it and deal all these problems and
Speaker 1: it suddenly become actively toxic. And yeah, it did not
Speaker 1: stay limited to Kern County out near Baker's Field. The
Speaker 1: case of the mccuon and the Niffin families was just
Speaker 1: the beginning in nineteen eighty three. Not long after there
Speaker 1: and after their initial conviction Evince in another part of
Speaker 1: southern California. We're about to take the nation by storm.
Speaker 1: And next episode we're gonna talk about the mcmah in
Speaker 1: preschool trial, which is the longest, most expensive trial in
Speaker 1: US history and one of the most fucked up things
Speaker 1: I've ever read about in my entire life. You're happy
Speaker 1: to read, Uh, you want to plug some ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just the podcast right like Q Clearance is out
Speaker 1: now obviously with you guys um. Popular Front is always
Speaker 1: around popular Front dot cr um. One thing I do
Speaker 1: want to say though, is like, especially considering this copic,
Speaker 1: you know, I've done a lot of research into like
Speaker 1: various kind of child abuse scandals, and the thing is
Speaker 1: like they do exist, and even some of the more
Speaker 1: lurid insane stories have happened for real, but on a
Speaker 1: way that where it's like it's nowhere near as ritualistic
Speaker 1: or movie like, you know. So there's a great example
Speaker 1: that people to look into, um, like the Monster of Belgium,
Speaker 1: a guy called Mark the Troll, and like he would
Speaker 1: just had this horrific kind of child abuse scandal thing
Speaker 1: where he was like snapping children for higher and it
Speaker 1: involves like some of the most yeah, involves some of
Speaker 1: the most high level politicians. This isn't a conspiracy, like,
Speaker 1: but it's one of the least known ones. Because stupid
Speaker 1: stuff like this gets the hearing right, the more sensational,
Speaker 1: the more easy to understand. Satanic stuff is what people
Speaker 1: are queuing on often put out. Meanwhile, people are doing
Speaker 1: very dark things and it kind of goes by the
Speaker 1: wayside because obviously real life is a little bit more
Speaker 1: kind of intricate and confusing, you know, and it's it's
Speaker 1: a real shame. It's this fucking thing that happens in
Speaker 1: the Satanic panic too. Were like no, like we could
Speaker 1: all there is a conspiracy to traffic people who are
Speaker 1: legally children, rich and doubtful. Like it absolutely happened, it
Speaker 1: probably still is, but like focused on that, not this
Speaker 1: is not Michelle's whatever the hell, it's cool. Well, it's weird.
Speaker 1: It's interesting to me that like the things that go
Speaker 1: viral are always like to focus on tiny, tiny kids,
Speaker 1: which are very it's very uncommon for like two and
Speaker 1: three and four year olds to be molested. It's like
Speaker 1: it's like like yeah, it's yeah, men fucking teenagers, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's bad. It's right terrible and it doesn't
Speaker 1: make it any better. But again it's like this is
Speaker 1: the issue, right, It's like when you have people like
Speaker 1: t and On specifically, one of my biggest problems with
Speaker 1: them is that they make people just go, oh, that's
Speaker 1: just queue and on stuff, and a lot of it
Speaker 1: is just nonsense doing on stuff. But in between that,
Speaker 1: there's things that really need to be looked out for
Speaker 1: the safe of the victims, you know, and it's like, thanks,
Speaker 1: You've completely destroyed any relevance because you're making things up
Speaker 1: all the time. It's yeah, I mean I get why,
Speaker 1: Like it just come out the Virginia Jeffrey, I think
Speaker 1: her name is pronounced, who's one of the Epstein victims,
Speaker 1: and like she's the one I can't blame for it
Speaker 1: because it's like, yeah, you were part of a giant
Speaker 1: sex abuse like conspiracy, right, and even that now it
Speaker 1: makes you think it's like not to say you want
Speaker 1: to believe of it. Now some people will just go, oh, exactly,
Speaker 1: I've heard it to do with you, and they won't
Speaker 1: look any deep. It's fun. It's all. Everything is horrible. Um,
Speaker 1: thanks for listening to the podcast. People. We'll be back
Speaker 1: on Thursday with some of the worst stories you've ever
Speaker 1: heard in your life. Yeah, h h h