Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 2: my name is Nolan.
Speaker 3: They call me Ben.
Speaker 4: We're joined as always with our super producer Dylan the
Speaker 4: Tennessee pal Fagan.
Speaker 3: Most importantly, you are you. You are here.
Speaker 4: That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 4: Friends and neighbors, longtime fellow conspiracy realist of a certain age,
Speaker 4: you may remember that not too long ago, the United
Speaker 4: States and later the world was gripped by a paralyzing fear.
Speaker 4: The Devil is real, people claimed, and not only that
Speaker 4: his followers are actively doing horrible things to children. This
Speaker 4: was an outbreak, right, a moral panic that metastasized across
Speaker 4: the cultural landscape, evolving into something we now call the
Speaker 4: Satanic panic.
Speaker 3: But you know what exactly was this? What is this?
Speaker 4: How did it happen? What does it teach us? To
Speaker 4: answer these questions more, we are thrilled to welcome none
Speaker 4: other than Sarah Marshall, the writer, media critic, and creator
Speaker 4: of the new hit podcast, The Devil you know, Sarah,
Speaker 4: thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for having me here. Then, thank
Speaker 5: you for calling it a hit podcast. I love that.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, oh it's especially a hit and we have
Speaker 5: it in quotes.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a fantastic podcast. It's a dark listen. I
Speaker 2: might say, uh, I've set the kids off to school
Speaker 2: a couple of times in the past few weeks and
Speaker 2: put on an episode and oh it's it's heavy because
Speaker 2: of the subjects matter, right, but you handle it pretty
Speaker 2: beautifully by talking to people that were truly affected by
Speaker 2: what Ben just described there.
Speaker 5: I thank you.
Speaker 2: I wonder if you would just let us know how
Speaker 2: the Satanic panic came into your.
Speaker 5: Life, sir, huh, yeah, I mean it came in via
Speaker 5: old Texas Monthly articles, because about fifteen years ago, when
Speaker 5: I was in grad school, I was reading a lot
Speaker 5: of Texas Monthly because they've always been very generous or
Speaker 5: at the time at least, they were about putting their
Speaker 5: archive online and have always had great true crime reporting.
Speaker 5: And they had some articles about one of the nineteen
Speaker 5: eighties Satanic panic daycare bease cases involving a couple named
Speaker 5: Fran and Dan Keller, who had a childcare facilic kind
Speaker 5: of at home childcare that they as many people do,
Speaker 5: and did that they ran in the Austin area, and
Speaker 5: they got kind of swept up in what reading about them.
Speaker 5: At the time, I was just learning more apparently fairly
Speaker 5: commonplace allegations in the early to mid eighties where parents
Speaker 5: would become concerned that something was amiss at their child's daycare,
Speaker 5: which is a very easy thing to wonder about a
Speaker 5: place where your child goes all day and can't really
Speaker 5: tell you what they've been doing even if they wanted to,
Speaker 5: depending on the age. And it was at the time,
Speaker 5: you know, police officers, detective social workers, a lot of
Speaker 5: people kind of in the mainstream of the legal and
Speaker 5: therapeutic communities were on TV, kind of in the media,
Speaker 5: in the news saying, well, you know, it's just kind
Speaker 5: of a known fact that there are a lot of
Speaker 5: Satanists around that they like to work in daycare centers
Speaker 5: and they abuse children there because it's apparently important to
Speaker 5: their rituals. And at the time I just thought, wait, what,
Speaker 5: this is something that had you know, had happened in
Speaker 5: a huge way. But I think in about twenty ten,
Speaker 5: our culture was not far enough removed from to be
Speaker 5: to have started really reckoning with in a big way.
Speaker 5: And I was just absolutely shocked because I had a
Speaker 5: very you know, I grew up watching Law and Order,
Speaker 5: and as people who grow up watching law order and
Speaker 5: not having to actually tangle with the legal system often believe,
Speaker 5: I was like, well, surely we have a basically good
Speaker 5: legal system and things are basically fair, right, right, And
Speaker 5: so in this way that I think that my interest
Speaker 5: in the Satanic Panic kind of set the tone for
Speaker 5: everything that was going to happen in actual day to
Speaker 5: day American life for the next fifteen years, because it
Speaker 5: felt like this astounding part of history that I was discovering,
Speaker 5: and then as soon as I started learning about at
Speaker 5: present day events started basically mimicking it as far as
Speaker 5: I can tell. And so now it feels maybe less
Speaker 5: shocking than today, and maybe in a way I think
Speaker 5: even it can offer some comfort, which we try and
Speaker 5: get to by the end of the show of saying,
Speaker 5: you know, this is it's shocking how deep into conspiracy
Speaker 5: theories people can get and how easy it is to
Speaker 5: have a legal system. Certainly our legal system corrupted by
Speaker 5: stories that have no actual evidence to support them. But
Speaker 5: also if it's not an anomaly but something that humans
Speaker 5: do a fair amount, then maybe that's something that we
Speaker 5: can study and undermine rather than just being shocked by.
Speaker 6: For sure, did the documentary Paradise Lost the child murders
Speaker 6: at robin Hood Hill cross your eyeballs when you were younger?
Speaker 5: Yes, that was actually after the Texas Monthly articles. That
Speaker 5: was the second thing I encountered, which, again, you know,
Speaker 5: this is kind of a fairly late case in terms
Speaker 5: of the initial spread of the Satanic Panic, because this
Speaker 5: is in the early nineties and West Memphis, Arkansas. But
Speaker 5: I think that as happens with a lot of things
Speaker 5: are kind of widespread phenomena, the Satanic Panic kind of
Speaker 5: spread initially through mainstream media, and then after it had
Speaker 5: begun to be taken less seriously in kind of in
Speaker 5: big cities in the United States and North America, it
Speaker 5: kind of stayed lodged in more rural areas, I think,
Speaker 5: and certainly in the Bible Belt. And that was a
Speaker 5: documentary that I remember watching and things and coming to
Speaker 5: the closing arguments. I think of Damien Eckles's trial, and
Speaker 5: I believe the prosecutor saying that there was not a
Speaker 5: soul in his body. I was like, but surely you
Speaker 5: can't say that in a trial, right.
Speaker 6: It seems outside of the realm of legal jargon.
Speaker 5: Say that at a trial. And they did, and they
Speaker 5: got a conviction. And I was like, well, God, what
Speaker 5: else is in law and order telling? We do? Go
Speaker 5: back and watch lawn Order, And I gotta say, I
Speaker 5: don't know if McCoy is that good at his job.
Speaker 5: Actually he says a lot of pretty lammatory.
Speaker 3: Some of them are.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there may be built more for the stage than
Speaker 4: the courtroom.
Speaker 5: Yeah, maybe we need to cancel McCoy. Maybe I need
Speaker 5: as well.
Speaker 3: But you heard it here first, folks.
Speaker 4: One thing that stands out, Sarah, not just in or
Speaker 4: latest project.
Speaker 3: But in a lot of your earlier work is.
Speaker 4: The concept of moral panic and in st in the
Speaker 4: phenomenon that we call the Satanic panic. I think you
Speaker 4: hit on something really interesting with how much it has
Speaker 4: in common with other outbreaks of public concern and paranoia,
Speaker 4: like the infamous Red scare of McCarthyism, where you know,
Speaker 4: high level US politicos thought dar near everyone was a communist,
Speaker 4: or maybe more recently, things like Pizzagate, Wayfair QAnon, right,
Speaker 4: those all three take cues from the panic, the Satanic Panic.
Speaker 4: So the question here is, if we're defining the Satanic
Speaker 4: Panic in like a window of time, what would that
Speaker 4: window of time be?
Speaker 5: You know, I think that everybody seems to break it
Speaker 5: down a little bit differently, and I tend to put
Speaker 5: the sort of need the big tent, polls or fence posts,
Speaker 5: I don't know, Yeah, the trees between which we can
Speaker 5: put the hammock of the Satanic Panic at its most powerful, maybe,
Speaker 5: and it's big enough for everyone. Feminists, fundamentalists, whoever claim
Speaker 5: in there figure it out later, but I would I
Speaker 5: would put it between the publication of Michelle Remembers in
Speaker 5: nineteen eighty because that was, you know, a book that
Speaker 5: was marketed as nonfiction. And not only that, but he
Speaker 5: used to train you know, new social workers and in
Speaker 5: these police trainings that you see throughout the eighties of
Speaker 5: you know, not only is this book published in the
Speaker 5: non fiction genre, but we're going to believe absolutely everything
Speaker 5: it says and go out looking for the things it
Speaker 5: tells us to look for. And then in the early nineties,
Speaker 5: and I want to kind of put this at about
Speaker 5: about nineteen ninety two, we had the publication of the
Speaker 5: Landing Report, which I believe was that year Landing's FBI report,
Speaker 5: because he was the person whose job it was to
Speaker 5: try and do student diligence and see if he could
Speaker 5: find any evidence of actual Satanic cults in the US
Speaker 5: the way that was being described, and despite using all
Speaker 5: of the FBI's resources, could not ever find anything suggesting
Speaker 5: that there was cult activity the way that people were describing,
Speaker 5: you know, you had occasionally, like I guess learned recently,
Speaker 5: there was a case in Long Island in the eighties,
Speaker 5: for example, where a teenager murdered his friend or murdered
Speaker 5: another teenager that he knew and said that that was
Speaker 5: for the glorification of Satan, you know, and there were
Speaker 5: kind of Satanic elements, and this was I just learned
Speaker 5: to kind of the inspiration for the song Teenage dirt Bag,
Speaker 5: which has been stuck in my head since I learned that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: this idea of like, you know, being profiled. Were also
Speaker 5: enjoying Iron Maiden back in the day, right, So you
Speaker 5: have cases of you know, an individual sometimes will do
Speaker 5: something violent and bring up Satan somewhere adjacent to that.
Speaker 5: But this idea of organized cults, especially with some kind
Speaker 5: of a hierarchical like top down structure, who have kind
Speaker 5: of goals and principles and are functioning like a church,
Speaker 5: there is never any evidence of any of that. And
Speaker 5: then of course you have the Church of Satan, which
Speaker 5: says in its literature that they don't literally believe in Satan.
Speaker 5: But if you want to hide a fact in America,
Speaker 5: you should put it in a published book. And then,
Speaker 5: of course, in the early nineties also Ensures stopped covering hypnotherapy,
Speaker 5: which I think was a big part of this, because
Speaker 5: if you have therapists who believe it's their job to
Speaker 5: recover repressed memories and every patient, then it stops being
Speaker 5: lucrative to do that. And interestingly, I think, you know,
Speaker 5: some of the reasons that we moved moved on from
Speaker 5: the Satanic panic as a culture is partly because we
Speaker 5: you know, the evidence that we expected to define wasn't there,
Speaker 5: but also because people were kind of I think, getting
Speaker 5: tired of it being in the media. We've done a
Speaker 5: lot of specials, you know, it's not being something you
Speaker 5: could make a lot of money on as a therapist,
Speaker 5: and so I think the financial incentive is also kind
Speaker 5: of dried up.
Speaker 6: Just to jump up this idea of the media, it
Speaker 6: occurred to me that, like, you know, obviously we have
Speaker 6: moral panics that resemble the Satanic Panic, because things like
Speaker 6: the same witch trials and the Spanish inquisition. Is the
Speaker 6: thing that makes the Satanic Panic sort of more of
Speaker 6: a modern construct, its relationship with the media and the
Speaker 6: legal system, and just this the way that it was
Speaker 6: elevated in this very modern way.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think so. I think that one of the
Speaker 5: interesting things about it is that it you know, we
Speaker 5: have the first daycare you know, like satanic ritual abuse
Speaker 5: case is famously the McMartin case and eventually trial in
Speaker 5: southern California, and then you can see pretty clearly that
Speaker 5: once that reached his national news, then some number of
Speaker 5: parents who have their kids in daycares or some number
Speaker 5: of local police see those stories and it's it's just
Speaker 5: kind of it's almost a meme of an idea, right
Speaker 5: where it's one of these things that just replicates itself
Speaker 5: so easily in different communities because it's just such a
Speaker 5: it's a fear that feels very easy to catch, right
Speaker 5: and kind of speaking about, you know more in the
Speaker 5: present day, the wayfair stuff and the way I remember
Speaker 5: in the summer of twenty twenty one people were, you know, saying, well,
Speaker 5: you know, actually putting your child in a mask is
Speaker 5: just deployed by human traffickers, because if the traffickers get
Speaker 5: your child at the food Lion, then you won't know
Speaker 5: that it's your child because they'll have a mask on,
Speaker 5: because you won't recognize any of their clothes or shoes
Speaker 5: or hair.
Speaker 4: Well, well, first off, thank you for that food Lion
Speaker 4: shout out.
Speaker 3: I like that reference there, Sarah.
Speaker 4: We also we also see kind of the commonality that
Speaker 4: you and nol are speaking to. There's a really great
Speaker 4: point here about you know, what we described as the
Speaker 4: phenomena of satanic panic metastasizing across a culture going viral.
Speaker 3: As we would say.
Speaker 4: Now, it appears though, to persist in some form even now,
Speaker 4: in increasingly secular twenty twenty five, we will find allegations
Speaker 4: of ritualized, satanically themed or as you said, adjacent abuse.
Speaker 4: So is it is it persistent? Because it's so binary,
Speaker 4: like very evil, powerful people and the most innocent victims
Speaker 4: imaginable or like what's the what is this story telling
Speaker 4: us about society?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, yeah, these are such good questions. I mean
Speaker 5: that makes me think of a couple of things, which
Speaker 5: is a I think, yes, I think that it is
Speaker 5: because it's so binary and this idea of I mean,
Speaker 5: for a while I was really fascinated by and this
Speaker 5: is you know, about ten years ago and a lot
Speaker 5: of the things that seemed to be coming have come true,
Speaker 5: but kind of fascinated by the language of kind of
Speaker 5: the pro life movement and especially the number of people
Speaker 5: who were fixated on, you know, not protecting actual babies
Speaker 5: that had been born in children who we already exist
Speaker 5: in this country because like who cares about them? But
Speaker 5: like in this idea that sort of in conservative American
Speaker 5: doctrine that like babies were interesting only to the point
Speaker 5: of birth and then after that they were like too
Speaker 5: old to take care of or something, you know, because
Speaker 5: the idea of we're gonna cut benefits, we're gonna cut
Speaker 5: any kind of access to resources that parents need, but
Speaker 5: if that baby is still inside or even like a
Speaker 5: frozen embryo, we were going to do everything in our
Speaker 5: power to protect that theoretical baby. And then even that
Speaker 5: they were kind of. There was a subset within the
Speaker 5: pro life movement that was fixated on snowflake babies, which
Speaker 5: they named them, which is, you know, basically, when people
Speaker 5: do IVF, you often get left with extra embryos and
Speaker 5: you can either decide to keep them in the deep
Speaker 5: freeze forever or donate them or just you know, I thought.
Speaker 3: Snow snowflake babies were like soft liberal baby.
Speaker 5: I think that's what it is now. I think now
Speaker 5: we're all actually snowflake babies and today's parlance. But but yeah,
Speaker 5: this idea that like that rather than chucking your unused
Speaker 5: embryos down the drain or whatever they do with them,
Speaker 5: that you should donate them to some fundamentalist Christians who
Speaker 5: will then raise them with corporal punishment or whatever, which is,
Speaker 5: you know, a great thing to invasion happening to my
Speaker 5: imaginary embryos. But I guess this idea that like we
Speaker 5: were turning away from actual babies because we'd found a
Speaker 5: smaller baby, and then even with fetuses, it was like,
Speaker 5: but what if there was a smaller and even more
Speaker 5: innocent baby because it was just a blast cysts that
Speaker 5: barely existed at all. Like that, you can't get more
Speaker 5: innocent than that, right, And I'm sure just event yeah,
Speaker 5: I'm sure we'll find an even smaller version of life soon.
Speaker 5: But yeah, this idea that it almost feels like it
Speaker 5: came up as a form of smoke and mirrors because
Speaker 5: we were starting to talk in the seventies and a
Speaker 5: way we hadn't before about sexual assaults and rape as
Speaker 5: an endemic problem, and about child sexual abuse is something
Speaker 5: that was happening in significant numbers, which as a culture
Speaker 5: we hadn't really reckoned with before. And I think it
Speaker 5: was very It saved us from a lot of difficult
Speaker 5: conversations and from a lot of you know, pointing the
Speaker 5: finger justifiably at having, you know, our society set up
Speaker 5: in a way that kind of does facilitate abuse, you know,
Speaker 5: where we can see now that like a lot of
Speaker 5: abuse happens in churches and not Satanic ones, and that's
Speaker 5: because of you know, kind of a very rigid hierarchical
Speaker 5: power structure, for one.
Speaker 6: And there is proof of that, by the way, right, there's.
Speaker 5: Actual evidence of those ones. And so I feel like
Speaker 5: the idea of having you know, this cross can who's
Speaker 5: getting abused and who's committing the abuse it's like, well,
Speaker 5: only tiny children and or you know, once it moves
Speaker 5: on to adults, you can use it to say like, well,
Speaker 5: you know, you know, babe, you weren't satanically abused, like
Speaker 5: you weren't ever tied up in a field and made
Speaker 5: to you know, stab a baby like you were. Only
Speaker 5: you only experienced garden variety abuse of the kind that
Speaker 5: women have experienced forever. So who cares? It was interestingly
Speaker 5: like a way of saying who cares while claiming to
Speaker 5: care so deeply about a problem. And then I think
Speaker 5: there's just the fact that we've had the Devil as
Speaker 5: an American character since the very beginning, and so we
Speaker 5: just can he'se him, We're used to him. He kind
Speaker 5: of he he's ready.
Speaker 6: Okay, we're gonna take a quick break here, aware from
Speaker 6: our sponsor, and then come right back to our conversation
Speaker 6: with Sarah, and we're back. Let's jump right back in.
Speaker 6: You pointed out a neat distinction. I just wanted to
Speaker 6: ask you about the moment when the devil became a
Speaker 6: thing that's just around versus the devil of the Bible
Speaker 6: that you see when you go to hell after you've
Speaker 6: lived a bad life, this idea of taking the devil
Speaker 6: and inserting it into everyday life and becoming a thing
Speaker 6: that you can find all around you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Just how that sort of you know, propelled.
Speaker 5: This kind of thing, right, Yeah, And there's like there's
Speaker 5: this interesting unspoken thing and the initial sproad of the
Speaker 5: Satanic panic, where if you're secular, then you can say, well,
Speaker 5: you know, these people believe in Satan, and there's do it.
Speaker 5: They're doing all these things because they believe in Satan,
Speaker 5: and so belief is scary enough. We don't have to
Speaker 5: believe in actual Satan. But then within the movement there's
Speaker 5: always people who you know unspoken or very much spoken reasons.
Speaker 5: The problem is no, like the devil is showing up.
Speaker 5: People hold these rituals and he's there, you know. And
Speaker 5: then Michelle remembers the devil turns up as a character
Speaker 5: and the last portion of the book and he speaks
Speaker 5: in dogg girl. It had to be very hard to
Speaker 5: come up with all those rhymes, and I can't believe
Speaker 5: Michelle followed through it, to be honest, But I don't
Speaker 5: know the thing. I always feel like I have an
Speaker 5: interesting blind spot here too, though, because I grew up
Speaker 5: pretty secular, and like, I am so much more ready
Speaker 5: to believe in God than I am to believe in
Speaker 5: the devil. I just have no interest in the devil,
Speaker 5: you know. And I think that you can see in
Speaker 5: kind of modern American Protestantism, the strain of thinking that
Speaker 5: you know, goes through different denominations by different names, but
Speaker 5: this idea that no, the devil is actually responsible for
Speaker 5: the thoughts that you don't want to be having, for
Speaker 5: your depression, you know, for the feelings that are inconvenient
Speaker 5: to you, for the things that you feel tended to
Speaker 5: do that maybe are very reasonable but are forbidden by
Speaker 5: the religion that you're stuck in, you know, So that
Speaker 5: the devil just becomes an interesting character, partly because I
Speaker 5: think everyone kind of means some one slightly different when
Speaker 5: they when they refer to that person.
Speaker 3: Absolutely right.
Speaker 4: It's it's not only its names, but its definitions are legion,
Speaker 4: I think, is what we're saying here. And Okay, we're
Speaker 4: gonna have to talk about Patrick Swayze at some point.
Speaker 4: How However, before we do that, there's something that I
Speaker 4: think is really connecting with a lot of our fellow
Speaker 4: listeners tuning in here which is Michelle Remembers, with which
Speaker 4: Matt and you mentioned just a minute ago, but it
Speaker 4: also ties into the psychology. So up there with mass media,
Speaker 4: I think we also see something akin to the earlier
Speaker 4: spiritualism movement, the idea that science can answer the supernatural
Speaker 4: or allegations thereof. So can you tell us a little
Speaker 4: bit more about the origin story of Michelle Remembers and
Speaker 4: the psychology and evaluation controversy involves.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I mean, spiritualism is such an interesting thing
Speaker 5: to compare it to because it feels like a feel
Speaker 5: that we created out of kind of the things that
Speaker 5: we desired to be able to figure out. And so
Speaker 5: Michelle Remembers is a book about this real woman. Her
Speaker 5: name was Michelle. This was in Victoria, BSI in the
Speaker 5: nineteen seventies, and she went back to her former therapist
Speaker 5: and I think late nineteen seventy six because she was
Speaker 5: experiencing depression following a miscarriage, and interestingly, her therapist was like,
Speaker 5: there's no reason for you to be this depressed. You're
Speaker 5: simply too depressed, which I like to think a therapist
Speaker 5: wouldn't say today. But you know, half of the time
Speaker 5: people seeking therapy have to just just talk to someone,
Speaker 5: you know, who's like eating popcorn in the whole time
Speaker 5: and working for better help. So it could probably happen today.
Speaker 5: But he just felt that, like he had given her
Speaker 5: such good therapy in the past, this is according to
Speaker 5: the book, that there had to be something more, and
Speaker 5: so he put her into some kind of a trans
Speaker 5: like state. The book never refers to it as hypnosis.
Speaker 5: It seems at least hypnosis adjacent. And you know, hypnosis
Speaker 5: is also kind of a complicated concept that is not
Speaker 5: as magical as we would like it to be, because
Speaker 5: what we kind of know now about the way hypnosis
Speaker 5: works is that you're not going to be more truthful
Speaker 5: in a hypnotic state than you would be in a
Speaker 5: non hypnotic or non trance state, and some people are
Speaker 5: more susceptible to it than others, but you are going
Speaker 5: to be a lot more open to suggestion. And so
Speaker 5: he started doing this therapy with her where he believed
Speaker 5: that he was age aggressing her to the age of five,
Speaker 5: and she began, in this first session, described kind of
Speaker 5: this kind of dream like scenario where she was on
Speaker 5: a table, there were women in the room lighting candles,
Speaker 5: and her mother wouldn't look at her. I think was
Speaker 5: part of the dream because she also had, you know,
Speaker 5: a very traumatic bringing with a lot of abuse in
Speaker 5: the home and a mother who died when she was
Speaker 5: very young, and her therapists again kind of rather than
Speaker 5: looking at her life and thinking, all this trauma that
Speaker 5: you've experienced that I know about is a reason enough
Speaker 5: free to be traumatized. We don't have to go looking
Speaker 5: for more stuff, kind of took these images from the
Speaker 5: first session they did and said, you know, that sounds
Speaker 5: like sounds a bit satanic, sounds a bit wichy to me,
Speaker 5: and kind of guided her. And this is in the
Speaker 5: text of the book toward the conclusion that her mother
Speaker 5: had given her to a Satanic cult. And then suddenly
Speaker 5: they had to keep doing these long sessions where he
Speaker 5: also had to apparently start hugging her the entire time
Speaker 5: because she was recovering memories of a Satanic cult that
Speaker 5: had imprisoned her for a sustained period when she was five.
Speaker 5: And again she had siblings at the time who very
Speaker 5: easily contradicted this. She was, you know, we have her
Speaker 5: attendance records from school. She was never out of school
Speaker 5: for a week's long period, and there's a lot of
Speaker 5: stuff in this book that's sort of physically impossible, but
Speaker 5: it does. If you see it as sort of visions
Speaker 5: of the kinds of you know, the kinds of emotional
Speaker 5: pain that she had been through, it makes sense. But
Speaker 5: the problem was that they tried to kind of make
Speaker 5: it into a story where they were going to find
Speaker 5: out what these cults were up to and what the
Speaker 5: devil's plan was for getting power on earth, and so
Speaker 5: they kind of became these spiritual warriors and their own estimation,
Speaker 5: and then we're able to publish this book, leave their spouses,
Speaker 5: marry each other. Unclear what order all of this happened in.
Speaker 5: I feel like we got a little bit more information
Speaker 5: when we did the interviews for the show about just
Speaker 5: kind of how this relationship kind of started between doctor
Speaker 5: and patient, which I know we all know this, but
Speaker 5: you're not supposed to do that. And so it's just
Speaker 5: this wildly unethical book that kind of inspired a Satanic
Speaker 5: panic that progressed along the same lines of people. You
Speaker 5: can see a lot of people throughout the whole Satanic
Speaker 5: panic who grabbed onto that hero role and wouldn't let
Speaker 5: go of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're listening to the show The Double, you
Speaker 2: know that's episode two Marilyn Remembers, And just quick spoiler.
Speaker 2: Marilyn is the name of the former spouse of Lawrence
Speaker 2: Larry Padster, who is the guy who wrote the book
Speaker 2: with Michelle Smith, the one we're talking about. Michelle remembers.
Speaker 2: I've seen to recall that the divorce occurred in like
Speaker 2: seventy eight, and then the book came out, and that's
Speaker 2: when they're writing the book, and then the book comes
Speaker 2: out in nineteen eighty. So it certainly seems as though
Speaker 2: there's a romantic nature to that relationship, as some of
Speaker 2: these tapes are being recorded and as some of it's happened.
Speaker 5: Well, let me tell you, when you're reading the book,
Speaker 5: it is clear, and all the copy and all the
Speaker 5: promotional material they're just co authors. They're just doctor and patient.
Speaker 5: And but you know, the I think we I can't
Speaker 5: remember if we have this exact excerpt in the episode.
Speaker 5: I'm pretty sure we do, but you know that it's
Speaker 5: the book is showing us Larry seeing Michelle and she
Speaker 5: was a pretty young woman with masses of curls and
Speaker 5: a heart shaped mouth, and you're like what are we doing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a whole subreddit called men writing Women and
Speaker 4: this is this is a top notch example cardinal sense. Yeah,
Speaker 4: because in the like you're saying Siah in the text
Speaker 4: which we did check out, there's there's stuff that calls
Speaker 4: into serious ethical question the objectivity of the research, even
Speaker 4: just bracketing way the the very challenged and controversial techniques
Speaker 4: that you're describing, like regression therapy. There there's something else
Speaker 4: that there's something else that we have to go into
Speaker 4: when you're talking about not just in the second but
Speaker 4: the third episode, and it kind of speaks to something
Speaker 4: you alluded to earlier, the idea of satanic panic as
Speaker 4: a business word industry.
Speaker 3: What is.
Speaker 4: How does asking a child about this kind of situation,
Speaker 4: these allegations of satanic abuse? How does that occur? How
Speaker 4: are psychologists tackling that? And what is this idea of
Speaker 4: confession versus compliance?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Well, I mean the McMartin case where this all started
Speaker 5: as a great example, because I mean one of the
Speaker 5: things that it's easy to take for granted now is
Speaker 5: that we do, you know, with as many problems as
Speaker 5: we have with our system and as many reasons we
Speaker 5: can see that it was you know that it's not broken,
Speaker 5: but is functioning as designed and designed to oppress. We
Speaker 5: at least have been around long enough to have best
Speaker 5: practices around questioning small children. You know, like theres been
Speaker 5: enough work done in the past few decades that police
Speaker 5: and social workers have some kind of a sense of
Speaker 5: what the norm is if you're going to try and
Speaker 5: forensically question a child, especially a small child, about sexual abuse,
Speaker 5: and that we just really didn't have that in the
Speaker 5: early eighties. This was a field that was really just
Speaker 5: beginning to be created, and so if you were going
Speaker 5: to question a child who was, you know, maybe three
Speaker 5: or four years old, as the kids in the McMartin case,
Speaker 5: and a lot of the cases that followed were. I mean, interestingly,
Speaker 5: you didn't hear about satan as infiltrating elementary schools. Generally,
Speaker 5: you heard about them infiltrating daycare centers and nursery schools.
Speaker 5: And I think that one of the reasons for that
Speaker 5: is because these cases can actually be replicated if you
Speaker 5: asked a new group of children, you know, he is
Speaker 5: kind of any nursery school about the things that social
Speaker 5: workers and police officers at this point were starting to
Speaker 5: think about has indications of satanic stuff. Right, So there's
Speaker 5: this thing that happens in the McMartin case, and then
Speaker 5: in other cases kind of following after that, where you
Speaker 5: have a child, they initially say that nothing happened or
Speaker 5: they don't know what you're talking about. And so, for example,
Speaker 5: I believe in McMartin, the concern was that a teacher
Speaker 5: had abused children at the guys of taking their temperature.
Speaker 5: So you ask a child about that, they say they
Speaker 5: don't know anything. And then so what you would do
Speaker 5: in this case is to kind of guide them an
Speaker 5: imaginative play, you know, bring out toys. And then if
Speaker 5: they say something weird the way that little kids very like,
Speaker 5: the way little kids do very very frequently, which I
Speaker 5: think is you know, developmentally appropriate, they say something yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: if they say something a little bit odd or violent,
Speaker 5: or if they like, you know, this is this. I'm
Speaker 5: not basing this on anything this example, but say if
Speaker 5: I'm interviewing a child and they pull a doll's head off,
Speaker 5: and I'll say, is that what is that? What they
Speaker 5: may do?
Speaker 7: You do to the baby? Right?
Speaker 5: And if I'm blurring the line between imagination and reality.
Speaker 5: And if I'm working with a three or four year
Speaker 5: old who doesn't fully understand, you know, the difference between
Speaker 5: play and in reality in some ways, or who has
Speaker 5: a very strong imagination, and who also maybe just wants
Speaker 5: to be done with this conversation, I can probably get
Speaker 5: them to agree with me that yes, they did cut
Speaker 5: the baby's head off. And then I will go to
Speaker 5: all the other children and say, tell us about this
Speaker 5: baby whose head you cut off? And if I say it,
Speaker 5: like it definitely. Like even adults, if they're told that
Speaker 5: something happened that didn't happen, can generally be counted on to,
Speaker 5: at least some of the time, be like, hey, yeah,
Speaker 5: that does sound familiar.
Speaker 6: Well, you're a small kid and you're speaking to someone
Speaker 6: who's in a position of authorities, with a sense of
Speaker 6: authority and confidence. They're kind of painting reality for you.
Speaker 6: They're the like person you're literally looking up to, like,
Speaker 6: how are you maybe not going to be taken along?
Speaker 6: They keep asking you these questions that are describing these
Speaker 6: odd scenarios.
Speaker 3: Well, you know what, it was kind of weird.
Speaker 6: Actually, now that you mentioned it expertly, that's that seems
Speaker 6: off right.
Speaker 5: And then as a kid, adults are really writing the
Speaker 5: reality that you live in. And so one of the
Speaker 5: counter arguments of the idea that these you know, that
Speaker 5: these cases are flawed is well, kids don't lie. And
Speaker 5: it's like, well, a, they do, and that's fine. We're
Speaker 5: not saying there's anything morally wrong with that, you know,
Speaker 5: it's I think I would often, maybe more you could
Speaker 5: call it fibbing.
Speaker 3: And b.
Speaker 5: They will say what they need to to get out
Speaker 5: of a situation where they know that they can't escape
Speaker 5: unless they give you what you want, and that's kind
Speaker 5: of your fault as a hetault. In fact, it's definitely
Speaker 5: your fault. Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: Keep thinking about it's horrific reality that we live in
Speaker 2: where there is so much child abuse that occurs in
Speaker 2: all kinds of different institutions. Like it's just the reality
Speaker 2: that we live in this world right where that just occurs.
Speaker 2: And then trying to imagine that the con even the
Speaker 2: concept of a Satanic based version of an organized group
Speaker 2: that does that to children is seem silly, But the
Speaker 2: fact that it is reality that other people do it
Speaker 2: just under the guise of you know, scouting, scouting or
Speaker 2: something that seems completely innocuous to us and did for
Speaker 2: a long time, But in reality there was there's a
Speaker 2: whole group of kids who became you know, men and
Speaker 2: women who had just been abused by systems that never
Speaker 2: said anything about it because they were trained not to
Speaker 2: say anything about it, right, and then it was too difficult.
Speaker 2: There's so many reasons. It's just it's striking me that
Speaker 2: it does seem so almost silly, the concept of a
Speaker 2: satanic abuse system like that that was alleged so many times.
Speaker 2: But at the same time it all in a weird way,
Speaker 2: it's not silly at all. I guess for the people
Speaker 2: who were living through those times in that moment, maybe.
Speaker 3: Is it a comfort?
Speaker 6: Is it a way of explaining away the evils of
Speaker 6: the world by like making it superbinary, like a lot
Speaker 6: of conspiracies kind of do or a lot of conspiracy
Speaker 6: theories kind of do?
Speaker 5: I think so it's not. But yeah, I mean, speaking
Speaker 5: of the silliness, I think there is something reassuring in
Speaker 5: that way of saying, well, why would someone abu as
Speaker 5: a child, Well, only because they worshiped the devil, So
Speaker 5: no one who's worshiping God by definition abuse a child.
Speaker 5: And it's like Oh, no, they can.
Speaker 3: It's a very very sneaky decision. Tree. I agree with you.
Speaker 4: There one question here as well, when we're talking about
Speaker 4: I loved your phrase of adults painting reality for children.
Speaker 4: That leads to a question that I know is on
Speaker 4: all of our fellow listener's minds after all of the
Speaker 4: research that you have done on this aspect in particular,
Speaker 4: and we can't commend you enough for your objectivity there
Speaker 4: by the way, oh thank you, because you take pains
Speaker 4: to fairly and accurately describe the methods right that these
Speaker 4: evaluators employ. We have to ask, in your opinion, were
Speaker 4: these folks acting in good faith? Like did they believe
Speaker 4: what they were asking the kids about?
Speaker 5: I do think so, Yeah. I think that people generally
Speaker 5: did believe. And in fact, it's hard for me to
Speaker 5: think of anybody who I think was acting in bad
Speaker 5: faith in all of this. But I think that maybe
Speaker 5: in a way, you know, someone who is.
Speaker 7: Truly deeply committed to a belief system can be much
Speaker 7: more dangerous than someone who's just kind of in it
Speaker 7: for themselves, you know, because someone actually I got to
Speaker 7: speak once to Ken Lanning, the author of the Landing Report,
Speaker 7: just to a phone call, so I didn't get to
Speaker 7: record this, and I wish I had, because he had
Speaker 7: this amazing metaphor about how it's all like the music man, right,
Speaker 7: because if you have someone who's a true believer, they're
Speaker 7: not going to give up on that belief.
Speaker 5: But if you have the music man coming to town
Speaker 5: and creating a moral panic about pool Hall so they
Speaker 5: can sell brass instruments to everybody, and then if Ron
Speaker 5: Howard confronts him, baby Ron Howard, about how he's scamming everyone,
Speaker 5: then he will maybe admit it. Like the music man
Speaker 5: is less dangerous. The con artist is maybe less dangerous
Speaker 5: than the true believer. Emany have somebody like our current president,
Speaker 5: who I think is like a corrent artist who lies
Speaker 5: about TENCSI because he believes his own lies and sort
Speaker 5: of that way of I don't know, narcissism, and also
Speaker 5: uh is losing his mental faculties for so many other
Speaker 5: great reasons. But yeah, I really I think that this
Speaker 5: is a great example of how passionate belief in something
Speaker 5: can be extremely dangerous. And I think it's it's the
Speaker 5: idea of I don't know, I don't you look at people,
Speaker 5: especially who wanted to do something to make the world
Speaker 5: safer for children, and you think, yes, that's always a
Speaker 5: good goal. And then I think you had people who
Speaker 5: kind of believed that they could eradicate child abuse if
Speaker 5: they could guests get rid of these Satanists. And it's like, well,
Speaker 5: we let's not try to Let's not have our only
Speaker 5: reason for being involved in a cause or trying to
Speaker 5: make the world better this idea that we can do
Speaker 5: it in a heroic role. Because I think that if
Speaker 5: you're gonna be committed to doing good work in the
Speaker 5: world as it is, then you have to accept that
Speaker 5: it's going to feel like not very much a lot
Speaker 5: of the time. Because I think that the Satanic panic
Speaker 5: stuck around for so long partly because it sold people
Speaker 5: this very appealing narrative where you know, as with Larry
Speaker 5: and Michelle is they're writing Michelle remembers they're not just
Speaker 5: two Catholics too were cheating on their spouses with each other.
Speaker 5: They're actually stopping Satan from taking over the earth, and
Speaker 5: that's the most important thing they could be doing with
Speaker 5: their lives.
Speaker 3: And a little sin is fine if it's for the great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, say it's.
Speaker 6: Okay to lie, I mean, I was going to just
Speaker 6: ask you about this other book in episode four. I'm
Speaker 6: the name of this author is escaping me. But she
Speaker 6: was on Oprah. Yeah, famously wrote a book where she
Speaker 6: participated in breeding babies for the purposes of Satanic sacrifice,
Speaker 6: and literally Oprah platforms this person and speaking about it
Speaker 6: very objectively as if all of this were fact, and
Speaker 6: of course Oprah no hard questions at all, and all
Speaker 6: of that was proven to be complete fabrication. Do you
Speaker 6: think that person was good had good intentions? Is this
Speaker 6: like a breaking the few eggs argument? Or is this
Speaker 6: the person? Because then didn't she move on to another
Speaker 6: grift immediately after?
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's right, Yeah, because she is a good example
Speaker 5: of a grifter actually because she uh Laurence Stratford, she
Speaker 5: wrote a Satanic panic memoir, she claimed, because there is
Speaker 5: a question that kind of came up through the eighties
Speaker 5: of like if Satanic cults were always talking about or
Speaker 5: if we're always talking about the Satanic cults sacrificing like many, many,
Speaker 5: many babies, where are they getting all these babies? Because
Speaker 5: like it's the eighties, we actually keep a pretty close
Speaker 5: eye on these babies. Yeah, and then he had, you know,
Speaker 5: Lauren Stratford strapping up to be like, actually, I was
Speaker 5: used by a cult to breathe these babies. I have
Speaker 5: one of those baby breeders you've been hearing about. But
Speaker 5: although even then she only ever talked about producing three
Speaker 5: to be clear and imaginary babies. And it was also
Speaker 5: in her story. I've read these the most horrible books.
Speaker 5: I'm so happy to be able to take a break
Speaker 5: from the literature. But you know, she her story also
Speaker 5: involved kind of getting involved in pornography and then this,
Speaker 5: you know, the most out there thing for a pornographer
Speaker 5: to do next is to start a satanic cult? Was
Speaker 5: I think at how it went in her book.
Speaker 6: So it's well snuff films, right they were making, which
Speaker 6: we also know is an urban legend.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, sorry, thank god.
Speaker 5: Yeah, a lot of things are real, but not that
Speaker 5: that what Harry, who's your who's your distributor going to
Speaker 5: be for that? I ask you. It's hard enough to
Speaker 5: make a midbive yet rom com these days. Yeah, So
Speaker 5: this idea of like, well, you know, out in la
Speaker 5: they're all doing drugs and making pornography and killing babies
Speaker 5: and it's all one and the same to them.
Speaker 4: So it's it's a very interesting point you bring up there,
Speaker 4: because one one piece of the one missing piece of
Speaker 4: the puzzle for the Satanic panic as a conspiracy theory
Speaker 4: is qui bono, right, who benefits? So, uh, you raised this,
Speaker 4: You raised this excellent point where he said, you know,
Speaker 4: a lot of times, if you're a member of the
Speaker 4: concerned public at large, it may not necessarily matter whether
Speaker 4: or not a devil exists. It's the the fact that
Speaker 4: there are people doing crazy, evil, horrific things. So what
Speaker 4: would if we were to complete the jigsaw puzzle here
Speaker 4: as members of the concerned public, what would we say
Speaker 4: the ultimate end game of these devil worshipers would be?
Speaker 4: Like is it just a ruin stuff or is there
Speaker 4: like a greater goal at play.
Speaker 6: To glorify the dark Lord?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, but why right?
Speaker 5: Why do we have sewing circles because it's a nice
Speaker 5: way to spend Saturday night. I mean, I think the goal,
Speaker 5: and this comes up, and Michelle remembers, is that like
Speaker 5: Satan is going to take over the earth like pretty soon,
Speaker 5: and so if you take it to its most extreme,
Speaker 5: then you're like trying to then you're you know, we're
Speaker 5: getting into the end times because of course late twentieth
Speaker 5: century and early twenty first century Christianity has been very
Speaker 5: apocalypse oriented, as we just saw when you know, we
Speaker 5: had like a TikTok rapture, panic and September, which is
Speaker 5: so funny to me because especially because this thing where
Speaker 5: like people are like, I'm going to get raptured, but
Speaker 5: who will take care of my pets? And it's like
Speaker 5: your pets are going to be raptured and you're going
Speaker 5: to stay. Don't worry about it.
Speaker 4: Also, speaking of speaking of narcissism and inserting oneself into
Speaker 4: the heroic moment, I think the appeal of cultic activity
Speaker 4: and the appeal of apocalyptic belief is always that it's
Speaker 4: going to happen while I'm around.
Speaker 3: Yes, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: So maybe that is maybe that is part of the aspect.
Speaker 4: But we keep going back to this when we were
Speaker 4: talking off air about it a little bit, We keep
Speaker 4: going back to this concept that there was actually no
Speaker 4: proof of this like of a larger conspiracy.
Speaker 3: Can we confirm that? Is that true? That there was
Speaker 3: no proof?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, if you trust
Speaker 5: the FBI and the Landing report, which you know, I
Speaker 5: don't trust every single little thing the FBI has ever done.
Speaker 5: They did try and get Martin Luther King Junior to
Speaker 5: kill himself, but I generally think they do pretty good
Speaker 5: work a lot of the time. And that's one of
Speaker 5: the examples. And you know, it's just the amount of
Speaker 5: effort that went into because I mean, okay, so like
Speaker 5: to compare it to other forms of organized crime, right
Speaker 5: if you compare it to like the mafia, Like the
Speaker 5: FBI was working on that and had you know, probably
Speaker 5: thousands of hours of wire tapped conversations. We had trials
Speaker 5: involving physical evidence. You know, there's like if you look
Speaker 5: at other cases of religious abuse, right, like if you
Speaker 5: look at I think that there was a you know,
Speaker 5: there are cases in Canada, which of course our show
Speaker 5: is also looking, you know, to some extent, how this
Speaker 5: phenomenon got transported down to the United States and then
Speaker 5: embiggened and taken back up to Canada to some extent,
Speaker 5: you know, it was already there culturally, but American police
Speaker 5: also did training and kind of brought our particular spin
Speaker 5: to it. But you know, there's if you think about,
Speaker 5: you know, what happened at Canadian residential schools and the
Speaker 5: presence of you know, mass graves of First Nations children
Speaker 5: who you know, of Indigenous people who never, never were
Speaker 5: mourned and who never made it out of a system
Speaker 5: that saw them as expendable. You know, we're just kind
Speaker 5: of graves of of unclaimed people. Kind of one of
Speaker 5: the things that we get into, and the final episode
Speaker 5: actually is that, you know, it's kind of easy to
Speaker 5: forget that in nineteen seventy eight, that was when the
Speaker 5: Jonestown massacre happened, you know, and it was I think
Speaker 5: the largest loss of American civilian life until September eleventh,
Speaker 5: and about a third of the people who died in
Speaker 5: Jonestown were miners. A lot of them were quite young.
Speaker 5: There were a lot of babies there, and nobody wanted
Speaker 5: to take the bodies of the people who had died
Speaker 5: of Johnstown after the fact. Nobody wanted to to bury them,
Speaker 5: and they were very difficult to identify, and I think
Speaker 5: most of those people were never in any way identified
Speaker 5: or reunited with their families. And so we have this
Speaker 5: presence of you know, if there is an actual mass
Speaker 5: baby grave, like we usually know where it is, people know,
Speaker 5: and it just doesn't matter that much to us, you know,
Speaker 5: and that's happened pretty routinely throughout history. You know, there
Speaker 5: are bodies and we keep finding them. And so this
Speaker 5: idea that there are these satanic cults acting in a
Speaker 5: way that would leave massive amounts of physical evidence that
Speaker 5: would require huge amounts of infrastructure to do what they're saying,
Speaker 5: what we're saying that they're doing. And this is kind
Speaker 5: of a prosaic comparison, but I think a lot about
Speaker 5: the fact that one of the things that was a
Speaker 5: huge concern for the People's Temple and kind of caused
Speaker 5: the unwrap veling in Jonestown was just like, how do
Speaker 5: you feed this many people? Like if you have a cull,
Speaker 5: they only need food, and they got hungry, like you have,
Speaker 5: you know, a long worship session, and then you have
Speaker 5: to feed them afterwards. And so where are these satan
Speaker 5: Is getting all their food? You know? I mean it's
Speaker 5: a serious question I've always had and nobody has ever
Speaker 5: you know, the idea of something this big functioning without
Speaker 5: leaving any kind of of evidence in terms of just
Speaker 5: you know, physical evidence or the kinds of resources that
Speaker 5: they needed to operate. You can only believe that if
Speaker 5: you believe that the magic of Satan himself is just hiding,
Speaker 5: you know, hiding all this physical evidence after the fact.
Speaker 4: We sometimes refer to that as the bigfoot question, because
Speaker 4: you know, if there is a if there's a large
Speaker 4: cryptid of that size, no matter what it eats, it
Speaker 4: poops somewhere, right, it lives, it dies, So where where
Speaker 4: is the physical evidence. The Jonestown comparison there is is
Speaker 4: quite harrowing because I think it teaches us that there
Speaker 4: are real life consequences for people enacting beliefs, even if
Speaker 4: those beliefs cannot be proven.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, well, and also I think what and again,
Speaker 5: I think the sight handing panic was a way to
Speaker 5: distract ourselves from this because I know that, you know,
Speaker 5: Americans saw what happened, you know, in Jonestown after the fact,
Speaker 5: after it was too late to do anything about it.
Speaker 5: And what that revealed is that you really don't need
Speaker 5: Satan at all. You just need one guy who's able to,
Speaker 5: you know, just got a stranglehold on the lives of
Speaker 5: a lot of people and systematically take away any sense
Speaker 5: of power that they have over their own lives, make
Speaker 5: it physically impossible for them to escape, and then you
Speaker 5: don't need anything supernatural at all, you know, because normal
Speaker 5: human abuse is enough.
Speaker 2: And he use a sin a bunch of troops into cities.
Speaker 2: Oh wait, wait, that's a different we're talking about.
Speaker 5: Different thing to fight the evil of public nudity here
Speaker 5: in Portland orgh.
Speaker 4: We're gonna pause here for a word from our sponsors,
Speaker 4: which are hopefully not wayfair, and we'll be right back
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Speaker 3: And we've returned.
Speaker 2: I wonder about underground worship sometimes, and that's not to
Speaker 2: say speak ast anything we've been talking about. I just
Speaker 2: wonder about, historically, over time, when there's a prevailing religion
Speaker 2: that is in some way entrenched in the power structure,
Speaker 2: let's say a city or state or something like that,
Speaker 2: and then the underground worship that occurs. And I'm thinking specifically,
Speaker 2: guys about some of the Freemasonry things that were discovered
Speaker 2: over the years, where there was a really awesome almost
Speaker 2: cave system, like small cave system that was built underneath
Speaker 2: buildings so that people could, you know, go there small
Speaker 2: groups and worship just the way they on it to
Speaker 2: and they needed to without being persecuted by anybody up above.
Speaker 2: I just wonder if that kind of thing. I don't know,
Speaker 2: I get I'm kind of obsessed with this concept that
Speaker 2: I feel like personally I'm dismissing some of it in
Speaker 2: a way that I'm almost uncomfortable with because it feels
Speaker 2: so it feels like movies that I've watched it write
Speaker 2: this the whole concept of everything in the Satanic Panic.
Speaker 2: It feels like a fictional story and there is no evidence.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, I almost feel like I'm
Speaker 2: being tricked into not believing it's there's any sand to it.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, is it helpful to think of it
Speaker 5: in the sense of like, because I think the great
Speaker 5: lie of the Satanic Panic because like, I could start
Speaker 5: a Satanic cult with you right now if we all agreed,
Speaker 5: we could be like our colt. Yeah, and as our
Speaker 5: first cult activity, we're gonna write to our senators because
Speaker 5: the most satanic thing you can do, because Satan is
Speaker 5: all about asking uncomfortable questions.
Speaker 2: Well, according to Peter Teele, it would be we would
Speaker 2: protest some form of AI data center.
Speaker 5: I think, well, I've been fine with that too.
Speaker 3: Oh call Greta right now, guys me, I'll text.
Speaker 5: Let's get satanic let's conserve some water for the humans,
Speaker 5: like satan let us do.
Speaker 3: Like classic lucifer as you were saying.
Speaker 5: Well, so, I think that a key part of kind
Speaker 5: of the Satanic panic is like is not sort of
Speaker 5: what not even exactly what it's identifying, but this idea
Speaker 5: of like the Satanists have already basically taken over and
Speaker 5: we're in the minority, and therefore we have to fight
Speaker 5: with you know, all of the force and all of
Speaker 5: the resources available to us, because the Satanists have already
Speaker 5: won basically and we're like late to the party. Because
Speaker 5: I think that one of the functions of a moral
Speaker 5: panic is to kind of identify real anxieties and real
Speaker 5: problems and then target, you know, find some kind of
Speaker 5: a useful scapegoat, and to never look at who's in
Speaker 5: power visibly and actually and you know, one of the
Speaker 5: things I find interesting about the context of this is
Speaker 5: that Reagan comes into office, you know, in early nineteen
Speaker 5: eighty one, gets shot, immediately bounces right back, and then
Speaker 5: one of the first things that he does, as he promised,
Speaker 5: is to cut the federal budget. And one of the
Speaker 5: things that he cuts the budget for is childcare, and
Speaker 5: so part of the reason people are so stressed about
Speaker 5: childcare and daycare in the early eighties and kind of
Speaker 5: setting the stage for McMartin is because there's less there's
Speaker 5: fewer viable resources than there used to be because of
Speaker 5: the direct actions of the president, you know. And so
Speaker 5: it feels like part of the function of a panic,
Speaker 5: or of a moral panic, is to identify the wrong
Speaker 5: cause for the thing that you are worried about, because.
Speaker 6: It is tricky, right, because I mean, every flavor of
Speaker 6: depravity and evil and you know, despicable act exists. Like
Speaker 6: I think films aren't an urban legend anymore, talked recently
Speaker 6: about the first like proven Stuff film out of Yasha.
Speaker 5: I mean, we do have a different distribution model now
Speaker 5: it makes sense.
Speaker 6: Yes, every corner of the Internet, you're going to find
Speaker 6: some thing that is equally as bad as what we
Speaker 6: imagine Satanism to be, is not entirely worse. So we
Speaker 6: don't even need this organized version of it. It's just
Speaker 6: a way, like a stand in for something that already
Speaker 6: exists in worse ways than we could possibly imagine. But
Speaker 6: it's being weaponized in a way that isn't for the
Speaker 6: greater good.
Speaker 5: I think is the right. And there's this kind of
Speaker 5: you know, this idea and the satanic panic of when
Speaker 5: we look at who gets accused in these trials, there's
Speaker 5: a statistically very out of line with what we know
Speaker 5: about you know, who's abusing children. It really goes after
Speaker 5: a lot of women and a lot of queer people,
Speaker 5: and also just you know, anyone who's kind of a
Speaker 5: low wage daycare worker, because that's who's available, and that's
Speaker 5: who's easier to crush legally, to be sure, right, gotable, Yes, right,
Speaker 5: it's a great m uh.
Speaker 4: And this this also leads us to this interesting complication, right,
Speaker 4: because as we said, we're kind of establishing the fingerprint
Speaker 4: of a moral panic. That being one, there's a binary
Speaker 4: good and evil.
Speaker 3: These are absolute right.
Speaker 4: Two, Uh, the people who are in power are in
Speaker 4: a weird relationship with the underclass right as ever, Right,
Speaker 4: And it turns out that the folks who are, as
Speaker 4: Noel said, scapegoatable usually aren't the folks who have a
Speaker 4: high uh high level Uh. They're the folks who historically
Speaker 4: don't have the means to defend themselves against accusations or
Speaker 4: are so big ticket sociologically that that they don't have
Speaker 4: to worry about it. And this takes us to the
Speaker 4: quot U Shu we teased earlier. As we're wrapping up
Speaker 4: Patrick swayzey, Sarah, just give it to us straight.
Speaker 3: Guy doesn't worship Satan right well, you know, as a
Speaker 3: force for good.
Speaker 5: Like Patrick Swayze is sitting at the right hand of
Speaker 5: the Lord as we speak. Let's be real here, he's
Speaker 5: playing pickleball with Simon Peter. Not really pickleballs, pickleball belongs
Speaker 5: and help.
Speaker 3: Yeah stuff.
Speaker 8: Wait, so but please please just a story, the story
Speaker 8: that we start off with, and this because you know, yeah,
Speaker 8: the story is kind of we're trying to maybe give
Speaker 8: you a little sampler platter for what the whole experience
Speaker 8: will be like.
Speaker 5: Because basically, we tell the story of this woman we
Speaker 5: call her Diane and the show who uh was you know,
Speaker 5: living a few hours away. Came to the small town
Speaker 5: in Kentucky as an arts educator. She had a grant,
Speaker 5: I believe, so she is going to teach photography at
Speaker 5: locals and especially teenager is like this very nice, you know,
Speaker 5: just thing of the country, people from different parts of
Speaker 5: the state, different parts of the country, kind of sharing
Speaker 5: skills of each other. Getting to know each other. And
Speaker 5: during that same period, this is real East Kentucky. In
Speaker 5: the late eighties, a film crew had come to town
Speaker 5: because they were making a Patrick Swayze movie called Next
Speaker 5: to Ken, which is about Patrick Swayze going back to
Speaker 5: the holler where he grew up and you know, getting
Speaker 5: vengeance as you do sometimes, And they had to shoot
Speaker 5: a funeral scene, which actually didn't make it into the movie,
Speaker 5: but to do that, they had to purchase a bunch
Speaker 5: of black dresses. Like I haven't listened to it in
Speaker 5: a while, but you know, it's late ten or twelve,
Speaker 5: but a largish number, and a number again that you
Speaker 5: would is not unimaginable, like feral is maybe the first
Speaker 5: thing that you would think, maybe in reasonable frame of mind,
Speaker 5: but because there was so much anxiety about kind of
Speaker 5: Satanism and satan cults in the air. You know, this
Speaker 5: is the era of the you know, Heraldo special where
Speaker 5: they're like, please, if you're if you're an impressionable child,
Speaker 5: don't watch this. We're putting it on right after school
Speaker 5: and or right in prime time, and it's got a
Speaker 5: lot of gory, scary, violent stuff in it, so don't
Speaker 5: watch it. So Obviously everybody watched it, because if you're
Speaker 5: a kid, you're going to watch that.
Speaker 3: And a disclaimer is an invitation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and they knew that. And so there's just this
Speaker 5: general anxiety that Satanists are around. And so when somebody
Speaker 5: buys a bunch of black dresses all at once, that
Speaker 5: kind of is enough for the local rumor mill to
Speaker 5: kind of reach a flashpoint. And aside, the Satanists have come.
Speaker 5: There's a Satanic cult. They're looking for blonde, blue eyed
Speaker 5: children to sacrifice. Interestingly, and this woman who has come
Speaker 5: to town trying to just like educate some kids in
Speaker 5: basic photography skills. Because she's she's the outlier, she's the stranger,
Speaker 5: she's a new person in town. They decide, well, this
Speaker 5: is our Satanist and so she basically has to flee
Speaker 5: with a very reasonable fear that you know that her
Speaker 5: life is in danger, because if you have a scapegoat,
Speaker 5: then you get to come at them with all the
Speaker 5: force then that the person truly in power deserves to
Speaker 5: get from you. So because of Patrick Swayze, there was
Speaker 5: enough of a disturbance in everyday life that people felt,
Speaker 5: you know, things feel weird. And I have been told
Speaker 5: by people smarter than me that that means Satanists are
Speaker 5: here right now.
Speaker 2: As it reminds me a lot of the the FEMA
Speaker 2: camp rumors that were started by those the black Liners
Speaker 2: for Grave Grave Liners. Do you guys remember this, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was just storage, but the images circulated on social
Speaker 2: media in such a way that it was panic really.
Speaker 4: Began launching Jade Helm and their similar conspiracy theories. That's
Speaker 4: a great call, mat it. Also, it reminds me of Oregon.
Speaker 4: Theft conspiracies were common in theories that were common in
Speaker 4: Latin America, like back in they had real world consequences, Sarah,
Speaker 4: kind of like what you're illustrating with the Satanic panic.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: Specifically, there were Japanese nationals in Guatemala who were killed
Speaker 4: by people in a rural area because the assumption was
Speaker 4: by taking a photograph of the kid, you were planning
Speaker 4: to abduct them and steal their organs.
Speaker 3: No proof of it, but you.
Speaker 4: Have confirmed officially on stuff. They don't want you to
Speaker 4: know that Patrick Swayze is not a devil worshiper, And
Speaker 4: we couldn't be more grateful.
Speaker 5: And I'm just glad that there's not any question about it.
Speaker 5: I mean, I that's why you're here today, right.
Speaker 6: He's a bit of an agent and dirty dancing started dancing.
Speaker 3: To the summer camps.
Speaker 5: He does teenage to move cross first and you know what,
Speaker 5: I'll take it.
Speaker 3: It is, Yeah, I'll take it.
Speaker 4: So we we have we always like to end on
Speaker 4: one final question. First off, folks, we hope you can
Speaker 4: tell that we're huge fans of this show. We think
Speaker 4: it's extremely important, especially in an increasingly divisive and paranoid
Speaker 4: society right these days. Sarah, what do we hope our
Speaker 4: fellow listeners can take away from the Devil?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 5: Yeah, thank you for asking that. I just I hope
Speaker 5: that you listen. It is a very as we've been
Speaker 5: talking about, in many ways, depressing subject matter. But I
Speaker 5: hope that we've told the story, or allowed the people
Speaker 5: who experienced it to tell the story in a way
Speaker 5: that also highlights just how many amazing people have lived
Speaker 5: through this, and who've survived it and who are you
Speaker 5: motivated in all things by really just the search for
Speaker 5: truth and love. You know that that's not going to
Speaker 5: go out of style. And I would also say that
Speaker 5: this really we tried to tell the story of the
Speaker 5: kind of the origin and the spread and the shape
Speaker 5: that this took. But also this is, you know, really
Speaker 5: just the tip of the iceberg. And I think that
Speaker 5: as much media and as much reckoning as we've done
Speaker 5: with the Satanic Panic in the past few years, there's
Speaker 5: so much more to do, and there's so much more
Speaker 5: history left undiscovered. So I hope that this inspires people to,
Speaker 5: you know, if you get curious, to do your own research,
Speaker 5: to find more of those stories that we haven't heard yet,
Speaker 5: and also just to as we're living through this moment,
Speaker 5: to maybe take some perspective and useful knowledge and comfort
Speaker 5: from the fact that this is something that seems to recur.
Speaker 5: Moral panics seem to be a part of not just
Speaker 5: the culture we're in, but kind of the people that
Speaker 5: we are, and to learn how to ride those waves,
Speaker 5: because there's a lot of us all all in this
Speaker 5: trying to he's trying to keep telling the truth and
Speaker 5: keep taking care of each other, you know. And I
Speaker 5: think that when I when you're younger, you might have
Speaker 5: the idea of history that, like, you know, especially before
Speaker 5: our country descended into fascism, it was easy to look
Speaker 5: back at history and be like, why didn't Germans just
Speaker 5: simply stop it? Why didn't they say, hey, stop that?
Speaker 5: And now we have been humbolt and and so that
Speaker 5: you know, you can you can live in a culture
Speaker 5: that's going out of its mind and you can't steer it.
Speaker 5: Maybe on the scale that you would have liked to
Speaker 5: believe that you could be, can still make more of
Speaker 5: a difference than you may realize you're doing at the time.
Speaker 5: And that's what we're trying to tell too with the
Speaker 5: story Amazing.
Speaker 3: This reminds me so much of your earlier work on
Speaker 3: You're Wrong about Thank.
Speaker 5: You Yeah, thank you Yeah, And that's you know, and
Speaker 5: we love making that show today and just kind of
Speaker 5: sharing sharing stories and and getting to laugh about it too.
Speaker 5: I think that's important. These are all really hard, sad stories,
Speaker 5: but we get to laugh about it together and that's
Speaker 5: gonna help us get through all this.
Speaker 2: For my final question, sir, do you still talk to
Speaker 2: Tonya Harding? And is she doing okay?
Speaker 5: I have never met Tanya Harding. I really want to,
Speaker 5: but I want it to happen organically. I want to
Speaker 5: us like get really into skating and then one day
Speaker 5: we're going to run into each other and then We're
Speaker 5: just gonna like kind of nod. It'll be like the
Speaker 5: end of Francis Ha.
Speaker 3: Okay, perfect.
Speaker 6: The only thing I know about Francis Haw is the twirl.
Speaker 6: I actually need to get a bit of a blind
Speaker 6: spot for me.
Speaker 4: It's gonna happen. We're manifesting it. Sarah are our final
Speaker 4: thank here. First off, thank you for being so generous
Speaker 4: with your time. Thank you for your excellent work as
Speaker 4: a media analyst, as a writer, as a as a podcaster.
Speaker 4: Uh where can outwur Fell listeners go to learn more
Speaker 4: about not just The Devil you Know, but your many
Speaker 4: other projects.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well yeah, so of course check out The Devil
Speaker 5: you Know. It's out from CBC Podcasts. Listen to it.
Speaker 5: Wherever you got podcasts. You can listen to my week
Speaker 5: to week I guess once every two weekly Fortnightly you
Speaker 5: can listen to my fortnightly show You're wrong about as well,
Speaker 5: which is also wherever you fine podcasts. My mom, if
Speaker 5: she would listening, would say what what does that mean?
Speaker 5: And I would tell her just google it, Just google
Speaker 5: it's my name and it'll it'll come up. And I
Speaker 5: feel like I should tell you to visit a website
Speaker 5: or a newsletter or something.
Speaker 3: Oh remember Sarah Marshall.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's my website. Yeah, I have a website. I
Speaker 5: really need to update it. But it's it's pretty good.
Speaker 3: I love it.
Speaker 6: You just gotten ahead of the forgetting Sarah Marshall jokes
Speaker 6: with your r L.
Speaker 3: I think it's key.
Speaker 5: I'm sure you love.
Speaker 6: It when people bring that up.
Speaker 5: I got right on top of that one. Yeah, that
Speaker 5: was important set. But if you want to find out
Speaker 5: more about the Satanic panic, also listen to American Hysteria,
Speaker 5: another great show that is made by my friend Chelsea
Speaker 5: Weber Smith and I got to go on there and
Speaker 5: guest sometimes, which is an amazing show. And there's just
Speaker 5: so much There's so much great stuff out there. Read
Speaker 5: some old Texas Monthly articles, watch the Paradise Lost documentary.
Speaker 2: There.
Speaker 5: We've mentioned some some good stuff here today. So yeah,
Speaker 5: listen to my show, listen to other shows. If your
Speaker 5: brain is too overwhelmed to listen to anything right now,
Speaker 5: I also really understand. Just take a nice walk.
Speaker 3: And there you have it.
Speaker 4: Folks, get thee to thy podcast platform of choice and
Speaker 4: check out The Devil. You know, we had a great
Speaker 4: time with this. When we can't wait to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 3: Guys.
Speaker 4: This was I think this was a great accompaniment to
Speaker 4: our earlier episode about how so your soul works?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and our episode are there real devil worshipers
Speaker 2: and Italy's Satanic murders and gosh we've been talking.
Speaker 3: About snosis work. Yeah, we we went deep.
Speaker 4: As you can tell. We're big, big fans of Sarah.
Speaker 4: Do check out you're wrong about as well. If you
Speaker 4: dig our show, you'll love that one and hit us
Speaker 4: on folks, We would again love to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 4: You can call us on the phone, you can send
Speaker 4: us an email, you can find us on the lines.
Speaker 6: Oh please do find us at the hammlic Conspiracy Stuff
Speaker 6: where we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group Here's
Speaker 6: where it gets crazy, on XFK, a Twitter and on
Speaker 6: YouTube or we have video content just galore for you
Speaker 6: to dive into on Instagram and TikTok. However, we are
Speaker 6: Conspiracy Stuff a show.
Speaker 2: We have a phone number. It is one eight three
Speaker 2: three std WYTK. Why don't you call in tell us
Speaker 2: what you thought about the episode and maybe your experience
Speaker 2: with a satanic cult. When you call it, give yourself
Speaker 2: a cooal nickname, and let us know if we can
Speaker 2: your name and message on the air. If you want
Speaker 2: to send us an email, you can do that.
Speaker 4: We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence
Speaker 4: we receive. Be well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void
Speaker 4: writes back, would you like a random fact? Would you
Speaker 4: like a random quotation? Something that Sarah referenced in our
Speaker 4: conversation reminded me of a quote we've shared in the past,
Speaker 4: but it's terrifyingly relevant for this Methodist pastor David Barnhardt said, quote,
Speaker 4: The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for.
Speaker 4: They never make demands of you. They are morally uncomplicated,
Speaker 4: unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor. And when
Speaker 4: they are born, you can forget about them because they
Speaker 4: cease to be unborn. They are, in short, the perfect
Speaker 4: people to love if you want to claim you love
Speaker 4: Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe, prisoners, immigrants, the sick,
Speaker 4: the poor, widows, orphans, all the groups that are specifically
Speaker 4: mentioned in the Bible. They all get thrown under the
Speaker 4: bus for the unborn conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff they Don't Want You To Know is a production
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Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.