Thread by @dappergander

The Satanic Panic burned through the American imagination during the 1980s. We laugh about it now, but at the time, it was considered to be fact by law enforcement, government, church groups, media, and child psychologists.

Imagine if QAnon was on the cover of People Magazine.

The moral panic was widespread. D&D was teaching teens to conjure demons; heavy metal was filled with secret messages; national networks of devil worshipers were sacrificing dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of kids.

These are all real headlines.

Perhaps the most famous and illustrative episode of the era was the McMartin trials. We'll get to that. But what really kicked everything off was a book: MicHELLe Remembers.

It was published in 1980, authored by Dr Lawrence Pazder and his patient, whom he would later marry.

Wikipedia sums up the contents of the book pretty well, and this is going to sound *awfully* familiar to any of you who have dipped your toes into the modern SRA movement, QAnon, Pizzagate, or any other lingering aspect of the panic.

The Wiki article lists all the problems with the story in detail, you should read it. But the tl;dr is that there was no evidence of any of the horrific crimes described. Michelle described an 81 day long ritual in a public cemetery that wasn't noticed by anyone on the island.

Of course, one of the most glaring problems with the whole story was simply this: Michelle described an intricate network of Satanic priests and worshipers that had existed in British Columbia for over a hundred years and how they had all been outwitted by a five year old girl.

By 1990, everyone except the authors and their fans had distanced themselves from the book.

However, in the 80s, it was a sensation. Dr Pazder was giving lectures and training on SRA to law enforcement. Cops were taught that these cults *existed*.

And so: McMartin Preschool.

The McMartin Preschool trials are *probably* the best known part of the Satanic Panic. They captivated the nation-- it was the OJ trial of its day-- and even had a movie made about them, which was moderately accurate and starred tremendous actor and garbage person James Woods.

The McMartin trials lasted for 7 years (1983-1990). Starting with over 200 charges, from sexual abuse to animal sacrifice to human sacrifice, but eventually 53 charges were brought to the first trial. The jury acquitted on 40 charges and hung on 13.

The 2nd trial prosecuted 8 of those 13 charges. The jury acquitted on 2 and hung on 6 at first, then asked the judge to retract the 2 acquittals and return a "hopelessly deadlocked" verdict on all 8 charges, resulting in a mistrial. The DA declined to have a 3rd trial.

By the end of the trials, both law enforcement and the public at large had soured on the concept of SRA and national underground cults.

That had a lot to do with the videotaped interviews of the alleged victims conducted by the Children's Institute International.

The techniques used by CII were highly damaging to their subjects. Interviewers would coax the children to produce stories of the abuses they suffered. If the children denied any abuses had occurred, they were called stupid and cowardly.

As a result, the stories the children told were often beyond belief: rituals took place in public, or in churches. Babies were eaten. Animals were tortured. There were tunnels under the school. They were taken to the airport, flown to a 2nd location, and abused in a ritual there.

Again, there was no evidence of any of this. Just videotapes of young children weaving ever more elaborate stories to please the CII staff. Worth noting was that no one on the CII staff was actually a psychologist. They were amateurs.

(On the "worth noting" front is also that mother who filed the original complaint, Judy Johnson, was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. She self medicated with alcohol and died of complications from chronic alcoholism before the trial even started.)

When the videotapes were viewed by an actual psychologist, he was appalled.

The McMartin trial would forever change the way interviews with children would be conducted, a cautionary tale about suggestibility, coercion, and false memory.

In many ways, the McMartin Preschool Trials were a perfect encapsulation of the entire Satanic Panic era of the 1980s, and by the time they ended in 1990, law enforcement and the public had largely discarded the idea of nationwide secret cabals on a child abuse rampage.

But not everyone, and not everywhere. It's important to remember that the *parents* of the McMartin kids considered the verdicts a great miscarriage of justice. They remained convinced that the nonsensical events their children described had genuinely happened.

You see echoes of the Satanic Panic in the cases of the West Memphis Three, in QAnon, and of course the most direct descendant, the modern SRA community. What started 30 years ago never really ended.

The beating heart of this continuing belief in secret cults are people who make the same claims that the McMartin children did in 1983.

Their stories are the fuel the community needs to keep believing.

Are these people victims? Lying? Crazy? Con artists?

It really might not be so simple. It's entirely possible they honestly believe their own stories.

So, after I take another break, let's talk about trauma and memory and whether you can be convinced to remember the impossible.

The McMartin children and their parents still believe in their memories. I know of only one child, now an adult, who has come to understand the events never happened.
latimes.com/archives/la-xp…

Everyone has experienced a time where an event you thought you recalled well is described by another person who was present and things don’t quite line up. An argument with a loved one over who said what, or how big the fish you and your friends caught was.

Memories aren’t videotapes. It is the extraordinary human who can recall with perfect clarity past events of their life. This is why eyewitness testimony convicts innocent people and why gaslighting can be a successful manipulative tactic.

Our memories are also connected strongly to our imaginations. That’s why it’s possible to have visual & auditory memories of things we’ve never actually seen or heard—moments from our favorite books or heroic events in a D&D game.

Have you ever seen a movie based on a book, then later, read the book? Did you find it difficult not to see the actors from the film in your imagination, even if the dialogue wasn’t quite the same, or scenes on the page were edited out of the screenplay? If so, you’re not alone.

To this day, I can't help seeing Martin Freeman, Sam Rockwell, and Yasiin Bey in my mind's eye when I re-read the Hitchhiker's Guide. Half the time I even visualize Zooey Deschanel, even though Adams describes Trillian as looking *Arabic* in the book.

Clearly, memory is malleable and can fail us. The majority of people know that—but we still fall into these sorts of traps. The basic math seems to be that about 1/3 of people get the details wrong even on images they've seen their entire lives.

But for a small community of people, those traps seem impossible to climb out of. People who somehow find it easier to believe that they’ve slipped into a parallel universe than that Kit Kat was never spelled Kit-Kat.

It’s even possible to create a memory of an impossible event—which brings us to the strange case of Bugs Bunny and Disneyland.

In the early 2000s, Elizabeth Loftus and her research partners undertook a study, and you can read the results here: staff.washington.edu/eloftus/Articl…

They created a fake advertisement showing children meeting a costumed Bugs Bunny character at Disneyland, something that has never occurred. This ad and others were shown to subjects, who were then asked to recall their own trips to Disney Parks.

The results were stunning.

Simply having a cardboard standee of Bugs Bunny present in the *room* when they were questioned increased the likelihood of subjects creating an “autobiographical memory” of having met a costumed Bugs at Disneyland. Again—this event never took place.

With all of this in mind, is it really a mystery that the McMartin children remembered being abused in a Satanic ritual? The fact that they remember it happening in a public car wash during business hours is no more or less impossible than the subject of Loftus' experiment.

Imagine being a child and being told by an adult that other children in your class were abused. Imagine being told that they already knew YOU had been abused. They just needed you to remember what happened and tell them all about it. You can probably see where this is going.

Imagine that for the better part of a decade, everyone just *knew* these cults were everywhere. Anyone could be a high priest in a centuries-old Satanic cabal. Trusted media figures did entire segments on the "facts."

And we haven't really abandoned this narrative thirty years later. Sure, Tom Brokaw isn't telling us about it on the evening news—but Alex Jones is screaming about it on InfoWars. Though again relegated to the fringe, it's still in our public imagination.

The Satanic Panic is over for most of us. But not all of us. Not for the modern SRA community, not for QAnon, not for fundamentalist evangelicals, not for Pizzagate. For them, Moloch lives on and his minions are everywhere.

And just by repeating these stories, over and over, we see people convince themselves that they remember being ritually abused by the Satanic cults their families led, just like they could be convinced to remember meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland.

Hey, my first unroll. Thanks, @Maksimiljian!
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