Bitchy History - Season 2, Episode 8： The Satanic Panic

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Bitchy History, the irreverent history podcast that's here to tell you another tale of how Phyllis Schlafly ruined everything. 1.00

00:00:06.800 Even if it is mostly by coincidence this time. 1.00

00:00:23.860 Welcome back to Bitchy History.

00:00:25.220 This semester has been a bit of a glitchy one for me, which I'm sure you can tell by the slightly irregular posting schedule of the podcast lately.

00:00:33.120 As a result, even though it's December 7th, today is the day you are getting the long-awaited Satanic Panic episode.

00:00:39.280 I know it would have made more sense during spooky season, but...

00:00:42.420 It's always home-awaited by soul.

00:00:45.460 So it should all work out fine.

00:00:47.060 So, the Satanic Panic. What was it, and what does it have to do with Phyllis Schlafly?

00:00:52.400 Let's start with answering the first question, and we'll get around to answering that second one in a little bit.

00:00:57.500 The Satanic Panic was a widespread moral panic that had massive cultural impact in the United States between the 1970s and 1990s.

00:01:05.240 There's some debate on when the Satanic Panic started and when it ended, but that's mostly because people can't decide which moral panics constituted the Satanic Panic.

00:01:15.020 There were a few of them.

00:01:15.940 Whether it was just the supposed satanic rituals at daycares, or if we can consider the cultural

00:01:21.100 reaction to films like The Exorcist and the Amityville Horror in the 1970s, or the evangelical

00:01:27.040 backlash against Harry Potter in the 1990s as well. Some might say that the satanic panic never

00:01:32.880 really ended, but we'll talk about that toward the end of the episode. The most common associations

00:01:37.700 we have with the satanic panic in our culture is associated with media. Before we blamed video

00:01:43.240 games for school shootings, we were blaming

00:01:45.140 the demonic forces of Dungeons & Dragons

00:01:47.400 for encouraging teenagers to

00:01:49.200 summon demons and commit

00:01:50.920 acts of violence.

00:01:53.260 Dungeons & Dragons.

00:01:55.860 Satan's game.

00:01:57.860 Your children,

00:01:59.160 like it or not, are attracted

00:02:01.100 in their weaker years to the occult.

00:02:03.820 And a game like D&D

00:02:05.380 fuels their imagination

00:02:07.020 and makes them feel special

00:02:08.860 while drawing them deeper and

00:02:11.140 deeper into the bowels of

00:02:12.800 El Diablo. This afternoon, the Dead Ale Wives Watchtower invites you to sit in on an actual

00:02:19.460 gaming session. Observe the previously unobservable as a hidden camera takes you to the inner sanctum

00:02:27.280 of Dungeons and Dragons. Okay, that clip was satire, but I'll play you some actual clips

00:02:35.260 of commentary about Dungeons and Dragons later that prove that that one was pretty much spot on.

00:02:40.700 Dungeons & Dragons was released in 1974, and I won't give you a history of it because we're all nerds here.

00:02:47.020 We know Dungeons & Dragons, but suffice to say, it was more controversial than Gary Gygax probably thought it would be.

00:02:53.640 There was a variety of anti-D&D propaganda during the 1970s, but the pushback against it came in the 1980s specifically.

00:03:01.780 In 1979 and 1982, two particular tragedies hit the news that were both blamed very heavily on the role-playing game.

00:03:10.060 The first, in 1979, was the disappearance of James Egbert from his dorm room at Michigan State University.

00:03:16.120 A private investigator was hired by his parents, who soon found out that James had been an avid player of D&D,

00:03:21.820 and he began to publicly amplify police theories that his death was somehow related to the game.

00:03:28.200 Only the police theory wasn't related to D&D being some sort of dark cult.

00:03:32.820 They just said that students were said to play the live-action game in the steam maintenance tunnels below the campus,

00:03:38.400 and they thought that Egbert had probably gone into the tunnels and either been injured or lost

00:03:42.840 his way in them. But that wasn't a good headline. College student dies in steam tunnels is boring.

00:03:49.220 College student vanishes after joining a bizarre and secretive cult sounds much cooler, which is

00:03:54.920 what the media went with. Egbert was found only a few weeks later, having called the private

00:03:59.860 investigator from Morgan City, Louisiana, where he had run from Michigan. Sadly, James Egbert would

00:04:05.560 die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on August 16, 1980, almost exactly a year after his story

00:04:11.500 generated national attention. According to William Deer, the private investigator who would eventually

00:04:16.380 publish James Egbert's story in 1984, the cause had nothing to do with D&D. Rather, it was a

00:04:22.660 combination of depression, loneliness, parental pressure, drug addiction, and possibly difficulty 0.64

00:04:27.640 in coming to terms with his homosexuality. Egbert's story would also, however, be turned

00:04:32.660 into a 1982 made for tv movie titled mazes and monsters starring tom hanks which is a lot

00:04:41.340 tom hanks and his friends get caught up in a deadly game of fantasy i am the maze controller

00:04:48.760 until they take it too far i propose we play mazes and monsters in a real setting

00:04:55.780 It won't be a fantasy.

00:04:58.840 Too bad for one of them, because now there's no turning back.

00:05:04.020 This is only a game. 0.98

00:05:05.580 I know, I killed somebody.

00:05:07.280 Mazes and monsters.

00:05:09.400 This was, uh, it was not Tom Hanks' finest hour, let's just put it that way.

00:05:14.520 The same year as this highly questionable film,

00:05:17.700 the suicide of Irving Pulling would bring increased negative attention to the game as well.

00:05:22.380 Irving's mother, Patricia, would end up founding an organization known as B.A.D. with two Ds,

00:05:27.420 which stood for Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, and she blamed the death of her son exclusively on the game.

00:05:35.280 She even filed a wrongful death lawsuit against both her son's high school principal, Robert Bracey III,

00:05:41.300 holding him as responsible for what she claimed was a D&D curse that had been placed on her son's character shortly before his death,

00:05:48.120 but she also filed suit against D&D's publishers.

00:05:51.920 Both lawsuits were summarily dismissed, because even during the satanic panic, no one was going to take

00:05:57.380 My son was cursed by his high school principal during a game of D&D seriously as a lawsuit.

00:06:03.260 Bad described D&D as a fantasy role-playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide,

00:06:11.780 assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic-type rituals, gambling,

00:06:18.640 barbarism cannibalism sadism desecration demon summoning necromantics divinations and other

00:06:24.700 teachings which is a big ask for a game that during the 1980s was nearly exclusively played

00:06:30.280 by ostracized nerds who couldn't get laid you'd think if they had all this real magic going on

00:06:35.280 they might have been able to get a girlfriend or get the football team to stop beating them up and

00:06:38.920 tripping them in the hallway calm down i played dnd in high school i get to make these jokes i

00:06:43.640 also never got laid in high school the football team never beat me up though but that was more

00:06:48.080 because I was a girl than anything else. Because I know that I annoyed them enough for them to want

00:06:52.960 to beat me up a few times. One of my favorite pieces of media to come out of the D&D moral

00:06:58.600 panic has to be the Jack Chick track titled Dark Dungeons, which likely took heavy inspiration from

00:07:04.620 the story of Irving pulling suicide and Patricia's claims about a curse. In the track, a girl named

00:07:09.800 Marcy is killed in the game, leading the dungeon master to declare, Marcy, get out of here, you're

00:07:15.480 dead you don't exist anymore which is a bit extreme i've died in dnd several times i just

00:07:20.820 rolled a new character i never got told i didn't exist anymore this dm needs to chill but of course

00:07:26.520 this dm has darker intentions she pulls aside another player named debbie to tell her that now

00:07:32.060 that her cleric has been raised to the eighth level she's ready to learn real magic debbie is

00:07:37.440 accepted into a witch's coven eventually of course the whole thing takes a dark turn with marcy

00:07:41.980 committing suicide because it was her fault her character died and she can't face life alone.

00:07:47.320 Debbie realizes how evil the game is, accepts Christ, and burns all of her occult items.

00:07:52.320 At the end, there's a lot of biblical quotes about how being a witch or consulting with spirits is

00:07:56.340 an abomination to the Lord, which, okay, maybe it is, but what does that have to do with D&D?

00:08:00.960 At all. But the facts of what an average D&D session actually looked like weren't important

00:08:05.980 at this point. The media had latched onto a narrative that was an excellent 1980s version

00:08:10.700 of clickbait. In 1985, 60 Minutes broadcast an episode which offered a hugely biased look at

00:08:16.680 whether or not Dungeons & Dragons was harmful. Ed Bradley mostly focused on the story of the

00:08:21.420 pullings, but he did bring on Gary Gygax at one point, mostly to ask him why he didn't add a

00:08:26.740 warning to the game, letting people know of the potential harmful effects it might have on players,

00:08:31.360 which has vaguely the same phrasing as asking someone if they've stopped beating their wife

00:08:35.200 yet. It assumes that the harm is real and has been done, rather than asking if the claim of

00:08:40.020 the harm itself is a load of bullshit in the first place. But the satanic panic didn't just 0.95

00:08:44.860 create fear about Dungeons and Dragons. The fear of media influencing children to witchcraft and

00:08:49.920 Satanism evolved over time, well into the 1990s, where my love of fantasy novels became something

00:08:55.860 rather suspect in my deeply evangelical Southern Baptist church, and I got plenty of lectures about

00:09:01.220 how reading Harry Potter might give demons access to my soul. I still don't get it. The Latin in

00:09:06.700 Harry Potter isn't even proper Latin. What was I going to summon with it? Bad writing and transphobia?

00:09:12.460 Knowing my church, they would have been all for both of those things. But I digress. But it wasn't 1.00

00:09:17.440 only the nerds who liked to cast poorly Latinized spells and read about magic swords and defeating

00:09:22.520 dark lords that were impacted by this fear. It even affected the cool kids who listened to rock

00:09:27.340 music on their boomboxes at lunch. Now music has always been an area filled with moral panics. In

00:09:33.300 the 1920s, it was jazz. In the 1950s, it was the birth of rock and roll. In the 1960s, it was

00:09:38.820 Beatlemania. And in the 1980s, it was, again, rock music and rap. But the racial history of musical

00:09:45.300 moral panics is a topic for another episode. The entire panic was because of something called

00:09:50.240 backmasking, what we might call Easter eggs today in modern media, or just Taylor Swift's general

00:09:56.140 communication style with fans. In modern media, an Easter egg is a hidden message, image, or feature

00:10:02.360 that can be found if you watch closely or give a specific set of commands.

00:10:06.540 Think about the hidden Mickeys at Disneyland,

00:10:08.800 or for Doctor Who fans, the episode Blink,

00:10:11.180 in which hidden messages from the Doctor are found across 17 different films,

00:10:15.460 giving the protagonist the information she needs to save both herself and the Doctor.

00:10:19.580 The concept of backmasking was just Easter eggs, but for music,

00:10:23.300 where a recording technique is used to record a message backward

00:10:26.200 onto a track that is meant to be played forward,

00:10:28.820 usually for comedic or satiric effect.

00:10:31.540 Now, to the credit of the evangelical religious rite, which is not a sentence you'll hear me say often,

00:10:37.000 backmasking was real.

00:10:38.920 Bands really did encode messages into their music if you played it backwards.

00:10:43.100 Here's an example from the Pink Floyd song, Empty Spaces.

00:10:47.860 You are a snowman.

00:10:52.080 Congratulations.

00:10:53.540 You have just discovered the secret message.

00:10:57.500 Please send your answer to our pink.

00:11:01.020 and there are a lot of other examples my personal favorite is the belgian band that included a 0.99

00:11:14.140 backmasked message on their 1988 album tetra that said you fucking asshole play the record the normal 1.00

00:11:20.680 way and weird al yankovic's nature trail to hell where the backmasked voice declares that satan 1.00

00:11:26.880 Eats Cheese Whiz, which is obviously making fun of the Satanic Panic. And in fact, many heavy metal

00:11:33.040 bands did actually have references to Satan in the backmasking of their albums. But it's not like

00:11:38.560 those songs weren't already referencing Satan in the forward tracks as well, usually. In 1981,

00:11:45.000 an English extreme metal band named Venom released the song In League With Satan, which included a 0.97

00:11:50.340 backmasked message that said, Satan raised in hell, raised in hell, I'm gonna burn your soul,

00:11:55.620 crush your bones, I'm gonna make you bleed, you gonna bleed for me, which sounds more like they're 0.99

00:12:00.760 threatening Satan than worshiping him, but that's just me. The metal band Slayer also included a 0.97

00:12:06.000 backmasked voice that repeatedly chanted join us at the start of the band's 1985 album Hell Awaits. 0.94

00:12:12.500 In any case, there's dozens of real examples of backmasking, so I guess the evangelicals had a

00:12:17.980 point, except that they were rarely interested in albums that had actual backmasking. It's no fun if

00:12:24.140 you find hidden satanic messages in an album from a band called Slayer on an album called

00:12:29.760 Hell Awaits, after all. That's boring. Expected. Amateur night. If your kid is listening to Venom

00:12:35.560 or Slayer or Cradle of Filth as an evangelical Christian, you already have a problem with that. 0.51

00:12:40.380 No, no, the real winner would be finding messages praising Satan in otherwise completely normal

00:12:45.760 secular music. Which brings us to this hilarious televangelist from 1983 who had supposedly found

00:12:52.860 damning backwards messages about Satan in Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven.

00:12:58.280 And I'll read the last verse for you because it's very interesting.

00:13:01.680 It says,

00:13:02.520 And as we wind on down the road, our shadow's taller than our soul. 0.87

00:13:05.920 There walks a lady we all know who shines white light and wants to show

00:13:09.060 how everything still turns to gold.

00:13:11.320 And if you listen very hard, the tune will come to you at last,

00:13:15.180 when all are one and one is all, to be a rock and not to roll.

00:13:17.940 If you listen to the tune...

00:13:19.940 all right now you're going to play this backwards right to get critics even you know

00:13:28.420 or the skeptics to show them what i'm going to do i've actually taken the exact piece of tape

00:13:34.020 that you just heard it off of and i've reversed thread the machine and i'm going to play that

00:13:37.620 exact piece of tape backwards now okay just that you've not doctored it in any way all right let's

00:13:44.060 Let's go ahead and start.

00:13:58.160 Okay.

00:14:00.160 I heard something there.

00:14:01.800 All right, listen for I Live With Satan, exactly.

00:14:04.960 You might want to turn it up just a little out here on the floor.

00:14:08.320 I Live With Satan.

00:14:09.580 Listen again.

00:14:14.060 I don't know about you guys, but there is no way I could have heard that message unless I was

00:14:26.360 already primed to hear it, which is why they announce them before they play the music, of

00:14:31.320 course, so your mind is listening for those syllables. They do this several times throughout

00:14:35.900 the rest of the video, priming you to hear certain phrases before they play them backwards on the

00:14:40.980 tape. I'll post the full video on this week's Substack post if you're interested in seeing

00:14:45.400 any more of that insanity. That said, even with the priming, I don't hear I live with Satan at all.

00:14:52.460 And even if I had, what is that supposed to accomplish for Led Zeppelin, the supposed

00:14:56.820 Satanists in this situation? Even if every fan listened to Stairway to Heaven backwards and

00:15:02.520 happened to hear I live with Satan on the track, is that a spell? Will it forcibly convert them

00:15:08.380 to Satanism? I have questions. I blame this period specifically for the churches I grew up in that

00:15:14.240 were consistently shaming me for listening to anything that wasn't Christian music specifically.

00:15:19.580 This was a real problem in evangelical churches in the 90s and early 2000s. Anything that wasn't

00:15:24.940 Skillet, Reliant K, Switchfoot, Rebecca St. James, Jars of Clay, or Jennifer Knapp was seriously

00:15:31.220 frowned upon. My youth pastor tried to confiscate my Lincoln Park CDs once. It was a whole thing.

00:15:37.520 Jennifer Knapp was, of course, my favorite, and then she vanished from the face of Christian 0.96

00:15:41.500 music for a decade and came back from Australia as a lesbian. 0.72

00:15:45.140 So really, I guess that tracks for me.

00:15:47.720 In fact, the consuming of non-Christian media is still a highly debated issue within evangelical

00:15:53.020 circles today.

00:15:53.920 If you go online, you'll find endless videos and evangelical think pieces on how the consumption

00:15:59.460 of secular media is intensely frowned upon by many evangelicals.

00:16:03.740 Because even if you can't find hidden subliminal messages while playing the music backward,

00:16:08.540 anything that doesn't glorify God is clearly demonic.

00:16:12.220 God created music for his glory.

00:16:14.360 And Satan is a fallen musician, and he uses music against God's glory for his glory.

00:16:18.580 But this discussion of backmasking actually leads us to another cultural factor of the

00:16:23.420 satanic panic, the horror films of the 1970s.

00:16:27.300 Way back in 1973, The Exorcist used the concept of playing a tape backwards to hear a message,

00:16:32.980 a tape of noises from the possessed victim was discovered to contain a message when the tape

00:16:37.500 was played backwards. When The Exorcist was released in 1973, it created a media frenzy.

00:16:56.300 Amy Chambers in the journal History of the Human Sciences writes that the media circus

00:17:00.540 surrounding the film from December of 1973 when it was released all the way through 1974 led to

00:17:06.880 increased reports in the press of demon possessions, reports of audience members convulsing

00:17:11.900 and vomiting at screenings of the film, and moral outrage from the religious, both Protestant and

00:17:17.020 Catholic, at the content of the film. The 1970s was the perfect priming ground for the height of

00:17:22.560 the satanic panic in the 1980s. Movies like The Exorcist, The Omen, The Wicker Man, and Amityville

00:17:28.240 horror were all wonderful meat for the paranoia of the religious right to feed on when it came 0.82

00:17:32.960 to fears about demonic influence. The parents of children in the 1970s and 1980s had been raised

00:17:38.700 in the religious boom time of the 1950s, but by the 1970s society had changed. There was growing

00:17:44.940 secularism of media and music, the sexual revolution, and the civil rights movement had

00:17:49.660 all taken its toll on the traditional America that these people had grown up with, and the response

00:17:55.020 of the newly birthed political religious right was to push back against the secularism that was

00:18:00.380 taking over American culture. Take a listen to this clip from The 700 Club.

00:18:05.260 Dungeons and Dragons emphasizes black and white witchcraft. It creates a world of fear and death. 0.91

00:18:11.340 Dr. Gary North says, Dungeons and Dragons is the most effectively, most magnificently packaged,

00:18:16.860 most profitably marketed, the most thoroughly researched introduction to the occult in man's

00:18:21.820 recorded history the books the games the toys the tv all seem to have the same origin throughout

00:18:28.620 society a web seems to be woven to initiate and educate the unsuspecting into the world of the

00:18:34.540 occult the influence passed an alarming shadow over our culture the potential exists to deceive

00:18:41.020 a generation this influence raises important questions what will happen to the world if it

00:18:46.860 loses its youth? What will happen to parents if they lose their children? What will happen to

00:18:52.860 children if they lose their soul?" But all of these cultural iterations of the satanic panic

00:18:58.140 would lay the ground for one of the truly most heinous parts of the entire witch hunt,

00:19:02.780 one which would see teachers and daycare workers falsely imprisoned for decades,

00:19:07.020 an FBI investigation, and a really convenient boogeyman for Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum.

00:19:12.860 It all starts in 1980 with the publication of Michelle Remembers,

00:19:17.080 in which a Canadian psychiatrist, Lawrence Pasdar, used the now discredited practice of recovered memory therapy

00:19:24.220 to make some incredibly lurid claims about the satanic ritual abuse of his patient,

00:19:29.780 and later his wife, so there's some ethical issues right there, who was named Michelle Smith.

00:19:35.300 This phase of the satanic panic would see around 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of satanic ritual abuse,

00:19:41.800 starting in the United States in the 1980s, spreading through many parts of the world by

00:19:46.340 the late 1990s, and in some cases still persisting today, although now I'd say that the modern

00:19:52.140 satanic panic should probably be renamed the drag queen story hour panic. In America, the first 0.98

00:19:58.620 accusations about this start in Kern County, California. The cases involved allegations of

00:20:04.520 satanic ritual abuse by a sex ring against as many as 60 children who testified that they had been

00:20:10.340 abused. At least 36 people were convicted, and most of them spent years in prison. 34 convictions

00:20:16.380 were overturned on appeal. The other two, well, they died in prison, or else the number of overturned

00:20:21.380 convictions probably would have been a total 36. Many of those accused spent many years in prison,

00:20:27.760 such as John Stoll, who spent 19 years behind bars because of accusations that were quite simply

00:20:33.260 made up. No, really. Ed Sampley, one of his accusers, told the New York Times he made it up.

00:20:39.000 Not out of malice, he was a little kid, but because the police coached him to make the

00:20:43.920 accusation.

00:20:45.160 They told me that John Stahl was a bad man and I needed to help put him in prison so

00:20:49.360 he wouldn't hurt any more children, Sampley says.

00:20:52.200 They said everything would be okay if I just told them something had happened.

00:20:56.540 So he did.

00:20:57.780 The Kern County case started a trend and suddenly a lot of kids were remembering ritual sexual

00:21:03.540 abuse.

00:21:04.360 McMartin Preschool in California was the next to come under fire in 1983.

00:21:09.000 In 1984, another school, a daycare, and a daycare employee were all accused.

00:21:14.820 The daycare employee, Bernard Baran, was convicted in 1985 and not exonerated until 2009.

00:21:21.120 His actual crime? Being openly gay and a nursery worker. 0.87

00:21:25.040 The accusers had complained previously to the board of directors that they didn't want no homo around their son. 1.00

00:21:31.420 Nice. 0.99

00:21:32.300 Nursery schools, preschools, daycares in America, England, Canada, and even New Zealand became the site of these witch hunts.

00:21:39.860 Listen in to a clip from Texas Public Radio on the exoneration of Melvin Quinney 32 years after he was convicted of a crime he did not commit.

00:21:50.180 With just a few strokes of a pen.

00:21:52.620 Judge Christine Del Prado dismissed the case against 74-year-old Melvin Quinney, giving him his good name back.

00:22:03.060 Mr. Quinney, I have signed the dismissal.

00:22:05.080 For decades, Melvin Quinney has been registered as a sex offender.

00:22:08.680 But now the courts and his family says the abuse never took place.

00:22:12.860 And I thank you, sir, for your attendance. You are now discharged from this court.

00:22:16.240 this was the final courtroom step in quinney's exoneration a painful journey that some spend

00:22:24.740 eight years in texas prisons forced him to register as a sex offender and saw his four

00:22:29.360 children pushed into the foster care system and it was all based on a lie a quote moral satanic

00:22:35.800 panic that swept the country says innocence project of texas director mike ware this is this

00:22:40.820 is a good day for justice quinney's now deceased ex-wife along with therapists pressured his son

00:22:45.960 john parker quinney to testify that his father molested him that he was part of a satanic cult

00:22:50.980 and that he had witnessed children murdered the accusations sound ridiculous now says where

00:22:56.180 but it was a hysteria that swept the country children were being coerced by ill-guided

00:23:03.220 professionals coerced by ill-guided professionals to make these outrageous demonstrably false

00:23:09.800 accusations that have now been proven false beyond all doubt john parker says he resisted

00:23:15.560 testifying against his father and he recanted them as an adult but Parker physically cringed

00:23:21.400 his eyes wet with tears when an attorney with the Bexar County District Attorney's Office called him

00:23:25.940 a hero for fighting for his father. In 1992 the FBI would finally write a formal report completely

00:23:34.060 discrediting the satanic ritual abuse scare. It was titled Investigator's Guide to Allegations

00:23:39.600 of Ritual Child Abuse in which they conclude that until hard evidence is obtained and corroborated

00:23:45.540 the public should not be frightened into believing that babies are being bred and eaten,

00:23:50.260 that 50,000 missing children are being murdered in human sacrifices,

00:23:54.260 or that Satanists are taking over Americans' daycare centers or institutions.

00:23:58.720 No one can prove with absolute certainty that such activity has not occurred,

00:24:03.020 but the burden of proof, however, as it would be in a criminal prosecution,

00:24:06.620 is on those who claim that it has occurred.

00:24:08.980 The explanation that these Satanists are too organized and law enforcement is too incompetent

00:24:13.520 only goes so far in explaining the lack of evidence.

00:24:16.820 For at least eight years, American law enforcement has been aggressively investigating the allegations of victims of ritual abuse.

00:24:23.340 There is little or no evidence for the portion of their allegations that deals with large-scale baby

00:24:28.220 botanic conspiracies.

00:24:32.800 Now, I'm not going to say that incompetence of police is impossible,

00:24:36.440 but I kind of doubt it's possible on this grand a scale, too.

00:24:40.160 And coming from me, that's saying something.

00:24:43.040 And this, this is where I finally bring in Phyllis Schlafly.

00:24:46.540 Now, I'm not going to make any broad sweeping claims of any connection between Phyllis Schlafly

00:24:51.020 and the satanic sexual ritual abuse scare of the 1980s and 1990s.

00:24:55.220 That would be crazy.

00:24:56.500 I have no evidence of that.

00:24:58.120 I will only say that it could not have come at a better time for Schlafly. 1.00

00:25:02.260 During the 1970s, she had spent most of her time mobilizing anti-feminists against the 0.92

00:25:07.360 Equal Rights Amendment, and she got her way.

00:25:09.300 The ERA was never ratified by the required number of states to be made part of the Constitution.

00:25:14.740 But was Schlafly done? 0.87

00:25:15.980 Oh, oh no, she was still breathing, so she had plenty of time to commit more evil acts.

00:25:20.960 Next on her agenda, child care.

00:25:22.980 In 1989, she edited a book titled Who Will Rock the Cradle?

00:25:26.920 The Battle for Control of Child Care in America,

00:25:29.880 in which she and various other experts discussed all the dastardly problems with child care

00:25:35.600 and all the horrible things that daycare does to children.

00:25:38.800 In the book, one policy analyst, Robert Rector, actually points to the McMartin preschool case

00:25:44.000 as an example of how regulated daycares can be just as bad, if not worse, than letting your family be the caretaker for a child. 0.84

00:25:51.600 If the McMartin case hadn't been bullshit, I guess Rector would have had a point, but it wasn't true. 0.97

00:25:56.760 I'm sure there were real cases of sexual abuse in daycares, 0.98

00:26:00.020 because someone who wants to victimize children will inevitably try to put themselves in a position where they have access.

00:26:05.420 but throughout the book different authors refer to the epidemic of sexual abuse in child care

00:26:10.900 facilities which in 1989 undoubtedly referred to many of the so-called satanic ritual abuse cases

00:26:17.740 that had sprung up over and over again throughout the decade. What makes this example even more

00:26:22.660 ironic is that by 1989 the McMartin preschool trial was almost over with not a single conviction

00:26:29.420 being won. All of the charges were dropped by 1990. Phyllis Schlafly was almost comically opposed to

00:26:36.400 anything feminists wanted, and to quote Annabelle Duvall in her paper, Testing the Limits, Radical 0.97

00:26:41.640 Feminist Approaches to Child Care in the Early 70s, Duvall writes that, when feminists around

00:26:46.940 the United States held the Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970, they had three 1.00

00:26:52.800 demands, equality in educational and employment opportunities, free abortion on request, and a 0.84

00:26:58.500 system of 24-hour daycare centers. Access to abortion and child care had become a foundation

00:27:03.860 for most second-wave feminist visions of equality within the home and the ability to pursue 1.00

00:27:08.220 opportunities outside it. Feminists emphasized that these changes would allow for women to have 1.00

00:27:13.220 choice over such intimate and fundamental decisions as childbearing and childrearing. 1.00

00:27:18.540 Therefore, Schlafly hated universal access to child care because feminists liked it, 1.00

00:27:23.580 and she and a cabal of religious right-wing anti-feminists were probably uncontrollably 1.00

00:27:29.000 horny at the prospect of daycares being run by Satanists that sacrificed children to the Dark 0.99

00:27:33.840 Lord. In the book The Mommy Myth from 2005, professors Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels

00:27:39.960 shared this about the mindset of the 1970s and 1980s about motherhood. To give you an idea,

00:27:46.120 let's look briefly at the news, which has played a much more central role in policing the boundaries

00:27:50.540 of motherhood than you might think. Few books have reviewed the enormously influential role

00:27:55.120 the nightly news played in shaping national norms about motherhood. Revisiting Good Housekeeping or

00:28:00.200 The Cosby Show makes sense, but the news? Yet it is the news that we can track especially well the

00:28:05.580 trajectory of the new mom-ism. Most people don't get or want to look at old news footage, but we

00:28:11.740 looked at 30 years of stories relating to motherhood. In the 1970s, with the exception of

00:28:16.860 various welfare reform proposals, there was almost nothing in the network news about motherhood,

00:28:21.740 working mothers, or child care. And when you go back and watch news footage from 1972, for example,

00:28:27.820 all you see is John Chancellor at NBC in black and white reading the news with no illustrating 0.71

00:28:32.640 graphics or Walter Cronkite sitting in front of a map of the world that one of the Rugrats could

00:28:37.160 have drawn. That's it. But by the 1980s, the explosion in the number of working mothers,

00:28:41.760 the desperate need for daycare, sci-fi-level reproductive technologies,

00:28:46.380 and the discovery of how widespread child abuse was,

00:28:49.440 all this, this was newsworthy.

00:28:51.680 At the same time, the network news shows were becoming more flashy and sensationalistic

00:28:55.620 in their effort to compete with tabloid TV offerings like A Current Affair and America's Most Wanted.

00:29:01.140 NBC, for example, introduced a story about daycare centers in 1984

00:29:05.240 with a beat-up Raggedy Ann doll lying limp next to a chair

00:29:08.820 with the huge words, child abuse, scrawled next to her in what appeared to be Charles Manson's

00:29:13.680 handwriting. So stories that were titillating, that could be really tarted up, that were about

00:29:18.360 children and sex, or children and violence, well they just got more coverage than why Senator

00:29:22.860 Ropadope refused to vote for decent daycare system. From the McMartin daycare scandal and

00:29:27.940 the missing children, to Susan Smith and murdering nannies, and the barrage of kids in jeopardy,

00:29:32.800 innocence corrupted stories made mothers feel like they had to guard their kids with the same

00:29:37.340 intensity as the Secret Service guys watching the president. I don't think that any of this was

00:29:42.240 necessarily intentional. What I think Douglas and Michaels discovered was nominally a coincidence.

00:29:47.580 If it bleeds, it leads. And right then, stories about violence against children were the thing

00:29:52.000 that bled. But it fit right into the right-wing demagoguery of the pushback against women taking

00:29:57.420 their place as equals in the world that was ongoing in the 1980s. Oddly, or maybe not oddly,

00:30:03.380 this same moral panic about daycare is repeating itself with anti-feminists today. 1.00

00:30:08.800 Suzanne Venker, author of The Alpha Female's Guide to Men in Marriage, 1.00

00:30:12.980 which I have actually had to read as research for my PhD proposal,

00:30:16.800 has an entire episode on her podcast dedicated to 0.97

00:30:19.640 the ridiculous idea that daycare is perfectly harmless. 0.57

00:30:23.240 Turning Point's own Real Alex Clark had Dr. Erica Commissar on her podcast

00:30:28.180 to talk about all the damage that daycare does to children.

00:30:31.540 Also, the doctor thing is in quotes, if you can't tell.

00:30:33.920 That's because that's what they call her on the description of the podcast episode.

00:30:37.400 But she is, in fact, not a doctor.

00:30:39.440 She has a BA in English literature from Georgetown and a master's in social work from Columbia.

00:30:43.800 And a certification in adult psychoanalysis from the Contemporary Freudian Society, according to her LinkedIn account.

00:30:50.860 Which, look, I'm not a psychoanalyst or a social worker.

00:30:53.620 But anything in those fields that's still using Freud as a positive is going to give me the ick from the start.

00:30:59.380 Commissar is also the author of Being There, Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three

00:31:04.360 Years Matters. Now, I'm not saying that parents shouldn't prioritize their children. They should.

00:31:08.940 You chose to have them. You need to raise them, not just throw them to the wolves and expect them

00:31:12.740 to come out all right. But I always find it odd how people like Commissar and Schlafly seem to

00:31:17.620 focus entirely on motherhood, as if the father doesn't exist at all. I've mentioned the book

00:31:23.420 modern woman the lost sex on this podcast before which does the same thing it places all the

00:31:29.240 responsibility for the mental health and good rearing of children on the mother dr spock did

00:31:34.500 much the same thing with his early editions of baby and child care which only ever referred to

00:31:39.160 the person doing the child care as the mother where is the father in all of this apparently

00:31:43.940 playing golf with his buddies and beating his wife when the kids aren't looking hey look if they can

00:31:48.620 make spurious accusations about Gary Gygax's motivations in creating Dungeons and Dragons,

00:31:53.440 I can make them about their views on masculinity. I don't like the rules. I just enforce them,

00:31:57.900 for the sake of humor. And this is where I bring it all back around to the original point of this

00:32:02.380 episode, the satanic panic. I have a theory. Not a theory that's in any way ready to be an academic

00:32:07.740 paper or anything, but a theory nonetheless. The satanic panic was, at its core, a backlash

00:32:13.440 against feminism. Almost every core issue of the satanic panic had to do with children, 0.96

00:32:18.940 from the games they play and the music they listen to, and how those impact their mental 0.85

00:32:23.260 and spiritual health, to the dangers of putting them in child care so women could go to work. 1.00

00:32:28.000 My evidence? Well, this podcast episode. But also, let's look at the new modern rebirth of 1.00

00:32:33.560 the satanic panic. The rhetoric from the anti-feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s

00:32:39.040 is popping up everywhere again, from every trad wife TikTok account to every anti-feminist

00:32:44.760 podcast. It's even in the content from Moms for Liberty and the uproar against Drag Queen

00:32:50.000 Story Hour. Hell, we've even still got the satanic ritual abuse conspiracies going on

00:32:55.480 thanks to QAnon and those weirdos on the internet who think Taylor Swift was performing witchcraft

00:33:00.240 on stage at the Eros tour. And now a sequel to The Exorcist has come out, and the 1970s

00:33:06.500 and 1980s exploits of con artists like Ed and Lorraine Warren are being made into film after

00:33:11.840 film with the Conjuring series, while right-wingers are busy demonizing teachers again. It's hard not

00:33:17.800 to see the parallels. Just a reminder that history always comes around again, so it's important to

00:33:23.340 know what happened in the past. Thank you everyone for tuning in once more, and thank you for your

00:33:28.480 patience while I got my legs back under me this last couple of months. Great news, I have at least

00:33:33.300 the first two months of topics for 2024 completely planned for the show, and I have a really awesome

00:33:38.600 list of guests who will be coming on the show throughout the year as well. We'll be talking

00:33:42.220 about everything from Anne Boleyn to the history of sex workers next year, and so, so much more,

00:33:47.660 and I cannot wait for the next year of podcasting. Have a great week, and mental health permitting,

00:33:53.100 I will see you back here next Thursday.

00:34:03.300 Thank you.

Bitchy History - December 07, 2023

Season 2, Episode 8： The Satanic Panic

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Transcript