00:00:53.240and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:00:58.760I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:01:02.380Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:01:09.920These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:13.740Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:21.360If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:01:27.060Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:35.740Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:05:04.960that there were large-scale satanic cults
00:05:09.380that had infiltrated North American society
00:05:12.480and they were the ones abusing children
00:05:14.600and they were the ones kidnapping children.0.95
00:05:17.480And if we could just find the satanists,
00:05:19.200then we could find the real threat to life, love, and happiness, I guess, and the threat to the American family.
00:05:28.340And so it resulted in investigations and trials and wrongful convictions generally without a shred of physical or even circumstantial evidence that really pointed toward child abuse.
00:05:43.780And now, of course, we kind of we have a White House that that's kind of openly embracing the idea that if anything happens that you don't like, it's Satanism.
00:05:55.740But this was a very politically bipartisan idea to begin with, and one that for really quite a while, it was hard to express doubts about publicly for fear of, you know, being accused of being on the side of if not Satanists and at least child abuse.
00:06:16.460You might already know some of the big names who pushed the idea that Satanists had infiltrated daycares and were harming our children nationwide.
00:06:25.740But Sarah's work, The Devil You Know, focuses on something different.
00:06:30.420The everyday people swept up in this panic.
00:06:33.580Teachers and caregivers, people who just wanted to work with kids,
00:06:38.020only to be branded as members of a satanic cabal.
00:06:43.320It is wild to me how much this is kind of back in the zeitgeist again.
00:06:49.320And something I really, really like about the new show, The Devil You Know,
00:06:55.740that you've done with the CBC is how the voices that you're hearing are from people who were
00:07:00.860caught up in this, right? The first voice that we hear is from Diane, just somebody who was doing a
00:07:06.360photography project with kids in a school, and then everything is going fine. And then all of a
00:07:12.180sudden, one day hears over the school's loudspeaker, the principal saying, if anybody sees that
00:07:16.860photography lady, send her directly to my office. The way that regular people got ensnared in this
00:09:12.260And that if that causes fear and superstition and anxiety,
00:09:16.860Then that is, you know, then as now is taking away a lot of a lot of the love and care that we have the potential to offer to each other and making us feel more like enemies who happen to share a country than anything else.
00:09:32.500That's such a good way to put it. And I do I do. There's this thread of like the demonization and fear and anxiety around children being in contact with adults who are not family.
00:09:46.280Right. Especially I feel that today that, you know, there are all these ways that anxieties about the family and sort of our current sort of social climate is translated into it's it's dangerous if your kid is being watched or taught by an adult that is not a blood relative.
00:10:06.860You know, I wonder if that's part of it, too.
00:10:09.700I think so. And I feel I mean, something that is very apparent today that I feel like is, you know, not even difficult to pick out the subtext from.
00:10:19.520It feels like it's become text at this point. It's this idea that, you know, that in the kind of the political conservatism of the United States today, which has become, you know, very infiltrated by fundamentalist aspects of Christianity, there's this sense that like someone sexually abusing your child and teaching them about sex ed and about, you know, about gender and about queerness,
00:10:48.560that it feels like people are equally afraid of both those things.
00:10:52.940And that feels like it's bringing this sort of subtextual part of the satanic panic of
00:10:56.900the 80s, like straight into the foreground, where it's you kind of reach this point in
00:11:02.440a lot of looking at the fears and anxieties of a lot of people of, well, are you worried
00:11:08.880Or are you even perhaps maybe even more worried about your children learning things that you
00:11:15.240don't want them to know and then having the power that comes with that knowledge or finding
00:11:19.520finding community that empowers them to live a life that you didn't envision for them because
00:11:24.840then it becomes you know not about protecting your children from harm as much as trying to maintain
00:11:32.280absolute control but then passing that off as your desire merely to protect them when in fact
00:11:41.480you're maybe the thing that they need to be protected from at a certain point
00:11:45.240Yeah. And, you know, in your in the first episode, when you talk to Mary, that Grand Valley State professor who basically is talking, I mean, she really breaks it down that at the time when the satanic panic was really popping off in the 80s, people were really just the fam, people were very anxious about the family.
00:12:02.380Right. You had these higher rates of what I guess back then you would call non-traditional families.
00:12:08.380What was that? Is that a euphemism for like single parent households?
00:12:13.640Or I couldn't quite pick up on what the subtext of that was.
00:12:16.880I feel like that is just the non-nuclear family, which, you know, which is interesting in its own right.
00:12:22.180Right. Because then if we call something the non-traditional family for not being a nuclear family, it's well, it's like, well, OK.
00:12:28.940The nuclear family isn't super traditional, as evidenced by the fact that it's named after something we didn't discover until, like, the middle of the 20th century, right?
00:14:16.840Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.
00:14:21.400I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:14:25.860I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:14:33.480They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:14:37.380But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:14:40.840They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:14:43.960Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:14:52.920If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:14:58.840This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:15:11.320I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:15:18.420I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:15:21.860From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:15:27.960It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:15:35.480Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:15:45.040Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:16:58.540So then you have economic anxiety, more women working.
00:17:03.320And then on top of that, you have these social commentators who are going on TV and really making people afraid of what the consequences of all of this might be.0.89
00:19:16.480And I mean, I never thought about this before, actually, but it does feel like the satanic panic mimics the Cold War just a little bit, you know, where it's like you have these Satanists and it's like talking about Soviets where like they're not regular people like you and me.
00:19:31.160Like instead of worshiping Jesus, they worship Satan.
00:19:34.980And instead of saying goodbye, they say bad bye.
00:19:39.140But this idea that they're sort of bizarro humans is such a great way to divert our anxieties away from the places that we should be directing them, which are, of course, you know, generally the people in power who are doing whatever they can to save a little bit of money by cutting welfare a little bit more.
00:20:00.280Yes, yes. And if you are really worried about your kid being like sexually exploited or sexually abused, it's probably not by Satanists. There are probably, you know, like there might be someplace else to, statistically speaking, there might be elsewhere that you could be looking if that was a meaningful concern to you other than the occult.
00:20:24.440Yeah. And I think the kind of the thing about the especially in the early 80s that the satanic panic made possible, which the allure of this makes total sense to me, is, you know, to say that this problem of child abuse in America that at this point in history, we had only really recently begun talking about that the problem, you know, wasn't what we now having had the chance to really study it, understand it to be, I think, based on all available data, which is that it's it's people
00:20:54.420in the family, it's people close to the family. If you're in a church, you have to think about
00:20:58.460the people in your church and the ways that, you know, very rigidly hierarchical institutions,
00:21:05.120including like quite a lot of Christian ones, really support and facilitate abuse. Because0.54
00:21:11.200if children are disempowered to speak ill of someone who's in a position of authority for
00:21:18.000them or their family, then that's going to be a lot harder for them to do. And so the satanic
00:21:22.620panic i think was so appealing because it was saying not just that there were satanists who
00:21:26.920were abusing children but that the majority of child abuse potentially was being perpetrated
00:21:34.180by satanists and once we and also this kind of this idea that i think leads to you know
00:21:42.040people struggling uh to deal with child abuse in a way that's proportionate which is the sense of
00:21:50.780you know, that we've seen a lot in kind of American history and probably everywhere of like, well, you know, dare we remove a pillar of the community?
00:22:00.400Dare we say these things about, you know, someone who is in this or that important role who is in a job that is sort of supposed to be for good people?
00:22:15.060What are we to do with this information? And the satanic panic just makes it easy that way. We're like, well, here's a satanist. And as far as we know, they do have fun sacrificing animals and possibly babies.
00:22:28.080So there's really not, it allowed, I think, adults to protect a child from an absolute villain as opposed to putting them in a position that forced them to really question the world that they had built and question the safety of the world that they were enforcing rather than choosing their own prejudices over a child's welfare,
00:22:54.000which we can see does happen quite a lot when Satanists are not a convenient villain.
00:22:59.860The Satanists, according to those raising the alarm, weren't equal opportunity predators.
00:23:06.640They supposedly targeted a specific type of child, white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed kids.
00:23:14.120This meant the people working in daycares, who tended to be marginalized by race, class, or both, became the ones being demonized.
00:23:23.620And speaking of convenient villains, like something that you say in the, I think the first or the second episode is that, you know, a lot of the accusations being made were falling on the shoulders of people who were marginalized, whether they were lower income folks or strangers from out of town.
00:23:39.720And the idea that, oh, these Satanists are not just looking for any child.
00:23:44.540They're looking specifically for blonde haired, blue eyed children.
00:23:48.460Like those are the children you've got to keep out of school.
00:23:50.660it's just very clear to me how much this was a proxy for attacks on the other using claims that
00:23:58.420as you put it would be comical if there weren't actual lives at stake yeah yeah that's the thing
00:24:03.460right is that it's the details of it are so over the top that it really it if it weren't real it
00:24:11.500would be very funny and there's even moments where it is funny you know you have kind of
00:24:15.400cult cops which is what I think they're happy to be called at the time or at least not too
00:24:22.400miffed about it in the 80s who's you know who make a living by traveling from town to town
00:24:27.140giving seminars talking about how you can identify like satanic elements in a murder
00:24:31.580investigation and talking about you know oh I own a copy of the satanic bible but I'm afraid to read
00:24:37.760it because it's demonic and it's like you should read it and then you if you read it you would find
00:24:42.260out that in the satanic bible anton lave himself is like no of course we don't literally worship0.71
00:24:48.800satan because that would be silly but this is a religion about celebrating selfishness
00:24:53.440and then you would know that but just i don't know this idea of um of grown adults being afraid
00:25:01.360of the state of even opening the satanic bible is just like it's it when you think about them
00:25:08.020being in charge of what happens to the rest of us you're like oh no but in isolation it's hilarious0.88
00:25:13.100or like the story of the people who come into town and they buy yards of black fabric and
00:25:21.820that's that's it satanists there's no other reason why else would someone need black fabric
00:25:27.420i know and and the story behind that is that they were you know making dresses for a funeral scene
00:25:36.080in a movie um and and a funeral itself is like a reason that anyone could reach for and there's an
00:25:41.980example also in the uh the mcmartin case which was kind of the first big trial in the satanic
00:25:47.480panic and these cases of alleged daycare sexual abuse um where one of the women who ran this
00:25:54.020daycare center was they searched their house and found a black robe in it and they were like oh my0.97
00:26:00.100god it's a black robe what could explain this except to use in satanic rituals and it was
00:26:06.280a graduation robe like so many people hang on to you know it's because it's one of these things
00:26:12.340where you're kind of like i don't know i'm not much of a detective but even i can think of a
00:26:17.940reason just offhand why someone would have that i'm sad to say that not a lot has changed daycares
00:26:25.820remain targets for people looking to attack those who are different, and the playbook today is
00:26:31.200remarkably similar. In the 1970s and 80s, books like Sybil and Michelle Remembers laid the groundwork
00:26:39.520for the satanic panic. Sybil, published in 1973, detailed a woman who supposedly had 16 personalities
00:26:47.560uncovered through recovered memory therapy, techniques later discredited but treated as
00:26:54.180gospel at the time. Then came Michelle Remembers in 1980, claiming to document recovered memories
00:27:01.980of satanic ritual abuse. These books didn't just tell stories, they created a template.
00:27:08.600They taught people what to look for, what to fear, and how to interpret ambiguous situations
00:27:13.940as evidence of hidden evil. And this template was weaponized against daycare workers,
00:27:20.020particularly those who were working class, immigrants, or people of color.
00:27:24.660Caregivers who simply wanted to work with kids
00:27:27.280found themselves accused of participating in elaborate satanic conspiracies,
00:27:32.680accused of targeting white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed kids specifically.
00:27:37.660The allegations were baselessly sensational,
00:27:40.720spread through media coverage and word of mouth,
00:27:43.000but resulted in real destroyed lives and careers.
00:27:47.240Fast forward to today, and we're seeing that exact same playbook, just with different villains.
00:27:54.020YouTuber Nick Shirley baselessly accused Somali-run daycares in Minnesota of fraud,
00:27:59.800filming empty buildings during off hours and presenting it as damning evidence.
00:28:04.660His viral videos, viewed over 130 million times, led to frozen federal funding,
00:28:10.800increased deportation threats, and a new wave of suspicion against immigrant child care workers,
00:28:15.880despite state investigators finding no evidence of fraud at the facilities he targeted.1.00
00:28:22.080And they're all recreating it because it works.
00:28:25.300Moral panics about children amplified through media
00:28:28.240aimed at marginalized communities doing the work of caring for kids.
00:28:32.800Yes, the details might change, but the pattern remains the same.
00:28:38.460So many of these allegations circulated around daycares
00:28:43.140in places like Kern County, California, like...
00:28:45.880like prominently featured. Why daycares? Like, why do you think that was like the place where
00:28:51.700so many of these allegations stem? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I couldn't say exactly why,
00:28:58.860but I think there are a few factors and that it started with this case in McMartin where you had
00:29:03.400a parent of a preschooler who had some severe mental health issues that she was dealing with
00:29:11.020Who I think kind of latched on to this idea that was being, you know, already kind of in the air and being talked about by experts and by people who had every reason to be a bit more skeptical about it.
00:29:24.940That, you know, daycare, well, not daycare sexual abuse so much, but just that Satanists were looking for young children to abuse.
00:29:34.180And also that this was, you know, if you were looking at sexual abuse, then you would have to wonder about Satanism.
00:29:42.120And that kind of came from this book that came out in 1980 called Michelle Remembers, which was kind of a smaller scale bestseller at the time, but was actually used to train social workers and police.
00:29:55.180And so it was, you know, kind of a sensationalistic paperback. It was definitely a sensationalistic paperback on the same scale as like, I mean, it was attempting to emulate Sybil to an extent. That was another highly fictionalized book that was then treated as gospel by people who perhaps could have known better.
00:30:46.980what his plan for the 80s was and that that was going to be his decade to take over.
00:30:52.000And so if you believe that kind of thing, it was extremely stressful, you know.
00:30:57.220And so it seems as if we had this initial daycare case in McMartin
00:31:03.280where essentially a mother became concerned that her child had been abused.
00:31:08.840There wasn't any actual evidence of this.
00:31:11.340And in my opinion, it was something that she kind of had on her mind and brought brought that concern to her child, who was kind of too young to confirm or deny it because of being, I think, two or three years old.
00:31:26.860And, and of course, you know, it's worth mentioning that at this time, we really didn't know how to forensically question children, especially young children about whether they'd experienced abuse, because we hadn't, you know, no one had really bothered to learn how to do that before.
00:31:43.180It wasn't something that the police in North America had too much experience with.
00:31:50.940The idea of childhood sexual abuse as a social concern or something that people were talking about on a bigger scale was just very new.
00:32:00.340And so there's this, you know, combination of we didn't know what to do because no one had had time to research yet.
00:32:06.920And also the sense of blame of like, well, why didn't why hadn't we done that?
00:32:10.680But that was what the situation was. And then it seems as if there was almost kind of a meme quality to it where this case progressed because then you had police and social workers who didn't know how to question young children and so inadvertently contaminated their witness pool and fairly quickly began pressuring young children to corroborate details that they were able to get other kids to mention.
00:32:38.020and often would get those details through kind of imaginative play.
00:32:42.500So we ended up with these extremely, extremely strange and elaborate claims
00:32:47.500against the family that ran McMartin as this investigation proceeded.
00:32:52.860And it was on the level of there were these tunnels under the school
00:32:56.620and the kids were being taken up in planes and taken to other countries
00:32:59.900and they were forced to kick a pony to death.
00:33:02.500And, you know, one of their alleged abusers flew through the air
00:33:07.880which was supposed to prove that they were using witchcraft.
00:33:10.880And it was a lot of it, in retrospect, pretty clearly seems to have been just children told to play with puppets
00:33:20.080until they said something that could maybe be connected to the idea of a crime
00:33:24.320and then being asked to implicate or to confirm each other's stories in the same way
00:33:30.300that you would maybe ask people to implicate each other when they were your suspects rather than their witnesses.
00:33:35.520So I guess this really, this absolute nightmare of an investigation that was the most expensive legal proceeding in California until the O.J. Simpson trial, and that ultimately went nowhere, but it did, you know, destroy the lives of the people who were accused who had no choice but to be caught up in this for several years.
00:33:58.440But then the issue is that once, in terms of how that gets replicated, I think the McMartin investigation breaks as national news.
00:34:08.180And then I think there's just something about it where people are primed to look for the devil, where it's this idea of, could Satanists be secretly abusing your child who's too young to really be able to give you much information about what they're doing all day long?
00:34:26.100And it's something where similar cases then pop up elsewhere in the country, which can, if you're looking for it, give the impression that, oh, my God, the Satanists really are everywhere.
00:34:40.500I mean, they're not just in California.
00:37:37.180And then people can study your country
00:37:38.700and be like, wow, it's crazy that everyone just agreed
00:37:41.260that they were all gonna become evil all at once.
00:37:44.100I would never. Right. Which I think is kind of how we were taught about Nazism when I was in middle school. I was just like, wow, sex to sex wouldn't want to be evil and have that happen in a country where I lived. And then you're like, oh, no, that's it's a slightly more complicated.
00:38:03.160And so, yeah, you look at there's, you know, journalists locally, kind of in, especially in local newspapers in the early 80s who are like, I just don't know about this. I have some questions. And this seems strange. And I'm going to bring up some inevitable logical fallacies.
00:38:19.820And then, you know, it's just would be something that maybe would have you would hope would have a little bit of a ripple effect and that some people would read and be affected by and that it would maybe kind of slow to some extent the progress of this this kind of epidemic of conspiracy theories.
00:38:41.420But it could have, I think, could have pretty negative effects for your career because it was the kind of thing where even more so than now, I think that you would really be in a position of being accused of being sympathetic to child abuse or even to Satanism.
00:39:01.460And by people who, you know, were not as conspiracy-pilled, I think, as the people that who, and by people who are not as conspiracy-pilled as the people who would be mad at you for saying that today, because it was really more, at least in the early years, much more accepted as a mainstream belief that these Satanists were behind child abuse.
00:39:28.000And also we're dealing with it for the very first time.
00:39:31.160So we have to deal with it this way, apparently.
00:39:34.300And yeah, that social pressure was definitely there.
00:41:11.140Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.
00:41:15.240I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:41:20.020I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:41:27.640They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:41:31.540But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:41:34.980They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:41:38.620Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:41:46.400If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:41:53.300This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:42:05.460I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:42:12.600I'm going to have to look up this story.
00:46:50.060well, we're very reliant on eyewitness
00:46:52.580testimony despite knowing more and more about how unreliable human memory is not that you can't
00:47:00.360rely on it at all but that it's tricky and that there are ways um there's magical thinking around
00:47:05.960it which you know has been proven not to be true there's also a belief that the satanic panic
00:47:12.380really benefited from that uh testimony under that you produced under hypnosis was more reliable
00:47:20.600And you're not more truthful under hypnosis, but you are more vulnerable to suggestion.
00:47:27.120And that ended up coming up quite a bit, you know, and so there were things that we could learn and that some people did learn and that we still, if we look at it, have the capacity to learn today because those lessons don't expire about just not surrendering our common sense to authority figures and about the ways that it's comfortable to shift your anxiety over to a scapegoat.
00:47:49.620when really the people who deserve it are in your community, often in leadership roles.
00:47:56.180And so those lessons are there and we can recognize those patterns around us.
00:48:01.820If we study the past, then we can see more clearly how it's replicating in the present
00:48:06.620and try and do something to affect it or to affect things meaningfully
00:48:14.060and to provide shelter for people who inevitably those myths are going to come for in some way.
00:48:20.940I guess I think it's important to try and find this middle ground of, you know,
00:48:25.900if you can't stop history from happening, then how do you live within it
00:48:29.400and even protect some of the people who are stuck inside of it with you?
00:48:36.840And I think that's the goal because it is so tempting to feel despair
00:48:39.880that we can't just explain something to people really, really well
00:49:10.640But unfortunately, as you just beautifully articulated, I'm not sure if that's the world that we have today so many decades later.
00:49:17.980I'm not sure if we have learned those lessons or if we ever will.
00:49:21.280Yeah. Yeah. And I also just it's I don't know, it was kind of a fun show for me to do, partly in terms of in terms of thinking about who is this cultural figure, the devil, who we love to blame stuff on.
00:49:34.560Because I grew up pretty secular. I've never had actual anxiety about the devil. And so trying to think about what would it be like to have that figure in my life, it would be very scary, you know, to think that someone is always out there trying to tempt me or trying to make me stop doing, you know, the right thing in life.
00:49:57.320I feel like I, I actually, I guess I do have a concept of that and it's just my internal sense of like anxiety, you know, and that that's, they're like things inside of my brain or inside of my mental health that are trying to sabotage me all the time.
00:50:12.860And that's what I have instead of Satan.
00:50:17.620But it feels like, you know, there's that Satan is a character who you may find yourself clinging to if you need to believe in the righteousness of yourself a little bit more than is necessary.
00:50:35.400If you're, you know, if you're saying, well, you know, I'm breaking a few eggs, but I'm fighting the devil.
00:50:42.860Or I'm taking on pure evil and I'm really a warrior for God and all this so I can do whatever.
00:50:49.880And it's like, what if we didn't know that we were being these great heroes and we had to actually keep evaluating our actions one thing at a time and not be so sure that everything we were doing was necessary?
00:51:04.020Because I think that would cause us to listen more, you know?
00:51:06.440And I think we're able to do more good works for each other if we're not so sure that we're the heroes in our own story.
00:51:19.640And that's like a positive thing that comes from discomfort where I think if you look at people in the satanic panic who just got really deep in it and fell into some kind of expert role potentially.
00:51:34.180And they were in a position, especially in, you know, I think in mental health fields where a lot of your victories are very slow and hard won and can reverse themselves out of nowhere, that wouldn't it be nice to just to be the hero and to fix a patient one day and just to like, just to do something kind of impossibly great and good.
00:51:59.120and I hope it's reassuring for people to hear.
00:52:03.140I think it's reassuring for me to think about the fact
00:52:05.380that you don't have to be in that hero role
00:52:23.780I have to say, I'm so glad that you brought up
00:52:25.940just sort of satan as a character i i grew up in the south i my parent i grew up pretty religious
00:52:33.740my parents were like in the church but not super into it but then the like one sphere over so like
00:52:41.540my extended family and where we lived super super religious i went to religious schools all of that
00:52:45.980and you know you you interview one person in the show that their experience i was like oh that is
00:52:53.600where you see like people with the long denim skirts and all of that that was my childhood
00:52:59.840I was like oh definitely recognize that and when I tell you the role that say like there was
00:53:06.200definitely an under Satan had a had a recurring undercurrent role in my childhood to the point
00:53:11.640where you know I remember going to do a school project at someone's house where we had to um
00:53:19.000It was a project about Ouija boards, and her mom made us keep it on the front porch because she was like, if you kept the project inside, it would be like inviting the devil into our house.
00:53:29.520And I remember when I was growing up, the group Three Six Mafia, so already right there, 666, they had a song called Stay Fly.
00:53:39.600And the rumor was if you played their song backward, what the chorus actually said was, Lucifer is my king till I die.
00:53:48.200So, like, all of these, like, ways where we were taught to sort of be both afraid of Satan, never have any kind of interaction with Satan, but also be obsessively looking for him in his presence everywhere.
00:54:00.700Yeah, it's like when you, like, hate someone who turns out to be your crush.
00:54:13.840so much of your work, including this project, is about looking back to get a sense of where
00:54:19.040we might be headed in the future. Where do you think we're headed? Oh, my gosh. I'm an optimist,
00:54:28.920and nothing can beat it out of me, apparently. So I'm honestly very hopeful in a way, because
00:54:37.240you know that the show closes with an episode where we actually talk quite a bit about Jonestown
00:54:44.320and the People's Temple and about this question of sort of well why is it that we felt a why did
00:54:50.260we feel the need to invent the satanic panic when we kind of we had a case of a large-scale cult
00:54:56.180operating under everybody's noses and that we just kind of ignored that one and we're like but what
00:55:01.520What about an imaginary one, though? Let's focus on that. And, you know, this thing that I feel like I can see pretty clearly, especially having done this research where you look at the United States and the past few years politically, and it feels like we're, you know, we've become infiltrated by fascism.
00:55:24.740And as far as I can tell from this experience, a fascist government operates similarly to a cult and that a cult operates basically like an abusive household.
00:55:34.400And then it feels to me at this point like there's just sort of fractals where you have the same logic replicating itself, which is scary and also helpful because it's kind of the same story over and over again.
00:55:49.520And then maybe you can kind of anticipate the logic of it.
00:55:52.760And I do tend to think just from looking generally at what happens when people get very attached to kind of a dictator-like figure is that, you know, there have been horrors and will be horrors that can't be undone because of that.
00:56:16.060But also it's charismatic evil leaders can't really be replaced that easily.
00:56:38.040I don't know if I'm ever able to get there with my sort of need for Pollyannaism, which you can see is very loud.
00:56:48.120But yeah, I think that, you know, within the story of the satanic panic, you kind of, you step away from the devil and you're like, okay, we haven't met this guy.
00:56:59.000We haven't been able to talk to him really.
00:57:01.280So what we really have are a bunch of stories of individual people who were able to get what they wanted by striking a lot of fear and anxiety into people and getting what they wanted out of them.
00:57:13.580and the idea of looking forward to a time