Satanic Panic | The "Cancel Culture" of the 1980s

hello this is dr grande today's question is can i analyze the satanic panic phenomenon another question here is what are the parallels between satanic panic and cancer culture just a reminder i'm not diagnosing anybody in this video only speculating about could be happening a situation like this if you enjoyed this video please like it subscribe to my channel and consider supporting me on patreon i'll put the link to patreon in the description for this video satanic panic is a type of moral panic that swept across the united states and united kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s there were these stories about satanic cults who were harming people using mind control and engaging in bizarre ceremonies i'll start by taking a look at the factors that came together to create and promote the satanic panic and then i'll talk about what happened during the panic itself it is believed that a number of movies may have introduced the idea that these satanic cults were on the loose to the public the film most often connected to satanic panic would be the 1973 movie the exorcist not long after it was in theaters there were these stories about people being hysterical fainting vomiting and having other strong reactions to the intensity of the film billy graham denounced the exorcist which gave it even more attention and increased people's interest in the film in a way he also gave the film a mystique by suggesting that it emitted some type of evil energy in addition to the exorcist many other horror movies came out in the mid and late 1970s just to name a few the omen and kerry in 1976 the exorcist ii and the sentinel in 1977 omen 2 and the fury in 1978 the legacy and the amityville horror in 1979 in 1980 we see the changeling the hearse and the shining the movies being played in the theaters may not have actually been the problem as far as satanic panic it may have been the release on television several years later in 1983 the exorcist premiered on pay cable some of the other films i mentioned were available before this in addition poltergeist came out in theaters the year before after people were exposed to all these similar films we see that satanic panic starts to set in there were many factors that facilitated this in addition to the movie industry there were some recent changes to society that people were concerned about as well they didn't know what was going to happen these were confusing times for instance the divorce rate dramatically increased in the late 1950s there were more dual income families more children were in daycare than ever before they were referred to as latchkey kits indicating they would come home to an empty residence after school in addition this new group of children had increased access to television and movies there were more shows on tv and vcrs were now available there were many other factors as well the gas crisis was putting financial pressure on a lot of people there was a recession inflation and unemployment were both high the effects of the vietnam war were being felt the counterculture was challenging traditional views of morality the drug culture was as well the charles manson murders had terrified the nation and they were thought of as connected to satan and people were cynical about the government because of the watergate scandal all these factors together led to paranoia people started to look for a reason why things were changing what could be doing this during the same time evangelical christian groups were becoming politically powerful for example jerry falwell's moral majority these groups suggested an answer to the question satan that answer was being contemplated by many in 1983 and even acted on in some instances but in may 1985 we see that satanic panic was given a boost the abc show 2020 aired an episode titled the devil worshipers it featured stories of alleged kidnappings murder and other bad activities connected to satanic activity the episode suggested that cinema was the devil's public relations firm as satanic panic really started to take hold stranger danger was also being publicized because child abductions and murders were on the rise people started connecting these two constructs people started to believe that satanic cult members had infiltrated various levels of the government police forces schools and daycares with the mission being to promote evil and to contaminate a generation with immorality the main targets of these evildoers were children ostensibly they were committing homicide kidnapping and other types of maltreatment this fictitious epidemic was called satanic ritual abuse or sra as these rumors started to gain steam the media bought into the nonsense and created a feedback loop there were all these stories about sra and the news people would see them and have these intense reactions so the news would put more of these stories on instead of helping several mental health professionals made things worse various psychotherapists like mental health counselors social workers and psychologists decided to try to find the evil they thought of themselves as having an amazing ability to detect who was evil and who was not a special power they could see hidden bias they also believed they could convince children to remember sra which would allow these offenders to be prosecuted the psychotherapists were joined by sociologists journalists and law enforcement in their mission to fabricate victims of non-existent crimes there was a sense of urgency mental health professionals claim that if they did not quickly facilitate the apprehension of these dangerous offenders the problem could propagate to such an extent it could destroy the world what kind of courses do these clinicians take in graduate school was there one named james bond villains and counseling strategies they seemed very focused on world destruction the mental health professionals spearheaded their campaign by focusing on what they referred to as repressed memories they didn't let the fact that the concept is not supported by any science discouraged them logic was not going to stand in their way the idea behind a repressed memory is if a child doesn't remember anything about an event like they don't even remember the event happening at all the clinician implements tactics to help the child find the missing memories for example they might make a number of suggestions to the child they might ask the child to pretend that the narrative provided by the clinician is what actually happened and they would introduce a wide variety of leading questions eventually the clinician would come to believe that the child is reconstructing the memory when in reality the clinician has supplied the narrative to the child when the child simply repeats the narrative back the clinician is amazed at how this repressed memory has been unlocked so they were fascinated that someone could repeat their own words back to them that is setting the bar pretty low if they ever had access to a tape recorder they could have entertained themselves for hours the memories of children are subject to fantasy the social environment cultural influences and suggestion the mental health professionals should have known this the information was well established in the research literature at that time yet they chose nonsense a good example of how this technique was used with disastrous consequences is the mcmartin preschool incident it was really one of the most high profile examples of satanic panic in action in 1983 the mcmartin school in california was the center of a number of false accusations all of them started from one allegation it came from the mother of one of the preschool students the mother's name was judy johnson even though the allegations were unfounded law enforcement vigorously attempted to find other complaining witnesses they sent this letter home with all the other students that essentially told parents that this person had been arrested at the school and they should see if their child had experienced something like that going on they were kind of putting ideas in the heads of the parents psychotherapists using the repressed memory technique i talked about before managed to elicit false accusations at an astounding rate eventually several members of the mcmartin family and teaching staff were charged with hundreds of criminal counts by 1984 there were 360 children who claimed they were victims of crimes at the daycare none of them reported crimes when interviewed initially it was always on the subsequent interviews this technique of course the repressed memory technique was being employed the clinicians had constructed their own false witness factory the children who were interviewed combined the narratives supplied by the psychotherapist with a number of fanciful elements this certainly should have been a clue to people that their stories were made up just a few examples of pieces they added they said that they had taken trips and hot air balloons they told stories about secret tunnels under the school they had stories of their classmates being flushed down toilets and ending up in hidden rooms some people think the subway is bad they never rode on the toilet flush express in queens new york there is actually a line called the flushing line its eastern terminal is in flushing queens so i'm sure no one ever made that connection but i just thought that was interesting the children also said they saw some of the staff members flying one child even identified chuck norris as one of the offenders chuck norris of course had nothing to do with the school he was never there even with these fanciful stories prosecutors went forward with the case many innocent people spent years in jail as they defended against these unfounded allegations eventually it was discovered that judy johnson had schizophrenia and her accusations were actually part of a delusion in 1986 near the beginning of the first trial judy johnson died from complications of alcohol use there were no convictions and all the charges were dropped in 1990 the state spent over 15 million dollars on the prosecution it was the most expensive criminal prosecution in american history interestingly not all the mental health professionals in the area bought into the nonsense many condemned their colleagues but their voices of skepticism were drowned out by the sensationalism of the accusations satanic panic affected many people from across the united states and the united kingdom eventually it would die out in the mid 1990s there were other trials related to satanic panic in various places that did result in false convictions satanic panic was a failure that negatively affected a large number of people various experts including mental health professionals were largely responsible because they reacted irrationally to the fears of the public satanic panic was just another expression of moral panic we have seen many of these situations throughout the years they are often associated with conspiracy theories moral panic is essentially a conspiracy theory for example the q 9 conspiracy theory promotes the idea that children are in danger from a group of evil conspirators like the satanic panic it was based on the idea that people were being hurt which does happen but just not to the level that was indicated by the panic similarly the cancel culture takes a real occurrence like bias against certain groups of people and expands the concern to the entire population without logical justification the action is always disproportionate to the problem that's a key feature of moral panic as ridiculous as the satanic panic appears to people now cancel culture will appear to people in the future but that's always the case with moral panic few people can see it at the time the fear of the alleged offenders is greater than the fear of making false allegations it is theorized that one of the reasons that moral panic discontinues is because the feedback loop becomes broken news outlets simply stop reporting on the topic and people lose interest these days with social media being the source of news for so many we have an endless supply of moral panic content to fuel cancel culture far into the future who knows when cancer culture will die out it may turn out to be the most persistent moral panic in history those are my thoughts on moral panic including satanic panic and cancel culture please put any opinions and thoughts in the comments section they always generate an interesting dialogue as always i hope you found my analysis of this topic to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 41,010

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Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Dougtoss]

I would say that unlike previous panics this one has a very straightforward material gain - you can knock rivals and superiors off the corporate ladder.

Who could give that up?

[u/ITakeaShitInYourAss]

Surprised to see Dr Grande here :)

[u/Winter_Parfait]

Satanic Panic just didn't have the broad appeal that woke culture has.

As a Gen Xr raised a Jewish atheist (my parents were literally members of American Atheist for a while), there are plenty of people that Satanic Panic just wasn't even going to get at, ever, whom wokeness is actually able to reach. Its religious nature was a bug and not a feature.

A broad swath of an entire generation (mine) came of age with this shit and it was, to a lot of us, a joke. Plenty of Xrs, particularly if we had progressive parents, weren't raised religious, compared to Boomers and Zoomers. Satanic Panic wasn't infecting every part of life, it was largely a media and pop culture thing. Depending upon where you were, there were plenty of adults around who thought it was stupid. My own parents were anti authoritarian and thought it was stupid. Also the legacy of the 60s-70s free speech movement was still somewhat strong, and there was a growing secular movement to act as a counterweight. "Satanic Panic" practically ended up being free publicity for anything it tried to police. It was not able to exert the power over any media platform that wokeness is able to exert, and contributed to Christian culture becoming more fringe.

It did not have the institutional power that wokeness has, not by a long shot.

The only well known (in the US) moral panic that has anything on wokeness, in the past century, in the US, in terms of institutional power and sheer scale, is the Red Scare. In Europe it would be the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Maybe China's Cultural Revolution.

Satanic Panic did not actually in any way manage to become a populist fascist movement in any but the most homogenously Christian spaces.