Misinformation Mayhem: Satanic Panic 2.0

Estimated Read Time: 18 minutes

The Good Old Days

Think back – way, way back – to the mid-80s. Through the lens of nostalgia, it seems like a much simpler time. The internet and social media were not even blips on the radar yet. Your biggest worries were maybe having plenty of AquaNet to get your hair big enough, or being ready at the exact right moment to press the “record” button on your boombox to capture that one perfect song from the radio for the super-cool mix tape you were making for your boyfriend or girlfriend, and hoping that the DJ didn’t talk over the introduction. MTV still played music, and the premiere of your favorite group’s video was appointment television. Perhaps your idea of a perfect afternoon was going to the arcade to play Pac-Man, or heading to the mall to shop at Contempo Casuals or The Limited.

But for many people, the 80s were not the happy, carefree time that most of us remember so fondly. The Satanic Panic was also an 80s phenomenon, one that for the most part has become a forgotten footnote in history.

Surely you remember this, or parts of this. I certainly do. I remember one of my friends telling me that her other friend (OK, this is sounding sketchy already, right?) had told her that the members of Led Zeppelin were devil worshippers. The proof, she said, could be revealed by putting your Led Zeppelin IV record onto your turntable, placing the needle on “Stairway to Heaven,” and then spinning the record backwards with your finger. Then you’d hear all of the “satanic” messages that had been secretly put into that song. It was right there, for anyone who wanted to hear it for themselves!

You tried it, right? Come on…it’s been almost 40 years, it’s OK to admit it now. I promise I won’t judge, because I did it too. And since I was 15 years old, I heard exactly what I was told I would hear: the eerie, spooky, quavery voice of Robert Plant crooning about his love for Satan. It’s embarrassing to admit it now, all these years later, because it’s so utterly ridiculous. My friends and I were convinced that the reason it all sounded so creepy was because it was devil worship, not because, you know, the record was being played backwards. But like I said, I was 15 years old.

A Darker Side of the 80s

In the years since high school, I’ve read a few in-depth articles and listened to some podcasts about the Satanic Panic, and it went far beyond impressionable teenagers with too much time on their hands doing irreparable damage to their record needles and hearing encoded messages in classic rock songs.

The genesis of the Satanic Panic was the publication of a book called Michelle Remembers in 1980. It was written by Canadian psychologist Lawrence Pazder and his patient (and later wife) Michelle Smith. In it, Smith detailed shocking, lurid, and ghastly accounts of abuse she suffered in 1954 and 1955 at the hands of members of the Church of Satan. It chronicled detailed atrocities of torture, sexual assault, and human sacrifice. There was even an account of Satan himself appearing at some sort of ceremony.

All of the claims in this book were roundly and widely discredited, as was the therapeutic practice of recovered memory therapy (RMT) that was used to “retrieve” all these memories. But before – and even after – everything in Michelle Remembers was thoroughly debunked, Pazder and Smith made the rounds on radio stations and television. Prominent 1980s power-house talk shows like The Oprah Winfrey Show, Donahue, and Geraldo, featured them as guests, and popular weekly news magazines like 20/20 ran interviews with them.

Word began to spread like wildfire. And how could it not? It was a shocking, horrifying story; a precursor of the daily train-wreck television seen on the Jerry Springer Show in the 1990s. Shortly after their media blitz, Pazder and Smith were recognized as the foremost authorities on satanic ritual abuse. They led training seminars for mental health professionals, social workers, and law enforcement officers and taught them how to identify the signs of satanic abuse.

Before long, reports of satanic ritual abuse were sweeping the country. It seemed to have been hiding in plain sight, around every corner, in suburbs, small towns, and everywhere in between. Each new case was more salacious and fantastical than the last. It reached a fever pitch with the McMartin Preschool case in Manhattan Beach, California. It started with one mother accusing an employee of abusing her son.That led to the police sending about 200 letters to other families whose children attended the school. “Please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim,” a letter from police read.

The accusations from the mother who filed the original complaint against the McMartin Preschool became “increasingly bizarre.” Eventually, prosecutors realized that she was schizophrenic and suffered from paranoid delusions, but by then, the damage was done.

Hundreds of children – most of them toddlers – attending the McMartin Preschool were questioned. These interviews were almost all conducted by one person: a woman named Kee MacFarlane, a consultant with the Children’s Institute International, an agency with the mission of identifying and treating abused children. However, the methods she used were highly suspect, asking leading questions and promising rewards to the children if they provided her with the “right” answer.

“At first, children generally denied seeing any evidence of abuse. Eventually, however, many children came around to giving MacFarlane the stories that she clearly wanted to hear. After the interviews, MacFarlane told parents that their children had been abused, and described the nature of the alleged abuse. By March 1984, 384 former McMartin students had been diagnosed as sexually abused.”

The methods used to question these children could be the topic of a book entitled, How Not To Work With Toddlers. Young children are very impressionable, and in general when asked a question want to give the “correct” answer. The notion of telling the truth, good or bad, is still a nebulous and abstract idea.

And in addition to being interviewed, many of the children were also subjected to extremely invasive physical examinations as well. Many of them were declared to have been sexually abused, but those conclusions were later discredited.

Ultimately, all the charges against the owners and employees of the McMartin Preschool were dismissed due to a complete lack of evidence. But in the process, their lives had all been destroyed.

In time, the panic, paranoia, and baseless accusations subsided. But believe it or not, there are still people today, roughly 35 years later, who are still in prison after being unjustly accused of being devil worshiping child predators and being convicted of those crimes. The podcast Conviction: American Panic tells the story of a boy who, at 10 years old, testified against his father because he believed he was the leader of a satanic cult. His father was convicted. Decades later, he learned that his family was just one of many that had been caught up in the hysteria that swept across the country. The Satanic Panic went far beyond just playing “Stairway to Heaven” backwards; it ruined many lives.

Everything Old is New Again

Now here we are in 2022, and instead of satanic cults lying in wait in every small town in America, it’s teachers wanting to “groom” your children lurking in every classroom in the country. It’s all too familiar, isn’t it?

Is it a coincidence that child sexual abuse was at the heart of both the allegations and accusations we’re seeing leveled against educators today and the owners and employees of the McMartin Preschool and everyone else caught up in the Satanic Panic? No, it isn’t.

All of us want give our children happy, secure, carefree childhoods where they know that they’re loved and safe.The idea of your child being the victim of sexual abuse? Well, there are very few things more horrifying than that. It strikes at the heart of the most powerful and primal parental instinct of them all: protecting your child.

So when people with an extremist agenda want to create chaos, sow the seeds of discontent, and create a wedge issue to get people all riled up, then what better tactic could there be than to target the people who spend more waking hours with your kids than anyone else?

It started during COVID. We all remember the world being turned upside down and things changing overnight. Here in Douglas County, it happened on March 13, 2020. I remember this because it seemed quite fitting that it happened on Friday the 13th.

Think back to the challenges of remote learning. I remember the frustrations of trying to help my kid with math. And I’m a numbers person. I really felt for anyone who wasn’t a numbers person trying to get through that. I remember the exasperation of not knowing when it would ever end, and feeling like the information was changing every time I turned around.

But I also understood that other than the handful of centenarians still with us who were toddlers during the last global pandemic, everyone on earth was living through something that literally no one alive had ever lived through before. So yes, there were poor decisions, mistakes and missteps. There were things that were not handled very well. Things I would have done differently had it been up to me. But it wasn’t. I always felt that everyone was doing the best they could with the information they had at the time.

At first, teachers were hailed as heroes. But then, as the pandemic dragged on, remote learning stopped being a novelty and became the new normal. Weary parents were anxious to resume their pre-pandemic lives and routines. As the start of the 2020-2021 school year approached, teachers had concerns about returning to the classroom, and many were excoriated for being lazy slackers who didn’t want to do their jobs.

But that standard did not apply to everyone. In 2020, NFL players were given the choice to opt out of the season if they had reservations about playing during the pandemic, and receive a stipend of up to $150,000. Worth noting is that this was negotiated by the NFL players’ union. Here are some public comments from an article on this topic (although not the one referenced here).

But an article about teachers expressing similar concerns about returning to the classroom generated comments like these:

And this comment was posted on the local Parents Advocating for DCSD Students page:

After educators were declared to be the enemy by right-wing agitators such as Steve Bannon, and he declared open season on school boards across the country, the next target was masks. It was unfortunate that masks became politicized, but they did. We saw plenty of that right here in Douglas County. Here’s just one example, ridiculing former school board director Kevin Leung:

One person on the local Parents Advocating for DCSD Students Facebook page encouraged parents to flood the Colorado Child Abuse hotline and report school teachers and administrators over mask mandates.

Then the next uproar was Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is not now, nor has it ever been, a topic covered in any K-12 curriculum, but regardless, it became a topic of hot debate over the next several months. Make no mistake, this was by design. It was the brainchild of Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. In March, he tweeted a promise to make CRT “toxic” in the public imagination. And he certainly made good on it.

“The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans,” Rufo boasted.

We saw plenty of that in Douglas County during the 2021 school board election. Here are some campaign materials circulated by the Kids First candidates during the 2021 school board race on behalf of the Kids First candidates . This propaganda was paid for and published by the 1776 Project PAC. These same postcards were circulated in 28 other districts that, along with DCSD, were targeted by this far-right extremist organization.

And here is a statement issued by Parker Conservatives in 2021, issuing its own dire warnings about the evils of CRT, and that the only way to stop it from happening was voting for the Kids First slate of candidates.

And now, the discussion has turned to allegations of teachers “grooming” children, insinuating that sex education is somehow prurient and predatory, with bigoted, hateful attacks on the LBGTQ community thrown in for good measure. Social and emotional learning (SEL) content has come under fire as well.

This of course started in the alt-right extremist circles of QAnon, in the darkest, most furtive corners of the internet. In 2016, the infamous “Pizzagate” incident occurred, and from there, it’s only become more inexplicably outlandish. To detail how QAnon has insinuated itself into the mainstream could be a blog series all on its own. But the underlying message is always the same: the “woke, liberal leftists” (which by their definition includes educators) are all evil child predators, just waiting to get their hands on your beautiful, precious children and subject them to horrible, unspeakable things.

Whispers about educators “grooming” children began circulating as early as the summer of 2021, courtesy – again – of Christopher Rufo, who, as mentioned above, successfully architected the demonization of Critical Race Theory.

It catapulted into the mainstream in March of 2022 with the infamous and highly controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill signed into law by Florida governor Ron DeSantis. This bill prohibits any discussion whatsoever on sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K-3, as if these were existing hot topics of classroom discussion with 5 - 8 year olds, which they were not. “We will make sure that parents can send their kids to school to get an education, not an indoctrination,” DeSantis intoned during the signing ceremony.

Defenders of the bill condemned its critics as “groomers,” despite the bill not mentioning or referring to grooming at all. This tweet from DeSantis’s press secretary a few weeks before he signed the bill is an early – and soon to be classic – example.

This was a deliberate move, designed to pander to the QAnon crowd, throw them some red meat, and galvanize the radical, extremist, right-wing base. And hoo boy, has it ever worked.

It didn’t take long for reliably right-wing extremist media personalities to start fanning these flames into an all-out inferno. Tucker Carlson has advocated for violence against teachers on his show. He has a history of attacking educators; this even extended to his own first grade teacher, who he maligned in his 2018 book. She later set the record straight, and shared that she was actually hired to tutor him privately – a fact that he conveniently omitted. And according to Laura Ingraham, teachers who even mention sexuality to students are “grooming” them.

It’s not just extremist right-wing media personalities who are throwing fuel onto this fire, either. Renowned playwright David Mamet said on Mark Levin’s Fox News show that, “teachers are inclined to pedophilia.” This is a person who has won a Pulitzer Prize! But evidently, even he is not immune to the siren song of QAnon.

And this radicalized rhetoric has certainly reverberated throughout our own community too. In March 2022, Joe Oltmann, Douglas County resident and founder of the right-wing extremist organization FEC United, stated on his podcast Conservative Daily that, “They’re [educators] grooming them to be gay. This is a real thing – they are grooming your children so they can molest and abuse them.”

DCSD school board president Mike Peterson was the featured speaker at a luncheon meeting of the GOP organization The Lincoln Club of Colorado, and stated that “We had legislation that mandated sexual education, you know, in the K through 6th grade, some pretty aggressive stuff that I won’t repeat here.” Notice how he conveniently omitted any specific examples of what this “aggressive stuff” might be, satisfied to leave it at dark and foreboding insinuations easily left open for interpretation.

Then-candidate Becky Myers got in on the action too, by answering providing this answer on the FEC United 2021 Candidate Survey:

“Health classes should be health classes and not classes teaching sexual orientation,
sexual practices and promoting transgender, LGBTQ agenda."

Director Myers also recently sent an email to Kevin DiPasquale, director of Douglas County Federation, in which she chastised him for items displayed on the DCF table at a new teacher orientation event.

So according to Director Myers, one may either be an LBGTQ ally, or be an American patriot. Wow. Last time I checked, it was possible to be both. Or perhaps Director Myers believes that the American flag is only for people who share her political beliefs? Is that her personal opinion, or the opinion of the Kids First majority? Since she expressed this sentiment in her capacity as a school board member, it’s a legitimate question.

A parent on the Facebook page for the local chapter of FAIR (formerly known as Wokebusters of Douglas County) offered this assessment of an SEL survey:

And Now We’ve Come Full Circle

This “groomer” slur has morphed into the all-purpose, go-to insult for these people, who toss it out whenever they encounter someone who doesn’t agree with them. This comment was recently posted on the “Living in Parker” Facebook page, on a post about the latest manufactured outrage regarding an incident at the Douglas County PrideFest during the drag show. One person opined that it was pretty silly to be offended by fake nipples, and got this reply:

Oltmann used it twice on Lora Thomas’s official County Commissioner Facebook page, replying to a post where she discussed a meeting she had with the organizers of the Douglas County Pride Fest.

So it’s officially a “panic” now, akin to what we saw back in the 80s. Someone rubs you the wrong way on social media? They’re obviously a “groomer.” Your kid’s teacher gave an assignment that you don’t like for some reason? They’re trying to “groom” your child. You don’t like the state curriculum about sex education? It must have been written by “groomers.” Someone’s political viewpoints don’t align with yours? Well then, they must be a “groomer.” Where will it end? How long until someone decides that dog groomers are child predators because the word “groomer'' is in their job title?

A person who would level these types of allegations against anyone to further their political agenda is, without question, a person utterly devoid of even the tiniest shred of human decency or morals. Not only is it an absolutely horrible thing to accuse someone of, but labeling every single person you don’t like or disagree with as a “groomer” dilutes and diminishes the actual act of grooming, which is even more despicable. And it accomplishes exactly what these people claim they’re trying to prevent – children being in dangerous and perilous situations.

The reason that this is such an effective strategy is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to prove a negative. Think about it. What if someone accused you of being a child molester? Could you really disprove it, beyond a shadow of a doubt? No. That’s why it’s so insidious. If someone were to accuse you of that, what would that mean for you? How would it affect your relationships with your spouse and children, your friends, your neighbors, your colleagues, or people from your church? No matter how stridently you denied the allegations, and no matter how many people came to your defense, chances are, there would always be someone out there who thought you were guilty. Someone who thought you got away with it – perhaps that you were still getting away with it. What would it be like to have that haunt you, every day, for the rest of your life?

The other reason it’s such a powerful technique is because people, in general, are hesitant to express anything that could be construed as an opposing viewpoint. I mean, who isn’t against child predators? Who doesn’t find them to be the most abhorrent people imaginable? The people who do those sorts of things, that’s who. If you express even the slightest bit of skepticism, or ask a question about the credibility of the information, chances are, people will turn on you and accuse you of defending child predators and/or being one yourself. In this age of doxxing and online public shaming, who wants to take that risk? I certainly don’t. Do you?

Like the Satanic Panic, this “groomer” frenzy will eventually dwindle and recede from the public dialogue. But until it does, how many people will be caught in the crossfire? Only time will tell what kind of destruction it will leave in its wake.