Satanic Panic

Thursday

Bridget Phetasy

The Epstein files and the new Satanic Panic

I’ve spent the last few years building an audience of skeptics and – let’s be honest – more than a few conspiracy theorists who turned out to be right about some pretty big things. We saw #MeToo devolve into a moral panic where accusation equaled guilt and due process was something only rape apologists cared about. We watched Covid turn half the country into snitches who, drunk on their own righteousness, ratted out neighbors for having a barbecue. We talked endlessly on podcasts about groupthink, social contagion and mobs. And on some of the biggest questions – the lab leak, institutional corruption, “gender-affirming care” and the machinery of public manipulation – the conspiracy theorists were vindicated.

Thursday

Amelia Butler-Gallie

Devil in the detail

When I was offered the chance to review two new books about the Devil, I thought, “what fun!” I wouldn’t describe myself as a particularly diabolical person, but as someone whose deep love of Paradise Lost has made me, as good old William Blake didn’t quite put it, “of the devil’s party while very much knowing it,” I rubbed my hands together in glee at the prospect of getting down and dirty with Old Nick. Not, you understand, that my purely literary interest can begin to compare to the “Satanic Panic” outbreak that gripped the imaginations of middle America in the late 1980s and 1990s. “Satanic cults! Every hour, every day, their ranks are growing!

devil

Sunday

Jessa Crispin

Crazed and confused

Perhaps you’ve noticed that America isn’t holding it together very well. Every airplane seems to have a middle-aged man throwing a temper tantrum about his facemask, every state house has some woman with artificial hair coloring and too much facial filler screaming about some imagined threat to “the children,” and every time I think I have found a normal person on Twitter it only takes twenty seconds of browsing their timeline to find a post that compares the Covid-19 vaccine to the Holocaust. It would be easy to dismiss this as just a particularly nasty lull in our collective sanity, but it’s time to be real. We have always been like this. Our nation wasn’t founded when the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock, as they taught us in kindergarten.

hysteria