Satanism Expert Reacts to Anti-LGBT “Satanic” Panic

We are in the middle of a moral panic surrounding LGBTQ issues in America, where Satan and demonic forces are constantly being invoked. My parents hired an exorcist to get all the demons out of my room that they thought were making me gay. Devil, no! In Jesus' name. Target hired a Satanist to put together their Pride line. It's the open Satan that opens Satanist, guys. That's what we're gonna get up against. This open sickness, like they're...

Dr. Joseph Laycock is a scholar of religious studies who has written about Satanism and satanic panics in the U.S. He agreed to join me to discuss our current moral panic. I have a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and I have a PhD from Boston University, and I study American religion, the history of religion in America, and I study new religious movements, which are those religions that are kind of stigmatized by the public or seen as somehow marginalized or alternative or or deviant. And I am an editor for Nova Religio, which is one of the the top journals for that field. So my book, Dangerous Games, is about the moral panic over Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games in the the 1980s. It goes through kind of the history of role-playing games and the the panic, uh, about it. And it also just asks the question, why of all the things that conservative Christians could have been upset about in the '80s, did they focus so much on a game that was played by basically nerdy boys, right, at that time? And one of the kind of conclusions is that, in a lot of ways, religion functions kind of like a massive fantasy role-playing game. And I think at least some of the people, uh, making this this claim, this is a satanic cultish game, realized that connection. And it was, in some ways, a defense mechanism, right? It was, "My religion isn't a fantasy role-playing game. Your game is a religion." And and that kind of helps, uh, pushes those thoughts down. So I think that's at least part of what was happening there, uh, with that panic.

Dr. Joseph Laycock, as a scholar of new religious movements, I'm sure that you are privy to the moral panic that is happening right now surrounding LGBT issues, especially, and where narratives of Satanism are being invoked constantly. But you probably haven't been asked to come in and look at some videos, look at some clips of moral panic happening in real time, being documented right there on the scene. So today, I was hoping that we can take a look at some of these clips and discuss how today's moral panic, if you would call it one, may relate to moral panics that you've written about happening in the '80s and '90s that we would refer to as the satanic panic. Sounds fun. Let's do it.

I wanted to start out with something that I find particularly disturbing because we're witnessing in this clip harm that is going on firsthand. And, uh, a rather resilient young man making light of a pretty terrible situation. "When my parents hired an exorcist to get all the demons out of my room that they thought were making me gay." "Devil, no! In Jesus' name!" "You foul spirit, you leave in Jesus' name!" "Something happened in this closet, in Jesus' name!" "Every evil spirit, go now, in Jesus' name!" "Evil spirit, go now, Jesus' name!" "And I pray the conviction of the Lord upon this room, in Jesus' name!" "Devil, you have no more place. You can never enter this room again." "I pray, I plead the blood of Christ out of this closet, offering every piece of clothing in here salvation in Jesus' name!" "The presence of God! Whoo! If something was in here, in Jesus' name!" "Thank you, Jesus!" "We are now, we commission angels to be in this closet." "I anoint, is this oil represents the oil of the Holy Spirit, and we anoint this bed in the name of Jesus, that every person that touches this bed shall be saved." "Yes, in Jesus' name!" "In Jesus' name!" "In Jesus' name!" "I feel that that's the Holy Ghost. Give us direction. Hallelujah! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!" "I would say this other side's had just as much shenanigans."

Now, the person who uploaded this said that his parents were going and exercising his room because they thought that demonic forces were making him gay. Is this a scene that you would have seen in the '80s and '90s, or were exorcisms of young men's rooms related more to heavy metal and D&D and things like that, with sexuality as an element? You know, that's interesting. Um, I am not aware of people trying to address homosexuality through exorcism, uh, in the in the '80s and '70s. You know, I, I wrote an article about a boy who was accidentally killed at his church because he was a gay teen, and, uh, they, they basically held him in a bear hug until they, they did permanent damage, and they couldn't resuscitate him. And when he began to vomit, they said, "It's working!" Right? So it is a very serious problem right now, but I'm not aware this was so common in the '70s and '80s. And, and I don't know why, but it may be because in the '70s and '80s, if your child came out as gay and you didn't like it, you could still frame this as a medical issue, right? You could still put this in a medical register. If we need a doctor now, if you go see a doctor, they're more likely to say, "Well, here's a pamphlet about how to accept your gay son," or something like this. Uh, but you still have the demonological, uh, register. So that might be one reason why this is becoming a, a more common, um, or maybe just because as the sort of culture has changed around homosexuality, there's a needle we can't, where there's no longer consensus that homosexuality is evil or dangerous. And so we need to resort to the Demonic because the Demonic is sort of this trump card, right? If we can, if we can frame something as demonic, then, uh, that's the end of the discussion, right? We don't have to debate the merits or the logic of it anymore because it's evil with a capital E, right?

I apologize for this next one. It's gone pretty viral, properly viral, tens of millions of views on on different platforms at this point. Are you familiar with the whole Target fiasco that's going on right now? I'm aware Target has become, well, a Target in the, uh, in our current culture wars, yeah. So for people who are uninitiated into this, which I, I doubt there are any that that wouldn't be familiar with this at this point, uh, there was a queer artist who designed several things that Target began to sell in Pride displays during Pride month, the month of June here in the U.S. There were plenty of people who were not okay with Pride displays being there in the first place, but they were especially not okay with the fact that the artist had discussed Satanism or had sold things that had to do with satanic narratives. Uh, well, check out this clip. This is a Christian nationalist activist, uh, who posted this clip to Twitter, him trying to to preach his his message to the Target employees. "Hey, do you guys support the satanic Pride propaganda? You support Satan?" "Um, what's God gonna think of that?" "I don't believe in God." "So you think, do you need help with something? You support the propaganda that's targeting the kids? Oh, it's all of our kids. TV shows, it's all over. They're targeting the kids. Choose to wear whatever they want. Do you support the sexualization of kids through Pride propaganda by corporate?" "Is there something that we can help you with?" "I'm just asking people questions." "What about you, sir?" "I am the Undercover Boss prevention." "Oh, okay. So I'm just asking questions. So do you support this satanic propaganda?" "Questions." "What you need to do is you either need to leave the store. God will judge you guys." "Okay, I mean, I can't." "He won't if I don't believe in it." "And also, is that Archer?" "Yeah, it is." "Are you going to purchase that shirt?" "Hey, ma'am, do you support this?" "What did I just say? You support Pride propaganda?" "Whoa, I'm buying this. Whoa, let's go!" "I'm not buying it. I'm gonna buy it and burn it." "But what I said, ask anybody any any questions." "You can't describe." "Please." "Do you want me to?" "Yeah." "Call." "Okay. Trespass me. I don't care, dude." "Okay, clearly you think I care if you trespass. I've done this a thousand times." "You guys are satanic. See, open Satan that opens Satanist, guys. That's what we're gonna get up against. Is open sickness." "Like they're just..." "No, you can't disrupt any more guests, sir." "Do you support the satanic Pride propaganda?" "He doesn't." "You're judgmental." "Excuse me, do you guys support this?" "You guys support the propaganda." "Yeah, you do. Yeah." "So you can be satanic, man." "Please ignore it. You know what the real rainbow stands for."

All right. Now, when I see this, it makes me wonder if in the 1980s and '90s, if someone went into a store and said, "You know, D&D is satanic. Do you support Satan?" I, I mean, of course, I was not there. You would, you would know better than me having written on this. But I'm not sure if people would be saying, "Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. We support Satan." Absolutely. And and not caring to elaborate anymore, kind of just giving them what they want so that they'll go away, type of thing. And am I wrong there? Is my impression off?

That's an interesting question. I mean, I think that in the '80s, first of all, D&D would only be sold in kind of specialized hobby shops and things like that, and you wouldn't have had the ability to just film it. And I think this person was not interested in the reactions of anyone in Target. He wanted to go on Twitter and hopefully this would go viral on Twitter, and he would help build, uh, his his brand. So in some ways, it really wasn't the opportunity to do something like that in the '80s. Uh, however, uh, people like Gary Gygax did as much as they could to try and say, "No, no, D&D is a good, wholesome game." They even hired a child psychologist to write about all the positive virtues of D&D. And I think one thing you see in a video like that is you really can't argue with these people. They're not interested in having a rational debate, right? I think it was Sartre who said, you know, the anti-Semite plays with words, right? Knowing that you're the one who has to try to respond to his words with logic. Yeah. And he can just be annoying. So he begins by asking loaded questions, right? "Do you support the satanic, uh, propaganda?" Right? And the, the woman even responds that there's an objection with with the way the question is phrased, right? And then when that doesn't work, he just says, "God will judge you." Right? So that's kind of his ultimate, "I lost, but I still win," right? Because I could invoke, uh, I can invoke the supernatural force that sees the world exactly the way that I do, yeah.

What do you make of this Target employee just directly saying, "Yeah, sure, we support Satan, whatever." Uh, at one point she does say, you know, "I'm just more anti by people being judgmental." And it seems that just being an avowed Satanist, you know, in that moment, to her, was saying, "Don't judge people. You suck." Uh, it, what do you think about that? What's your take on her response?

Yeah, I, I mean, I think that that is a fairly common response when people are just asking you idiotic questions, is you just say yes, right? The thing that they're, they're asking. So I didn't read that as her professing Satanism or anything of the sort, so much as just kind of, "I don't have the patience to to deal with this, and your questions are not worthy of a serious answer." So, so yes, I support Satan. That's how I read that. Now, maybe she actually does support Satan, but I, I don't think so, just from watching the clip. It is a bit of a risky strategy to even say, even give them, give people like this just the, a tiny little bit of what they want so that you can shut down the conversation. And, and people, I mean, clearly in the video, he ran with the idea that she was an open Satanist working at Target. And I'm sure that plenty of people watching that video would think, "Wow, that's all the proof that I need to to really believe that Target is purposely pushing Satanism, even their employees are satanic."

What do you, what do you think about the the risk?

Yeah, he seemed to really feel that he got something out of that exchange, right? That he sort of scored a point. Uh, I think the loss prevention officer strategy was better, of just simply saying, "I'm not going to answer your questions. Right? I'm not going to answer any of this. I'm just going to keep, uh, sort of, you know, herding you towards, uh, the exit." Rebecca Barrett Fox wrote a book on the Westboro Baptist Church, uh, and one thing that she noticed was, first of all, everyone in that church has a law degree, and they're very adept at creating a situation in which they will be completely offensive and insulting to you, but within the grounds of the law. And they can basically trigger someone into assault, and then they get to sue you and make more money. And so she says, "My advice is, unless it's personally going to make you feel much better, right, just do not engage with them. Do not attempt to have an argument with the Westboro Baptist Church." And I think that probably goes for all movements like that.

Now, I have said that the artist who designed the, at least some of the Pride merch, uh, which was pulled from Target's shelves recently as a result of the the backlash against this, people like this going in and harassing employees, has actually made merchandise not for Target at all, but prior to their deal with Target, that had satanic imagery. Uh, the, the main artist for this has discussed Satanism, has not called themself an outright Satanist, I don't believe. But we will get into some of the merchandise that they actually did design, which was not, again, sold in Target, but was designed by this artist.

Is that like a pin for a backpack or something?

Yeah, it's a, it's a metallic pin that says, "Satan respects pronouns." Uh, I'll read a bit of the caption here. "One of my favorite and most popular designs, and one that gave the, uh, the brand, I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce it, their brand, its proper footing and direction. Coming up with this phrase really helped make the brand what it is today. Satan loves you and respects you for who you are. You're important and valuable in this world, and you deserve to treat yourself with love and respect. LGBT+ people are so often referred to as being a product of Satan or going against God's will. So fine, we'll hang with Satan instead. Satanists don't actually believe in Satan. He is merely used as a symbol of passion, pride, and liberty. He means to you what you need him to mean. So for me, Satan is hope." This is flipping the narrative on people who are making accusations against this person who is clearly faced accusations of being satanic.

What do you make of this?

Well, I mean, it's interesting because I think, uh, the opponents would say, "Oh, it's right there. It's what we've been saying. Right? Satan respects pronouns." Right? Uh, asking for someone's pronouns is a satanic, uh, practice. I mean, that is, um, that is honestly edgier than I thought it was going to be to be something you could find on the shelf of a of a Target. This would not be found at Target. This is sold by the brand, but not in any way associated with Target.

I see. Okay. All right. So you could buy this with like a Target website or something?

No, not even that. Uh, you could buy it at this brand's website that's based out of the UK. Okay. But you can buy some of their products, I think it's like something like three or four products, uh, that do not have any satanic, uh, imagery or slogans or anything on them. So this is totally separate from Target. Did this is just the, the same artist who designed some of Target's Pride merchandise for June this year.

Okay. So this is kind of a guilt by association, somewhat?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's interesting that they did so much research. I mean, this all honestly reminds me of the, uh, Procter and Gamble panic in the 1980s, where people became convinced that, uh, the the logo for that company, which they used since the 1800s, was satanic or contained the face of the devil. And Procter and Gamble finally just had to change the logo. This is, there's legitimately an element of Satanism here, but it's similar in that, uh, there is all this research, right, involved. And it's this kind of this argument of, "The ordinary people don't know the spiritual danger here, but I do because I did all this research, and I'm this, I'm this kind of a demon hunter." And you very often find figures like this behind these these panics. A term David Frankfurter uses in his book, Evil Incarnate, is simply the expert in evil, the person who has the ability to track down that, "Oh, don't you know this artist made this pin that they're selling in some totally different company?"

I thought we could take a look at one of the tweets that seemed pretty early in the whole panic surrounding Target, specifically, that seems to do some of the things that you just mentioned. This is an activist with a group called Moms for Liberty, uh, very vocal Christian, very vocal conservative. Uh, I, I think that you could argue there's some nationalist, uh, rhetoric going on in the, uh, Orwellian name for Liberty, right? Liberty for who? Uh, yeah, I, I think so. She said, "Why did Target hire a Satanist to design pieces for recent Pride clothing line?" And then quotes the the post that we just looked at. If you take a look at the pieces that were being sold by this supposedly satanic artist in in Target, you see a pretty generic slogan here, "We Belong Everywhere," with a bunch of planets and it looks like a trans flag colored rainbow, too. "Queer for here," with a UFO. And this is a bit harder to see, but this shirt actually says, "Cure transphobia, not trans people," or I believe, or maybe it just says, "Cure transphobia." Uh, no outwardly satanic imagery or or slogans or ideology here at all. But associating this with Satanism in some way, I think, really puts gas in the tank behind behind tweets like this and, and maybe the activism of people with Moms for Liberty.

Yeah, so this seems reactionary. And again, it seems like they've, they've kind of admitted defeat on having a rational argument about how trans people ought to be treated. There are no, our arguments sort of supporting them unless they can bring in something like Satanism. It's satanic, or it's grooming children for pedophilia, or something like this. They have to bring in these other things to kind of win their case. This is also a great example of a loaded question, which I think people need to start paying attention to, which is, "Why did they hire a Satanist?" They didn't hire a Satanist. They hired an artist, right? So you're sort of asserting your claims in the form of a question. This is something that, uh, when I do seminars with my students, I really try to get everyone to stop doing and to notice when someone, uh, is is doing it. It's not necessarily ill-intentioned, but it makes it harder to get to the truth of things if we're, if we're asking loaded questions.

Now, I've scrolled down a little bit here, and this activist has tweeted a bit more about some of these products that are not, by the way, sold in Target, I believe. Captions like, "Trans witches for abortion," and, "Join our gay cult." She says, "Definitely not trying to use designs and art to groom, manipulate, and control kids." My instinct is that some of these, uh, very transgressive, outlandish sounding slogans are a bit tongue-in-cheek. I believe this artist has described some of their work as tongue-in-cheek before. But, uh, I, I'm genuinely not sure where kids come in to this. This apparel is not branded for for children. I don't believe you can even get these things in children's sizes. Uh, maybe the colors, which are emblematic of the trans flag, this baby blue and and pink, could be interpreted as somehow having to do with baby colors, you know, gender reveal parties and things use these colors. But is it, is it a regular occurrence for people who are stirring up moral panics to say, "Think of the children, think of the children," and find reaches of connections in order to say that children are the ones that are being targeted when there's not hard evidence of this?

I mean, yeah, there is a history of this. And of course, the irony is, um, now unfortunately, children are abused in all sorts of contexts, especially in religious contexts, right? Especially in, in churches. Uh, the people making these kinds of accusations do not seem to be also worried about abuses within the Catholic Church, but really all churches. You know, the, uh, uh, Episcopal prep school that I, I went to had the exact same problem of, they knew they had a predator, and they decided to hide him. Uh, public schools hide predators, the Boy Scouts hid predators. If people were concerned about all those issues and doing something about it, then maybe this would have some, some merit. But as it is, it seems like this is, um, this is disingenuous, right? This is not a good faith, a, a concern. I don't see anything in these slogans that has anything to do with grooming children. I mean, we, we've seen literature from things like NAMBLA trying to put out an argument for why, uh, pedophilic relationships are acceptable. That's clearly not what this is. And I see slogans like "Trans witches for abortion," and obviously, I think that is, um, meant to kind of Razz people, right, that maybe have a problem with the Trans community. But I also think this is just a logical progression from the term "queer" itself. You know, when I grew up in Texas in the '80s, "queer" was a slur. Yeah. You couldn't say that to someone. You certainly couldn't put it on a bag at Target, right? And now I work for a state university, and we have, you know, "Queer Ally" training, and it's more or less required, right, that you, you go and do that. So there is kind of a progression of one side puts out a slur, and the other side turns a slur into a badge of honor. So words like, uh, you know, "witches being for abortion," even things like "cult." I see that as the same thing, sort of. We're going to take all these negative slurs you're putting on us, and we're going to show that they don't have any power by kind of celebrating them.

Yeah, absolutely. You've spoken about the phenomenon of hunting super predators. This, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that this was something that grew in popularity in the mid to late '90s, kind of at the, if you could call it, the tail end of the the satanic panic that seemed to begin with D&D. And the people who were identified, you know, identified as super predators were often black teenagers. Uh, racial issues in America were in the forefront of many people's minds in the way that, I think, queer issues are today. Uh, do you see any similarities between hunting super predators, who are these undesirables, if you are at a certain, you're, you occupy a certain place in society, with asserting that everyone who is LGBT or anyone who even agrees with defying traditional gender norms, to be a groomer or or predatory in some way?

So Stanley Cohen was a sociologist, and he kind of pioneered research on moral panics. He wrote a book called, uh, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. And he said, to have a successful moral panic, you need two things. Number one, you need an enemy that can't fight back, right? So it's never the, you know, "white male millionaires are coming for us," right? Or if people say that, it doesn't do anything. It doesn't cause any actual, uh, problem for the, the white male millionaires. So it's always some minority group is the target. And then the second thing you need is an innocent that has to be protected, right? And that's not always children, but it usually is. So, I mean, even things like, um, the Ku Klux Klan, they said, "Well, our purpose is to protect white women, right? White women are in danger, and they need us, basically, doing terrorist activities to to protect them." So that's kind of the, the mentality here. So, uh, saying, "Well, we have this group who can't fight back, like the trans community," which, while it, it's become a lot more prominent, is still, we're talking about a small minority of people, right? Um, we have, and we have to stop them because it's to save children, right? That's the innocents who are who are being threatened by this. So I see this as kind of the, the same thing. The super predator fear in the in the '90s, it was in a lot of ways a racist dog whistle, right? So nobody would ever come out and say, uh, "We're talking about brown teenagers," but that was what they, that was what they meant. And the book, Body Count, this very famous book about this, which had a bunch of, um, uh, pretty dubious statistics, said that this was, this was a generation of adolescents who basically didn't have a conscience and had grown up in a condition of moral poverty. And the more you read the book, you realize when they said "moral poverty," what they really meant was just actual poverty, right? It's the poor kids doing this. And the whole time, crime rates were dropping all over the country, right? Especially in cities. But they kept framing us as, "This is the calm before the storm, right? That the super predators are coming, and we've, we've got to do something." And the recommendation in Body Count was basically just, "We have to lock up this whole generation for life and start over." All right, start over with some new kids, and maybe they will be, maybe they, uh, uh, will have a conscience. So that was a somewhat unique moral panic in that, uh, in hindsight, things were pretty okay in the '90s, right? A lot of the problems that we have now, we didn't have back then, or we didn't have them as bad. And yet, there was still this great fear, right, that society is fundamentally broken, and then we have to be very afraid.

Yeah, right now, the ACLU is tracking 491 bills that they've identified as anti-LGBT. Many of those, many, many of those are actually in our state of Texas, but just about every state, I want to say that there's only a couple of exceptions, have some kind of anti-LGBTQ bill that is being reviewed or has been passed in recent years. Meanwhile, there's this narrative that's being spun that trans people, queer people, gay people, even older gay people who have been married from, you know, who were married in Massachusetts as soon as it became legal and now just have this quiet life, they're all grooming children, they're all predators, and they're the ones that are actually facing discrimination. There's also a study from, this is 2017, or at least the data was collected in 2017 and 2018, that I found in the American Journal of Public Health, transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime. This was a few years ago. I'm not sure if those rates would have changed from then to now, but I think the point here is that it is measurable that there is harm being done disproportionately to people who are become being called predators.

Is this a common feature of moral panics in general?

Yes, it is. Yeah. Uh, there's a folklorist named Alan Dundes, and he gave a name to this, and he called it projected inversion. So projected inversion is, you want to do something to this group of people, and you accuse them of doing to you the thing that you want to do to them. So the classic example that he uses is in Nazi Germany. If you ask the state, "Why are Jews enemies of the state?" They would say, "Because Jews believe that they're the master race and they want to take over the world." Well, for most historians, they would say that was the goal of the Third Reich. You believe you're the master race, you want to take over the world. You've projected that onto this group, and you've used that to tell yourself the story where you're defending yourself against this powerful threat. And at the same time, you know, we got to pick the Jews because a different group of people would be able to resist us, right? And we wouldn't be able to get away with it. We wouldn't get the political points. So I, I see that happening here. And I, you know, it's, uh, someone regrettable that everything eventually gets, uh, related to Nazis at some point. I don't mean to do that, but this idea of projected inversion, I think, is exactly what's happening here. You're taking a group that is a very oppressed, um, very much marginalized and endangered, you're saying, "This is not just a threat to us, but a great threat. Right? This is this huge problem. The daily Americans have to deal with every day, the existence of of trans people." And it's, I don't think historians will look back on this very kindly.

You've spoken about how when there's rapid change in society, whether it's political or cultural change, these moral panics tend to be stirred up a lot. I, I tend to think that this hunting of super predators being mostly black teenagers, uh, would have been somewhat motivated by the fact that a lot of older white conservative parents probably saw their kids watching NWA videos on MTV in the in the late '80s, early '90s, right? They're seeing black culture become so mainstream that it's on the TV when you're flipping through the channels. Now, it is when I was a kid, at least, which was not very long ago, seeing queer people on TV, having their own shows, there being queer characters in TV shows wasn't, wasn't really happening. If, if this did happen, it was there was, there was one, there was one person, one TV show, one character that you could point to. You know, I heard that Ellen DeGeneres might like women, but today it's much more prevalent. If you're flipping through, you know, just prime time TV, you might see a queer character. I'm wondering if this rapid change that we're going through in traditional gender roles, gender expression, norms surrounding, uh, sexual partners being challenged, is is motivating a moral panic in the same way that, you know, pop culture did in the '80s and '90s? Can you speak on how change in rapid cultural change can contribute to moral panics?

Yeah, I mean, I should make a caveat here that sociologists make these theories about, you know, it seems that when society is this, this happens, and then immediately, and it's often historians will come in and say, "Yeah, but here's 10 examples where that factor occurred and this didn't happen." So the theory doesn't always work. It's not like a chemistry experiment. Having said that, it does seem to me that things like, especially, um, in some of my own research, things like witch hunting and, uh, panics over demonic possession and things like this, seem to coincide not with the level of scientific progress that society has, but how quickly things are changing. So the golden age of witch hunting and demonic possession was not the Dark Ages. It was the early modern period, where you have the printing press, you have the Protestant Reformation, eventually you have, uh, kind of monarchies, uh, changing. That's when everyone begins killing their neighbor because they think they're a witch. So I do think that that is a factor here. And as someone who is a little bit over 40, a lot of change has happened very, very quickly. You know, my first book, um, I, I remember writing that book and thinking, um, "What's a word for not trans people?" Is there a word for that? Right? And this is 2010. And of course, now everyone's like, "Yeah, even people who are against trans people, no, there's this word 'cisgender'," right? Right. So things really have changed quite a lot, very rapidly. And I do think for some people, that is, uh, legitimately kind of disturbing them and making them more amenable to these kinds of movements. And I think for others, their motivations are far more cynical, and they're saying, "I need some hot button issue because I can't do anything that will actually benefit my constituents. So what's something I can kind of cynically exploit and and claim that I am protecting people from?" I know how about this transgender stuff? That's, that's my sense.

I do wonder if there are some differences between then and now when we're talking about the satanic panic of the '80s and '90s versus the the moral panic we seem, the satanic panic around LGBT issues that we're having now, in that, many of the popular artists who are claimed to be Satanists, people like Lil Nas X or Sam Smith, Kim Petras, or Billie Eilish, they've all directly made music videos or done performances where they have purposely used satanic imagery. They have explained that they're doing this in order to turn a narrative on its head, but they, they are directly, you know, giving back what they are receiving. Is, is this entirely unprecedented?

It, it is striking. You know, I just have a book coming out later this year, this is just a short book on Satanism, and I had to cut a lot out. But in the final chapter, I thought a lot about things like Lil Nas X and the the kind of panic that happened around that. It seems now that every single year of the Grammys, somebody does a big musical number, and there's some kind of a cult imagery or something like that in it, and then everybody loses their minds about it. And I have to think that the producers are now just saying, "Put satanic imagery of some sorts in there, right? You have to have something." Absolutely. Because usually the song on its face has nothing to do with the occult or Satanism or anything like that. And, you know, it's now, there are conspiracy theories that performers like Beyonce are in the Illuminati, right? And this is the secret of their, uh, success. I even had a student say, "Well, you know, you get a Ouija board and you sell your soul to the devil in the Ouija board, and that's how you become a, a singer," and so forth. So I do think that there is some of this is just kind of deliberately playing into, uh, those kinds of conspiracy theories to get the, you know, "no press is bad press." At the same time, I think that some of these musicians really do identify as Satanists, and what it means to make satanic music has changed. Right? So when I was in the '90s, when I was in the '90s, when I was experiencing the '90s, uh, you know, there were bands like Deicide and Morbid Angel and so forth, who were like, "Okay, these guys are satanic." Yeah, right? These guys hate life itself, and they're nihilists, and they want to, you know, spit in God's eye or something like that. And it's very angry music. And if you go to your concerts, you're probably gonna get hurt, right? So unless you're a very large person. And more recently, I went to see a concert by a band called Twin Temple, and they are basically LaVeyan Satanists, right? And they do kind of LaVeyan ritual on the stage, but their songs are all about kind of, you know, "love yourself and inclusion," and they had band t-shirts that said, you know, "Satan loves all their children," right? Kind of, kind of using pronouns. And I think for some people, that is legitimately what satanic music is about now. And they're, they're a doo-wop band, by the way. They do satanic doo-wop music. Wow. And, and I think, you know, Morbid Angel would be appalled by that. But nevertheless, you know, that is kind of the direction that this is heading. So I do think we're seeing something very new in the culture about what, what satanic culture, uh, and Satanism itself actually look like and sound like.

Let's talk about something that really reminds me of the older satanic panic, probably the most notorious thing, the thing that I think of when I think of the satanic panic in the in the '80s and '90s, and that was the whole phenomenon of repressed memories of Satanic ritual abuse. I haven't seen stories of this come to light since I was like a very small child, and even then, it was, it seemed to be on the tail end of the popularity of that whole thing. But recently, a very large content creator, Anthony Padilla, who does a kind of talk show thing on YouTube, had someone on to discuss her trauma and how she uncovered, uh, memories of Satanic ritual abuse. And so I thought to close this, we could check that out and I could get your thoughts on it.

"Hello, Mary." "Hi." "We originally reached out to you because we wanted you to be part of our human trafficking survivors episode, but your story is just way too complex. I feel like it needed its entire own interview for us to get deep into all the elements of your story." "Thank you." "Can you get into the things that you witnessed as a child?" "First, I want to say that my life is really good now. My recovery, though, was from sex trafficking. My parents were my pimps. They prostituted me. They took time, you know, me, and they also, some of the abuse would be considered by some people, Satanic ritual abuse. The things that were done to me are done to other children. And included being placed in a coffin with a corpse. It wasn't just any corpse. It was my sister. My sister died when I was nine, and she was 11. And she was the person in the family I could trust. I couldn't, we couldn't trust our parents. And so I had some memory of of of thinking she was the lucky one because she died. She had brain cancer. She died in a hospital. She was not murdered. But then her body was taken to our church, and I was there. It was in the middle of the night or wee hours of the morning, and they made me watch while they, um, mutilated my sister's body. They put a knife in my hand, and I've wondered like, how did they get me to do that? And I, I really felt guilty that I had, uh, cut my sister's body. But really, my dad just said, 'Do it,' and I did it. I mean, we were, that's just how it was." "Well, they give you plenty of reasons to fear him." "Oh, yeah. So many reasons to fear him. Before I went to kindergarten, we had a cat that had kittens. And so, you know, we love the little kittens. And they made us stand at the side of the house while they, in a ritualistic way, killed our kittens. They threw the kittens at the house, and they had water there to drown kittens. I mean, these were several different kittens, but we had to stand for a long time watching our kittens die. And then they said the same thing will happen to you if you tell about the abuse. And you block these memories out for a very, until I was 37."

First clip we'll go over, we'll return to it in a minute. But we're talking about, uh, a young girl having to mutilate a corpse, having to watch animals be abused, being threatened by her parents. Is this a, is this new? Is this something that was kind of commonly claimed in the satanic panic of the '80s and '90s?

Oh, yeah. This goes back to to Freud, right? To Sigmund Freud doing psychoanalysis. But he was treating women who had hysteria, diagnosed with hysteria, which was basically just, "You're acting in ways that men find annoying," right? Uh, and, you know, he's, he said, "Well, if we just talk to these women, they will get better." And he did find that some of them had experienced sexual abuse growing up. And he said, "Okay, this is it. Hysteria is caused by sexual abuse." Except some of them had not been sexually abused. So then he said, "Well, maybe you've repressed it, right? Is it possible you've repressed this memory of sexual abuse?" And, but then when he started pressuring them, something began saying things like, "Yeah, actually, I'm remembering now. I was sexually abused, and my father was a cannibal, and he worshiped Satan." And Freud said, "Oh, no. I'm, I'm giving you these crazy ideas." And he recanted of this, right? He said, uh, uh, "You know, I'm, this is not really true. These repressed memories are not real. They are fantasies." However, he would still say, "The fantasies are significant, right? As we said, if you believe that you, uh, were locked in a coffin with your sister, this actually is interesting. This says something about your relationship with with your sister." What happened leading up to the satanic panic is some people said, "No, no, Freud was right the first time, right? Freud was right when he said everyone has these repressed, uh, memories." And so this led to this diagnosis with multiple personality disorder, which today is called dissociative identity disorder. And some of the cases that really got famous, things like Sybil, and there's a book called Three Faces of Eve. These are very dubious cases, and people who've looked at them have said there's a lot of evidence that this was a psychiatrist kind of leading people to perform this way. But they became movies. People watched the movies, and they began saying, "Oh, I think I have this too." And the other thing that happened was in the '70s, psychiatry went through this really radical paradigm shift from Freudian psychiatry, which is, "Sit on the couch, tell me about your mother," to, "I have a checklist and I have a prescription pad." All right? You will go through the checklist, I'll give you a prescription, come back next week, we'll do another checklist, we'll tweak the prescription. So there was a whole generation of psychiatrists trained to talk to people about their childhood, and their training was suddenly obsolete. But there was a loophole, which was the DSM had a listing for dissociative disorders, which were still said to be caused by trauma. So if you diagnose your patient with a dissociative disorder, you can still put them back on the couch and say, "Let's talk about your trauma." So dissociative disorders became a much more popular diagnosis at that time period, for that reason. And this dovetailed with the satanic panics in the '80s. All these people were being diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, and some of their personalities were satanic cultists. This had been caused by satanic cultists. A lot of those people went on to sue their psychiatrists later. That part of the story has kind of been forgotten. And Richard Noll is a historian of psychiatry, and he actually spoke at a conference on Satanic ritual abuse and said, "I think a lot of this is not real. That these are not memories, but kind of images created through the therapist kind of leading and suggesting things to the patient." And and also, frankly, things like images from horror movies and so forth that are that are showing up. And he said that at that conference, after he gave that talk, four medical professionals approached him at various times in elevators and things and just said, "I know you're a Satanist, and I know that you're here to spread misinformation." So watching this does disturb me because I feel like, especially with the satanic panic, we're very bad at learning from our mistakes. And it seems like we have forgotten history, and now we are doomed to repeat it.

All right, last clip here. Let's take a look at her description of how she uncovered these memories and see if it, uh, has any parallels with the things that you just discussed.

"Do you remember the moment when you first realized that you had these memories? That this part of your life that kind of seemed like a void in terms of your memories?" "They actually had all these colorful images attached to them. I was not the first one in my on my extended family to remember. So I had an aunt and three cousins with similar memories. And she talked to my parents. My parents had come to visit me, and I lived in the same city as my aunt. So I said, 'Well, how did your visit go?' And they said, 'Oh, well, we think she's crazy. We're never going to see her again.' They said, 'She thinks she was sexually abused by her grandmother, by our, you know, my father said, by our grandmother.' So when my parents left, eye contact."

My aunt and said, "Would you be willing to meet with me?" So we met. She told me I had witnessed abuse, and when she said that, I knew it was true. There was a part of me that just went, "Yeah, that's that happened."

And so then I went to, uh, I was in counseling with my ex-husband. We were in marriage counseling at the time. And so I stayed with that same counselor, and she said, "Well, just journal. Just write down anything you remember from your childhood, no matter how benign, just anything." And so I started doing that. I was just in my living room alone, sitting on the couch, and I was looking at the wall across from me, and I saw a man's hand holding a dog roughly. And that was my first image.

So I went to my counselor and I asked for hypnosis. She just had me go up the man's hand, and I could see it with my dad. What was it like that moment realizing that there was a part of your childhood that you had suppressed? What was it like knowing that there was this whole new world to uncover, this horrifying world to uncover? You know, one of the things that struck me the most is just, you know, I loved my dad. I didn't want it to be true because of me, but I didn't want it to be true because of him. And I remember thinking, you know, I would give every physical possession I have to be able to continue to have a relationship with my father, but I had young children, and that was just, I had to protect him.

So I called him and told him about the, I having seen the man's hand. That's the only memory I had. And he said, "Is this going to lead you to think I sexually abused you?" I'm like, "What? No, no, I don't think so." So he's the one who brought that up. He volunteered that information. He said, "I guess this means I'll never see you again." I'm like, "I didn't see that either." After that first memory, that was, you know, the sole memory. But then the next time I went to hypnosis, the memory of my sister's mutilation, of my sister's body, came. And for some reason, and this shows how thrifty of a person I am, but the session wasn't over yet, and I'm like, "Well, we can keep going." And so another memory came, which was really upsetting. I started getting these memories just relentless. I mean, as I was falling asleep at night, I'd remember more. As I was waking up in the morning, just during the day, I'd have memories.

When you first recovered these memories, many people did not believe you. And maybe they still don't believe you. They say that it's, it's too far-fetched and ridiculous. That sounds like something you only see in movies or read about in books. It hasn't actually happened to people. And then they say that there's no way that you can repress a memory like that and then suddenly recover it. So you made a documentary, and one of your goals with that documentary was to sit down and have an honest conversation with the people who doubted you. There's even a foundation. What is it? The False Memory Foundation? Yes, False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Yeah. And their their whole idea is to paint this picture that people who recover memories of being abused in their later life are making it up. Yeah.

I got to talk to the founder of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation on camera. There was a part of me, an unhealed part, that thought it was kind of like going back to seeing my mom, who's at that point deceased. And I just kind of thought, maybe I could talk her into believing my memories are true, and then she would believe her own daughter. The people in this organization, many of the people in this organization are accused parents. And I think she thought she could get me to not believe my memory. And, you know, of course, neither happened.

Are we saying something familiar there? Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, the use of hypnosis, you know, to to sort of free associate and see images, and then the therapist is asking somewhat leading questions, right? That wasn't nearly as bad as some transcripts I've seen from the 80s, or saying, you know, "Were there black candles? Were there skulls?" and so forth, directly suggesting things rather than it being led by the by the client, right? But but there's still an assumption built in the question that you can see the face of the person whose hand this is, and that this is actually a a memory, and so forth, right? And the other thing that really disturbs me about this is some things in that interview make me think there may have been actual abuse here, right? And if there was, it could be that much harder to get to the bottom of it and prosecute it and see justice, because now we have all this smoke of being locked in a coffin with your mutilated sister and things like this.

Kenneth Lanning was an FBI agent who specialized in breaking up child pornography rings, which are a real thing. And he wrote a report on the Satanic ritual abuse claims. And when these claims first came in, he said, "Oh my gosh, how could I have missed a cult of this magnitude doing things so horrible?" And another one came in, another one came in. Eventually realized people are making this up. But one of the things he said was, "This focus on 'we have to stop Satanic crime' is a huge distraction from preventing actual pedophilia and child pornography. And let's just focus on enforcing the law instead of bringing this idea of Satanism into it. If you're making child pornography, it really doesn't matter whether you're a Christian or a Satanist. It matters that you're breaking the law."

If you were to speak to those who make content out of this kind of thing, turn this into a talk show, would you would you have any advice for sources that they could look at or narratives that they should learn about, things that they should consider, uh, maybe before or or after they've made content like this? Well, it's very difficult, right? Because this is this is not just a claim about how memory works, but this is also a conspiracy theory, right? And one of the features of a conspiracy theory is all contradictory evidence can be accounted for if it's coming from the conspiracy. So when they discuss the False Memory Foundation, the first thing she says is, "Well, a lot of those people are accused parents." In other words, these people are Satanic child abusers who want to sort of gaslight us into being led off the hook. So it's almost impossible to have a frank, evidence-based conversation about things like the nature of of memory.

I think that, uh, hypnosis is a highly controversial, uh, topic. I mean, I actually, I used to teach psychology at the high school level, for what that's worth. And we had a chapter on consciousness that discussed hypnosis, and kind of the leading theory of explanation of hypnosis, that it's a social phenomenon. It is basically the hypnotist and the patient are performing roles, but there is nothing actually kind of neurologically or medically, uh, happening here. It's it's a sort of profound performance of just giving over your authority, or giving the hypnotist authority over you. It's actually structurally very, very similar to an exorcism. In an exorcism, the exorcist can say, "You have such and such demon, don't you?" "Yes, I do." The hypnotist can say, "Your father was a Satanist, wasn't he?" And you say, "Yes, yes, yes, he was." So the reliance on hypnotism there was was very disturbing.

And, you know, I'm not a cognitive scientist, but we have a lot of evidence that memory is extremely malleable. But also that with trauma, the more commonly the problem is not that you black it out, but the opposite, you can't stop thinking about it. When Freud said people have, are repressing these memories, he meant that quite literally. The memory isn't erased. It's more, I'm just choosing not to think about it, or I'm choosing to convince myself that what happened was, you know, not sexual abuse, that it was a misunderstanding or something like that. It's a conscious form of coping that people engage in. It's not a sort of a lacuna in your your memory. And I'll say one last thing, which is that in the DSM, when it discusses the effects of trauma, it can say, "can lead to memory problems." What that meant when they wrote it was things like, "I forgot I had a doctor's appointment because I can't stop thinking about this traumatic event." It wasn't trauma causes you to have long gaps in your memory that you can only remember decades later. But people can point to that passage in the DSM and you'll say, "See, it's right here. Right? This is a known phenomenon." And actually, all of this is very highly controversial within within psychology.

All right, that's all we have time for today. But thank you so much for talking to me about this massive range of, uh, topics and propaganda and, uh, just questionable things in general that are coming out of our current moral panic. Thanks for for joining me, and I hope that people pick up both "Speak of the Devil" and "Dangerous Games," two of my favorites of of yours. Well, thanks so much. This is really fun. Thanks for watching. I've been Drew of Genetically Modified Skeptic. A special thanks to my patrons for their constant love and support. If you want to hear more from me, then subscribe. As always, if you are an apostate in need, there are resources linked in the description to help you find community and mental health support. Remember to be kind to others in the comments, and until next time, stay skeptical.