Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mehrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And of course, is business broken? Listen wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Hey, Ben. Hey, Emery. We got something a little different today. I'm feeling a little different. Do you feel bedeviled? I feel possessed. Positively possessed. It's getting warm in here. It's getting hot. Thank goodness, because it's freaking freezing where we are. I know. I know. It is as if hell hath frozen over. Ooh, that's the spirit. And we have an episode today for you that features a podcast comrade who you may be familiar with. My name is Sarah Marshall, and I host a podcast called You're Wrong About. And I have been a longtime person obsessed with the satanic panic is the best way to put it. It's not a professional title. It's just something I've thought about way too much for the past 15 years. The satanic panic of the 1980s and 90s was basically a widespread panic-fueled conspiracy theory that the devil and devilish influences were leading people to commit acts of violence, from allegations of sexual abuse taking place at daycares to ritualistic human sacrifice. And Sarah has now turned her obsession into a podcast. And she joined us to talk about the forces that fueled the satanic panic and how it might have played out differently in the age of the Internet and social media. Sarah's series is called The Devil You Know. And it's a show that tries to tell the story of the rise of the satanic panic, both as a really massive phenomenon and also getting into the questions of what it was like for people who experienced it at a very unique level, both kind of watching that story being created, being in its path, being victimized by it, and also just kind of as bystanders trying to make sense of the whole thing. What's your origin story with the satanic panic? I think my Oregon story partly is just being a millennial, which is a very funny generation to belong to, as I guess they all are. You know, I was born in 1988. And so there were kind of like, not explicit mentions of the satanic panic when I was kind of in, you know, little kid elementary school, but sort of like shadows of it and of the policy that it left behind, you know, and this idea of like, and also, you know, the kind of general stranger danger of the 80s, where we were told when we were in the 80s. we were pretty young about what to do if someone tried to like grab you and stuff you in a car and like to like wear layers because then you could like get rid of a layer and then you know run away while your potential kidnapper was holding your jean jacket or something to which i now wonder what were you what were they telling kids in warmer climates you know and not that you don't want to give kids useful information but there's a really fine line to be walked in terms of um conveying the idea that you kind of expect kids to be kidnapped, which I think is what a lot of us didn't grow up with. And then, you know, it was a rarer problem than maybe we were trained to think. Or that there was, you know, a theme that I feel like a lot of the work I do comes back to is that kids have more to fear often from the adults who are already in their lives than from strangers, but we train them to kind of not really imagine that that's possible. For people who are maybe less familiar with the specifics of the satanic panic, what was happening in the country then culturally and politically that you think really gave rise to this panic? Well, I mean, there's a few things I can name, and these are ones that you could probably imagine based on the timing, because this gets started in the early 80s, right? So we have, you know, the past few years of women's lib and gay liberation as movements and the inevitable conservative backlash to that and something I think we're seeing today where marginalized groups make fairly minor gains in terms of civil rights and visibility. And then the backlash against that is severe enough to imply that something way more has happened. and we also have Ronald Reagan coming into the White House and kind of being the first president to bring the Christian right into the White House as well along with him because previously Christianity had been more of a moderating influence on politics than sort of a wing of king making in American politics and that changed in the 80s and also kind of on a smaller scale but also on a national level, Reagan, you know, came in promising to slash the federal budget. And one of the things he slashed was federal funding for daycare. And so there was kind of just in terms of like this perfect storm brewing, a lot of people scrambling to find adequate daycare for their kids because maybe a place that they had relied on and had really liked had just closed down. And this general anxiety about a giving your kids to strangers to take care of um also the guilt that is being thrust upon you um if you're kind of a boomer woman returning to work after having kids at that point of being the focal point of anxiety too because isn't it terrible for women to to be in the workplace when they have young children at home and for them to be putting them in daycare This is really being guilt for it being given to American women and mothers especially as usual is massive at this point So those are kind of the things that come to mind for me Throughout the series, you ask several people what their definition of a moral panic is. What's the definition that you've kind of landed on as you've worked on this? I mean, I think in this case, it's something that kind of metabolizes the real and justifiable fear that a lot of people have. You know, if you look at the kind of explosion of moral panics in 2020, it's like, of course we were having moral panics in 2020. We were all freaking out because we were living inside like, I don't know, the largest public health emergency and several living memories. You know, that was incredible for everyone to keep trying to muscle through the way people did. And so, you know, I think that in times of anxiety over a real threat, and in this case, you know, part of what was going on and the ingredients that went into this were that we had started to talk about child sexual abuse in a real way, kind of, and largely because of the work done by women's liberation movements. And then there arose the question of, well, who's committing this child abuse and why? And it sort of allowed people to avoid asking any difficult questions about the kind of power that men had in the United States to terrorize their own families without consequences. and the lack of social mechanisms or social safety nets that meant that you kind of often, really, if you had kids with someone who was trying to kill you, it was often seemed and probably was more dangerous for you to try and leave. And that being a structural problem and that being something that we could work on, but it would be expensive and unpopular. And it would suggest that we were handing it to the feminists, which, of course, you know, a lot of people didn't want to do. And so it feels like Satan really emerged at a great moment, you know, where it was like, oh, my God, what if Satan is doing this? What if what if it's all Satan? This is incredible. You know, it would be great in a way to be able to bring it back again and again to something that allows you to skip all of the hard work that the real data is pointing towards, you know? How do you think the satanic panic would have been different if we had had internet and social media i don't know because i feel like we are kind of going through a satanic panic redux or something and that it's like easier for people who disagree with what's going on to come together and i mean i think this is structurally different what we're experiencing now and that it is you know has from the beginning been like very divided and divisive politically, right? Whereas in the 80s, the satanic panic was pretty much, at least at the beginning, a mainstream phenomenon that actually seemed to kind of, you know, put feminists and conservatives sort of allied them to an extent, the same way a little bit as the wars on porn. It's a whole other topic. But I feel like the internet causes, you know, like faster rumor cycles, faster periods of burnout. I wonder if it would accelerate the whole phenomenon and make it in a way maybe take less time and be less culturally sticky than it was. But that's very hopeful of me. Are there examples of modern day moral panics that the Internet created rather than just like spread? I would love it if I could think of a great example right now, which I can. But that feels inevitable to me because it feels like the internet, you know, partly is like a great generator of like misheard and half-truths, you know, and this kind of this social game of telephone that happens when people try and spread information feels like it's accelerated when people talk about stuff online. And so it feels like, you know, the same way information comes together and coalesces into something weirder than the sum of its parts when people are passing it around, you know, through folklore. Or, you know, if you look at the 80s satanic panic, a lot of that happened because of national media and because we had, you know, especially in the early years of these daycare cases of alleged sexual abuse that once they hit the national news were just the kind of thing that spread like wildfire across the country is something that people were talking about and were worried about. and were therefore kind of, you know, spreading almost the story that that anxiety told, which caused people to look for it and then potentially believe they had found it where it wasn't. Yeah, and media felt a lot more centralized in that, like, everyone was watching Oprah, who was sort of validating the satanic panic in a way, whereas the internet is a lot more dispersed and chaotic. I mean, if you were on a daytime TV show host in the 80s, then at a certain point talking about, you know, alleged satanic ritual abuse just kind of became what you did because everybody else was doing it, I think was the logic. but yeah i mean i think that the internet sort of behaves the way i realize that you have bots to correct for but i mean that the way people behave kind of happens online and gets accelerated so it seems inevitable that we are creating kind of new strains of moral panic through that but i think that fundamentally the rules remain the same well and also like the the panic is um it's framed as a lot of the time this measure to protect kids and I don't know if this resonates with you at all but it it these days it feels like social media itself might be satan or at least like Australia just banned social media for kids under 16 yeah that seems wise Well I wonder I want your thoughts on that about are like are children the problem or the solution or both Right. I think, no, I think that adults are the problem generally because we're the ones who have made the world that kids have to live in. Right. And we're like, kids, you have to get off social media. and then we are on it for 13 hours a day. You know, I think one of the few things that liberals and conservatives actually can unite about today is fear of their own children or fear of kids and this idea that, you know, both terrible things are going to happen to kids and that kids are going to become awful and at least they're, you know, annoying to us. And so it feels like, you know, the fear of what people growing up today will become feels like, again, And like, it's really a reflection of our fear of the world that they have to live in. And that was a world that they didn't create. We made that for them. I agree with that. And I also think it's an interesting, as you're describing it, it also strikes me that a lot of these two different kinds of fears, like fear of what children will become and fear of what will happen to children, are also really about ourselves and our own inability to protect children. Mm-hmm. It's like redirecting a feeling of powerlessness into a feeling of condemnation or something. And it makes sense that people will be attracted to that kind of thing. And I think, again, this idea of like, well, trans kids are satanic. It's like, well, okay, they're not. And it makes sense that you are afraid of your child questioning your worldview and maybe becoming estranged from you ultimately because of that, if that's what you're going to insist on. And it's scary to think of your kids growing emotionally beyond the life that you've had. It doesn't mean they shouldn't do it, and it doesn't mean it isn't healthy, but it is like a difficult emotion to process. And an easy emotion to process is being the victim of something evil and Satan having taken your child away from you. And so I feel like one of the kind of bargains that's being struck here that conservative politics in the United States today offers is you can trade in your difficult emotions for an easy emotion, and all you have to do is think that your child is in the pocket of Satan. More panic and some hope from Sarah Marshall in a minute. At Radiolab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers and hopefully make you see the world anew. Radiolab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. Business leaders listen. Over half tune into podcasts daily. Reach them with CitySpace Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. CitySpace Productions crafts custom podcasts for businesses that showcase expertise, deepen connections, and drive engagement. Turn your vision into a podcast. Visit wbur.org slash creative studio. All right, we've been talking to writer and podcast host Sarah Marshall about her new series, The Devil You Know, about the satanic panic of the 80s and 90s. The details of which can be hard to believe today, except that some of them were put in writing and are now circulating on the Internet decades later. including an exhaustive PDF from the Justice Department titled Occult Criminal Investigation. Can you explain what this is? Yeah, what a joy that is. This is something that has been sent to me many times by many people, and I think maybe there's even kind of different sources for it, for maybe the same document, I'm not sure. But the one that I shared with you was circulated by the city of Glendale. And it's just a wonderful 47-page-long guide for anyone in the police arts who wants to learn how to spot Satanists. And it has a guide to signs and symbols, including the sexual ritual symbol, the blood ritual symbol, the inverted cross of satanic justice, and so on. things you should look for in a crime scene to determine whether it is satanic, which is very broad. And just it feels to me generally like it, if you look at it from a distance, and this is why it kind of it's been circulating online for, I don't know, probably at least 10 years now. And I would actually love to know how it got online to begin with. But it kind of is a guide to creating false positives where it's like we will give you a list of objects so generic that you can probably find any of them at a crime scene and therefore make it a satanic one yeah the existence of this thing is so um uh it's as it's as validating as it is frightening because it's it's proof that they that this at one point satan at one point was taken so seriously as to put this in writing and make it part of the teaching like there's no denying you know there's no going back once you have a pdf like this in the world it's so crazy to read through this pdf it's like bells satanic owls satanic nests satanic satanic you know like it like like there nothing There so many Eyes satanic There eyes in my face right now And they are satanic, Sarah. Podcasts, satanic. Well, that is pretty satanic. Right, but it's like a way of, you know, having, you know, basically expert evidence to point toward or sort of something to cite when, you know, you decide that you need to, you know, this gives you the ability to brand basically any home that you encounter as a satanic worship site. And it's silly, but the ways that, the ways people in power, and in this case the police, can take advantage of a social fear to railroad people who it's advantageous to them to, you know, to wrongfully convict is the case maybe. and there were certainly many miscarriages of justice within that. You know, it's a classic American story of a silly thing making a horrible thing possible. What is the good in studying and knowing the history of something if we're going to keep doing it? I've kind of struggled with this one over the years and with this feeling of frustration of like, what is the point in knowing all this stuff if it's just happening again? And like, you know, starting up again as it has in the past 10 years, I would say, and with different narratives, but certainly with this idea that we can use Satan as an excuse to mistreat and further marginalize already marginalized people who are trying to get a little bit of access to social services and civil rights, and demonizing the attempt to be seen as a whole person by society and by the U.S. government. And I think my answer at this point is that when you study history, it allows you to maybe make better choices and to understand in a more systematic way the things that are happening around you. Because I think moral panics are somewhat inevitable, and that doesn't mean that we can't make them less damaging when they come. But I think the feeling of powerlessness that many of us have felt at sort of seeing that unfold, that we don't have to dwell on that. And if we recognize it as something that recurs and that has things about it that we can really kind of predict and maybe even undermine, then maybe we can make it feel more like living through a slasher movie in the scream kind of a way where you at least know what the rules are and you're not going to go around saying, I'll be right back. can the internet be a better part of the solution or our use of the internet and social media be part of the solution in maybe not um repeating some of the history we've repeated or perpetuating some of the moral panics that have and are currently happening? Yeah, I think so. I still love the internet. You know, I mean, it's really like I realize it's doing terrible things every day, but it's that makes it easy to forget that a lot of the good things in my life and honestly, a lot of the great relationships in my life have come to me because I was, you know, from an early age a pretty online person and also found community online in a way that a lot of misfits do and have and I think that it still has the capacity to help us and also you know I mean to look back at people questioning the satanic panic you know back in the 80s there always were people who were questioning things but it was just hard for those people to find each other or to band together to kind of find, in many cases, major outlets for that kind of questioning because it was not politically expedient and just was kind of a tricky proposition. And so I think that today as we have the internet as an accelerator of conspiracy theories, it also allows people who question and debunk to find each other. And I mean, I don't know, if you're working in podcasts, then like, what would I do without the internet? I would, I would, I would simply have to make a little radio tower in my backyard, I guess. And I feel like the capacity for people to, the capacity for the people who need each other and who can help each other to find each other with the technology that we have. I mean, we're not going to unring this bell, so we might as well use it. I know bells are satanic. We're working with what we have. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for telling us more about the series and taking time to think about it in an internet-y way with us. Thank you so much. This was really a joy, and thank you for doing all you do. And I guess I know we have a lot of bad things to say about it, but I still cherish our friend, the Internet. We do, too. Sarah Marshall's series is called The Devil You Know. All the episodes are out now and you can find them in all the podcast places. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and us, Anne-Marie Sievertson. and Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Meg Kramer, mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vykus. All right, folks. Thanks for listening to us and to Sarah Marshall. She the best. See you next week.
