There’s a “You’re Wrong About” episode about the Satanic Panic.
My memory is fuzzy, but I seem to recall that it had something to do with the cultural shift from “child sexual abuse doesn’t happen at all, kids just make up stories” to “holy shit you guys, child sexual abuse is real” and that it was so shocking to people that they had to ascribe it to something otherworldly.
Mix that eagerness to attribute it to Satanic rituals together with the popularity of Freud and the idea of repressed memories, and zero awareness that “memory retrieval” techniques can cause the subject (especially young children) to invent memories, and suddenly you’ve got a deluge of stories about legit new-found instances of child sexual abuse, made-up instances of child sexual abuse, and off-the-rails blood sacrifices for Dungeons and Dragons campaigns all mixed together and presented as one phenomenon.
Reminder that there are still people in prison - and mercifully being exonerated - convicted on these wild conspiracies taken by rampant homophobia and religious fervor.
My mom threw all of my cassettes away after getting a tape from her church telling of the satanic messages subliminally added to the devil’s soundtrack.
Ironically, she listened to the very same music decades later in her golden years. I’m assuming Jesus had had sufficient time to strip the messages out of the music.
Oh man, I am sorry about that! My mother did something similar: she threw all of her old vinyls away. I loved them as a kid! Jethro Tull, a couple of Dio records, Guns n Roses and lots of samplers with hair rock. Ironically I became a metalhead years later and still listen to black metal from time to time. Ha!
