First Question Episode Show Notes: QAnon and the Satanic Panic

Listen here to this episode of First Question!

Welcome to Dominique Does Life Podcast Network's Show Notes

Dominique Does Life podcast,
First Question podcast,
and all other subsequent podcasts on our network
will be publishing episode notes and resarch sources here,
from now on,
in an effort to share with and grow our audiences and to promote
transparency.

QAnon and the Satanic Panic (⬅️Click to listen to the full episode

“The idea of the cabal persisted above all: the Jews of England taking part in these ritual mutilations of children’s bodies, the secret meeting of rabbis, a shadowy group of elders. The blood was distributed among Jews; it was eaten in bread; it was drunk in a demonic inversion of the sacrament. The children—found in wells, in fields—were victims and, post mortem, were given the crown of sainthood, as the Jews were given the stain of devilry.”

--Source: The New Republic

Sounds a lot like something that might have been posted on 4Chan a couple of years ago, right? Well, it's not. This text is an example of blood libel mythos from over a thousand years ago, and it's religious propaganda meant to keep curious people from practicing the Jewish faith or “consorting” with Jews. This clear and clearly false propaganda has become known to historians as “Blood Libel,” and it didn't stop then and it won't stop now. 
 Cut to today:

 Whispers of secret nighttime rituals, clandestine meetings where “elites” (read: anyone whom the reactive group du jour doesn't agree with) drink the blood of children, extracting some sort of magical essence from them as they cower in fear, waiting to be devoured. 

 But back to the 1980s. 

In a small town in Canada, an RCMP officer’s life is upended when

accusations arise that seem to pit him and other “elites” against the
innocent children in their community. Charges arise. Parents begin coaching
their children as court dates are scheduled. Meanwhile the officer in
question worries that he will lose his kids and his family, and eventually
collapses in panic in the courtroom while the children testifying recount
wild tales of him and other adults flying, dressing up in horrific costumes
and abusing them. Nobody lends a hand to help. Nobody so much as leaves
their chair. Heads turn back to the courtroom proceedings. The suffering man
is left to lie on the floor without aid. 

Now let's take another trip through time, back to February of 1692, when my ancestor, 81 year old George Jacobs, a wealthy, crotchety older man, full of personality and owner of much land and one of the finest homes in his town of Salem, Massachusetts lived with his wife Mary, on their sizeable farm, Northfields. Mary and George took in their 17 year old granddaughter and lived comfortably...until…

 During what became a village-wide panic, later documented in the only partly fictional 1953 Arthur Miller play, where children accused adults of wild and imaginative abuses and the accused adults in turn pointed the finger at others in order to divert blame, the Jacobs’ fell prey to the spreading wildfire of panic, when their 25 year old maid, Sarah Churchill accused George Jacobs, his grandson and granddaughter of witchcraft, in order to avoid harsh punishments herself. 

 To give you an idea of how ridiculous the whole thing was and how wild the group paranoia had become, I’ll share with you this excerpt from the Salem Witch Museum: “Thomas Putnam’s servant Mercy Lewis accused Jacobs Sr.’s specter of beating her with his sticks and Mary Warren, who worked for the Proctors, said she’d witnessed Jacobs Sr.’s specter beating Churchill at Ingersoll’s ordinary. Neighbor Mary Walcott also claimed she’d been beaten by Jacobs’s specter.”

Because yeah. Of course an old man literally climbed out of his body to beat young women with his walking stick. Makes perfect sense. 

But like it or not, our laws and our culture here in the United States evolved from puritanical, religious “morals” of the day. We struggle with this as a country, and if we’re not vigilant and if we don't learn from history, it might just prove to be our undoing. 

As for George Jacobs, well, he was killed horribly and painfully. This 81 year old man who kept to himself, took care of his family, and managed his land was pressed to death. 

Now let’s flash forward again to the 1980’s, this time right here in the United States.

• McMartin Preschool: Manhattan Beach, California:

• From Investigation Discovery: MANHATTAN BEACH, CA — In 1983, the mother of a two-year-old student at the McMartin Preschool alleged that a teacher there had sodomized her son. Eventually, hundreds of children reportedly described being abused, often in fantastical situations involving human sacrifice, child pornography, and Satanic rituals. As news of the McMartin case spread, a multitude of similarly bizarre ritual abuse claims reportedly arose against other teachers, childcare workers, and parents nationwide. Since then, many analysts have attributed a number of those incidents to a cultural phenomenon that’s come to be called the “1980s Satanic Panic.” More than three years of pretrial investigations into the McMartin Preschool allegations were followed by multiple trials between 1987 and 1990, reportedly at a cost of $15 million — the most expensive such process in American history at that point. Ultimately, no criminal convictions were obtained and, in 1990, the state dropped all charges against the defendants.

• But as the satanic panic took off in full force across the United States, there were many other charges against many other people, which weren't dropped. 

The beginnings of the Satanic Panic in the 1980’s: 

• From NPR: “One of the earliest bellwethers of the Satanic Panic came in 1980 with the publication of Michelle Remembers, a memoir co-written by Canadian psychologist Lawrence Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith. The book graphically details abuse that Smith claimed to have suffered as a child at the hands of a satanic cult — abuse that she had allegedly forgotten but eventually recovered through her work with Pazder. The book was a bestseller, and Pazder became the leading academic voice warning about the dangers of "ritual abuse." He also began to consult with prosecutors in criminal trials, including the case that would spread fears of satanic abuse even farther around the country: the McMartin Pre-School trial.”

• People all over the world started reporting cases of supposed recovered memories of ritual satanic abuse. This was shortly thereafter found to be false. 

• Re the McMartin Case, courtesy of NPR: “I thought it was the case of our times," says Danny Davis, attorney for defendant Ray Buckey. Buckey, a teacher at Virginia McMartin's preschool in Manhattan Beach, Calif., was accused of abusing one of his students in 1983. By the following spring, the accusations had grown to include hundreds of children, and rumors swirled that the students had been abused in satanic rituals at cemeteries and in tunnels underneath the school. "Whatever it was that happened was social contagion, and it's that simple," says Davis. Davis decided to study historical examples of witch hunts and allegations of satanic behavior in order to prepare his defense. "I saw clearly there's a process on a timeline that starts with some sort of scandal or change in the society that develops a very forceful, agreed-upon accusation against a target or scapegoat. And the scapegoat is then quickly destroyed," he says.”

• At the time, the McMartin preschool case was the longest in history and one of the most expensive. 

• But it didn't end there. In May of 1993, three boys went missing in West Memphis, Arkansas. When their bodies were found, three young men who favored a goth lifestyle and style of dress were immediately charged with their murders and left in jail until 2010, when they were released only after having entered Alford pleas and being sentenced to time served. 

November 2017: conspiracies posted by 4Chan anons give birth to QAnon

• “Q” ‘moves’ to 8Chan, and the rest is history

• QAnon is now a broad disinformation conspiracy movement, which influences millions of people and US elections

• QAnon more or less focuses on Hillary Clinton, citing dubious claims about emails exchanged on the wrong server, interpreting the content of those emails to be more nefarious than they were, and giving rise to conspiracies like pizzagate--a debunked urban myth revolving around popular local pizza joint Comet Ping Pong having a secret child torturing dungeon in their nonexistent basement. Q adherent Edgar Maddison Welch found this out the hard way when we went to “storm” comet ping pong with guns a blazing, and found out that it indeed did not have a basement, and that the only closed door on the premises was a disused storage closet. 

• But QAnon didn't stop there, nor did it's adherents stop believing in the mis and disinformation being spread through Q. Since then, offshoots of QAnon have cropped up left right and center, including alleged death cult, Negative48, which centers its beliefs around the idea that, among other things, John F. Kennedy, Sr. and John F. Kennedy, Jr. are both alive and will soon show up at Dealey Plaza, this site of JFK’s assassination, to usher in a new era, with Donald J Trump as forever President of the United States Of America. 

• You can see the similarities here between the various ideological movements which make up the broader qanon conspiracy theory, and the fear based ideas which got innocent folks prosecuted locked up, and killed in the 80’s and early 90’s. In fact, I believe that QAnon is just another manifestation of the same moral panic that caused Christians to spread the myth of blood libel a thousand years ago, and that which caused the Salem Witch Trials in the 1600’s (and the witch trials across England and Europe), and the satanic panic in the 80’s. 

Sources:

• npr: America’s Satanic Panic Returns: click here to read

• New Republic September 28, 2020: click here to read

• Satanic Panic: a CBC podcast: click here to read

• Salem Witch Trials: click here to read

• ID website piece on McMartin:click here to read

• Vox: The Satanic Panic and Why It Never Really Ended: click here to read

• NPR: click here to read