Part One: The Satanic Panic: America's First QAnon

a podcast, another one, Yeah, only doing Q Clearance. Sophie's been hoping. We've moved me with a podcast about Q and On uh, and about you know, the the searching for the person or persons behind it, right, Yeah, trying to trying to kind of lay out for people that are not one familiar as well. Like I kind of realized that a lot of the Q and On media is refocused on either like for Q and On people,

or it's kind of for the community. They're research and I kind of want to bring everybody together to be like, let's make everyone understand it. You know what I'm saying. And so far, so good, you know, Jake, I I admire what you're doing. I think it's important and I

wanted to help you out. And the way I wanted to help you out was by lending a bit of historical context because what we have with Q and On, I think it's it's fair to say, in brief, is like a massive, almost now international delusion about networks of Satanic child murderers and traffickers. Right, M have you figured it out yet, Jake? Q and On is not is not the first time this happened. And today, Jake, we're going to talk about the Satanic panic. Okay. I couldn't

have guessed that one man. Um No, it's interesting, it's interesting, it's perfect for me. Thank you so much. I just can't believe you haven't listened to episode two of Q Clearance where we talk about syntantic this, this is it's it was enormous. I don't I didn't know most of this stuff when I started reading about it. It's a fucking nightmare. And uh, you're gonna hate this episode. I

hated writing it. Um. It involved a lot of reading lurid, lengthy stories of child molestation that never happened, but that children were convinced had happened. To them, which is somehow yeah, more disturbing almost than actual child molestation, like the idea that like a kid, people convincing them it happened to them, right, yeah, Like why would you make someone feel the worst thing ever if they didn't actually feel it. You know, it's

completely fucked. I can't believe this is what you picked for, Jake. Oh yeah, Yeah, we're gonna talk about some fun ship. We're gonna go dungeons and dragons. We're gonna talk about the West Memphis three. We're gonna talk about the mcmarh in preschool scandal. It's gonna be fucking terrible. Um. But first we're going to go back in time a little bit, Jake, because the ideological soil that Q and on and the Satanic Panic grew in didn't start with either of those things.

So let's talk about A hundred and seventy seven A D or c E or whatever we're supposed to say Europe. Let's let's let's talk about that. This is about you know, A hundred seventy is about a century or so before Emperor Constantine was like, you know, brought Christianity to the Roman Empire and stuff. So things are still pretty pagan in Roman society, but Christianity exists and the Pagans do not like it. They've got these like weird people, um, who are kind of on the fringes of society, and

they start making up ship about them. So in the city of Lyon in modern day France, rumors started spreading that members of the Christian community there were secretly raping and cannibalizing their own children. Angry and probably drunken, mobs of pagan Romans chased the Christian community out of their homes, beat them, stone them, and tortured their households slaves until the slaves admitted that their masters had been eating and

molesting babies. With confessions in hand, the mob than massacred the entire Christian community of Leon. So like when you're it was cool, basically rads. So that massacre was an example of what anthropologists call demonology. So not demonology, demon o I O G y um. And Yeah, the authors of Satan's Silence, which is have you read that book,

It's fucking Satan Silence. Yeah, it's really good, the defining work of the Satanic Panic era, and the authors of that book define demonology as the narrative specific to every culture that identifies the ultimate evil threatening the group. During periods of social turmoil and moral crisis, societal preoccupation with its demonology intensifies. So in Pagan Rome, the ultimate evil

was like the the ultimate outsiders. The Christians at this point, like the people saying, now there's only one got right, So they get demonized and people start telling stories of about the molesting and murdering children. Now, once Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe, its adherents found their own evil to oppress in the way that they've once been oppressed.

In the twelfth century, a myth began to spread across the English countryside, initially about Jewish rabbis murdering Christian babies.

That's quickly spread all over Europe, and you start having this like it's still around yeah, yeah, they of course, yeah, they're always yeah, this kind it's kind of like it was an early meme and it's spread that way around Europe, and like pamphlets and even like you can still find churches in Europe that, like in stained glass reliefs will have like images of what's called the blood libel rabbi's

murdering Christian babies to make mods that. Yeah, um, and it's the same kind of thing, right, myths that this this group of social outsiders is gathering up and murdering and probably molesting children. Um. And Christians like killed so many Jews during this period as a result of the spread of this myth that later during the Reformation, there weren't like any Jewish people left in a lot of communities, so they had to find a new ultimate evil inside

their community to go after. And this is where we get the witch hunts, right like that everybody knows vaguely the story, and these two they took different forms over the centuries, but the gist of the threat was always the same. Satan is real, and he's trying to destroy our community via some member on the fringe of our community who's working with the devil, right Like, that's the the idea, and it happens a bunch of times. It happens in Europe, it happens obviously in the United States.

You get the Salem witch trials, and you have different groups of people targeted. Right. Sometimes it's midwife. Sometimes it's just like members of the community like in Salem, who start accusing each other of things. Um, and kind of one of the things that always marks witch hunts is that like there may be initially a specific group that's targeted, but once a real good witch hunt gets going, pretty much everyone winds up accusing everybody, right, Like that's what

we do. Yeah. Yeah. I remember reading the Weird Story where like a guy like pronounced something like differently to the rest of the town and they were just like, yeah, he's a witch exactly. You know, people go fucking it is one of those things. You know, I'm a I'm a pretty staunch fan of the concept of democracy, um, but man, reading too much about witch hunts makes you like, we're, well, yeah,

they voted, yeah yeah, drowning. Um. Yeah. So once the United States became a thing, it showed a marked talent for witch hunts. And I have to say, like, y'all over in Europe and ship can do some pretty good witch hunts, but the USA, like, who, we are good at mass murdering each other over rumors of the devil? Um, yeah, yeah, we're fucking great at it. And of course, like we you know, Jewish people got blamed for a variety of things,

but also Catholics um. During the eighteen thirties and forties, Protestants in America were so frightened of Catholics that rumors started to spread about nuns consorting with the devil and Moleste murder ring a bunch of little kids. And the quote again from Satan's Silence here, because this is some ship that sounds exactly like the ship happening now. Several books were written by women claiming to be x Nuns who had escaped from convents where they witnessed orgies, torture,

witchcraft in the slaughter of infants. One account was so popular that in the years before the Civil War, it's sales were surpassed only by Uncle Tom's cabin. During the same period, X Nuns and Priest real or Famed made a handsome living touring the country and testifying about the slaughter of innocence at the hands of Mother's superior and bishops. It's the same fucking thing, Like they're going around and making money off it. You've got like fucking pre medic

types in eighteen forty. Yeah, it's kind of funny though. It's like later the Catholics did do a lot of the kids, but oh absolutely, but not the Devil's yeah no, and like, yeah, you have to assume that some of this started from like well, yeah, a bunch of preestar molested kids, right, just throwing the devil as well, Like why not they eating them as well? Yeah, now they're

eating them yeah my peoples. Man. Yeah. So that's kind of the backstory of this really weirdly consistent thing that humans do, which is accused groups on the margins of murdering and molesting children. Right, It's like very consistent that it's always like, if you're going to really demonize a group, you accuse them of going after little kids. Um, and it's it goes back way more than a thousand years. I think it's like the Oats and the Evil, right,

Like that's the worst thing you can do. Like I'm a kid, let's go with that. Yeah, let's fucking go

with that. Um. Now, we're gonna have to cover a lot of other backstory in the United States before we actually get to the Satanic Panic because the reason that the Satanic Panic was able to get so bad, and the reason that like, like one of the things you have with the Satanic Panic is you have all of these like lurid stories of devil worship and these kids testifying that they've been raped because they've had false memories and planted in them and stuff, and all of that

was only possible because of a shipload of things that happened in the United States that made it the perfect soil for something like this. So we're gonna explain kind of all of different things that made it possible. First.

So one factor in the Satanic Panic being a thing that could happen was the fact that starting with our old buddy l Ron Hubbard in the nineteen fifties, colts started to get super mainstream in the United States in the nineteen sixties and seventies um and one of the ones that like got the most public perception was the Manson Colt, which carried out a string of grizzly murders in August of nineteen sixty nine. The most famous Manson killing was the murder of Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, and

several other less famous people. I think they killed five people at once in this like big compound that was like Roman Polanski's house, but he was out at the time. And these murders were incredibly grizzly, and they had elements that police at the time described as ritualistic. I don't know that they actually were ritualistic murders, but it was

described as ritualistic murders. So you have these cults. Is that great book Chaos O'Neill, and it just dispels all of that, like it was just again they just rolled with it exactly. Yeah, yeah, and it is bullshit, but people at the time believe it. So you've got suddenly number one, cults are all to the place, um. And

then you've got this cult murdering people. And then in the nineteen seventies you get the Zodiac Killer and the Son of Sam and the Alphabet Killer, and all of these were mass murderers whose slayings had like weird ritualistic

and occult seeming overtones to them. So people start to like get like really convinced that that this is a thing that actually happens, right that like, and they have some you know, if you are a person who reads the news in this period, you've got what you think is solid evidence that this is a problem, that there's

ritualistic cults out there murdering people for a cult you know, purposes. Um. Now, the nineteen seventies also happened to be the decade where Satanism went I don't know, mainstream is probably saying too much, but it became like it became like an organized thing, right. Anton the Vey publishes the Satanic Bible in nineteen sixty nine, which became the central text for the Church of Satan,

which probably had its heyday in the nineteen seventies. Now, the reality is that the Satanic Bible was both largely plagiarized and more or less just a self help book with an g rapping to it. This did not stop people who hadn't read it from flipping the funk out. So the Church of Satan, again fundamentally pretty peaceful thing, has maybe five thousand members in the US at its

height during this period. But all of this ship happening, like you know, with the Mansons and with these ritual murders, and then all the ship that's happening in Hollywood in terms of like the movies that are coming up, kind of cooks it into the center of a conspiracy. So in nineteen seventy three you have the best selling novel The Exorcist adapted into a film. We all know about

the Exorcist, big part of it is demonic possession. Um And in order to improve ticket sales, its producers claim that it was based on a true story, which was a lie. Um. They were like, some elements were taken all out of a story of an actual priest who had an x an exorcism, but like it had bore no resemblance to anything that happened in the book. Priest. Yeah, yeah, priests once existed and he was a little off. Yeah.

Demonic possession hadn't been a massive topic in American culture in this period, um, but after the Exorcist, it becomes like a huge topic of discussion. For one thing, there's hundreds of like movies that come out that are based on like similar premises, right. The thing that all that that like little bitty shitty b movie producers always do

like they rip off the big popular movie. Um. And for most Americans, obviously, this just meant that we got a bunch of fun horror movies that involved demonic possession. But among the nascent Christian right, which in this period was starting to form into a political block for the first time in the United States, the Exorcist was seen as a deadly warning. This was helped along by a new species of evangelical Christian grifter themselves inspired by the

Church of Satan, the fake former Satanist. So you start having former former Satanists kind of like these former Catholic nuns popping up in this period and lecturing about things they had supposedly done. Now, the most prominent of these guys was Mike Warnkey, who published his book Satan Seller in nineteen seventy two. Uh Satan Seller recounted a childhood and young adulthood that Warnkey claimed had been spent like

as a a hardcore devil worshiper. He claimed that he'd been a Satanic high priest and that he'd been involved in ritualistic sex orgies. He went into detail about ritual murders, child murder, and mass rape, claiming that he'd participated in a variety of capital offenses until Jesus saved him by sending him to Vietnam. Um that's what he Yeah, well, horrible guy. Yeah, there were a lot of Satanists back in the sixties and seventies. We had to get him

all off phenomen to clear that ship out. Um. Yeah, it's pretty wild because all of these guys like Warren Key would like they would all claim to have taken part in like serious crimes that never got investigated. So you'd think people would be like you said you murdered a bunch of babies, Like, oh, like, yeah, he's just admitted it in right, Yeah, it's it's it's just absolutely

it does. And Warren Key, Mike Warrenkey is kind of the biggest person, like who starts this avalanche, and he's within the bubble of Christian media, which was a lot smaller back then. He was a huge celebrity and he actually cracked over in the mainstream to an extent. He showed up on Oprah, on Larry King and telling lurid stories about his supposed past as a devil worshiper. He also used his past as a Satanist to launch a career as a Christian stand up comedian. Yeah it's story. Yeah,

it's very funny now. For reasons I will never be able to explain, Warren Ca saw massive success hybridizing his stand up routine with his claims about child like sex abuse and satanism um, which led to some really baffling recordings like the one I'm About to play you from his nineteen eighty nine stand up routine, Do you hear me in it? He starts with incredibly lame jokes, and I'm gonna play you a selection of his jokes just so you can get an idea of what the tenner

of his stand up act is. Like, told me this is gonna be a Christian playing and I tell you right now that bow up our own stage. He is not a Christian because he's got that long hair. Why do people drive on parkways and park on driveways? What is daylight savings time? And if we're saving so much of it, who's got it all? How do you know when yogurt's gone bad? How do you get tehlone to stick to a skillet when nothing sticks? To tell I'm not hearing you laugh, Jake. Do you not enjoy his comedy?

I mean, you know when you're Christmas you get like a joke in the crack up like it's that it's that level of like sun Cracker jokes into like stand up. He looks like he just I don't know, man, he looks actually kind of like the devil worshiper from like Three Detectives. You know, does he does look like a Satan's right, like like like a movie satan it's not a no offense to the actual Satanists in the audience. He would cast him as one, right, Yeah, like this

guy looks evil, yeah, and he definitely so. Like You've got those jokes, which are like the most milk toast nonsense that you could possibly put in a stand up routine, And then in the middle of them, he starts talking about deadly serious anecdotes about ritual genital mutilation and sacrifice. And again this is in the middle of a stand up set to a bunch of kids. Christian kids are

Christian kids and their families. I'm talking about a little girl who was murdered last year in the state of Louisiana by having her sexual organs cut out while she was still A lot a lot of you think that when a Satanist kills, they do so because they want to spill blood. You've seen enough late night movies to think that. But if a Satanist or any other kind of occultist kills an animal or a human sacrifice, it's not to spill blood. It's to release the life force.

Because when the life force is released and you've done the right incantations and rituals. You can absorb that force, they say, and it makes you a stronger wizard, warlock or whatever. The death, more reorganizing the death, the more force is released. So they took this little girl and they killed her by cutting her sexual organs out while she was still alive. Yeah, okay, really wait to lighten the mood. So you know, I've done some stand up by a friends who did it. That's a definite choice

in terms of how to end your set. Yeah. By the way he's saying, he's yeah, yeah, it's not it's complete nonsense. Why isn't he being investiga. I'm mean you listened to that though, and like the audience is deadly quiet. You have to assume they were all buying this ship. Like there seemed to be taking him very soon, and he was taken very seriously. Um, which is a problem

because he was a preposterous liar. Actual journalists sat down with Warrenkey's family and friends to ask them about his claims, which included the fact that he lived in a witch's coven with fift other people, um, and that he'd been a horrible drug addict and all of his like family, everyone who knew him laughed at all of this, like, of course, like we fucking grew up with him. He's like he's he's just a nerd exactly. Uh. And there

were a bunch of obvious holes in his story. For example, he claimed that Charles Manson had attended one of his deadly ritual sacrifice parties in nineteen sixty six. Unfortunately, the exact time that he claimed the party happened occurred during concurred occurred at the same time as one of manson stints in federal prison from a parole violation, so he could not have been there. There's actually a whole book that like was published proving beyond a shadow of a

doubt that Warren Key was a liar. And in fairness, the journalists were too, Christian journalists who worked for like an evangelical news site, who were like, this guy is like fucking full of ship, clearly, and yeah, like you know, there's nothing wrong with Christians, is like even taking advantage of like, yeah, evangelical who you know exactly, He's he's grifting these people by staring at them. Like it's very

horrible what he's doing. Not only is his comedy bad, but he's he's frightening people, and it's bad to frighten people for no reason. I would say, yeah, so unless it's funny, unless it's funny, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's funny that Yeah, he's absolutely not. Yeah. Um but yeah. The fact that Warrenkey was like he had a private jet at one point, like he's he was at least he claimed he had a private jet. I don't know, but he was very popular like it, and he was

a huge deal for a while. Um. Now, right around the same time Warnkey was starting to preach about ritual satanic murder, which is again in the midst of all these cults and zodiac killers and ship something else was happening in Americans, I d people were starting to accept that child sexual abuse was a thing and was a major problem, which is a good thing, right obviously, and for a long time, like people, you know, it is one of those things when you go back in time

like they were. It was kind of people really didn't give as much of a ship about kids as you might expect back in the day. It was the same in the UK, yeah, absolutely, people like, oh, we used just let our kids out and play anytime you could do that back then, like as if poptos didn't exist. Yeah it was. It wasn't like ignoring kids yeah back

then either. But yeah, they people start to accept that it's a thing, and there starts to be like an industry starts to build up with people who are our child protection advocates, which again is a good thing, but aspects of it go terribly wrong. Um yeah, it's it's

really messed up. Because getting people to accept that child sexual abuse was a problem was one of the first victories, major victories of the modern feminist movement, right, not talking about like the suffragets, but like people like Glorious Steinam and stuff like like like so it is like and this is like a really big victory that they that

they getting people to take this seriously. And initially their understanding and the understanding of most people was that most abuse victims were young girls, primarily daughters, who were violated by incestuous fathers. Um. And it's it is absolutely true that most kids who are molested are molested by a

close family member that or afraid of the family. Um. Now, as a result, the problem of child sexual abuse was generally referred to as a problem with incest during this period, So you'll see a lot of people talking about incest, and they're not talking like when we talk about incest today, it generally means something different. They're talking about child sexual abuse as a rule when they talk about incest in

this period. So, feminists argued that the solution to this was greater gender equality, which would enable girls to more effectively say no to the demands of their abuse of male relatives, and it would allow wives to stand up to their husbands. And they also argued that part I don't think is accurate, But they also argued that it would give mothers the option of taking their kids out of the house because they'd be able to have a job at a checking account. And that part actually does

seem like a realistic remedy. So again, yeah, right, like, there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, um, it does make sense. It's a good thing to do. But like everything that people do, there were problematic and and faulty aspects of it, including the fact how people began to sort of look at the problem of the men who were doing the molesting.

And I'm gonna quote again from Satan's Silence here, these feminist visions were obscured however, by an inTransition by an intransigent society, White insistence that the problem lay merely in the minds of a few troubled men. Accordingly, the cure for sex abuse was psychotherapy coupled with family counseling. And if treatment was all that was necessary, sex abuse was

not so much a crime as an illness. Hence, rather than calling for careful and partial investigation by the police, accusations demanded intervention by psychotherapists prepared to take the side of the grief daughter and to heal the perpetrator, even if he insisted the charges were false. Um, so again this we'll talk about some of the problems that the causes. Obviously good that it's being taken seriously, but also yeah, well we'll cover the aspects of this that are problematic.

So the first comprehensive legal remedy to the problem of child sex abuse was Walter Mondale's nineteen seventy three Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act or CAPTA and captives set aside money to reach research child abuse for the first time, which is great, definitely a good thing researching like the

causes of it. It also gave money to states, so they could set up treatment programs, which was more of a mixed bag because in order to get the Act through congressional Republicans and get it approved by President Nixon, Mondale had to water down some things. See the data suggested that the most significant driving factor behind child abuse of any kind was poverty, but Republicans didn't want to

hear that, so out the door it went. Corporal punishment was also understood to be a major part of child abuse, but talking about that was seen as undermining the authority of parents, so instead the Act focused on physical abuse and the idea that abuse of parents were suffering from a psychological illness, one that could strike any parent and

one that could be cured quote. By the time Senate hearings for Captain convened, this medicalized interpretation of child abuse was so firmly established that experts like Brandeis University professor of social policy David Gill found it impossible to promote

a different analysis to the politicians. After doing a groundbreaking national survey of child abuse in the nineteen sixties, Gil had concluded that neglected battering were intimately tied to poverty, and that the federal government's reluctance to correct social and economic inequality made Uncle Sam the country's worst child mistreator. But Mondale interrupted Gil and reminded the audience during the hearing that this is not a poverty problem. It is

a national problem. So again, the biggest part of child abuse is not child molestation, it's neglect and physical abuse, which is primarily driven by poverty. But nobody wanted to hear that in Congress, so instead they just focused on child sexual abuse. Sorry, as I said, you know what that kind of like reminds me of, Like, so I've done research on all this kind of child abuse stuff, and it is true that there are there have been

like communal child abusage, absolutely for sure. Yes, And then but then when they bring the devil in tweet, it's like, oh, get the priest to sort it out, and it just completely flies out the window and it isn't taken seriously anymore. It's so annoying. Yeah, it's it's very frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things that you see here too is people who have no experience in like investigating cases being assigned to these cases because they stopped being seen

as a criminal problem. Um. Yeah, So Congress didn't like Professor Gill's testimony, but they really enjoyed the testimony of a woman named Maureen Litvin, a southern California mom who went by the pseudonym Jolly Kay. Now Jolly told a heartbreaking story about how she'd been abused as a child and how this abuse had led her to abuse her own kids. She testified. She testified that she had once tried to strangle her daughter and had thrown a knife

at her daughter on another occasion. Now Jolly k described her long process of seeking treatment until finally her therapist advisor to start a self help group, which she eventually called Parents Anonymous. Now, a group like this being sort of touted as a cure for child abuse was a dream come true for Congress because Parents Anonymous Number one put the responsibility on abuse of parents themselves for fixing the problem, and it costs basically nothing to support as

opposed to alleviating poverty. Right, That's exactly right, Yeah, pan on Um, So Congress did give federal support to Parents Anonymous, but it was a hell of a lot cheaper than like fixing the broken social safety net or raising the minimum wage or any of the other things that might

have actually done a real like significant help. Uh. Not that it's a bad idea to have support groups for parents like this, but I would say that that shouldn't be your first priority when parents are throwing knives at kits, you know. Yeah, yeah, So Captor was enacted in nineteen seventy four, and among other things, that made therapists, teachers

and school administrators mandatory reporters. I don't know what you have if you have this in the UK, but basically, if you're a mandatory reporter and someone discloses child abuse to you, you have to report it to the authority, which is again a thing that makes sense on paper and sometimes is a good thing, but also is sometimes a bad thing because the police often do a very bad job of handling these cases, and it makes the kid not trust whatever authority figure they'd confided in about

the abuse in the first place. Like it's a very mixed bag, you could say, um, But the first thing that happened when they you know, Captive gets past is it leads to a massive search and reported child abuse. Suddenly it goes from something that like very rarely got reported to something that fucking all over the place which is because child abuse was all over the place, right, Like, it's not a bad thing that suddenly people are like, oh, ship, a ton of people are abusing and molesting their kids.

But this led to a massive problem for federal and state governments because an awful lot of working men were revealed to be abusive to their children. Locking these guys up would force the state to pay for their care, and it would remove like tax money from the state, and it would force them to like pay in welfare

to support the family. This was unacceptable. Thankfully, self help, the self help therapy group models solved this problem because instead of going to jail, abusive fathers were sentenced to therapy, which their families were often mandated to attend with them, including the children they've been fucking or hitting, like the way to like destroy the victim even more, right, like like you couldn't come up with a better way of doing it. How horrible, it's so fucked up, um, And

it's yeah, it's it's it's yeah. This is not to say that the situation for abused children was better prior to this, because like for girls, and it was nearly always girls who reported abuse back in the early nineteen seventies, the standard procedure before captive would be to make a report to the police, who would then force you to undergo an invasive genital exam, and then the cops would usually do a follow up interview which they would they

would like, show up at your school to interrogate you and ship um and you'd be sent to a foster home or a juvenile home, while your abusive dad stayed with the rest of your family so that he could threaten them into getting their stories straight, and the charges against him would inevitably hit the local news, which means he would lose his job, which with the family would fall in the It was just a whole fucking it's always been bad, right Like when criticizing captain, I don't

want to pretend that like it was good before, because yeah, but it's it's like putting salt in the wound a little bit more, you know what I mean. It's like trying to bail out the ship with the thimble exactly exactly. So the self help therapy group option allowed police to keep these kind of cases quiet, which saved on embarrassment

for everybody. It also allowed the fathers to stay employed and it avoided breaking up the family, which religious right wingers considered to be as much of a priority as treating battered kids. Jake, do you like weddings? Have you ever been at a wedding and been like, boy, I wish I could find a way to get several dozen grams of hexogen explosives delivered to this wedding, but I

just don't have a missile guidance. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah, Well the good people at Raytheon can help you out with that, Jake, because the missile guidance chips they make are guaranteed to hit weddings, school buses, mostly those two targets. Um. So yeah, no, no, it does help if you're in Yemen. Raytheon big presence and all right, here's the the actual ads. All right, we're back, we're back. We're talking about bettered kids.

Kind of deflated a little there. So the self help therapy group option was was considered great by everybody but the actual kids who were being abused. Um And oddly enough, one of the things that's weird about it in this period is that both kind of like a lot of left wing folks and feminists and the religious right kind of all get on board this idea for very different reasons. Right, the religious right likes keeping the family together, um, and it likes you know, they want to avoid divorces and

and what and whatnot at all costs. Feminists like it because all of these groups do involve these men talking about like they're like the things that the horrible things that they've done, like they're horrible sexual fantasies and stuff, which was seen as like a use whole thing at the time, right, like there, So it is this weird

kind of situation. And there's also you can find some writings from some people who are like advocate like child defense advocates and very left wing at the time, who also like that kind of the confessional nature of these things mirrors like what you see in certain like left wing political movements, the self criticism sessions. So it's weird you get all these different like like, all these groups who should who normally are at each other's throats all get on board of a very bad idea for wildly

different reasons. Yeah, a very different tech mil you know, yeah, yeah exactly, Yeah, a very different one. Yeah, it's bizarre. Um, it's a really strange period to study So if you're starting to say, boy, it seems like all these new programs prioritize the feelings and security of male abusers over their female child victims, you would be right. Uh. And the growing field of child protection was rife with misogyny. The best example would be Dr Roland Summit, who was

a massive piece of ship. He went on to be a major Satanic ritual abuse expert, and obviously everything he ever said about Satanic ritual abuse was nonsense. But before that he was an incest expert, and in his expert opinion, child sexual abuse by fathers was largely the fault of their wives. So this guy, who was again one of the most prominent doctors in the field and this time describes the behavior of child molesters as family romance. I'm sorry,

did you have any siblings? He had some daughters that you have to worry for them. Um. He believed that fathers who molested their daughters would never molest a stranger's daughter, which obviously is wildly untrue. In his argument was that the attraction of these fathers was purely two in his words, the delicious little creatures that the father had helped to create.

So somem It felt that basically all men considered their daughters to be delicious, and that the impulse to commit incest was nearly universal from middle aged men who were anxious about the end of their own youth men and healthy man projecting a little bit. Yeah yeah, So since all men clearly want to suck their daughters, the only reason that most men don't is because they have healthy marriages that let them deal with their horny nous by

fucking their wives. So when incest happens, it's the fault of the abuser's wife who was quote absorbing herself in a job rather than fucking her husband hard enough to stop him from raping their daughter. She's it's the right wing like defense. It's like outrageously fucked up. And he said this officially, like yeah, yeah, he was very open about this, and no one went, hang on, like, this guy is up to something. I would argue the right response when someone tells you that is to just start

hitting them and not stop. Just just immediately started punching, but no one did. Instead, he was taken seriously. So these beliefs were unfortunately quite common, and one of the most popular abuse treatment programs at the time was called Child Sex Abuse Treatment Program or c sat UP, SAT UP, CASSETTAP s A C C S A T P. I don't know how to acronymic CASSATTAP, so you did not do great. Cassett UP first launched in the Bay Area,

and it was geared towards preserving nuclear families. That because basically what happened is in the Bay Area because of a number of things, including affluence, it's one of the first areas that starts getting like really good reporting about child sexual abuse. And it turns out that a bunch of fucking dudes in the Bay Area we're raping their kids um, which created a problem because these guides were

pretty high income. So again, the state doesn't want to lose tax money, doesn't want their parents to go on the doll or their their families to go on the doll um. So c sat UP was geared towards preserving nuclear families, and it taught that the of sexual abuse of children was a dysfunctional marriage. Part of the repair work mandated by the therapy involved the mother apologizing to her daughter for her husband's sexual abuse and saying you are not to blame daddy and I did not have

a good marriage. That is why Daddy turned to you. Wow, it's just unbelievable, unbelievable. That's like, I can't believe that when the Yeah, this is the fucking like the late seventies. Yeah, thank you, you know what I mean? Like, no, no, really, fucking pretty recently. Um, we'll probably get at least one person who as a kid like went through Sea sat up and stuff with their family. In the comments in this episode from I wouldn't be surprised. Um, it's it's

so fucked um, it's so fucking wild. So, starting in San Jose, se sat up was increasingly mandated for father's accused of sexual abuse. Courts often made fathers what became known as the god fought their offer because it was an offer they couldn't refuse. So you get caught, you go to therapy, take probation, and avoid jail. Almost overnight, the confession rate among accused child molesters went from very low to nine And again, I don't wanna. This is

a really flawed system. So we're going to cover all the ship that's bad. It's also the aspects of it were good because most of these guys at this point, very few sexual abuse allegations made by children against parents were false, right, So the vast majority of these guys, you have to assume some innocent people took the basically the equivalent of a police bargain just because they didn't

want to go to trial. But the vast majority of these guys were guilty, and at least something happened um but c sat up led to a number of very unsettling changes in the way these problems were dealt with. For one thing, police shifted away from interviewing the child in these cases and instead started talking to their teachers, their mother, and other adults who knew the kid. And these second hand accounts of people who knew the child were considered to have the same legal weight as if

they'd come directly from the child. This is problematic for a number of reasons. I think that as a journalist we want to stand right, yeah, a little bit, yeah, And it feeds into the satanic panic stuff we're gonna talk about later. When the child was eventually questioned, the work was done by a social worker rather than a detective. And this may not sound like a problem because, like, if you have a social worker who specifically trained for

this ship. That sounds good because cops are not great at talking to kids all the time, right, right, But there was a crime committed, right, So it's like you need more than the social worker, right like us, one would say. And also the social workers were not well trained to do this. They were well trained on how to interrogate someone without asking leading questions, right, Police are

at least in theory, taught not to do that. Like, obviously that's a problematical yeah, But theoretically, a detective who's questioning a child is number one, not supposed to assume the allegations are true. They're not supposed to ask the leading questions. They're just supposed to try to have the kid talk about what happened, and the accused enjoys the presumption of innocence. And the social workers questioning these kids

weren't trained that way. They were trained to believe that it's always the case that like this is this is this per and is guilty, which is a problem for the person interrogating the kid in this situation because they tended to push the child to talk about like things that the child might not otherwise have talked about. Now, again, not a huge problem at the time because virtually all

of these allegations of child sexual abuse were true. But when the Satanic panic came about, the allegations were false, and the social workers still did the same thing. They pushed kids. Yeah, you're seeing all of this infrastruction their own thing against them. So yeah, forward right exactly, Like so you're seeing all this kind of infrastructure that created that allows this to happen later. So, by nineteen seventy five, c sat UP had become so popular that the entire

state of California adopted as the standard. Our friend. Dr Summit attended c sat UP training and was so taken by it but that he wrote a manifesto titled the Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome. In it, among other things, he pushed the idea that children never fabricate the kinds of explicit sexual manipulations they'd divulge in complaints or interrogations. As a result, they should always be believed, even if their story included fantastic, wild details that seemed impossible. Again,

like you're seeing the groundwork get laid here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. By nineteen eighty, child sexual abuse was no longer a dark national secret. It was a topic widely discussed by Americans and featured in the media, and I'm gonna quote

again from Satan's Silence. Thanks to an alliance among feminists, therapists, and law enforcement officials, it was becoming possible for daughters to disclose their victimization and for fathers to admit their guilt, and national media from The New York Times to Playboy, The and Landers Encyclopedia and Donna Hue testimonials abounded from repentant fathers, newly asserted wives and girls regaining their dignity.

Yet later research would reveal that many incest defenders also rebeless children outside their families, and they rape grown women as well. Further, there is evidence that, regardless of what kind of treatment, sex abusers get, as many as one

in seven goes on to offend again. Ironically, then politicians and child protectionists further to keep fathers in families left many youngsters and women at risk of further abuse, and by pushing godfather off for confessions, the therapy attle of sex abuse intervention replaced skilled forensics personnel with social workers and others who knew nothing about how to test the validity of criminal sex abuse charges. And who unstintingly believe

them all. So by nineteen eighty, all of the infrastructure we're going to need to let a satanic panic happen and had to have the legal system in Like, further, it is in place, right, didn't just come out of nowhere built on without them, I guess, without trying to do that. But like I can see what you're saying, like it just became the perfect ground for it, right. Yeah.

And obviously like fun dr summit, But the vast majority of the people involved in the setting this system up are people whose motivations are the purest it could possibly be. They want to protect kids right there trying it's a problem, but it's a new way to tackle it. Yeah, yeah, And again probably up to this point the system still does more harm than good because it was it replaced basically nothing, right um, But it's about to stop being a system that does more good than harm, right, Like,

that's that's about to change. So there's some more background we have to lay. In nineteen seventy nine, Jerry Fallwell and some other assholes founded the Moral Majority, which was the first large scale Christian right wing political organization. This is the first time that the Christian right is like a block in politics and it has been ever since. The Moral Majority was initially formed due to an opposition to Rove Wade and to force an opposition to force

integration of Christian schools. They didn't want black people to

be able to go to Christian colleges. That was a big part of the Christian of the very Christian of them, extremely love the neighbor, and it was Jerry, Yeah, yeah, very surprising stuff, um so, and like yeah, there's there were other a lot of other people obviously, but yeah, the Moral Majority was fueled also by a sense of deep, deep anxiety because women are starting to work at this point, like full time, Like it's becoming a very major thing.

One of the things I didn't realize until I was doing this research actually is that during this period, from like the seventies to the eighties, women it becomes the norm for women to work, but the average income of households doesn't really raise because like this is also at the time that workers protections and right are collapsing, and like Reaganomics starts to take over in the eighties, so like more people like you would think that having two

incomes in a household would increase the amount of any like disposable income people have, but it really didn't. And again yeah, yeah, great countries. So in nineteen eight, a psychologist named named Lawrence Pastor published a book about his wife and former patient, Michelle Smith, which you know, if your wife is a former patient as a therapist, you might not be a great therapist. So her memoir, Michelle Remembers,

detailed a childhood of horrific a cult sex abuse. Pastor claimed to have used hypnotic regression therapy to help his wife uncover buried memories of abuse at the hands of the Church of Satan. Pastor also claimed, with no evidence that Anton LaVey's church wasn't the real Church of Satan and the one that molested his patient wife had existed

for centuries. So and Michelle Remembers is basically so. The claim she's making is that she became the victim of a Satanic cult for several months during nineteen fifty five, when she was a five year old, she was imprisoned by them. She she like, had all these recollections being tortured in houses and mausoleums and seminitaries, of being raped and sodomized with candles and being forced to shoot on a bible. Uh, and on a crucifix, of seeing babies

and adults murdered. It's awesome because you know that two Christians of the day like her being like, I help, I watched babies get murdered was the same as like and I pooped on a Bible. Like both equally bad devil things like the guy like with their memories like a little bit more a little bit more offensive. Yeah, she also had memories of having a devil's tail and

horns surgically attached to her um. Yeah, she there. She had memories of a cult attempt to kill a child and make it look like an accident by placing her in a car with a corpse um and then crashing the vehicle. And this is said to we have gone on for close to a year until her faith, the fact that she was so Christian made the Satanists give

up because they just couldn't couldn't turn her. Uh. And then she him that she forgot the experience for twenty years until she entered therapy with Dr Pastor, who then became her husband. Now this was all lies. I feel like the therapy he was like weak, Yeah, yeah, yeah, if you remember, we can sell a book. And I don't know, there's a There's been a lot of writing

on this too. I haven't done enough research to know how you know the con Michelle was, but I'm almost certain her her husband was in on the con or it was a con on his behalf. Incredible. People debunked

the book immediately. For one thing, there's a picture of Michelle in her grade school yearbook that was taken during one of the months when she was supposed to be hidden like locked in a house by Satanists, which you know, all of her names and family members who knew her during this period basically say like, nothing out of the ordinary happened during her childhood. Uh, certainly nothing satanic ritual molesti. The only abuse that Michelle endured, for certain was at

the hands of her therapist husband. The whole idea of repressed memories, which now we got, we're laying a lot of groundwork here, so let's talk about the fucking idea of repressed memories comes from. It goes back to the eighteen hundreds when early psychologists decided that hysteria, which is what they called women having emotions in those days came from someone suffering a childhood trauma that was so terrible

that they developed amnesia to dissociate from the event. And this is a mix of because like Freud is involved in this and it's not all bullshit. Dissociation is a thing that happens when you under begin with PTSD, right, Like we've all dealt with it, Like it's a fucking thing, But it doesn't involve forgetting the horrible thing that happened, right, Memories become blurry. Yeah, yeah, I don't know, but it

doesn't sound very real. Yeah. Yeah, Like I definitely have had memories like that, like periods I don't remember during the the dealing with PTSD itself, but the actual trauma that caused it I remember pretty darn well. Uh. And the fact that I don't remember other things was probably because I was like drinking and abusing drugs massively. Yeah,

so there. Yeah, and you know you have to assume everyone was drunk in the eighteen hundreds too, and they were definitely on cocaine because that's how Freud did all of his psychotherapy, So yeah, that may have influenced the Yeah, so Freud decided that hysteria was inevitably caused by childhood's sexual violation, and he pressured his female patients to tell

him detailed stories of their abuse. And again a lot of these were probably true, um, but also a lot of them weren't, and he convinced himself that these stories were hidden memories, at least for a while. He did eventually realize that a lot of the abuse stories his patients told him were like physically impossible because they were

just like the outlandish fantasies um. And he kind of dropped this idea that child that like emotional issues like mental illness as an adult was inevitably caused by like some sort of sexual trauma as a child. He did kind of drop that idea. But in the late nineteen seventies, therapists started reviving his old theories, and among an influential subset of the field, repressed memory therapy became the go

to explanation for things like eating disorders and depression. Right like, you go to the psycho psychotherapist because you've got intorectually there or whatever, and he's starts trying to recover memories of you being raped as a kid, because you must have if you have intorectsia, right, it couldn't be caused by anything else. Um, and yeah, this was basically nonsense.

And the problem about trying to recover implanted memories is that generally what actually happens is the therapist creates memories of things that never happened from a write up in the conversation. Now, experimental psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated with ease which false memories can be implanted in a sizeable proportion of the population under well controlled laboratory conditions, but it is undoubtedly the case that such false memories can arise

spontaneously as well. In the context of psychotherapy, one of the techniques that has been shown to result in false memories is asking people to imagine events that never actually took place. It appears that eventually, and especially in people with good imaginations, the memory of the imagined event is misinterpreted as a memory for a real event. The use of hypnotic regression is a particularly powerful means to implant

false memories. So this became before though, Like as a kid, there were things that I was certain was like what happened? And then I get old on I think that must have been a dream. Was like, no way it would have, especially as a child, Like there's all sorts you could get confused about, absolutely, and like a lot of this is like this is part of the problem. This is part of why. Also, if you look at like eyewitness

testimony like generally sucks. Actually, like people are very bad at being eyewitnesses because our brains it all starts a wild ship. Yeah yeah, especially when there's like a traumatic experience, you know, yeah, important exactly. That's why reporters take notes, and it's why you should never listen to anything anyone ever says. Just fucking put on headphones to block out all noise, fucking put on blinders so you can't see, and just stumble through the world and you will not

believe anything untrue. You will probably bump into things a lot though. Yeah, yeah, yes, here's an ad for a product. Okay,

we're back, so yeah. Hypnotic regression and repressed memories mostly nonsense, basically all nonsense, but it was considered to be pretty settled science at the time, not by like an overwhelming number of scientists, but by cops and judges and TV hosts and the kinds of psychologists who are good at talking to cops and judges and TV hosts, right, Like, that's the group of people to whom this has settled science for will actually incredible researchers like, there seem to

be problems with this. Um. So, Michelle Remembers was a hugely influential book. Uh, it was treated as gospel by a terrible number of people, and it actually became a standard textbook for social workers in the United States. Um, yeah, yeah, it's not good man. So Lawrence Pastor became a recognized legal expert, and Satanic ritual abuse, which exploded into the

mainstream is a real problem thanks to his book. So what we have in nineteen eighty is a situation where evangelical Christian paranoia over the devil and the black arts leaps over and starts to infect mainstream society. This would come to have a terrible impact first on two families in Bakersfield, California. And now we're finally into the satanic panic. Ready excited? Yeah, yeah, I'm so excited. It's it's fucking awesome. So these two families are the mccuen's and the knife

Ins or Niffins. Uh. And I'm gonna quote from a write up in Religious Tolerance dot Org that kind of goes over the basics of the case. The triggering incident occurred in nineteen eighty when Becky mccouhen disclosed that her grandfather Rod Phelps had touched her inappropriately. The family doctor

confirmed the abuse, no charges were late. Becky's mother, Debbie mccuhen, arranged for her daughter to obtain counseling, but Debbie's stepmother, Mary Anne Barber, who is believed to have had a history of mental illness, felt that her stepdaughter granddaughters were not being sufficiently protected. She obtained the assistance of the Mothers of Baker's Field, a group concerned about child abuse.

Jill had dad took particular interest in the case. She was the spokesperson for the group and had many relatives working for local police forces. Miss Barbara claimed that Alvin and Debbie mccuhen were not good parents and that Debbie's daycare license should be revoked. She asked the Social Services Department to make a surprise inspection. The social worker, Betty Palco, found no major infractions and took no action to revoke

the license. So again, no actual evidence of serious child abuse here, although I will say that mcwan's weren't exactly ace parents, because later that year they did take their two daughters on a supervised visit to see their allegedly abuse abuse of grandfather, and this caused Marianne to have a psychotic episode which sent her to the psychiatric ward

at a local hospital. She eventually succeeded in getting custody of the kids and convincing county officials to file child endangerment charges against the mccuen's, But because she was not at all well, Marianne took things a step further, and she had begun believing that the mccuhans were part of a massive, insidious, satanic sex ring in Kern County. As she told social workers, there's a group of people involved

in molesting the girls. They're all in on it. So you have one in a case of actual abuse to some parents who probably are not being as careful as they need to be around, a guy who's dangerous and a woman who's maybe schizophrenic, definitely is mentally ill, and his hospitalized as a result. That who becomes convinced that, as opposed to a just a single act of of child molestation by one guy there's a massive conspiracy to molest all of the kids in town. Um And unfortunately

for a shipload of people. The social workers in Baker's Field had been trained using the textbook Michelle remembers. So when this very ill woman starts claiming that there's a massive network of satanic sex abusers in town, they believe her. Um. And by the time the social workers sat down with the kids, Becky and Don, both kids had spent months listening to their very, very sick stepgrandmother tell them they had been the victims of a ring of ritual abusers.

So these kids get repeatedly questioned and they confirm what there's They basically parent what their step grandmother had told them to say, and over the months their disclosures become like weirder and weirder. They claimed that they had been hung from sealing hooks, beaten with belts, rented to strangers and motels, and had been forced to act in kittie

porn movies. They claimed they were abused by a sex ring which involved their grandparents, their parents, their father's brothers, friends of their parents, uh and the social worker who did the inspection, a coworker of their father, and to one named welfare workers, and all these fucking people start catching charges and getting arrested and ship um, and their life just dynamites these people's lives, right, like, just just

based on this one testimony. Yeah, yeah, based on this woman and these kids who had been in her care listening to her talk about But it's like, you know, the thing I always think about things like this is

like racism. Right, No one is born a racist. Kids become racist from hearing what they from parents usually, So it's the same kind of concept, right, they'll just repeat that exactly their kids, Like if you tell them as you tell your if you tell you're like three year old, over and over you were raped by the devil, like,

they will look I guess I was. Yes. So the social worker and their father's coworker eventually had their charges dropped after their lawyer introduced Marianne's medical records into the trial. Was like, this woman has psychotic episodes and as paranoid

and probably schizophrenic. Perhaps we need more than just your testimony, right, Not that those people can't testify when they're the victims of abuse, but if you have them making lurid, wild allegations and there's no physical evidence for any of it. Perhaps you should not trust those allegations. Maybe, yeah, Um, So this convinced the DA to try to drop those

two people's charges. But then the medical records were sealed and forbidden from being used by the defense for the mccuen's and the Niffins, which is something else because again all of the cops have bought into this too. So I'm gonna quote again from that that right up uh in Religious tolerance dot Org quote. The Niffin's sons, Brian and Brandon, were repeatedly and suggestively interrogated. The interviewers would describe a sex act and then act that asked the

child to confirm or deny that it happened. When questions separately, each was old falsely that their brother had disclosed abuse by both the parents and the rest of the sex ring. Brian and Brandon claimed that they were yelled at and terrorized by the interrogators. They were told that they could go home again if they testified about the abuse. These manipulative and coercive interrogation methods are now known to generate

false allegations. No fucking dar right yeah. Questioning in Baker's field went far beyond the definition of leading and was in fact coercive, threatening and brainwashing of young children's is like a legal finding later. Unfortunately, in early nineteen eight three, basic research into child interview techniques was in its early stages. Direct questioning and manipulation of children was common practice. The Niffin boys finally caved in under the pressure and said

that abuse had occurred. So yeah. During a surprise supervised visit, Brandon Niffin was asked by his grandmother whether the charges were true. He answered, no, none of those things ever happened. The grandmother was arrested for discussing the case with her grandchild when she brought this up. When she said, like, hey, he told me that he was lying because the interviewers terrorized him. It's like, he tells his grandmother they made

me give a false confession. She goes to the judge and she gets arrested and is banned from testifying at trial and has her right to having custody visits like terminated for years. Because again, all of the people in the legal system believe all this ship and have to seem like, oh, she's got to be part of it, because she's trying to like there. It's so it's unbelievably fucked up. They just they just with each other, right,

it's amazing. Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. Actually, yeah, it's it's incredibly like there's a lot that like that is and should be studied about this period of time because it says so much that's very frightening about human psychology. It's that crowd like it's very scary. Yeah, yep, exactly, Like it's a lot of the same stuff that makes fascism work, right, it's just like the way people are and the way people act in groups, um, and the way people act when they are in a group and all get scared

of the same thing, right, Yeah. Uh so both Niffin boys later recanted entirely and stated that they've been coerced to testify, and they testified again in nineteen ninety six after the end of the Satanic Panic, and we're able to convince a judge to overturn both sets of convictions. But again, like the Niffins, like their parents, has been like a decade plus in prison along with the mccohen's like like four people in prison for years and years joking. No,

it's like it's unbearably fucked up. There's a partial happy ending here because the Niffins, like once the kids like realized what had happened to have been done to them and testified, like they got to be a family with their parents again. The mccohen's never did, because both Becky and Down continued to maintain that their testimony was true, and it's almost certain that both children had false memories forced on them as a result of improper interrogation methods.

But the family never fucking healed. Um, it's deeply bad. That's the side of the Satanic panic. You don't really hear a lot about. It's like it's kind of funny the whole things, Like, oh yeah, it's so stupid. But then like I was doing research for this this podcast episode the other day and it's like wow, Like, I mean, one woman in the Italian case I was looking at like a mother, she just killed usself. And it's just like you just couldn't handle it, right, It's like all

based on literally nothing, nothing at all. It ruins people. Um, I mean, the same thing in a different way is happening with Q and on. Right, Like you have hundreds of families at least that have been torn apart by

this sort of stuff. It's fucked it's super fucked um and it kind of if you kind of look at what happens with the book Michelle remembers and how it helps both spark the satanic panic and how it infests you know, this this system for dealing with child to bease that we talked about, it's almost like an infection that comes into it and deal all these problems and it suddenly become actively toxic. And yeah, it did not

stay limited to Kern County out near Baker's Field. The case of the mccuon and the Niffin families was just the beginning in nineteen eighty three. Not long after there and after their initial conviction Evince in another part of southern California. We're about to take the nation by storm. And next episode we're gonna talk about the mcmah in preschool trial, which is the longest, most expensive trial in US history and one of the most fucked up things

I've ever read about in my entire life. You're happy to read, Uh, you want to plug some ship. Yeah, it's just the podcast right like Q Clearance is out now obviously with you guys um. Popular Front is always

around popular Front dot cr um. One thing I do want to say though, is like, especially considering this copic, you know, I've done a lot of research into like various kind of child abuse scandals, and the thing is like they do exist, and even some of the more lurid insane stories have happened for real, but on a way that where it's like it's nowhere near as ritualistic

or movie like, you know. So there's a great example that people to look into, um, like the Monster of Belgium, a guy called Mark the Troll, and like he would just had this horrific kind of child abuse scandal thing where he was like snapping children for higher and it involves like some of the most yeah, involves some of the most high level politicians. This isn't a conspiracy, like,

but it's one of the least known ones. Because stupid stuff like this gets the hearing right, the more sensational, the more easy to understand. Satanic stuff is what people are queuing on often put out. Meanwhile, people are doing very dark things and it kind of goes by the wayside because obviously real life is a little bit more kind of intricate and confusing, you know, and it's it's a real shame. It's this fucking thing that happens in

the Satanic panic too. Were like no, like we could all there is a conspiracy to traffic people who are legally children, rich and doubtful. Like it absolutely happened, it probably still is, but like focused on that, not this is not Michelle's whatever the hell, it's cool. Well, it's weird. It's interesting to me that like the things that go viral are always like to focus on tiny, tiny kids, which are very it's very uncommon for like two and

three and four year olds to be molested. It's like it's like like yeah, it's yeah, men fucking teenagers, right, Like that's that's bad. It's right terrible and it doesn't make it any better. But again it's like this is the issue, right, It's like when you have people like t and On specifically, one of my biggest problems with them is that they make people just go, oh, that's just queue and on stuff, and a lot of it

is just nonsense doing on stuff. But in between that, there's things that really need to be looked out for the safe of the victims, you know, and it's like, thanks, You've completely destroyed any relevance because you're making things up

all the time. It's yeah, I mean I get why, Like it just come out the Virginia Jeffrey, I think her name is pronounced, who's one of the Epstein victims, and like she's the one I can't blame for it because it's like, yeah, you were part of a giant sex abuse like conspiracy, right, and even that now it makes you think it's like not to say you want to believe of it. Now some people will just go, oh, exactly, I've heard it to do with you, and they won't

look any deep. It's fun. It's all. Everything is horrible. Um, thanks for listening to the podcast. People. We'll be back on Thursday with some of the worst stories you've ever heard in your life. Yeah, h h h