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

you forever now, Jake. That yeah, I have that power. I am legally a reverend doctor. Both reference and doctors get to name things, Sophie. The state of New Jersey says, so, yeah, well, the state of New Jersey has no say in somebody who doesn't live in America. I think in New Jersey's jurisdiction does in fact go across the Atlantic. It is a coastal city. So back to the satanic panic, Jake, how you doing? How you're holding up emotionally as we tear in this? It's so good. Yeah, it's the worst.

So before we get into our main subject for the day, which is the McMartin preschool trial. We're gonna talk about some other wild ass satanic panic bullshit that was kicking off in the late seventies. And this this involves a little game you might have played called Dungeons and Dragons. You're played d DJ, which people play it. It looks really really cool. It's rules like yeah, yeah, yeah, I

played that as a kid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're doing Dungeon Dragons once and I just went in and was like, wow, yeah, it's fucking a great game. Great thing for kids. Also really good for kids, like teaches you storytelling, teaches you like a lot of I learned a lot about how to do journalism well by just like the way that you put together wis and stuff. But people find interesting it's a great game. Uh, A lot of people disagreed

with that in the nineteen seventies. So in nineteen seventy nine, when the game is about five years old, a sixteen year old named James Dallas Egbert the Third vanished from the steam tunnels under his school, which is where he and his friends played what honestly sounds like a pretty righteous game of D and D. That sounds so cool. Yeah, that sounds cool as hell. His family hired a private eye to track him down, and that guy publicly theorized

that James's lef of Dungeons and Dragons contributed to his disappearance. Uh, this was not true, but the press ran wild with it, and while James was eventually found, he committed suicide shortly thereafter. He was just very like, he chronically depressed kid, like, a very sad story, nothing to do with D and D, which was probably one of the few bright spots in his life. Yeah, but obviously it was all blamed on

the game. In nineteen eighty one, the book Mazes and Monsters was published on the case, and it was just nonsense. It was followed shortly after by the nineteen eighty two film adaptation starring Tom Hanks, which is a fucking if you want to watch a terrible movie about how dn D is the devil, Oh there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Mazes and fucking Monsters. So the private detective, who detective who started all this, published his own book, The Dungeon Master, where he clarified that D and D had nothing to do with James's disappearance or suicide, which he instead again blamed on chronic depression, but by that point it was way too late. In two, another kid named Irving Pulling committed suicide since he had played in a school supervised

D and D game. His mother, Patricia, sued the school in t s R. Dn d's publisher, blaming them for her son's death because quote, he had received a curse during a game session. Oh yeah, yeah, and it's it is this like, you know, the kind of people who played D and D in the nineteen fucking eighties were

big old nerds. Right nowadays it's gotten to be more mainstream, but like, you're a pretty big nerd in the eighties if you're playing D and D and you're probably bullied to fucking back, right, you probably get kicked out of you every day. You know. It was always like when I watched old American films, it was like the nerds

would always be doing like a version of Yeah. So obviously, like these kids who probably had a lot of ship, that was tough in their lives because it's hard to be a kid, and harder still if you're a kid who gets the ship kicked out of them by bullies, um killed themselves and instead of looking into anything else. They're like, well, they played D and D. That must have been it, right, Yeah, it's going to be that.

Patricia Pulling, Irving's mom, formed an advocacy group called Bothered about Dungeons and Dragons or Bad and dedicated to securing government Yeah, dedicated to securing government regulation of role playing games. A sentence that I could not type without laughing and can't read without laughing, Like the government needs to regulate RPGs. It's very funny, um and like the Christian right being

what it is. You know, there was there were people in the country who both supported the regulation of RPGs role playing games, and also thought civilian should be able to own rocket propelled grenades the other kind of art scheme where has just had a bit of therapy, Like yeah, yeah, it's fucking great. So Pulling tried to sue TSR over her son's death, but that didn't work because obviously there

was nothing to any of her claims. So instead she dedicated herself to pumping out propaganda claiming that D and D encouraged devil worship and suicide. Her pamphlets described D and D as a fantasy role playing game which uses demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex, perversion, homosexuality, prostitutions, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination,

and other teachings. Wow. Okay, well it sounds like cooler game than it was actually. Um yeah. One of the things that's weird about this to me is like the guy I played D and D with when I was a kid was like a fucking young Earth creationist, was a great dungeon master and also believing was six thousand years old. Um So, not every Christian had this attitude about D and D, but it was real common on

the Christian right for a while. I actually found the cover art for one of the books that Bad put out, and it's pretty fucking wild. The jacket quote, which is purportedly from some some young fan of D and D, was the more I play D and D, the more I want to get away from the world. And you know, you might argue that this says more about the world that these kids were growing up in during the nineteen eighties.

The Dungeons and Dragons yeah, your life sucks. Your kid pretend to be something that's not a kid that gets bullied all the time, right, Yeah, of course you're going to want to prefer that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So the book promises witchcraft, suicide, and violence inside and is marketed towards educators, librarians, pastors, police and parents. And despite being wrong about everything, Patricia was terrifyingly influential in both Christian

media and among law and for smith. Her books on dungeons and dragons were so popular with evangelical pastors in the US and in Australia, where she played a role in propaganda distributed by the Australian Federation of Decency, which is I guess a thing, and you know with a name like Federation of Decency, that you're the worst people in the country, right basically, like yeah, like anything we

don't like is devil. Yeah yeah, yeah exactly. So Patricia Polling eventually got a p I S license and became a consultant for law enforcement on a number of cases, all of which the police lost. Yeah. She advised police officers to open interrogations of teenagers with the question have you read the Necronomicon or are you familiar with it? Fictional? Great, she thought, like, h Lovecraft was a professor. Yeah, like

what she did? Someone after decades after Lovecraft def published a book called The Necronomicon to kind of cash in on the fact that number one. Yeah, well it was. It wasn't even a real book. No, it was like so at one point, she told the news a newspaper reporter that eight percent of Richmond, Virginia was Satanist, a figure she'd arrived at by calculating that four percent of

teens and four percent of adults were devil worshippers. And the reporter pointed out, like, well, that's actually just four percent of the population. If it's it's four percent of teens and four percent of adults, that's four percent of people. And she told them that it didn't matter that her math was wrong because her numbers were conservative. Just amazing. That kind of attitude hasn't changed. No, right wing, No, it doesn't matter, we know what we mean. Yeah, it

doesn't matter. I feel that it's true. So like the fact that factually I'm just making ship up is fine. Yeah. Yeah. And the fact that Patricia Poland was clearly incompetent and wrong about everything and was still treated as a recognized expert by law enforcement for years. Shou'd key you in

on a couple of things. One, cops generally aren't very good at their job, and two, in nineteen eighties, it was very easy to become an expert on Satanism as long as you were good at scaring suburban moms and cops. So all of this brings me to the centerpiece of our story today, the McMartin preschool trial. Now, this is still again the longest and most expensive trial in US history, and I would contend it's also the very, very dumbest.

It started thanks to a young mother in distress named Judy Johnson, and her story is about as heartbreaking as it gets. Um, she's kind of the villain of this story, but like it's fun. She's a bad situation. This lady, she'd gotten into a bad marriage and she and her husband only stuck together because they had a kid. And then that child, their first child, got diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor at age eight, which would like just destroy any parent, right, Like that's just gonna ruin you,

no matter who you are. And she was not a superstable person. Before this happened, um doctors were not able to help him, and so she developed an a rational but understandable hatred of doctors in medicine, right, like, it's not fair, But also like your kids, you're gonna have so much anger over this that you're gonna blame somebody, right, Like, you can't expect someone circumstance, no one would, uh, And like a lot of people in this situation, Judy sought

refuge in religion. She carried a Bible with her everywhere and was a very very hardcore fundamentalist and generally the kind of fundamentalist you would expect to be worried about Satanism. Now, you combine that with the fact that she was kind of out of her mind with grief over a dying child and the fact that her relationship with her husband imploded, and you probably won't be entirely surprised at what she does next, especially since it later came out she had

a series of schizophrenic breaks. So it also turns out she's like, it's a horrible like she she's the villain, and that she's responsible for the evil of this story. You can't she's not morally responsible for any of her acts. Yeah, like it's yeah, she had a very bad hand and as a result she creates as a result of that and this cultural panic over Satanism and all of these different legal structures that have been set up in our society, she's able to do tremendous harm. And it's just a

horrible fucking story. Um. So Judy had another child, Matthew, um, and he was like two years old. I think when they moved, she and her husband moved to southern California. Um. And they moved to Manhattan Beach, which is like a very nice part of Southern California's basically Santa Monica. It's like right on the coast. It's a fucking beautiful part of the world. There's no parking, but there was back then. Um, it was a paradise filled with places for people to

put cars in those days. Uh. And it had a pre school called the McMartin Pre School, which was considered the very best preschool in Manhattan Beach. Um. And like so as the very nice preschool in Manhattan Beach, every parent and one of their kids in there. Um. And so Judy wanted her son, Matthew to be there. Unfortunately, Judy was a bit of a mess, and she failed to enroll him before the school was full for that session.

Instead of finding another school, she dropped her two year world child off off outside the school with a note in his backpack that said, like you have to take him, basically, like here's his name, and like deal with it. Yeah. Again, she's not making very rational decisions here because she's profoundly ill. Um. McMartin Preschool was founded by Virginia McMartin, who was in

I think her sixties at this point. Uh, And Virginia was like, I don't think it's a great idea to allow this kid here that his mom has basically trying to force him on the school seems kind of sucked up. But Virginia's daughter, Peggy, was more sympathetic and assumed that a mom who would do something like this was had to be going through some ship and that they should

help her out because these are very nice people. Um. So they take Matthew in and he attends class for a few months, and this proved to be a horrible mistake because by this point Judy was not just out of her mind with grief, she was also a hardcore alcoholic and having schizophrenic episodes. So pretty bad situation, Jake, Yeah, I'm gonna quote again from that book, Satan's Silence. That summer, Judy Johnson became preoccupied with the condition of her younger

son's anus. In June, she would later tell the authorities. Matthew come plained that it hurt when he made a bowel movement. In July, she took him to a nearby hospital emergency room, where she told the doctor that her son's anus was itchy and that she thought she had given him her vaginal infection. The doctor did not examine Matthew, but he did treat Judy for vagenitis. A few weeks later did he mentioned to her brother that Matthew's anis

was inflamed. She began making frequent inspections of her son's rectal area. So a few things are going on here. One is that again not a great, not a very healthy household. This kid has bad hygiene, right uh. Also, his mom is now daily poking and prodding his rectum

in order to check it, and that irritates it. And she becomes convinced that the irritation that she is causing is the is the result of sexual abuse, and she grows convinced that this is because Matthew's teacher, a guy named Ray Bucky, had sodomized her child repeatedly over the course of the summer. Now, this is untrue, and one of the reasons it's definitely untrue is that number one,

two year olds are very rarely sexually assaulted. Number two, wind grown men penetrate to your children with their penises. It either kills or severely injures the child. It causes horrible injury, right, Like it's a terrible Yeah. Yeah, it's not like something you would miss exactly, and it's not like it would be it would not be something you had to inspect for like the kid would probably need to go to a fucking hospital. Um. Yeah, So again, her allegations are untrue. But Ray was kind of a

weird dude. He'd spent most of his young adulthood as a California beach bum with kind of a well off family, smoked a lot of pot um. He did this thing that California surfer dudes did where he didn't wear underwear underneath his board shorts, so like he had people. One of the things people knew about ray is that sometimes he would sit down he could see his balls like it was like a thing. Not again, he's not doing

anything like bad. Like the most you could say is like, hey, dude, maybe you should be wearing underwear because like people were saying your balls all the time. Like, nothing bad. Just kind of a weird dude. None of the kid children he taught ever had any complaints about him. He seems to have been a pretty unproblematic teacher. I've I've never run across any evidence that he actually he did anything bad ever. Um, but he was a weird guy, and it was also weird in nineteen eighty three for a

young man to teach preschool. That was a woman's job, right, This is still an area, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, just as certain people were suspicious of working mothers in this period of time and thought that like that was contributing to the breakdown of the family, a lot of folks were suspicious of young men in childcare and assumed that

they must have some multerior motive. Um. And Judy Johnson was one of these people, and her suspicion of male teachers meshed with her hatred of doctors brought on by the tragic circumstances of her oldest son to produce again, all of these are like perfect storm things, right, Like that's the thing about all this ship, like it isn't just erupt out of nowhere. So I'm gonna read another fucking horrible quote. Lately, she had noticed how Matthew would

run around pretending that he was giving people shots. As the popularity of toy Doctor Kits testifies, this behavior is common for small children. And although Judy and although Judy hated medical professionals, matt You had been exposed to them regularly that summer since his brother was getting hospital treatment for his tumor. Yet, Judy Johnson believed that Matthew had no idea what an injection was, so she asked him if Ray Bucky had given him shots. Again, he said no,

but she pressed. Finally, after repeated questioning, he told his mother that Ray took his temperature. Judy concluded that the thermometer must have been Bucky's penis. Oh my god, yeah, I was just picturing like the kid running around filling up like little shot glass like syringes, which is again, like I think every kid probably as a period where they play doctor and ship like it's a incredibly common thing. Yeah, she becomes convinced. And again when she first starts asking

her kid, did did Ray molest you? He says no. And that's the case with all of these satanic child abuse cases. The kids are always saying like, nothing happens at first, which is again we talked about like believing victims. Part of the problem is that people didn't and they pushed the victims repeatedly to like, yeah, it's it's very bad. So Judy calls the cops. Uh. And she took her son to the hospital, and of course the doctor listened

to her story and examined her boy um. And again the doctor is like, hey, when adult men sodomized two year olds, it results in horrific damage. Uh, and a summer worth of anal rape would be immediately apparent in a boy this young. And the doctor saw no evidence of that. All he saw was evidence that Matthews Rectam was irritated in a way you'd expect if his mom was constantly poking it. The doctor was like, your kid

seems okay, and he sent Judy away. This made her angry, and again she fucking hates doctors and she kept, and so she kept like. She started going to the police next, and through a mix of coaching her son to talk about a stranger's penis and speaking for her kid in police interviews, which remember they take the mom's testimony about what the kids said as direct testimony from the kid, Judy is able to convince the cops that her son

had been abused. She and the cops shopped around for doctors until they found an intern at U c l A who had never diagnosed sex abuse cases before. This intern sees Matthews wrecked them and it's like, oh, yeah, something must have happened here. Again, he doesn't really know what he's doing because he's not good at this kind of thing. Like the police like, yeah, let's find someone to make the story true. You know, cops, I know, it's just it's all so bad. It's all really bad.

It's so fucking terrible. So the long and the short of this is the police opened an investigation into Ray Bucky, and as soon as the word got out, people start telling stories about Ray, not real ones, because again, he'd never done anything, but the kinds of stories people tell whenever someone a little weird gets accused of doing something terrible.

A week later, the police exacerbated this as cops are want to do, by sending out a mass telephone request asking if any other parents had been abused, and like, the mass telephone request also has like, hey, please don't tell anyone that we called you about this. But of course everyone starts talking about it. It winds up in the news and it starts spreading. And now what you have all these parents going to their kids and being like,

were you listed? So Judy Johnson also keeps adding new stories on about her son's abuse, claiming that Ray had forced him to wear a bra because one time her son had walked in on her dressing and said, Matthew wear bra. Again, kid sees his mom wearing a bra, doesn't really understand things, and it's like, oh, I want to wear a bra. She interprets. This is like he's been forced to wear a bra by his teacher. And also, yeah,

the day after this, she told police. Uh she so she tells police this, and then the day after this she starts claiming, based on the strength of vague comments by a two year old, that Matthew had been tied

up with a rope by Ray. So again the story keeps expanding, it gets more and more elaborate, and again, the very concept of investigating child sex trauma was new at this point, and the cops basically handed over responsibility to this case to the few folks on their team who had any training in this, and those people had been trained to believe the children never lie or make accusations based in fantasy. Again, that's the training too, in

addition to Michelle remembers and ship. So the cops keep using the parents to ask if their kids had experienced anything, and the parents, being people, start to get excited about all the rumors flying around town. Some of them start to talk to their kids, and after badgering their kids repeatedly, those kids report what they think their parents want to hear. Ray had taken weird pictures of them. You know, that

sort of stuff starts coming out. Now. The cops had searched raise home and found no photos, but whatever, like, it didn't matter that there was no evidence. The accusations were out there. Poor boy, Oh, it's so worse. His life is just shattered by It's fucked. It's completely fucked. Satan's silence goes on to note that as this process

went on quote, other children embellished their stories. Within days, Tanya Mrjuli had talked about being sodomized, and some of her classmates said Ray had penetrated both of their rectums and made them fillate him. They also named additional children as victims, but when questioned, this new group denied anything had happened. The police and many parents did not believe the denials. They assumed that the children were keeping quiet

about the abuse, and they searched for telltale signs. One woman said she noticed that her five year old daughter was overly interested in her mother's genitals, and she vowed to question them her further. Donna Murgilli remembered that since the beginning of the year, Tanya had been plagued with vaginal infections. Until now, Donna Antonia's doctors had attributed the problem to poor hygiene, possibly due to the fact that Tanya had been masturbating regularly since shortly after the birth

of her baby brother. Now, Tanya's vaginitis seemed to have a more sinister origin. Police detectives urged parents to take their children to u c l a IF for team evaluations. These goings on were openly discutched disgusted in Manhattan Beaches, markets and churches and its ocean front promenade. So again, this all just goes viral, you know, and these kids who all deny it at first start being pushed into

recalling abuse. By the end of September nineteen three, many of the children who had at first denied any abuse at all suddenly started coming up with elaborate stories about what they'd suffered. Satan's Silence goes into very good detail over all this, but to be honest, it is some of the darkest shit I've ever read. For some reason, detailed stories of children being convinced they were raped by an innocent man is actually a more disturbing to me

than stories of actual child abuse. It's just it's so fucked all of this stuff. For example, for an example of how this ship went down, a popular nursery rhyme at the time was what you say is what you are? You're in naked movie star. It's just like some nonsense kids would say, right, there's a bunch of ship like that. Yeah, right,

just ship kids say. Most people would recognize this as that, But all of the adults in Manhattan Beach were by this point fully off of their goddamn rockers, and the fucking police detectives have decided that children who werecalled playing this game, we're providing evidence that they'd be sexually traumatized by Ray Buckey because the Naked movie Star game they called it, like, it's just like fucking making horrible ship

out of absolutely nothing. So as this all expands, these kids get sent to a social worker named Ki McFarlane and Ki McFarland for an example of her background. She she's very involved in, like the child protection movement, all of this stuff we talked about last episode. She's involved in like this kind of growing movement to try to

like do group therapy sessions. When I told you about someone who was like, oh, I like these group therapy sessions because they're like like public like self criticism sessions that like leftist political groups. Dude, that's Ki McFarlane. So she's that kind of person going into this um. And again I think her motivation was good, but she is

another person who does horrific damage. And her main innovation was that she had developed a series of anatomically correct dolls little kids could use to discuss describe their abuse. Now this could be a useful development for kids who'd

been abused, and we're too young to verbalize it. But the problem is that Key used her dolls to make kids feel like they were in playtime, and then she would tell stories about the abuse she thought they'd suffered, and kids, little kids being little kids, would start talking about this thing, right because they think they're in playtime

and ship did you know? Um? Sorry, But one of the most ironic things here to me is that the actual child abuse in this case, at least, was from all the people trying to do the child abuse right, Like they're abusing these kids by planning this up on them and putting them through this, Yeah, fucking them up probably for life, like you can't go through this, and like repeatedly interrogated about the rape that like, god, damn it, it's so bad. But you know what's not nasty, Jake? Yeah,

the products and services to support this podcast. We're back. Ah, Those ads were a lot better than manipulating children and the believing they were the victims of massive sexual abuse. That's what I say about what Sophie. That counts us a nice thing I said about the products. Okay, well, Will Roberts still have a job by the end of this record. So yeah, so Ki McFarland, we're talking, we're

talking k M k mc fee. So she she she has these dolls and she yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna read you a quote to talk about like how she uses these dolls from a right up by the University of Missouri Kansas School of Law. That's kind of analyzing this case. Um, so here's yeah, how this all goes. Parents were encouraged to send their children to see I I, which is the place she worked at, For two hour interviews.

McFarland pressed four hundred children through a series of leading question and the offer of rewards to report instances of abuse at McMartin. Children generally denied seeing any evidence of abuse at first, but eventually Mini gave McFarland the story she clearly wanted to hear. After the interviews, McFarland told parents that their children had been abused and described the

nature of the alleged abuse. By March nine, three hundred and eighty four, former McMartin students had been diagnosed as sexually abused three hundred and eighty four. But well, no, we're getting into that. It starts to expand massively. So, in addition to interviews, a hundred and fifty children received medical examination. Dr Astrid Hager, who was one of McFarland's colleagues, concluded that eighty percent of the children she examined had

been molested. For the most part, she based her findings not on physical evidence, but on medical histories and her belief that any conclusion should validate the child's history, which is not how you do science, you know, yeah, no, not good medicine. So to make it clear just how coercive McFarland's methods were, I want to read a passage about her interrogation of a little girl named Tanya. Long after most McMartin kids had been pushed into inventing lurid

stories of abuse. Tanya held her ground that her teachers had done nothing wrong. But Tanya's mother eventually broke down in the face of all the other parents who'd grown convinced that their kids had been abused, and she sent Tanya to Kie McFarland. Kim McFarland's technique with Tanny was much more refined. Before asking the child anything about sex abuse, McFarland spent several minutes, engaging her in fantasy play. Oh Froggy. McFarland squeaked as she and Tany manipulated a frog puppet

and a toy doctor kit. I think you have a little temperature here. The two played with the banana Puppet, Big Bird, Mr Doggie, Mr Dragon, Cookie, Monster Bugs Bunny, Mr Alligator, pac Man, and Mr Snake. Not until Tanya was deeply absorbed in the world of pretended, McFarland present her with a collection of very special dollies in this little bag. They look like real people underneath we can

take off their clothes. Tanya then identified the dolls we weise chee cheese, which is what you called breasts, butts weenie, and the naugas hole or vagina. McFarland proceeded to ask Tanny if she had ever seen a man's weany her daddy's, Tanya answered. McFarland was not satisfied. How about someone else, I don't know who else? Another man? Still, Tanya existed, insisted she had only seen her father's. Well, I know some secrets, said McFarland, and I know that you know

them too. You know what I know some secrets about year old school? When Tanya still didn't respond. McFarland added that she had seen the little girl's friends from mcmartin's and they told her all the bad secrets. We can have a good time with the dolls, McFarland coaxed, and you know, we can talk about some of those bad secrets if you want to, and then they could go away. Wouldn't that be a good idea? Urging puppets on Tanya, she again asked if she knew bad secrets. Uh, Tanya

shook her head. Then maybe she could figure them out. McFarland's said she should off her secret machine and assured Tanya that she would feel better if she told it bad things about Ray. I hate those secrets, Tanya finally said, addressing a bird puppet on McFarland's hand. Ray Ray did bad things and I don't even like it. Do you

see what happens here? Yeah? I just thinking though, like that, Tanya, right, what a like strong minded child was just absolutely not like literally just pushed to the point of like committing something that didn't happen. Yeah, you know, like despite all that, Yeah, and again like it really has the problem here is not that like you shouldn't believe children when they report rebus. It's that you shouldn't badge your children who insists they

haven't been abused into it. It's yeah, there's part of me that's like, right, I get it. If if any parent heard anything like that, you'd be like, oh, yeah, but this is beyond that. This is like literally that woman planning these ideas. Yeah, it's so bad. Yeah, and I don't like I think McFarland. McFarland had a long history of working with abused kids, like before anyone, before people even really believed that it happened. She was doing that work, and she came from a good place, but

she goes fully. I mean, like what she's doing is evil here, Yeah, exactly. Now, the McMartin case didn't start off as a satanic ritual affair. You'll notice, like we haven't been talking about like the devil in this case yet, right, But you have to remember that stories about other such cases, like the ones we discussed last episode in Kerrent County, we're all over the news and Current County was only like two hours away from McMartin. Both parents and students

were hearing all the ship on TV. And the kids are hearing this ship on TV. And as these kids are getting interrogated and has to give more information, they start to make up ship based on the stuff they're hearing on fucking television, right, and also based on the stuff they're being told by their parents. And this starts with Matthew Johnson, who again his mom is the the very very sad story lady m who is very Christian

and believes in all this stuff. And she starts, she starts pushing her son to tell stories of not just being molested by Ray, but by being of being molested by McMartin teacher Betty Raider, who was sixty four years old at the point. And the more Matthew said, the more his mom praised him, and she started to suspect that the McMartin school had been the center of a vast network of pedophile Satanist because again, she's profoundly ill and an alcoholic. By January nine four, matt was telling

stories of being molested at a ranch. And I'm gonna read one of the transcriptions Judy made of her son's stories. And keep in mind parents could enter statements they coaxed out of their kids into the legal record and authorities treated this as a direct statement from the child because kids and kids are also, you know, incapable of making things up. So this is the statement she coaxes out of her son, or at least says that she coaxes out of her son. Who knows what how much he

he fucking said. Matthew feels that he left l a international in an airplane and flew to Palm Springs. Matthew went to the armory. The goatman was there. It was a ritual type atmosphere at the church. Peggy drilled the child under the under the arms armpits. Peggy's one of the teachers. Under the arms and armpits. Atmosphere was that of magic arts. Ray flew in the air Peggy, Abs and Betty were all dressed up his witches. The person who had buried matt Who buried Matthew, she said he

had been buried, is miss Betty. There were no holes in the coffin. Babs went on him with a went with him on a train and an older girl where he was hurt by men in suits. Ray waved goodbye. Petty gave Matthew an enema. Staples were put in Matthew's ears, his nipples in his tongue. Babs put scissors in his eyes. She chopped up animals. Matthew was hurt by a lion. An elephant played. A goat climbed up higher and higher, and then a badman threw it down the stairs. Lots

of candles were there, they were all black. Ray pricked his right pointer finger put it in the goat's anus. Old Grandma played the piano. A baby's head was chopped off and the brains were burned. Peggy had a scissors in the church and she cut Matthew's hair. Matthew had to drink the baby's blood. Ray wanted Matthews spit. You see what they said, like this is a kid, it's nonsense, like they're fucking elephants in it, Like right, but surely

the police would have looked him like there's no wounds. Nope, And why did she let him go on a plane with strangers if she was already worried about No, he didn't she none of this happened. Yeah, but like she claimed that this was like while he was at school for eight hours, they took him on a plane to Palm Springs and like they were goatmen. Like it's all it's clearly like a kid being coaxed into coming up with fantasies. And they sound like a child's fantasies. This

isn't what happens in sex abuse cases. There are very early elephants. It sounds like her fantasies, you know what I mean, Like not fantasy, but it's clearly some ships. Like I can't believe that the police ever got serious. Yep, they super do. Once the news broke that Satanists were behind the purported abuse at McMartin, other kids came forward with an avalanche of stories of devil worship, child sacrifice, etcetera. Kids talked about watching babies get murdered and all sorts

of wild ship. And one of the things that they would claim in this period, because this happens all over the Satanic panic, is there's claims people will claim I sacrifice babies or I saw babies sacrificed like all of this ship and that people would ask like, well, but there's no nobody was murdered, like, there's no reports of

dead people. So they developed this whole theory that Satanists had a tactic of having children at home and not getting them birth certificates so that they could have babies to sacrifice that the state didn't know about. Like, yeah, it's it's a cute, Yeah you had the Like the most insane theory is that the video of Hillary cutting a baby's face off and wearing it, and it's like none of them have seen it. They're like, oh, we

know it's there, do you know? It's like I don't think you do, because that would be like the only thing the news talked about for like a year if it happened, right, like a thought that was real the people. I mean, well, I don't know if someone would be on it, you know, yeah, someone would be on it, and it would be like the top topic of discussion

nationwide world. Yeah, Like like I look at how much people discussed when Hillary Clinton fell down that one time, Like if she was killing babies, it would be huge. Hundred people know the video exists, but we're all dumb because we don't believe it's amazing. So yeah, it's all yeah. Again,

there's no evidence of any of this stuff. There's no evidence of any baby's getting killed, there's no evidence of any plane trips to Palm Beach, but also authorities, the cops, and the parents believed every word of this because at this point complete mania had overtaken Manhattan Beach. Like everyone is out of their goddamn minds at this point. And some of it's understandable, like their parents who legitimately think that there's a child rape epidemic at their school that

their kids were involved in. Like nobody's thinking anymore in Manhattan Beach, right. Yeah. The whole thing as well though, is like I think the police, oh, but like the police kind of abusing the phears of her Absolutely, it's horrible. I'm gonna quote again from the University of Missouri, Kansas is right up here. Judy Johnson's reports of misbehavior at the mcmartin's school preschool became increasingly bizarre. She claimed that

Peggy bucky raised mother, was involved in Satanic practices. She was said to have taken Johnson's sun to a church where the boy was made to watch a baby being beheaded and then forced to drink the blood. She insisted that Ray Bucky had atomized her son while his head was in the toilet, and had taken him to a

car wash and locked him in the trunk. Johnson told police that Ray pranced around the pre school in a cape in a Santa Claus costume, and that other teachers at the school chopped up rabbits and placed some sort of star on her Son's bottom. Eventually, most prosecutors would come to recognize Johnson's allegations as the delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic, but the snowball of suspicion had been started rolling.

Chief cool Meyer's letter led to Newt which is the letter he like sent out to parents, led to new accusations and demands from parents for a full scale investigation of doings at the McMartin preschool. Bowing to this pressure, pressure at the district attorney's office handed a major portion of the continuing investigation over to Ki McFarlane. So oh no, really, it's puppet lady. It's so fucked up, God, like the

worst person. You give it to her. Let her investigate the preschool, the person whose job is absolutely not to investigate, like man of criminal conspiracies. Yeah yeah again. No physical evidence was ever uncovered of any sort of abuse or

anything else illegal. The closest thing they had to evidence was that softcore porn mags were found in Ray Bucky's home, which like yeah, yeah, and they're like playboys, Like it's not even anything that's like you could say, is like super raunchy, right, Like, none of this stopped the case from going forward. On March twenty two, nineteen eighty four, a grand jury indicted Ray Bucky, Peggy, Bucky Peggy and Bucky,

Virginia McMartin, and three other McMartin teachers. These seven people were initially indicted on one hundred and fifteen counts of child sexual abuse. Two months later, they were indicted on another ninety three counts. The case had become a political issue for the d A Robert Philiposian, who was facing re election and thought that putting away some Satanists would help his chances. Now, most of the McMartin seven were

held with outrageous bails. Ray Bucky was held without bail, and he spends five years in jail as a ristle in jail as a child molester, which like just yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it's they just destroy this man. Now. As the case proceeded, all of the McMartin seven had their homes searched. Nothing was found. By this point children were telling stories about secret tunnels under the school and being

forced to bury ritually murdered babies. And of course, since the cops aren't finding anything, a lot of McMartin parents decided, like, what the cops have to be in on it because they're not finding any of the evidence that's got to be there. So the parents take it upon themselves to investigate, right, so we get we finally get um. In March of nineteen eighty five, as the case war on fifty McMartin parents showed up at a lot next to the school and started digging to try to find the caves under

the school, literally literally digging. Yeah, and the d a, who again wants to get reelected, hires an archaeological firm to help them. Oh my god. And they're all certain that it's also just bizarre to have people who's like, like people have job titles and training for a reason. No, they don't, fuck it, Who are going to figure this out? Ye?

So yeah, everyone is certain that they're gonna dick find mass graves and caves underneath the school filled with like that's where the evidence has got to be, is the caves under the school. They don't find anything because there's nothing there because no one at the mcmartins school had

been molestic kids, you know. Um, So the actual court case, thankfully, there is a period here where some rationality enters into it, because the actual court case against the McMartin seven runs into immediate problems over the fact that there is no evidence that anyone's actually been harmed in any way, shape or form. Um. Yeah, but this is five years into a jail sentence for this guy. Well no, not not yet.

This is like through I mean the trial takes actually twenty eight months just the trial, and of course there's years before this where all of this is building. Yeah, he spends five years in jail. Um. So again there's no evidence at any point, and that's the actual court case runs into the massive problem of the complete lack

of evidence. But all of these people have already been convicted in the court of public opinion, and in fact, the d A announced quote the primary purpose of the McMartin preschool was to solicit young children to commit lud conduct with the proprietors of the school, and also to procure young children for pornographic purposes. His assistant announced that millions of child porn films of the victims existed. The media dutifully reported on all of this, even though again

no evidence of this had ever been found. Millions said millions, millions found not not ever, not nothing, assistant assistant to some weird stat And again, part of this is the problem that is starting to get better in American media, but it's still pretty bad. Where the police say something and journalists don't investigate it. They say, oh, the police said this, this has to be the truth. Let's report

on what the police said. And it's like, well know, they lie all the time, right, And you get like any kind of like the un might say something or say anything against it, people like, oh, here we go conspiracy, Like no, it's your job, like question people in power, Yeah, that's journalism. And also all of these groups have lied on a number of occasions, let me list them. It's not a conspiracy to say that people in power lie exactly right, Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's what the it's

what you do if you have powers you yeah. Yeah. So people magazine called McMartin California's Nightmare Nursery Time published an article with the one word title brutalized, Like media goes whole hog on this ship, not all of them, because again, okay, so the the authors of Satan's Silence, which have been quoting from our journalists during this period, and there's some of like the only people seemingly in the country who are like this is nonsense, Like all

of this is nonsense. What is wrong with you people? And they like their book is published like right around the time that all of this, like all these cases start to fall apart, like Satan's Silence is from that time. That's part of why it's such a good Um. I mean, it's also is where I got all the background of like what set this up. I can't say enough about what a good book it is if you want to understand, Yeah, yeah, very good journalists. Um yeah, it's a good book. Um.

So yeah. All these lies about the McMartin teachers led to a lynch mob mentality within the community of Manhattan Beach. Peggy Bucky was stabbed in the crotch by a random man while she was out on the street. The school was lit on fire and spray painted with graffiti that

said Ray must die. Several parents went so far is to solicit the services of a hitman to bomb Peggy's car like off the No, it never like yeah, they just like the first episode, we're basically talking about people filling a car up with gas and then they just put a brick on the brakes. There's no one at the wheel. It just goes sucking careening into the city. Yeah, it's fucking it's so bad. It's like to tell though, like such a portionary tale. It's it's so important that

people know about this exact Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, I'm gonna quote again from Satan's silence about like how out of control ship gets in Manhattan Beach. The fact that the accused were behind bars did not calm the frenzy running through the South Bay as parents and authorities pursued Judy Johnson's claims and became convinced that mcmartin's staff was

only one arc of a gigantic sex ring. Searching for the other accomplices, parents formed investigative squads armed with address lists supplied by c I I, which is what McFarland worked at. UH. They drove to their sons and daughters around to find molestation sites like the Devil House, which is like what the kids had just been making shut up, and they were trying to find real locations that clearly weren't.

As the children pointed their fingers at homes and businesses, mothers and fathers wrote down addresses and submitted them to the d a's office, which in turn distributed them to more parents, and and they're like, hey, we hear this business might be involved in mass child sex abuse, as your kid's been near it, like just and it's just like they're just firing a shotgun into a crowd basically, like they're just shattering lines left and right, like right,

like it's so bad. A father staked out nearby commuter airports and copied registration numbers off the tales of planes, while reporting suspicious characters such as the female pilot who maybe a lesbian. The kids are, yeah, yeah, buck them, because again the kids are talking about how they were flown places. So like some dad shows up to take down all the plane the in numbers on planes, Um, yeah, so is the primarily besides word of mouth? Is this

just like grocery store magazine covers? Is that what it is that's getting this information out of you know, major news and the and the d a's office. The cops are calling people and being like, we hear about this happening in this school or this building. It's not it's like tabloid. It's like there's like credible quote unquote credible. Yeah,

like fucking Time is reporting on this ship. Most people trust Time, Like you could argue Time magazine actually a long history of shitty journalism, but like the people, Yeah, yeah, it's not like the National Enquirer spreading ship. It's like looking like the d a's office. You're supposed to theoretically be able to trust the d A. If you're like a random citizen, you would assume that they're not just spreading nasense. But that's why you shouldn't assume that. Can

you take a can you take an addie addie break? Yeah? So if you know who doesn't spread nonsense about mass satanic, pedophilic conspiracy is that chatters the lives of human beings like a cluster bomb. I mean, i'd certainly hope you'd say the products and services that support this show, that's right, not a one of them. Fantastic. Okay, we're back, So I'm going to continue that quote about just how out of control things get. The paranoia was all encompassing. One parent.

Jackie mcgauley, who had a two year old daughter enrolled at McMartin pre school for a short time after the investigation started, came to believe that Ray Bucky had molested her child, even though the police were watching watching him closely. At this time, she also became suspicious about many other people, including a local newspaper columnists she was dating. When the two broke up, mcgalley accused him of sexual abuse. Later, she made the same charge against a worker at the

rich Stone Center where her daughter went for therapy. Her allegations never went anywhere, but were lost amiddle wash of outlandish claims, including rumors that the mayor's wife was ferrying corpses around in her station wagon. At times, people who spread these stories ended up accusing each other. One couple, for instance, through a celebratory party for McMartin children and

their parents the day the teachers were arrested. Later there were whisperings that those two were accomplices because the rumor went Their business was located next to the athletic club where Matthew Johnson and later other children said they had been molested. Yep, you just can't go anywhere anything. Yeah, because again, everyone's lost their fucking minds at this point, Like, yeah, exactly, it's a sort of collective insanity that's taken home here. Yeah.

As the trial wore down, Judy Johnson broke down completely. Her husband left her, and she of course immediately accused him of being part of a vast satanic pedophile conspiracy. She eventually barricaded herself and her children and her small home with like a pile of guns. She threatens her brother when the twelve gage shotgun when he flies in from out of town to help, and she's eventually taken forcibly two way psyche atric hospital, where she's diagnosed with

paranoid schizophrenia. Police who searched her home found a cash of guns and AMMO, including a rifle, under the bed of her cancer written son, who told cops that he would kill them to protect his mom because he's been like they've all been, and like finished, it's terrible And yeah, I mean he dies shortly thereafter because of the untreated brain tumor, and so does his mom. She dies from

massive liber deterioration caused by alcoholism. Um, it's just a terrible just a nightmare of a story all around, like again, and she's responsible for a lot of this, all this starting, but also like fuck yeah, just a fucking horrible, horrible tragedy. Everything about it's terrible. Ultimately for me, I'm just thinking,

like what the funk were the police doing? Like they facilitated this, They absolutely did, But again they're also not the smartest people tend to join the police force, and they're being told, they're being trained in a lot of cases that satanic ritual sex conspiracies are a major problem in America and an absolutely real thing. People believed this ship.

There's a great video called um Defending Yourself against Edged Weapons, I think, and it's like a police training video that I believe was made in the eighties, And it's actually a pretty good training video if you actually want very practical training on like how dangerous fucking knives are. It's

all about like knives are fucking horrifying. But there's a scene in it because they like recreate a bunch of scenes where like cops get stabbed, and one of the scenes they're like busting up a satanic covin And it's not like a joke. Think they thought that this was the thing that happened. Um, it's it's fucking something else. So on November two nine, after twenty eight months of testimony, that McMartin case went to a jury who spent two

and a half months deliberating. They acquitted Peggy Bucky on all charges and wound up deadlocked on Ray Bucky. Jury four person Louis Chang noted the interview tapes were too biased to leading. That's the main crux of it. Another juror told reporters whether I believe he did it or whether it and whether it was proven are very differ print. Judge Pounders offered his own appraisal of the verdict. I was not surprised by the verdicts. I would not have

been surprised at any decision that Jerry made. The judge basically being like everything like who the funk knows, Like everything is so out of control at this point nothing could surprise me. Yeah, and that's kind of like he says some stuff to that effect of like I'm just glad like to not be involved in the ship anymore. Like this is so this of course, outraged child protection

groups and parents across the country. Five hundred people, including dozens of McMartin parents, marched through the streets of Manhattan Beach with signs that said, we believe the children good stuff. Well, but then abody. One TV poll at the time noted that of respondents thought the BUCkies were guilty. In the end, no one was convicted of any crimes at the McMartin preschool. But Ray Bucky still, you know, spent five years ago. These people's lives are just shattered. Like it's just a

mean a woman got stopped in the cross. Yeah, Like it's so fucking it's so bad. Yeah, And like the super fun thing, Jake, you're gonna love this part. The super fun thing about the Satanic panic is that the complete lack of evidence and the acquittal of all of the charged people and what became the nation's longest and most expensive court case, did nothing to quell the public witch hunts. Again. They spent fifteen million dollars on this

case and can't find a goddamn thing. Well, the McCartin trial was going on Kern County, which we talked about the end of the first episode. Right that first case interrupts again into a series of allegations of mass child rape networks. The cases never go anywhere, and they're all hampered by the fact that all of the cops, lawyers, and judges involved in every given case like inevitably get to cry it a secret satanic child molesters themselves, like

they get added into conspiracy. It's really blocks off the trials, like now the judges being accused. It's like like the just the community loses goddamn mind. Hundreds of innocent people in the ensuing panic get charged all over the country, many of them did time in jail some king decades. Families are torn the funk apart. One example of this would be the case of Carol Felstead and I'm gonna quote now from a rite up on her case in the conversation In n she went to her doctor complaining

of headaches. Rather than being given any kind of useful medication, she was sent to therapy, which included hypnosis to recover memories of ritual sex abuse. She was given psychotherapy and like yeah, she was basically went through repressed memory therapy, and she started to believe that her parents had been the leaders of a satanic cult and that her mother

had murdered another of their children. And that Carol had sat on top of the body and then set fire to the family home, and like none of this was true. What actually had happened is that, like they had, the family had another daughter who was ill from birth and died in the hospital um from a defective apart before

Carol was born. But obviously her parents talked about it when she was a little baby, and like those I like that got into her head and then wait, so she had to repress a quote unquote repressed memory of someone she'd never met. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's sucking. Uh. Carol falsely claimed to have given birth to six babies who are meant to be conceived and ritually sacrificed by the Satanic cult. Her medical records showed that she'd never been pregnant. But she believes all this, all these memories

that this therapist shoves into her head, she believes. She cuts off contact with her family, changes her name, and never ever, ever like forgives or come back to her family. She dies in two thousand five, in like very strange circumstances. It's just a terrible case. And like by all accounts, before going to therapy, she was fine, she was doing great, she was an intelligent young woman with a whole life ahead of her, exactly like this, this therapist just destroys

her and her family. Yeah, yeah, it's tremendously fucked. Like the actual number of casualties of this will never know. It's probably thousands, thousands and thousands of easily, it's so bad. In sixty minutes, there at a one hour special in the Connection between Dungeons and Dragon, Satanic rites and suicide

seven to bats Ship. Christian activists published the Catechism of the New Age, an unhinged pamphlet that argued, among other things, that D and D was evil because it encouraged critical thinking and children, which inevitably lead to heresy of the

devil thinking. And of course heavy metal music gets demonized in this period too, right, and obviously, being good marketers, a lot of heavy metal musicians lean into this and like specifically start like doing devil stuff in their songs, and their teenage countercultural fans do this as well, and this sometimes end in tragedy because a lot of these kids, they're just doing it to be like Funk the Man, like the Yeah, exactly, but also it makes them suspects

and murders. Which is what happened in the case of the West Memphis three. Have you ever heard of this case? Real bad? Yeah. On May five of that year, eight year old Christopher Buyers went missing with of his friends. The boys were found murdered shortly thereafter, hog tied with their own shoelaces. One appeared to have his genitals cut off. Um, I mean, like, obviously, this is an actual horrific crime that was committed, and it was immediately put down to

satanic ritual activity. Three teenagers were quickly accused of the crime, based largely on the strength of the fact that they've been arrested for vandalism and liked heavy metal, and the whole case was a complete ship show. So, for one thing, the police department that is investigating this case is not just wildly incompetent, It was actively being investigated for stealing

drugs from another police department. The other West Memphis Police are not a good department from So the cops never secured the crime scene, UM, did not properly investigate the crime scene, and the coroner was incompetent because he believed and reported that the kids general genitals had been cut off as part of like a ritual and the real is that like it was a decomposing body that got eaten by animals, right um, and a competent later, competent corners,

like this is clearly what was done, what happened to the body after death. So the police in order to find the culprits, rather than investigating because again terrible police department, they go to a local juvenile psychiatrist and ask like, hey, what kids do you think did this? Right? And the yeah, yeah, who who who do we are is for this? Like we we are so tired from stealing all these drugs from the cops next door, Like we really don't have any time to look into this ship. So the psychiatrist

blames a kid named Damian Eccles. Now Eccles was eighteen at the time, and he yeah, he's the kind of kid fortunate name. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is a really it's it's a problem. And again his town is like a hardcore religious fundamentalist. It's fucking West Memphis in the eighties. Uh. And he wore all black and listened to the metal music. He read Stephen King books. He was interested in the occult, so he had like books on the occult, and ship

in his house, and he had mental health issues. He'd spent time in a mental institution, which is why the psychiatrist knew this kid was out there. And the psychiatrist, doing exactly what psychiatrists should never do, blames him for

the crime, and soon so did the police. Yeah, they wind up wrapping up a friend of Echo's in it, Jason Baldwin, who was sixteen and was like a good student who had no history of trouble um he but was also a fan of like heavy metal like they, and they drew scenes from like Metallica and Slayer and Iron Iron Maiden songs, and like teachers found them and so like, oh, these kids are like it's the devil. Yeah, and they've both been arrested for vandalism in shoplifting, but

like nothing violent, like never an actual crime. Yeah, they're fucking teenagers. Yeah, uh, it's it's real bad. And basically, in order to convict these kids, the West Memphis Police found a mentally disabled seventeen year old with an i Q of seventy two who knew both kids, and they bribe his poor family with like lies about reward money that if he like well like and like they're talking to him about like, oh, yeah, on, once you get these kids convicted, you'll be able to buy a truck

and stuff like that, like it's unbelievably fucked up. Yeah yeah, And so they questioned this, The family agree with him, question this mentally ill kid who has no tie of this, and the police question for twelve hours with no parent, no lawyer, no child advocate with him, and he confesses eventually that he echoes and Baldwin killed the kids, even though his like as a clearly coerced confession that's frequently wrong and includes facts that weren't part of like the

physical evidence, and he immediately recants. But it doesn't fucking matter, um, because all three of these kids get fucking convicted, and it's it's I mean, like now, law enforcements pretty certain that it was they were like those kids who were murdered were killed by a single person, probably an adult. Um. But yeah, twelve hours. I remember one reading something that really made me think, Yeah, someone said, are like deep long interrogations like that out right, it's like being war

aboarded with dialogues, you know what I mean. And it's like I remember thinking, that's such a good way when the water dialogue. Yeah, it's it's a nightmare. So Damian Echols gets sentenced to death, Jesse ms Kelly gets sentenced to life imprisonment plus two twenty years sentences, and Jason Baldwin gets sentenced to life imprisonment. Um and yeah, the the prosecution basically claims like this is part of a devil ritual that the kids were doing, Like that's part

of the case. Um And obviously like there was never any hard physical evidence. And in fact, in two thousand seven, new evidence comes out that finds like genetic material of someone who's not any of the three victims around the bodies of the victims and was not any of the defendants either, um, which you know. Anyway, the case they appeal and ship like the case winds up, it takes until again this happens in night. It's not until two thousand ten that the people in the case are able

to negotiate a plea bargain. Like, they don't even get declared innocent, like which you would think. Instead they have to enter an Alfred plea and which they assert their innocence but also acknowledged that the prosecutors had enough evidence to convict them and they get sentenced to time served, both having served like eighteen years um or all having So yeah, it's right, that's a lifetime you know. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it's horrible. It's horrible. It's a horrible, horrible story, Jake.

The thing is as well, this sounds dumb, but I was just thinking, like, now, if a real Satanic group came out, they could just be like, no one's gonna believe that we did this, you know, like off the off the Satanic Panic, like it's fine. Well, let's saying that it would probably create a news Yeah. I mean, all right, listen up, devil worshippers, you've got you've got a window here. No no, Jakenrahan says, start committing crimes now, Jake, this has all been a real bummer, just not a

great time. Um. And I want to end on something that is at least kind of funny. So one of the major spreaders of the Satanic Panic, one of like the people who was responsible nationwide for getting a lot of this nonsense out was friend of the pod Oprah Winfrey, um, who, boy howdy, had a lot of people on to say to tell leward lies about the things they've supposedly done.

But during one of these times, she actually had a member of the Church of Satan on her show, and a guy in the audience started claiming that he had been a Satanist and had like murdered somebody as part of a Satanic ritual. And you actually this guy got cross examined by the Satanist that Oprah had on stage. And it's fucking great, and I'm gonna I'm gonna see you that video. Now we're gonna end on that note because it's actually kind of funny. It's very, very funny.

So what happened in the in the in the ritual where someone was murdered and how were they murdered? Uh, they were stabbed seven times with with nice because it was what here eight years ago, So it was about and so rich was a witch? Is seventh and it got out of hand and the High priest brought out these seven daggers and the person in the form of a cross with the seven daggers. Um, was this person impaled against his or her will? They won't wished to

be sacrificed. You know that this was against his will? Um? But so how did you know you were you weren't going to be pulled in and impaled. That's why I got That's one of the reasons why I got out of the church. And the other reason why I got out of the church was mentally, I had a nervous breakdown after that and I just mentally could not handle it. How do you explain that? My first question would be, were you a member of the Church of Satan, a

card carrying member of the Church of Satan? And who was the grotto leader? I don't remember his name. You don't remember the name of a person who involved you in murder? Not anymore now. Like I said, I had had a nervous breakdown and I have partial amnesia. Man, that is excellent, And then gave him a car to say, yeah, actually, yeah, yeah.

The guy that is cross examine him looks like Dracula, looks like and he's like, no, this is stupid, and he's he's very like methodical and lawyerly about how he cuts that guy's claims apart. It's great. Yeah, yeah, So Jake, how do you feel about the devil Um? I don't know. I need a shower now, I think, like a long one, you know what I mean? After all that's pretty grim. Yeah.

But again, like it's like I said before, like you call all of that is like very interesting, and there are some groups around, but this stuff just makes it all look stupid. And God knows how many horrible crimes slipped through the crux, you know what I mean, or maybe will or I don't know. It's just it's just so outrageous that that kind of hysteria took over through the police as well. It's not our rageous, but you know what I'm saying, it's just another thing of just

like wow, great job you can find. There are some cases of like ritual murders, like we talked, very very few. It is a thing that has happened in history in this country and in other countries. Like it's not a thing that never occurs. But it's not what they claimed it was, right, there's no gigantic international network of Satanists murdering children for devil powers. Yeah, and it often the

occult stuff is actually nothing to do with the devil. Actually, there's very few actual Sate worship yeah, you know what I mean. Yeah, And most Satanists aren't Satan worshippers because it usually means something completely different. To them than like or yeah, I mean there's alread yeah, there's there's a bunch of different like I don't want to Like I've known Satanists who like spoke pretty eloquently about like why they called themselves that, and it wasn't like a worship

the devil thing. It was like yeah, but yeah, it's like sometime often or whatever. Yeah, it's fine. I mean, it's it's I think the best thing about this, like like you know, when you were talking about us, thinking, man, I don't want to hear this, and that made me think, like, yeah, that's really why you should have to hit do you know what I mean? It's such a demonstration of mass hysteria and not even failure, but like almost like the

authorities are trying to make it worse. It was so bad, you know what I mean, And the idea I think that won't happen again, Like, oh it happened, that can happen any time. It'll happen anytime. Like there's always shades of this every time, Like there's shades of this and sort of the panic that was erupting over Antifa earlier, there's gonna be shades of it in the boogaloo stuff. There's gonna be shades of it, and I mean human on it is not just shades of it went onto

descendant of it, but like several shades of ship. Yeah, yeah, it never like it's the kind of thing. There's a bunch of things. If you're a responsible member of society or a responsible society, you always have to be on guard for fascism is one of them, you know, which or another. It's what it is, right, it's a modern day which one actually, yeah, like almost, I mean this was a literal which they were looking. Yeah, it's awesome.

I'm I never knew how unreal how many people like you're talking about probably somewhere around a thousand people harmed one way or the other by Justina case right, almost four kids, but like also like all these business family members. God knows what problems those kids having their lives now as well, that kind of abused by the authority. Yeah, if you're if you were a McMartin kid who like went through all this like hit us, hit us up. I'm really curious about right. Yeah. Uh so, Jake, do

you want to plug things? Yeah? Man, definitely, people should definitely listen to the new one clearance basically trying to trying to bring everyone together, to kind of put the story of put Chewing On together, but at the same time going to be like, you know, by the end, I want to be like, this is absolutely we think it isn't his wife, you know what I'm saying. Um. And yeah, also popular Fronts my platform, independent journals and just search Popular Fronts and you'll find it all. Yeah,

check it out. Check out Jake's new podcast, check out Jake's old podcast, Find Jake on the Street. No, don't do that podcast. We're done.