(Satanic) Panic Attack
Anyone who knows me well or who has followed me on the interwebz for a while knows that I have a long-time fascination with that period of time known as the Satanic Panic. Running roughly from the 1970s through about 1990, the Satanic Panic was a cultural freak-out in the U.S. that drug music, movies, books, games, and occasional day care centers into a morass akin to the witch hunts of old. And right now, the signs are clear that a few dipshits want to run it back again.
My first grand statement on this in the modern era was on the March 26, 2018 episode (episode 72, to be precise) of Cult Cinema Cavalcade. Hosted by Brandon Peters and Cullen Bricker, the podcast covered, well, cult cinema. By the time we did this episode, my third guest appearance, it was a running joke that I was always covering Satan-related TV movies. I had talked about some instances of the Panic from my personal experience, but on this episode, which dealt with Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters, I went full-bore into the history of how it happened (I get into it at about the 10:20 mark).
When Brandon started his own show, subtly titled The Brandon Peters Show, we ended up creating a subseries called “Products of the Panic” (the first episode, from November 2021, is embedded below). POTP zeroes in on specific topics, like the infamous 60 Minutes segment on Dungeons & Dragons or the Michelle Smith documentary, Satan Wants You. It has allowed us to take one subject and give us lots of room, so that’s a fun thing to revisit from time to time.
But where we come back to this with our current ruinous state of public affairs is how we always come back to it. Moral panics generally happen when political or social leaders decide that they need a bogeyman to blame for society’s ills or a cudgel with which to beat down a minority or disenfranchised group. Look at Salem or McCarthyism or Klan-driven lynch mobs and you get the point. And when it comes to bogeymen, who’s a bigger bogeyman that Satan himself?
The great thing for the opportunists who use Satan as a tool of moral panic is that it puts the speaker/crusader/dipshit in opposition with a diaphanous, unprovable ultimate evil. Like those good ole’ boys in Salem, with the right audience, many times the simple accusation of Satanic activity is enough. That’s what fueled the disaster that was the McMartin trial (our episode on that is right here).
Inspired by the words of abolitionist Theodore Parker, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. popularized the phrase, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Maybe that was happening toward the end of the Satanic Panic when several of the biggest televangelists, who had definitely leaned in on some of this bullshit to enrich themselves, began to experience hubris-fueled reversals of fortune. Oral Roberts’s ministry was already struggling a bit when made a fund-raising pitch that suggested God was “going to call him home” if he didn’t get x amount of money by a certain date. Public sentiment turned on him, with comedians mocking statements of his like seeing a “900 foot tall Jesus” in 1977. More mundane but just as effective of ruining them in public were the cheating scandals that hit Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker. Swaggart had more than one scandal regarding dallying with prostitutes (his 1988 one produced the prosaically hilarious “I have sinned against you” speech) and he also had a tiny problem with being a supporter of RENAMO, which did little things like committing war crimes in Africa. Bakker notably was accused of rape by Jessica Hahn, and he had already been under investigation at least twice for financial malfeasance before that blew up in his face in 1987. Word was that the Reagan administration had slow-walked investigations into Bakker and other televangelists because their audience was a big chunk of their base, a (deliciously ironic) devil’s bargain that occurred in 1979 when Reagan invited the Moral Majority into his campaign camp.
So yes, while kids were being persecuted for liking Judas Priest and Ozzy or playing D&D or enjoying Freddy and Jason at the movies, government officials were covering for televangelists who were allegedly supporting or even committing atrocities. What fun.
Which brings us to now. It was part of the 1980s playbook for that side to label an endless number of things “demonic.” So when I hear assclowns like Indiana lieutenant governor Micah Beckwith refer to a local marching band’s make-up from one of their shows “demonic” or refer to Islam as “a demonic death cult,” I know that fucking tune. And, as is almost ALWAYS the case with these motherfuckers, the son of Beckwith’s pastor friend recently got six years in a child exploitation case. Beckwith previously co-hosted a podcast with the pastor called “Jesus, Sex, and Politics” that discussed morality. This is abjectly hilarious when one discovers that the convicted son of the pastor also had sex videos of his parents on his computer. So to recap, Islam and marching band performances of Carmen are “demonic,” but the pastor dad who obviously fucked up somewhere returns to the pulpit, even as other congregants make reports on his alleged inappropriate behavior? I believe that’s rolling a Nat 1 on “avoiding a self-own.”
The far-right loves to toss around nebulous concepts to attack anything that they don’t like or understand. That’s why education is “indoctrination” and entertainment is “demonic” and health care is “communism.” They rely on their base to not know what these things really are, and then inflame them. One of the stupidest examples lately is the incel rile-up targeted at the casting of Luipita Nyang’o as Helen of Troy. Those dipshits lost their minds that Christopher Nolan cast a Black woman in the role, crying about “historical accuracy,” when a) Helen of Troy wasn’t real, and b) according to mythology, Zeus fucked her mother Leda while in the form of a swan and Helen and her sister Clytemnestra and their brothers Castor and Pollux were born out of a giant egg. But yeah, hiring an objectively beautiful actress is the problem.
The “demonic” thing has started to pop up more and more because these boneheads have finally grasped that they are losing the middle ground. Their hardcore adherents might still be there, but they need the middle to win elections. And they’re losing it with their grift and incompetence. So, as they have so often in the past, they’re pivoting to moral panic. It’s in the minor stages now, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it ramped up as the midterms approach. That side is in for a clock-cleaning of historic proportions, and they’re scared. Their leader is a dumpster fire sliding further into delusion and everyone under him is a buffoon. Is it any wonder that they’re going to say that everything that isn’t them is THE DEVIL?
We’ve been here before, kids. But no one says we have to stay here.