Life in The Age of Moral Panics
We keep doing the same thing.
There was something about Mary.
She was too attractive. She was too wealthy. She had too many kids. They were too healthy. So in 1674, Mary Bliss Parson's friends and neighbors started accusing her of witchcraft. The local court brought her up on charges, then acquitted her. But the accusations and rumors just kept coming. The Parsons had to move.
It was strange living in early Puritan America. If you were rich, it meant God liked you. If you were too rich, it meant you had some secret deal with the devil. If you were too outspoken or independent, it meant you were in cohorts with Satan.
Now, here's some irony:
In the 1980s, while American schools presumably tried to educate kids about the mistakes of the past via Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, they were repeating history all over again by fanning the great satanic panic. As adults talked about the unreliability of child testimonies during the Salem Witch Trials, they were literally coaching kids to rat out their babysitters, teachers, and daycare moms as satanists who practiced ritualistic sacrifice and cannibalism. I mean, it's really something to behold. Americans excel at promising to do better next time while learning absolutely nothing.
Canada's CBC News produced a great documentary on the North American satanic panic. It began with Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder's 1980 book Michelle Remembers, now widely discredited as a piece of fearmongering pulp psychology trash. In fact, it was debunked pretty quick by real journalists. That didn't stop American magazines and newspapers from publishing sensational reviews and think pieces on the book. Pazder capitalized on his fame, consulting on "Satanic abuse cases" that started popping up all over the country. He appeared on multiple television news shows, warning everyone about the occult. Everyone couldn't wait to accuse someone they knew of running a secret suburban satanic cabal in their basement that ate children.
Corporate media nurtured the idea of a vast, coordinated network of satanists trying to take over the world while, ironically, CEOs and lobbyists were consolidating their grip over politics. They spread conspiracies like peanut butter. Glorified tabloid reporters like Geraldo Rivera made their name by making outlandish claims, telling their audiences about secret societies with hundreds of thousands of members operating everywhere from small towns to major cities.
Meanwhile, parents like Patricia Pulling built entire careers out of the satanic panic. As the worst example of posthoc helicopter parenting, Pulling built the organization BADD (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) and spent nearly a decade lobbying against the game and its creators. After contributing to the mental anguish that drove her son to suicide, Pulling tried to blame it on the school principal, suing him for "cursing" her son by running a game club to keep kids out of trouble. She seemed to honestly believe the principal cursed him during a game, and the curse carried over into real life. She spawned the rumor that once you died in D&D, you had to kill yourself for realsies, and that kids actually believed they could summon demons in their bedrooms that possessed their souls.
Pulling tried to sue the game designers and then the company that sold the game. Courts dismissed all of the lawsuits. Nonetheless, Pulling managed to command significant media attention and found herself consulting on criminal cases everywhere. She broke multiple trespassing and harassment laws, stalking anyone she linked to the game and trying to ruin their lives. Although real authors, journalists, game designers, and advocates eventually discredited Pulling, she herself was never arrested, tried, sued, or held responsible for the lives she ruined.
It figures, doesn't it?