The 1980s Satanic Panic resembled Pizzagate as a paranoid revival

Evidence

Pizzagate also looks chillingly like a revival of a more local paranoid fantasy, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early 1990s, when dozens of childcare workers, teachers, and parents were accused of engaging in the ritual abuse of children. The panic was partially set off by the publication in 1980 of a book called Michelle Remembers, cowritten by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith, his patient and eventual wife. The book purported to be a chronicle of Smith’s recovered memories of horrific Satanic ritual abuse in the 1950s, and it initiated some two decades of procedures in which self-proclaimed experts guided vulnerable patients through “recovering” similar memories. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 276

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to vault claims about moral panics, as in the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article on culturally recycled panics, and to the authoritarianism/prejudice-psychology themes. — connects to: QAnon has revived fears from the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, borrowing from its playbook and deploying similar folk devils. — QAnon Revives America’s ‘Satanic Panic’; Americans recurrently embrace religiously framed conspiracy panics about children and the Devil — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 236; A loaded-rifle attack on a pizzeria was triggered by viral Pizzagate articles — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 5
• QUESTION: What made Michelle Remembers credible enough to launch two decades of ‘recovered memory’ procedures? The mechanism of lay-expert authority is worth tracing.

Broader Connections

• Americans recurrently embrace religiously framed conspiracy panics about children and the Devil #expands (0.85) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 236
• A loaded-rifle attack on a pizzeria was triggered by viral Pizzagate articles #exemplifies (0.85) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 5