Retronauts - 666: The ’80s Satanic Panic

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

The devil is in the details as Jeremy Parish, Diamond Feit, Chris Sims, and Benito Cereno look back at a major cultural moment for America in the 1980s—the so-called Satanic Panic—and the knock-on effect it had on video games and other media. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This weekend Retronauts, Lucifer, I'm home. This is the most evil episode of Retronauts to date, and as such, we have dedicated this episode entirely to Satan. That's actually very glib. So obviously, 666, you know, you can't do, you can't get to that number of a podcast to not do something. And so I wanted to take this opportunity to roll out a sort of branch of Retronauts that I've been developing for a while. while called Trends and Influences, which we kind of dipped a little toe into this past summer talking about political trends and things like that that influence video games. But I do want to start looking at culture and history that surrounded video game history and influenced it and isn't

necessarily directly about video games. So my thought was, having lived through the 1980s and experience this firsthand in my conservative Christian town, the satanic panic of the 1980s, which I thought, well, that will be a light frothy topic because that was a goofy thing. I remember, you know, getting trotted out to hear lectures about how evil D&D was. And, you know, so this will be a fun, lightweight sort of thing. And then I actually did the research and reading and watched documentaries and discovered, no, actually, kind of like the, you know, the communist hearings, the 1950s. The satanic panic, even though it was stupid and seems inexplicable in hindsight, it really wrecks in people's lives. So this is maybe a little more serious a topic that I intended it to be. But nevertheless, it is something that has had a real impact on video games and is something that I think is very relevant. to today's culture, and it just, it kind of interfaces indirectly with video games in a lot

of ways, and we will talk about that. But mostly we're going to talk about what the literal hell this was. And to join me on my spulunking into the satanic realms this episode, we have our returning regular from Japan. Thank you, Your Honor. This is Diamond Fight, and I'm here to argue on behalf of the defendant, so you might consider me a Beaselbub barrister. I won't do that voice anymore. Thank you very much. No, no, it's great. I'm just a simple country podcaster. I don't have suspenders, but I'm doing the gesture with a, yeah.

And also returning to Retronauts for the first time in quite a while, a former Retronauts East person who is no longer in the East, but we still like him anyway. Please, who are you? Hey, sorry, that's my, that's my ringtone. That's, sorry, hang on, hang on. That did not come through in the transmission. Oh, did it not come through? Oh, that's a bummer. That was a good job.

It was probably copyrighted and Zoom was like, no. Yeah, it was running with the devil. I'll send me the drop. I'll send me the drop so you can use it. Yes, it's me. You can just do the, oh, Chris Sims. You can do the isolated David Lee Roth audio track from running where the devil. It's really terrible.

Oh, one time. Ah! Oh! Yeah. It's bad. I'm here. I'm so happy to be back on retronauts and hail Satan, everybody. Yeah, when I thought of the devil, I thought, oh, Chris Sims needs to come back.

That's because Chris Sims co-hosts, co-hosted. Is it still a running thing? It is, it is, indeed. A podcast with our fourth guest this episode. Why don't you please introduce yourself and tell us about that podcast and why I might have said, Hey, you guys should join us. Okay, hello. Hi, how is everyone?

My name is Benito and I, with Chris, we host Apocry Pals, which is a podcast about a Bible and stuff that is Bible adjacent. And we talk about it in a way that tries to make a semi-scholarly approach to the Bible accessible to people who are from outside of academic circles. It's a comedy show, but also we're not making fun of the Bible. Except the dumb parts, I guess. That's probably fair. Yeah, that's the show. We do, I mean, we do Apocrypha as well. We do Saints Live.

Sometimes we look at Jack Chick-Tracks. That feels that's a little relevant to today's discussion. Before we get too deep into everything, though, can I ask a quick question? What is, I should have written this down. Hold on. what is video games it's a it's like you know a chess but with d-pads

you remember bible adventures we did an episode oh yeah okay like bible adventures okay okay so different kinds and on el shodai oh yeah ascension of the metatron we do we do have an episode on elshadai ascension of the metatron

we have so yes we've got a couple episodes on video games video games are where you attack and dethrone god actually oh okay so they fit right into this topic. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. I would like to add real quick, we do not, unlike what my mom seems to think the show is about, we are not tearing down biblical scripture. But we are also not a comedy podcast in the way that Mike Warnke is a comedian. Oh, buddy. There we go. Something that will come up later in the

episode. Good. Did you watch that video I sent you, Chris? No, because I already was familiar with it. All right. So this episode is going to be me and Diamond and a lot of in jokes that we don't get. But that's okay because it's going to make everyone's lives better. So just as a quick content warning, like I said, the satanic panic, even though it was deeply stupid and really hard to explain in hindsight, there is some pretty rough stuff involved in that, some of the origins of it and the results that it had on people's lives. And also the connections that. it has with present-day society and unhinged people. So just as a warning, if you're sensitive, that sort of thing, you may want to say, hmm, perhaps I should skip ahead to episode 667, and that is okay. But for those of you who are interested in kind of digging into some of the nitty-gritty, and we're not going to get too into that sort of stuff, but just to kind of learn more about this really global trend that was exported for.

America, one of America's worst exports, actually, and how it had an impact on video games and other media? Stay tuned, because the devil is in the details. So before we get started, I would like to recommend you do a little external reading on this if this topic interests you. A lot of my memory was refreshed on this topic by a fairly recent documentary that you can rent on YouTube and some other places called Satan White. wants you. And it is an attempt to kind of dig into the book that really kicked off the satanic panic in America and Canada, I suppose. And it actually reaches out to people who were involved in the periphery of the whole thing and whose lives were impacted, who, you know, were in law enforcement or media at the time and, you know, style.

and said, what's, what's going on here? Which not enough people did. So it's a pretty interesting documentary and a lot of information has been cold from that, although I did, you know, do additional readings. So I'm not just trusting one source like everything that we're going to talk about has been pretty well vetted, I think, and corroborated with other sources. Does anyone have any other recommendations that they would like to put out there? Yeah, I can highly recommend episodes of the podcast you're wrong about, where they dive into a lot of stuff, but the author or the creators of the podcast are Michael Hobbs, who was a reporter and Sarah Marshall, who was writing a book on The Satanic Panic at the time.

She is in that documentary. Yeah. Because she has a very memorable name. Yes. I will not forget Sarah Marshall. You shouldn't. But they did a very, really good deep dive into Michelle Remembers. They did a very big deep dive into Michael Warnke, who I know Benito was eager to talk about.

And also plenty of other topics, but a lot of satanic panic stuff. I got to say that documentary is a great watch. But if nothing else, you get to meet a Wiccan police officer from British Columbia, which is just that's such a wonderful sentence to be. It's a sentence that had never existed. before that. No, great stuff, though. Honestly, it's really, you know, as I was a child in the 80s, so this kind of, this all kind of washed over me at the time, and it seemed like something that was very strange.

You know, why are some people on television talking about dead babies and eating the babies and looking at the babies and the baby smiled back at me? Like, all these things were just on television all the time, and people took it as serious, and even as a child was like, wait, what are you talking about? And to come back and realize, oh, no, this really. really was a huge thing that started out with basically a single person and her doctor and who exactly wanted the story to get big and who exactly was embellishing is kind of a debate, I would say. But from this flashpoint in Canada of all places, it blew up and hit the Tinder box

of America, especially America television. And boy did it run wild. And boy did it, it's still going. It's still going in certain places. There are things happening today that are absolutely a little, you know, what brush fires that are left over from the ignition 40 years ago? Or huge conflagrations in some cases. Yeah, so the notes that I put together for this episode were pretty extensive, about 12 pages of notes. And it does get into sort of the origins, like some of the influences, some of the reasons that the satanic panic happened beyond just, you know, sensationalism. Like, it was just a kind of thing that hit at a very volatile time in our culture. And there were a lot of external factors that just caused people to become

unbelievably credulous and say, yes, I do believe that two million babies a year are turned into fodder for Satan and eaten and turned into candle tallow without really stopping to think how many babies are born in America each year? And it turns out it's not that many more than 2 million. So, you know, there is the question of how are all these babies being born and stolen away? And somehow, it's never happened to anyone that we know. But I guess the idea is just, this doesn't happen in our town. It's the other places that are bad. And so we're going to talk about some of those things. I do want to go a little bit out of order with the notes, since Diamond sort of got the ball rolling there. I want to ask what your experience is,

with satanic, panic, panic, panic, we're back in the day. Chris, it seemed like you had an extensive list of notes that maybe you want to talk about. So maybe cherry pick a few gyms and we'll go from there. Well, I know Benito and I both grew up in the South. And Jeremy, I know that you were either from the South or South adjacent. Nah, I grew up in Texas, which is more the West. There we go. There we go. But I was born in Michigan, so that's not the South at all.

But very, very much in that same Bible Belt vein. Oh, yes. We were the buckle of the Bible Belt is what everyone called Lubbock, Texas. Yeah. Fortunately, I never really ran into satanic panic stuff directly in a lot of ways. It was just sort of like in the air. I know that had I gone to, say, First Baptist, instead of, of Swan Lake Presbyterian as I did growing up that things probably would have been a little bit different,

but definitely had people come to my school to talk up, like to give talks to an assembly of the entire student body about the devil, which is not strictly legal. And I know that some of the conversation was about video games. The one thing that happened to me in particular was I had actually pre-ordered the Super Nintendo version of Doom, which as we all know is the best version of Doom. That's what YouTubers told us in the year 2025, yes. Yeah, if you're going to, if you're going to play one, play that one, and then you won't like first-person shooters and you'll really get into Metroidvania's. Although, I will say we at Limited Run Games have done a bang-up job of doing really weird, cool stuff with a reissue of that. So try that version of Doom for Super Nias. Anyway, please, Chris, go on.

What you should have done was release the T-shirt that I got for pre-ordering it at Toys R Us, which was a shirt, the black t-shirt that in, like, bloody red letters said, nothing can save you. And then I had the Doom logo on it, which is a pretty intense shirt. And I did wear that to school exactly one time. And the reason there was not a second time was because a classmate did approach me after I had noticed significant whispering amongst my classmates. One did approach me to let me know that there was someone who could save me. And his name was Jesus Christ. Well, now you know. Yeah.

That is at least half the battle. Yeah. But I definitely grew up in that time when, I mean, the things that I like are video games, comic books, and Dungeons and Dragons, all of which have been the subject of various moral panics over the years. Do you have the copy of the comic book that has Kisses actual blood in the ink? I do not. I did work on a Kiss Army of Darkness crossover, though. So, you know, I'm not too far from having blood in my comics, I guess, maybe. fair enough uh diamond you you kind of got this ball rolling like i said earlier so what about you

what were your uh what were your brushes with satan and panicking over satan well i may be the most outlier here because you know i'm from new york city and new york city yes get a room with the best salsas made um no but and also we were joking around before the podcast started and someone said the words jukoku which is very fun of me because i am i'm actually jewish so Yeah, Satan and I aren't really connected directly. We don't really have a lot of, a lot in common. But it's still, I was still a child in the 1980s, and I was, I was invariably impacted by all these things that came up and came around us. And, you know, a lot of my friends were not Jewish.

So I would hear them talk about things that were just, you know, holidays and important batters that were in their lives. Okay, that's fascinating. I don't know what you talk about, but okay, that's great. But it kept bleeding into because, yeah, as Chris mentioned, a lot of the stuff that I liked was things that these sort of people seem to hate, and they seem to have decided that, oh, those, you know, that music that you enjoy is actually being made by people who worship Satan, and their records are designed to make you kill yourself. And, you know, again, even as a child, I'm like, wait, so the band wants me to kill myself, but wouldn't they just want me to buy more of their music. I just, um, and so it was, it was very much, it was a constant climate that only died out, it died out the wrong word. It faded away, but it never truly disappeared. Because even, even years later when we sort of talked about this sort of, uh, the situation in past tense, like it was all behind us, like, no, it kept going. It kept going, you know, I think there used to be a baseball team called the Tampa Day Devil Rays. And I sincerely believe one reason they changed the name of that team is because

people, you know, they're in Florida, I think people were actually upset that they kept using the word devil. I believe that. I am not, I don't have a source to go to, but I, I remember reading stories about certain people who are like, hey, why is this team called the devil race? Should we really be talking about the devil that way? It's like, it's a fish, but today are the Tampa Bay raise. There's no devil there anymore. You know, I've been to church potlucks where they serve deviled eggs. I've never been able to reconcile that morally. I love those eggs. Benito, what about you? Yeah. So, yeah, I grew up in a very religious family. People who have listened to Apocry pals know that I come from a very churchy background and of the evangelical American type. So yeah, I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church. And I spent a lot of my time at church. I was definitely a church kid. And so I encountered a lot of the elements of the Satanic panic.

Uh, not, well, it was one of those things where it was kind of part of my day to day in the sense of like, this is media you can't consume or this is bad or, you know, don't do this. Uh, not the thing about, um, baby blood sacrifice and sexual abuse. Like, that's the stuff I didn't find out about until much later, uh, when I was an adult. And I was like, oh, that, uh, turns out this is a lot more than just like backward masking, uh, at the, at the heart of this thing. But, yeah, like, definitely, you know, my mom was concerned about this stuff. You know, my mom is the kind of person who definitely believed that mazes and monsters was a true story. If you guys know that movie, she definitely quoted that to me one time. She's like, you can't play Dungeons of Dragons because of this one time that Tom Hanks got lost in the sewer.

And that's a true story. But, like, at various times, I was not allowed to watch Bewitched because that was, like, too much occult for my mom. and yeah, you know, I listened to Christian rock music up until I was about 16 and my parents couldn't stop me from picking other stuff to listen to. But I still kept my, I still kept the sleeve of my Pixies record turned around backwards so they couldn't see the naked breasts on the cover of Surfer Rosa. But yeah, so like a lot of the stuff, you know, I grew up 80s, 80s, and so I was definitely in the in the circle of people who were like pointing things. fingers outwards right during during this stuff so and and my mom very concerned about like

the Satan worshippers that they're out don't go out on New Year's Eve that's when the drunks are out at the Satan in the Satan's so that was my family so I definitely grew up with some elements of it but the daycare stuff was new to me until much later And yeah, so for myself, and yeah, so for myself, I think I actually grew up on the religious spectrum than you did, Benito. I was, my family three times a week would go to services at the Church of Christ. Yep. People like to go, oh, Southern Baptist, that's the worst one.

It's like, no, you think it's the worst one because they're the loudest one. There are many that are a lot worse. Yeah, I mean, it was a church where we didn't use instruments because instrumental music was not directly permitted. like verbally permitted in the New Testament. It was never actually like excoriated or warned against, just never actually, you know, there's nowhere in the Bible that says you can use instruments in your music

to worship God. So it was all. There's a lot of instruments played in the Bible. Yeah. Not a New Testament. Yes, but it's the Old Testament, my friend. Yeah, that's how, that's how my grandpa was raised. My grandpa was Church of Christ.

And so he had not heard an organ until he married my on, they've been converted to being a Baptist. So the interesting thing is that my family kind of got into becoming part of the Church of Christ, not because of the conservative streak in it, but because it was more like an intellectual historical thing. They were more interested, especially my father, was interested in the fact that it was really sort of kind of a back to the roots sort of approach to Christianity and religion and didn't have a lot of the ceremony attached to it.

But, you know, it did attract a lot of very, very conservative types. And I would never, ever want to go back to that church in this day and age. But back then, I don't feel like it was so bad. And part of that, I think it helps that my parents were not and are not very conservative. They're pretty progressive and left-leaning, probably because they grew up in Flint, Michigan. And it's kind of hard not to just soak in that Michael Moore ambience. growing up there. So, you know, the time that I spent in church was very much about, like, hey, learn to be a good person, don't be an asshole, and God's out there doing stuff, whatever.

But, like, really, you should think about who you are and the kinds of things that you do. So I kind of got away lucky, and I still have a good relationship with my parents because they're not, like, twisted and bent into using Christianity and religion as a weapon. to hurt other people, which is kind of rare these days, and it's nice to see. But, you know, as a result of that, there was a lot of very sort of cultural and social conservatism surrounding us. And, you know, I had friends who, like, the only music they would listen to was Striper and the boogie boys because they, oh, maybe Amy Grant, because they were all, they were all religious and so forth. So, you know, a lot of my friends also were kind of like, this is stupid. So,

When one Wednesday night at Bible class, we were pulled out of our class and dragged across the street to the Christian college next to our church so that some police detectives could lecture us on the dangers of Dungeons and Dragons. I was probably like, I don't know, 12 or so. This was the late 80s. So we were all just kind of like, this seems ridiculous. And I had some friends who were very, very not having any part of it. but there were lots of people who did buy into it. And so I kind of grew up in this sort of mixed setting where there was a lot of like extremely straight-laced conservative Christianity and a lot of, you know, more laissez-faire mindsets. And so it was kind of hard for me to take the whole satanic panic thing seriously because even as a 10 or 12-year-old, it just seemed kind of stupid.

But, you know, the imagery and the concepts of satanic cults and rituals did seep into society and to pop culture and have become sort of perpetuated long beyond the point where everything to do with the satanic panic has been debunked and kind of shot down and killed off. So that's kind of where I'm coming from. Kewa, kent, herma, hermanu, these, these, Somme, o'stasaswa, Tepen, Favala, Ka'ala, ka'u'a, Kha'u'a,

Pha'u'a, Anyway, so that is the satanic panic, our personal experiences. Now let's talk about the origin story. And we're going to drop a pin in the year 1980 when lots of people who were cool died, like John Lennon. And a book called Michelle Remembers came out. And this book had been in development for like four or five years. It was basically a series of transcripts with commentary added based on therapy sessions where a woman named Michelle Smith went into sort of this deep trance state and talked about her repressed memories. And it turned out that when she was living in the sleepy town of Victoria, British Columbia, she was abducted for like,

two years by a satanic cult that did all kinds of horrible things to her, like make her eat babies and who knows what else. And it was horrible, just so bad. And so she would, you know, share these experiences on tape. And her therapist, Larry Padsder, Pazder, would transcribe them. And, you know, after a few years of this, he put together a complete book and they published. it, and it became a massive best-selling hit that spread across the U.S., in Canada, I guess, and made people aware of all the terrible things that satanic cults were up to in our very own

hometowns, doing horrible things to our children, and just doing their best to unravel the delicate thread of civilization. It was truly, truly, truly. terrifying. It's weird because no one had actually seen these things happen, but she said she remembered it when she was in therapy. And therapy was still kind of, I guess, new at the time. So people were like, yes, okay, sure. Why not? Definitely the idea of like repressed memories coming to the surface was new and had been really taking the world by storm, especially with regards to, like, sensationalized, uh, psychology stuff. Uh, this was also the era of, uh, and this is something that is pointed out on, on your wrong about a lot. This is the same era as Sybil, uh,

which is probably more well known now for the movie that Sally Field started about, uh, dissociated identity disorder, uh, that was also later revealed to not entirely be based in fact, but, but Jeremy, I do want to point out, you say it turns out she had been kidnapped by, uh, satanic cults. Sure, Jan. Yeah, I think it turned out that she, I think it turned out she hadn't actually. But she said, it's true that there's a lot of evidence that she was, you know, having a happy normal life during this period that she recounts having been in the thrall of Satan. But nevertheless, she said, like, don't you believe women? It's kind of shocking in the documentary when, you know, because I talk to members of her family.

Obviously, the Michelle of Michelle Remembers did not want to be part of the documentary, but they talked to members of her family and talked to members of Pazer's family. Pazer's, has actually since passed away, but his wife, his ex-wife, and his daughter were there. And, you know, one thing that gets lost in all this is that at one point the story changed from, I was abducted to, my mother gave me to the sickness cults. And Michelle's younger sister is the documentary. She's like, I really can't believe my mother. would give my sister to Satanist.

Like, that wasn't part of my childhood. And it's just a, it's kind of like, wait, no, you're really saying that your mother turned to her, and it's also, I mean, it's somewhat convenient the fact that by the time she says this, her mother had long since passed away because she died of cancer and her father was just not in the picture anymore. So she kind of had an easy out there to sort of point the finger of people who weren't there to defend themselves. And everyone sort of said, oh, well, that's, that's a terrible story.

I'm so, we're so glad you survived this. And then when they start asking questions about, you know, do you have any scars from the time they, they chopped you with knives or whatever? And all the, like, her stories just include these sort of magical outs that, oh, no, the angels came to me and healed me. At one point, the Virgin Mary appears, but she's speaking French. And Michelle Denai speaking French, which to me is an American, like, wait, I thought all Canadian speak French. and her family's like we literally our grandfather spoke French you spoke French why did you tell people

you don't speak French anymore like there's just so many weird things that like ease like own goals like wait why did you put this in your story here's what I'll say about Michelle remembers first of all Michelle and

Dr. Pasadr did leave their spouses and get married and there's a lot in that book about like all the intense time they were spending together and almost like they needed an excuse

to keep spending intense time with each other before they left their families for each other and that did to their credit remained together until his death Michelle remembers his bullshit I don't like I don't think we

can say that enough but I will say I don't think it's bullshit in the way that, like, uh, what are their names, Spanito, uh, Earl and Lorraine, the Warrens. Ed and Lorraine. Ed and Lorraine. Yeah. I don't think Michelle and I don't think they're charlatans in the way that the Warrens are charlatans. I think they, they did believe what they were saying to an extent of like, I think Michelle was clearly going through a lot of stuff. Like, uh, she had initially, uh, started seeing.

being, uh, Dr. Padsar. Pazder. Pazder. It's P-A-C. Uh, I always want to call him Dr. Paster because that's, yeah, Dr. Pazerre appropriate. Uh, but she had been seeing him because of like, you know, a lot of trauma that she had related to, like, having a miscarriage and, like, things in her relationship that weren't going well with her husband. So I think there was clearly like stuff going on there that then became something else that there's, no evidence of it ever happening and like a lot of things that you get with moral panics virtually all of which are bullshit

is that the lack of evidence then becomes not this didn't happen it becomes those crafty Satanists are so good at hiding the fact that they're murdering two million babies a year So, you know, the thing is, you know, the thing is, so, you know, the thing is, the thing is, talking about the inconsistencies and everything, and Michelle remembers, I feel like they did not know how big this book would become. I don't think they anticipated the amount of scrutiny they'd experience. I think they wanted, you know, to make some money to have, you know, a minor hit book, not for it to become an international sensation that would put them on the news on a daily basis and get them on the talk show circuit and so forth. So, yeah, I think they didn't really clearly think through the stories here and spend much time sort of vetting the book for logical fallacies and so forth. But you're right, Chris, like the sort of self-fulfilling element to it where they can say, well, you know, that doesn't seem right because there's some sort of, you know, shenanigans happening here.

it is it is kind of an easy out I don't want to just I don't want to just like dump on these people because I get the impression that you know for all the problems they caused and that they participated in I still feel like they were kind of messed up and you know there were some mental trauma issues and things like that and you know I don't want to like dance on that and make light of it. But at the same time, like, they really, they really screwed some people's lives up. And so it kind of becomes this, this difficult, like, question of where do you draw the line of accountability and how much should these people be responsible for? Because, you know, once the book did become a breakout and a bestseller, they hit the TV circuit. I mean, I remember seeing these conversations on TV, that this was kind of the peak of daytime talk television where like any time you turned on the TV in the afternoon, there were three or four stations available. And if it wasn't playing a soap opera or a rerun of Gilligan's Island, it was playing

a talk show that was a man or a woman. And the show was, the name of the show was that person's first name. And they would have a panel of people out. for them to, for the audience to either celebrate or excoriate. And that was a daily thing. You know, Sally Jesse Raphael, Oprah Winfrey got her start in this era, Geraldo Rivera, Moripovich. Donahue would have been the big one for this one. Well, he was the original and the best.

I feel like Donahue didn't quite wallow in the mud as much as a lot of the other, the other shows. I feel like he tended to keep his nose clean. relatively speaking, but, you know, someone like Sally tended to just kind of go in for it. Yeah. Anyway, so they were everywhere. And, you know, it's repetition. It's like in Snake Eater, you keep eating the same animal over and over again.

And eventually, snake will learn to like it. It's the same idea with information. You keep drilling it into people's head. You keep repeating these same comments over and over again. And eventually, it takes on the ring of. truth because you hear it so much. It must be true. You've heard it on so many different talk shows. Never mind that it's the same people on those talk shows, always guesting. There's always some sort of different configuration, and it's always being parsed a different way by the host

and presented a different way. So it must be true, because why would it be on television if it weren't? Why would so many people get this airtime if it weren't true? So, yeah, eventually people, I think, just started to buy into it. And because it was on TV, they did. didn't stop to say, well, this doesn't make any logical sense. This is all very stupid. And why should I, why should I buy into this? And so it just kind of was this self-perpetuating Oroboros that just kept eating eating on its own tail and getting bigger and bigger.

And it's, and it's exciting. You know, it's the idea that there are secret cults around us and that are summoning literal demons and they're coming for your kids. Like, that is, it's hard to blame anyone for putting that on TV when their business is getting people to watch their TV show, even though it is ultimately, like, exceptionally harmful. Yeah. I mean, so I think you've got like the elements of, you know, the introduction of kind of religious horror in the 70s. You've got, you know, the Exorcist is a big deal. The Omen is a big deal.

Rosemary's baby in the late 60s. And it's the thing where you can. suddenly be like, oh, well, I, you know, I believe in the devil. And, you know, if this is what can happen, then my life is potentially more exciting. I could, there could be a real demon. Speaking of my mom, as I was, my mom in the early 90s was very into the novels of Frank Peretti. I don't know if you're familiar with him. But two, he had two novels. One was called This Present Darkness and one called piercing the darkness. And they were out. Taking me back here. Yeah. Absolutely. They were about demons having direct influence on our day-to-day life. There's angels in the book, too.

But, like, it's really, he's trying to, I mean, he kind of tried to brand himself as the Christian Stephen King. But, like, my, you know, it's, again, so it's, I mean, this is. The Stephen King of Kings. The Stephen King of Kings. He's only one king in my heart, sir. And so there's like, you know, it's a broad, the broad Christian bookstore market. reading this and even though it's even it's labeled fiction but like you know when it's religious fiction how fiction is it you know in your mind when you're reading it because it's like

this could happen the angels and demons are out there so you know i think there's but i do think there's an allure to the idea that like i could be in a movie i could be the exorcist So you mentioned the movies of the 1960s and 70s, and one of the, I put together a section in the notes called the kindling of the satanic panic, the dry wood that caught spark and burst into flames. One of those things, one of the elements that I isolated that kind of fed into this was in 1968, the Hays Code was dissolved. And if you don't know what that is, that's a very, very conservative, morally conservative code that Hollywood adopted for its films. Was that in response to the communist panic of the 50s or was it before that? Well, no, it started older. It started in the 30s.

Okay. Was it in the 30s? Yeah. It was what preceded the MPA rating system that we have now. And so it was very similar to the Comics Code Authority, which of course was created in response to a moral panic from the 50s. But it was a very strict set of things that you could and couldn't show in the movies until eventually you got to the 60s and people were like, this is too restrictive. And so they said, okay, well, create a new system where you can have more adult content. in your movies. And so, yeah, by the late 60s, there's suddenly a wealth of rated R material that wouldn't have been allowed prior to that. Right. So in 1968, the Hays Code was formally dissolved, and Hollywood really wasted no time taking advantage of that. And Roman Polanski, most notably, which is kind of ironic because he's actually the guy you should worry about being around your kids. He adapted the 1967 novel, Rosemary's Baby, into a film in 166.

and it was very popular, very successful, and kicked off a massive, massive movement of films about satanic rituals, demonic possession. I mean, I linked to a page in the notes that just has like, here's a list of all the movies about Satan and demons in the 1970s. And it's an amazing list. There's so many of these movies. It was very, very on trend. And a lot of the things that are recounted and remembered in Michelle remembers appear to be drawn very directly from some of these movies like Sybil and so forth. And it really feels like, you know, whether deliberate or just because she was put into a trans-like state in that sort of half-waking, half-dream state where you're like having thoughts and they're not really

conscious thoughts and you don't really have any control over them, but they seem to very vivid and real. Like, you know, when you're first starting to fall asleep, I don't know what the origin was, but it really feels like she was processing a lot of things that had been in movies of the era and saying, oh, these happened to me. And no one stopped and said, hey, this kind of reminds me of that one flick I saw with Sally Field. There was never that kind of connection made, or at least not by anyone who had any presence, had any voice in the media. And so, you know, basically these lurid tales that were seemingly inspired by lurid movies created in the, you know, the wake of the creation of the MPAA and R-rated and X-rated movies, sort of fed into Michelle remembers and became the real actual, factual story of a woman's life and the terrible experiences she had as a kid. Yeah, I think one thing that's really notable about Rosemary's Baby and.

the exorcist in particular, is that they kind of move the idea of the occult into urban and suburban spaces. Because in earlier movies, you still have, you have devil worshiping cults and that kind of stuff, but it's guys in robes over giant horned altars and that kind of stuff. It's very, you know, very extravagant. Whereas the idea of Rosemary's baby is this stuff is happening right under your nose, in your apartment building, the nice old couple. In the basement of your pizza place? Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, in the case of The Exorcist, an old board game you find in the basement can be the key. My mom definitely freaked out about Ouija boards.

But, yeah, so it's like the idea that this is happening in the modern world. It's happening in the urban world. It's happening all around us. And it's, there's a, there's a thin, like, veneer. It's below the surface, but you only have to scratch it to find it, right? I was going to say we played with a Ouija board on a church trip, and it felt so transgressive. Then later on that same trip, I was playing Bionic Commando for NES with someone and beat the game. And they saw Hitler say, damn, and then his head exploded.

It was the most evil church trip of all time. Diamond, you were going to say something? Yeah, I think one thing that, one reason why I feel like it's okay to get really, really angry at the people who made this book. because even whatever they were experiencing, whatever Michelle experienced in her life, whatever this doctor thought he was trying to help with, in making this book, they worked with actual church officials.

They got money from church officials. The Catholic Church benefited from this extremely, and it reminds me of a line many years later in From Dust Till Dawn where they're surrounded by vampires and he's trying to convince, Harvey Keitel fallen pastor. It's like, no, no, we're here.

here, these things are creatures from hell. If hell exists, therefore, God exists. So you need to get back on the horse here and bless this holy water for us. But I feel like if you're in a member of the church and you see this stuff happening and you see pop culture being, you know, in your eyes, invaded by satanic imagery, that to you must be a boon because, of course, if people believe in Satan, then that must also back belief in God. You know what I mean? It's like we are selling the cure for evil, so we need to make sure people know evil is real, which is why I feel like this whole satanic panic, which they, you know, obviously, you know, there's not like one CEO church that made this all happen, but people, you know, their local, their local, like, father or

whatever was definitely involved in them. At one point, they flew to the Vatican. It's really not clear what they did in the Vatican, but part of the story is they flew to the Vatican and gave their evidence to someone. And that helped the story, that somehow made the story seem all the more, you know, official. Like, oh, with this all happened and we went to the Vatican and we reported our findings to someone in Italy who spoke Italian, maybe even Latin. And it just, it, it lended an air of authenticity to their story that didn't, that couldn't possibly have any. But that was good because the people, you know, who want you to fear Satan, that's good. That's good. That's good. We are good. Look at that. Look at us. You,

Which side do you want? Evil is good. Evil is the job. I don't want, like, a couple things. I don't want to say that or intimate that I believe that it is, that being religious or having any sort of faith or spirituality is naive because I genuinely don't think that. Like, you know, Benito and I refer to ourselves on Apocryphals as nonbelievers and not atheists because of the connotation of being an atheist on the internet is like, um, actually. Yeah, big time, yeah And that's not

My lobster Yeah, like that's That's not the way I actually feel However, I do believe that it is It's easier to believe in one If you already have the other, right? Like, it's, it's the, the Jimmy Olson thing, right? Like, it's easier to get to Jimmy Olson

If you already have Superman. It's easier to get to Superman's friend Who can marry a gorilla If you already have accepted the existence of Superman. That might sound dismissive, But I think a lot about Superman. You will believe a man can marry a gorilla. exactly. It's the same thing of like the philosophy for years of like we can't do superhero movies because people aren't going to buy everything and then someone made a movie that had a rocket raccoon in it that made a billion dollars. But that's a whole other discussion. The other thing is, you know, you mentioned Roman Polanski and one of the things that is wildly not the most well-known thing about him is that he is connected on the victim side to the man.

and family murders, which are like a scary, sensational cult, violent thing that like actually happened and was a huge cultural impact because those things are actually very rare. And those things when they happen are big news because of their rarity and not as an indication that this is happening everywhere. But if you combined that bit of reality with the pop culture stuff of, you know, demons possessing you and your head turning all the way around and and Satan babies and everything, you get Michelle remembers. It is, it is the, it is the most shameless pop culture mashup that I have not written. No, that was, that was, that just touches on something else that

I added to my kindling section, the rise of a cult and satanic imagery and pop culture, actual cults, serial killers. I mean, there was this sort of rise, maybe not in the actual number of these things happening in America in the 1960s, 70s, but certainly in the visibility of them and the sensationalism of them, which is another thing, you know, media sensationalism. That's also in the kindling. But, you know, there were groups like Hari Krishna, which, you know, were founded with good intents to things like Jonestown and Scientology, which were founded with ill intent and often had bad outcomes. You started to hear about these things kind of bubbling away in the background, and they were very not of the Judeo-Christian tradition. They were

different and scary and didn't obey the rules. At the same time, in 1966 or so, a guy named Anton LeVay founded something called the Church of Satan, which did not literally worship Satan as an actual physical being, not in the sense of like, you know, Jesus was a dude who was nailed to a cross and he lived and he, you know, did things with fish and water and stuff. It was, the idea behind the Church of Satan was basically, it's like Atlas shrugs, but with fun robes. It was very much about libertarianism and about self-actualization.

and thinking of yourself first. Lave was kind of a showman. And I think he realized that his philosophy and his movement would have more visibility if he embraced transgressive imagery like Satan. But at no point does the Church of Satan actually say, oh, yes. Like Satan is this dude who lives in hell. He's trapped in the ice. But we think he's really cool.

And it's great that he has the anti-Pope stuck in his mouth. We love that about him, and he's the best. We literally worship him. That's not what it is. But because he called it the Church of Satan, that was kind of a boogeyman for a lot of people I knew growing up. Like Anton LeVay was a known name. And when people talked about him, you know, my classmates or whatever, it was either with genuine fear or with this sort of like, here's something that is bad and is kind of cool. Here's a guy. who's like so evil he founded the Church of Satan. He is the, he is so rad. So, you know, you had these cults and you had the Church of Satan, which was absolutely not a cult, just sort of a movement basically celebrating the human spirit, if you want to say that. But it draped itself in religious imagery. And having that kind of in the background, just sort of bubbling away.

in people's awareness causing fear to percolate. I do think that helped make Michelle remembers a little easier to swallow. Like, oh, I've been hearing about all of these cults and all of these murders and about Satan's own church on the news. So maybe when this woman says that she was kidnapped and, you know, like she had to turn babies into candles so that she could, you know, use them for rituals. around a pentagram, that could be real. Who knows? Yeah, it is very funny to me to whenever you dive into satanic panic stuff, which is something that I've always found very fascinating.

We'll get to my obsession with police training videos later. But it's always very funny to me to remember, like, yeah, the Church of Satan is exactly as old as the Batman television show. That was the same time. That was all going down at once. I mean, that Batman mask does look a little devilish. And what are those, what are those motions he does with the Batuzi swiping the V across his? I don't know.

No, that's not satanic. That's acknowledging the Illuminati. That's a whole different thing. Oh, that's a different cult. I'm sorry, my mistake. I think the element that a lot of, a lot of people have missed out on. I mean, not if you, like, are aware of the online presence of the Church of Satan. And whatever, I get them confused.

There's like two different churches of Satan. But like, they're mostly there to troll Christians, specifically like Christian cultural hegemony is kind of their main thing, right? And so it's like, why choose Satan? Well, because it would upset the right people, what they viewed as the right people. Right. So it's kind of like, oh, that's kind of, to be applauded, a good job church. And then you see what the people, the members are like.

And you know, oh, never mind. never mind. I don't need to applaud the Church of Zayden. But, you know, keep trolling, I guess. You do not, under any circumstances, got to hand it to him. Thank you. you must answer my questions nine sing 99 and 90 you're not God you're one of mine and you'll be the devil's bonnie So once Michelle remembers became a hit and the author's began making the tour, the media circuit, other people began to come forward and share their own deep therapy remembrances of satanic rituals, satanic ritual abuse, I think is what is being termed now.

generally these were young women. It tended not to be men. It tended to be women. And they would come out and they would show up on television and talk about very tearfully, very convincingly, you know, like in a way that you really believe they felt these things. Their horrible memories, their traumas, you know, being forced to give birth to baby after baby so that those children could be eaten. and sacrificed in rituals and their bones could be burned and so on and so forth. And this naturally caught the attention of law enforcement and local law enforcement agencies and the FBI all took a real interest in this and said, we need to stop this from happening.

And I don't know that they found any real evidence, but that did not keep people from going to jail anyway. And so there's a very famous or infamous case of a daycare where children came out after being sort of provoked into saying, like, have you experienced abuse? You know, show us on this doll, you know, that's kind of where the joke comes from. Show us on the doll where they hurt you. It's actually not funny because, like, kids, you know, were kind of coerced or just made to think, like, I should say things. things, bad things happen to me. That's what the adults want to hear. And that was, the blame was pinned on teachers and people who ran this daycare center who did nothing. Like, there's no real evidence that they ever did anything wrong. But, you know, in court, I think juries are

predisposed to believe children over adults. And the kids were saying, here's stuff that happened. And these people spent five years in jail for the crime basically of running a daycare day Center where their kids were convinced that they should say that they had been abused and indoctrinated into satanic cult actions with no real basis for that. Because the kids were like four or five. They didn't really know the difference between, you know, they're in the magical thinking era. So that's genuinely horrible. Yeah.

It's definitely, you've got kids going to their parents and they're like, um, Mrs. teacher worship Satan also she can fly and there's a secret tunnel in the toilet under the thing and they were like oh that sounds plausible we better call the cops about that and that's not Benito is not exaggerating those are like actual things that were reported in this trial that they had talked about secret tunnels and and that their teachers could fly I mean in 2025 we have skibbitty toilets so were the children wrong I ask you I don't know what that is because I'm 42 years old. It's a, it's a toilet with a head and he sings the, he sings the scatman's on it. And he fights cameras. Okay. It's like, uh, Hinako. Is that the name of the, the Japanese ghost that lives in the toilet? But more annoying and grating. Anyway, uh, hey, there's way than way more than one Japanese ghost that lives in the toilet. That's true. But I'm thinking of the girl. I feel like there is more than one ghost girl that lives in the toilet.

it's an epidemic you mentioned jeremy that like juries were predisposed to believe children and i don't i don't know if that's necessarily true they believe children but they don't believe that children can be coerced or that children can lie uh which is funny because benito i know you're a horror movie guy and like so many horror movies involving children are based on the fear of not being believed when a kid because of the assumption that kids say things that are not true all the time. But if, but if, you know, juries are conditioned to believe that, like, if a cop shows up and uses their special investigation training techniques to get the truth out of a kid, then that we can believe. And that must mean that someone can fly. Whereas that's, I mean, you know, it's ridiculous.

And everyone remembers being a kid and lying to the point of you now believe that lie. You now believe like, oh, yeah, no, I did not break that. That was not me. That did not happen. And it's this confluence of overcorrecting for not believing children and also the child saying something that's either misinterpreted or misleading or is just flat out, you know, childhood nonsense. being given a stamp of approval by cops who also constantly lie and need to justify their continued existence. I'm sorry. What are you saying about cops?

Cops and lie all the time and they're legally allowed to lie. And the Supreme Court has ruled that they are not legally allowed or legally required to help you. Chris, I'm surprised. This is the first time hearing of your anti-police sentiment. That's a new one on me. a dude a dude who loves commissioner gordon more than most people love batman that's true coming out uh coming out hard but yeah like these these reports i mean a diamond already got the reference in to the to the ralph wiggum thing but it really does come down to so many of these reports were just like principal skitter mrs crevaple were sacrificing babies in the closet and i saw one of the babies the baby looked at me like that's legitimately like what it was and the and they were like the baby looked at you you going to jail it's it's so wild because like again if you're predisposed to believe that uh the the you're wrong about podcast brings up a lot Satan is alive and well on planet earth uh the the kind of famous like evangelical uh I guess sermon is the way to put it but like you know that the devil is out there and if you believe that sincerely then you are predisposed like you already believe that demons are out there right so having that confirmed

can be compelling but if you sit down and read any of these things they are so demonstrably not true like they will the Michelle remembers is full of specific events that Michelle remembers

title of the book that they're like yeah we looked and there was no car accident where a lady died on that day but that might just be because Satan worshippers use a different calendar. So it wasn't actually Christmas.

It was Satan Christmas, which is in January. Still in the Gregorian system. Look, look, if Satan can plant dinosaur bones, he can alter calendars. Yeah. There's literally a part of Michelle remembers where something happens at New Year's. And in order to justify that it never actually happened on New Year's, they say that Satan New Year's happens on the 13th day of the 13th month. Which is January. So Satan New Year's is January 13th.

Isn't that Orthodox New Year? That's Orthodox New Year, isn't it? What are they saying about the Orthodox Church? Sounds like an unorthodox New Year to me. That's the other thing that always gets me is that, like, Michelle remembers is a allegedly nonfiction work that stems so directly from The Exorcist and the Omen and Rosemary's baby. But by the time you get to like the real, like, high.

I octane satanic panic stuff, it's into jack chick territory where Catholicism is not Christian enough. Like Catholicism is actually secretly Satan worship, which is actually worse. I don't know if you know. Actually worse, which is something that I have always thought was very funny about evangelical Christianity. Is it like Catholicism? Is it just bad? It's actually worse than worshipping the devil. So, okay.

If someone of Irish descent, let me tell you. This is mildly tendential. But this will not surprise you at all, but the bulk of my Facebook activity is spent in a group for people traveling to Europe for Christmas. And that won't surprise Chris. Other people might be like, why would you do that? But people have started in the last year or so posting pictures of themselves at various crampas parades in Austria. and Bavaria. And there has definitely been some boomer clampback at that. And I just remember someone, you know, people are like, oh, this has nothing to do with Christmas. This is,

this is Satanic. And people are like, no, this is Christian, actually. And someone was just like, this has nothing to do with any mainstream Christianity that I know of. I had to stop myself from yelling at some grandma and being like, Catholicism is the most mainstream. By numbers, there's more Catholics than anything else. And also, they're the first one. Yours is fake by comparison. So let them have the demon man at Christmas. And shut up.

I will say that at the church that I went to as a kid, they never mentioned Christmas from the pulpit because that is a pagan celebration. It has nothing to do with actual Jesus. And it was totally verboten. We didn't have holiday parties, though. That's absolutely a certain flavor of Protestantism. I mean, the Puritans, I mean, it's the flavor that tastes like ambrosia salads and a potluck on Sunday. Yeah. I mean, like in New England, yeah, Christmas was literally against the law in the early New England colonies because, yeah, it was equal parts pagan and papish just as bad.

Wow. I mean, I don't want to take, don't want to turn this into me talking about Christmas. all the time, but, uh, yeah, that's, it's a little, a little late for that. Yeah. A couple of weeks passed. thing I want to get to, going back to the satanic panic thing, is that all of this publicity and press and talk show circuit conversation resulted in a sort of feedback loop, an echo chamber. And I mentioned that police and law enforcement got really into this.

And so they started to integrate, like, watching out for Satan kind of stuff, into their training. And this was all pretty much based on things they found in, or read in Michelle remembers. So you started to get this kind of feedback loop where they were looking for things, but they were specifically looking for the things that were pulled from Michelle remembers. So because they were specifically looking for those things and leading questions and questioning toward those sort of things, it led to more supposed incidents like that being brought to light and more people talking about things like this. So it just seemed like everywhere you went, there were impossible numbers of Satanism,

of satanic rituals happening behind the scenes. And, you know, in theory, everyone's lives should have been touched by this. And it just, I don't know, it just kind of kept getting worse and worse throughout the late 80s. It took a while before people would stop and say, wait a minute. As soon as you get one headline that the police are investigating a satanic crime, that

in turn will spark even more people to A, believe the original story, and B, come forward with their own tales. So it's like, it is absolutely, it is a back and forth that just happens, and it's like, it's like a ping pong ball bouncing back and forth that, you know, it doesn't matter that they never find anything. It doesn't matter that

you have people, you know, at the upper level saying, wait, there's no evidence of any of these, any of these situations, including Michelle remembers. But as long as, you know, as long as you have the headline that says, police looking into this or police investigating this, because police, of course, love to tell you what they're investigating because, again, it makes the, you know, it raises their profile, lets you know what they're, what they're, you know, what they're doing all the time. It all just, it's circular. And it just, it revs up and it serves like the entire 80s, I would say. And even in the early 90s, this just kept spinning and spinning and spinning. And it never really, it came to sort of a stop, at least as far as Michelle remembers goes.

But the, you know, the fears that it drove up, I don't really think ever really went away. No, they definitely didn't. No. And if the X-Files had started five years earlier, Fox Mulder would definitely have been out there saying, well, you know, Scully, we need to look into this candle. Do you think this used to be a baby? He would have absolutely bought the. that shit. I mentioned already my kind of mild obsession with police training videos that you could get on VHS and now you can find a lot of them on YouTube. And a lot of them are not fun or funny.

But some of them are. The best, of course, is surviving edged weapons, which is a training video about knives that has an extremely good narrator describing knives like the Bellissong. or butterfly knife, or the Mexican sacatripe, for gutting sheep and other warm-blooded mammals. But there is one that was from 1994. Wow. So the satanic panic goes up through, I would say, I mean, you said it never really went away. I would say it didn't stop until, like stop being at its peak until maybe the early 2000s. because the internet sparked a whole other wave of it.

But, uh, and also, 9-11 gives us a different group of people to otherwise as well. Uh, but certainly I mean, like I was in, I was in a high school when Columbine happened. And, uh,

you know, that was certainly blamed on the devil. Never on guns, which is weird. Uh, but definitely on the devil and the video game doom. But the law enforcement guide to satanic cults. I actually wrote an article for it for The Cracked Magazine back in 2015, and it's complete nonsense.

It talks about how cops everywhere need to be on the lookout for satanic initiation ceremonies in which someone promises to sacrifice children to the devil and how Satanists believe that the head is the most important part of the body. You got to give them that one, I think. I think we can all agree on that one. They often eat the brain to receive powers of the deceased person. The word often there is, does brain cannibalism really happen often enough that it warrants that? I'm not sure it does. But again, like this is the same thing where, like,

cops in the middle of nowhere get like tanks. Now, just in case terrorists decide to attack Roseville, Minnesota. I will say the, this is kind of later in my notes, but, you know, the, the sort of lasting impact of the satanic panic and the imagery and fear that it instilled in people, like that, that lasted well into the 21st century. Like, I had an aunt who refused to let her kids read or watch anything Harry Potter. into like the mid-2000s, because it was Satan. There was witchcraft and wizards and stuff. And then she finally watched it and said, oh, this is kind of harmless. Now all those people are like totally on J.K. Relling's side because she hates trans people as much as they do.

But at the time, she was seen as, you know, evil. And, you know, there was a certain flavor of person who said these books are wrong and bad. in promoting Satanism, and we should not accept this. So, yeah, like, it seems weird to think of this, this moral panic lasting that long, but it actually did. Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't think it went away. It just changed, right? Like, you can see so much of so many of the same elements in Q&ON conspiracy stuff.

I mean, like, what's the difference between eating babies for power and the adrenachrome and whatever, all that stuff, right? Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, watching the documentary, Satan Wanchu, like maybe a third of the way through, I started thinking, like, wow, this is really reminding me of QAnon and Pizza Gate and all that stupid shit. And at the end of the movie, they do tie it into that. Yeah, I think you have to see it as part of the same impulse, right? And, yeah, of course, I mean, Harry Potter is a great example, or it's like, and again, that's my mom being very concerned about witchcraft being real. via fiction. I remember in the early 2000s, I was in college at this point, but I was home

visiting for the holidays. And one of the, one of the Lord of the Rings movies was out. And so I was going to go see it in the theater. And I know my parents called me in to talk to me and they were like, how do you see the Lord of the Rings movies as different from Harry Potter? And I just kind of stared at them. And they were like, oh, you don't really. And I was like, yeah, I don't. but not in the way that you see them as the same thing. Like, I think it's fine to do either one. I disagree now. Don't read Harry Potter.

But you should read Lord of the Rings. But, yeah, think they've got a lot of cool swords. It's true. And it's like, I don't have to, Mom, I don't have time to explain to you the theology of Jolkin, Rolkin, Rolkin, Rolkin. We don't have time for that. But it is different. And also, he is way smarter than, uh, J.K. Rowling. Joel and Colling-Rolling.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like there are points in the timeline where people's insanity changes to a different flavor. So you have the satanic panic for quite a while, and then 9-11 happens. And I was thinking earlier today about how, like, there's a certain kind of person that just lost their mind and became a different human altogether. after 9-11. Like, you know, there was a website called Lilacs Institute back in the 90s, which was great. It was like this dude who was just like, hey, I found all these grotesque, you know, recipes and magazines from the 60s and 50s, and it's all this processed food and it's horrible. Let's make fun of it. But then 9-11 happened and all that went away and he just became like this chest-thumping Islamophob. Like, where did that come from? You were talking about, jello molds before and now you're talking about how we should go blow up the Middle East what's wrong with you i certainly hope that never happens to any creators whose work i enjoy

no one in comics ever ever lost their entire damn mind as a result of 9-11 yes thankfully uh just a shame that frank miller only style uh follow thankfully we only follow sane and stable people Yeah, Frank Miller unfortunately vanished in the Bermuda Triangle in 1993 and is certainly not around him. He left behind some great works, though. Yeah, and definitely didn't leave behind any extremely bad works that would have come out. He died before that happened. Yeah, fortunately for him. But, I mean, you mentioned, you know, J.K. Rolling, and we've already mentioned, like, the Hayes Code and the comics code and rock and roll and everything.

more like it's the same moral panic it never stops it just takes different forms and now it's the moral panic over trans people and it's all like they're coming for your kids in my notes this is called the post-war push pull between conservatives and counterculture aka olds versus kids and it's a tale as old as time and a song as old as rhyme it really is old people just hate hate kids they just don't like them because i don't know why actually and i mean like that's a thing that they bring up in the uh the michael warnkey episode of you're wrong about is that a thing that i thought was very insightfully put which is that the reason you see so much of this being set at like you know uh michael warnkey is like oh yeah i went to college in california and got real into drugs and satan and And I did all the drugs at once because that's what Satan wanted. And the reason you see like the pushback against academia and against

essentially kids going off to college is because that's where a lot of young people learn different things and learn to question. And it coincides with them becoming adults and pushing back against their parents' views, which happens in in all forms. But generally, due to youth and education, is a more liberal pushback against conservatism. Yeah, I think a really salient point from your notes, Jeremy, was talking about one. I think an underappreciated element that leads to these kind of, the forefront of the fronting of these kind of moral panics is that kind of marriage of evangelicals and right-wing politics, which really kind of happened in the 70s as a result of, Yeah, the Southern strategy, right? Thanks, Nixon.

Yeah, yeah, really. The shift, you know, because evangelicals were not the more typically not as conservative as they have been since certainly the Reagan era. Like my parents always, when I was growing up, they were always telling me, you don't always have to vote for the same person as us. We voted for Jimmy Carter. And they, I'm sure they have not voted for a Democrat since Jimmy Carter, but like, RIP Jimmy Carter. But, yeah, I mean, because then suddenly you're employing things that are at least superficially religious in order to consolidate political power. Things like my kids will never read Harry Potter. I mean, on the surface, that seems like a virtue signaling, but it's costly signaling to show your devotion to a particular set of identity politics.

And those kind of values, right? You're showing you're a part of an end group. And so I think a lot of these same things, these moral panics seem, I mean, there's so many, there's so many elements to them, right? There's the sensationalism that's fueled by the need for 24-hour media. But then there's also, you know, there's a political element to it. And I lost my train of thought because by Internet connection got not stable. but I was boy was I gearing up for a doozy of a point I feel very confident he was cooking I was yeah I was I feel it in my heart I got you I got you you look like an angel walk like an angel talk like an angel talk like an angel but I got wise you're the devil in the sky oh yes you are

Yeah. So I specifically feel like the satanic panic is kind of the result of a domino that started, you know, basically it was World War II in the baby boom. And you had an entire generation that in America was born into unprecedented wealth, unprecedented technology, comfort. At the same time, there was the rise of media, the rise of adamant. Advertising. It was just a generation of kids who grew up in a way that no one had ever grown up before. And I don't think, I mean, even now, we don't know how to deal with media. It's getting worse. But, you know, at the time, like, people just weren't media savvy enough to stop and say, hey, let's draw the line here. And media became more and more aggressive. Advertising became more and more aggressive. The boomers, had their youths of youth times of hedonism and hanging out in the mud at Woodstock and so forth, listening to rock and roll music and watching Elvis gyridus hips and so forth. And then they started to age out. They got jobs. Usually it was often both parents getting jobs. And they had kids.

So, you know, their kids had to go home after school by themselves and were, you know, all alone for several hours until the parents. got home left with just the TV or their friends. So there were just a lot of factors here of a generation of basically carefree hedonists aging up and seeing their children start to come into their own, but kind of at a remove because, you know, suddenly both sides of the family thanks to women's rights and progression. Everyone was working. I don't know if my making a point here, actually. I just feel like basically there was an increased fear among boomers of what are our kids doing. We know what we got up to when we were teens and tweens, and it wasn't anything good, and now we have our kids off by themselves sitting at home or doing

And God knows what until we get back from work. So it could be that in this time, this gap between school and their parents coming home, that they're being indoctrinated by the devil, we don't actually know. So those were, I think, more factors that kind of fed into the satanic panic was just a change in society where kids were left on their own much more so than they had been in the past and left to their own devices and parents weren't. sure how to cope with that. Maybe there was some guilt there. I don't know. But certainly that's something that seems to be very localized to Generation X and maybe some of the early millennials is that that sort of Lashkey kid phenomenon. Because now you don't have that. You have like parents hovering over their children at all times. School ends and immediately they're off to play sports or get lessons or whatever and there's there's no at least you know from what i've seen

in our family there's no sort of time for the kids to be kids and just have a few hours to hang out with their pals and play dungeons and dragons or whatever so and also like i know we're trying to have a fun time ha ha jokesy jokes discussion but like also the idea of child abuse is newer than you would think because honestly the idea of children as we currently understand them is also newer than you think. The teenager

is a 20th century invention which isn't to say that people were 12 years old and then became adults but well I mean some of them. Kind of I mean that's that's kind of what some lawmakers are trying to roll a back to

making child marriage legal again. Yeah like that the the sort of era of your life where you are a teenager or a young adult is very much kind of a like a post-World War II invention in a lot of ways. It changes culture. It's why culture changes so rapidly in the mid-20th century and why you have an entirely new and different media landscape of stuff that does include stuff like video games to kind of try and try and wrestle this discussion back to its nominal purpose. Like, the rise of the teenager as an economic and cultural force is one of the most important things that has happened in the history of the last hundred years, easily, because that's where we get, that's where we get Elvis. That's where we get the Beatles. That's where we get Marvel Comics.

That's where we get Dungeons and Dragons. And the idea of not hitting your kids is kind of new in a way that's like really from a very very very. from a very modern perspective, shocking to think about, that it's not that long ago that violence against children was like just what you did in order to teach them lessons. So the changing social landscape of realizing that, like, oh, there's this thing that we do that's bad, but we can't be bad, even if we did it. So any abuse of children had to be at the hands of Satan or Democrats or pizza parlors or Joseph Robinette Biden or whatever, like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's all, it's, it's all the same moral panic.

Yeah, I mean, I'm, sorry, that's a bummer. I'm old enough to, uh, have gone to school when corporal punishment was a thing. And you misbehaved and you got sent to the office so the principal could take a paddle to your ass. Yeah. That was just a thing that happened. My mom was a teacher and that was like phased out while like over the course of her career. Yeah. for sure

Which is wild So bring the kids along It's good clean family fun What have you got to lose If you like the 6 o'clock news Then you'll love Nature Trail to Hell Nature Trail to Hell

Nature Trail to Hell In 3D Nature trail the hell Nature trail the hell Get 3D Nature trial the hell Get 3D Um, but I'm sorry.

games because my next intent was to bring this back around to talk about how satanic panic affected video games so that we can kind of bring this home and wrap it up. But there was a definite knock-on effect, not just in video games, but also in video game adjacent media, such as movies and film and, dare I say, tabletop games. But video games, even though I can't really think of instances of video games being held up as demonic and horrible and, oh, my God, Satan is here aside from the whole Congress thing. Thank you, Joe Lieberman. There was still, I think, a lot of preemptive attempts to avoid that sort of thing on the behalf of publishers. Nintendo certainly, Nintendo of America certainly had a different approach to content,

in America than it did in Japan and Europe, which you saw pretty much the beginning of the NES era when they didn't localize the game Devil World, which until 2023, when it came to Nintendo Switch online, was, I believe, the only game designed by Shigero Miyamoto not to reach the U.S. because it was about the devil. And it's a very, it has almost nothing whatsoever to do with anything in the Bible. I mean, you, like, collect crosses and you can pick up a Bible book, and the devil is, like, dancing around at the top of the screen, but he looks just like Gannon. He's blue, and he's got red boiler shorts on.

Like, he's, uh, we all know what the devil looks like, Jeremy. You didn't have to explain that to us. He's blue and he wears little shorts. That's, it's a very different view of the devil than you see in most pop culture. But they just didn't localize that. And they took a stand against really sort of any religious content in their NES games, Super NES games. There was a great article that Drew Mackey just published on how the hell did they localize ghosting goblins for Nintendo systems when Nintendo was opposed to anything to do with religion, just out of caution and fear. and these entire games are about running into hell

killing Satan with crosses so you can save a princess. That's tricky. So there were a lot of weird localization choices, a lot of boundlerization. Sometimes things made it through, especially in the early days of the NES. You do see crucifixes, crosses,

you know, just things that kind of slip past the sensors. I mean, oh my God, the title screen for Schoon by IREM the NES sub-submarine shooter. It has a topless mermaid with two tiny pink pixel nipples holding a crucifix on the title screen right there. That is like the nadir of the Nintendo era. Just such filth leading our children into damnation. Is that pre- or post-mortal combat?

Oh, this was 1987. It was way before Mortal Kombat. Oh, my God. This was an NES game. This was early on. But it was an early on game. they hadn't gotten quite as stringent about their localization policies. And, you know, I think they just kind of gradually tightened those up as things kind of

slipped through like, oh, Galgo 13, just had sex in a hotel and spoke to a cigarette. Well, maybe we should be more careful about sex in video games from now on. Oops, there was a naked harpy boob in the Kidaccharis manual. Let's be cautious with that. And, you know, it was kind of the same thing with crosses, crucifixes, other religious imagery. Like, they got some of it, you know, in the legend of Zelda, the book of magic was called the Bible in the Japanese version, but it's Book of Magic in the U.S. version.

But still, you know, Link's shield has a cross. But Link still has a cross on his shield, which does imply the existence of Highly and Jesus. In Zelda 2, one of the items you pick up is a crucifix that you use in order to protect you against ghosts in the graveyard. Once you have the crucifix, you can see ghosts in the graveyard area, which are otherwise invisible. So, yes, in Hyrule, Jesus died for someone's sins. I don't know. And then he ascended to the Golden Land.

Jesus was, of course, the first male born to the Garudo in a hundred years. Couldn't make it through it. I apologize. You might be thinking of Paul Atreides. The one that always gets me is Castlevania Because I remember as a kid Like reading that manual And Jeremy, do you know anything?

Have you heard of Castlevania? Have you ever done anything about? I've tried. That's like Metroid, right? That's like Metroid. Not the first one. But the boomerang was referred to as a boomerang. And I'm like, I know what a boomerang looks like

because I watch a lot of cartoons and they don't look like T's. They don't look like... It's an X that's tilted 45 degrees. It's an X for no Dracula. But I will say Symphony of the Night actually does have a boomerang and a crucifix item separately.

Yeah. But I always thought that was funny because like, playing that game and reading that menu, I'm like, this had, like, I know who Dracula is. And I know that like one of the things you do against Dracula is, is you have a cross. Like, I've got the orange and black book from my school library that we all remember. Like, I know what you do with vampires.

You didn't have to hide that one, Nintendo of America. Somebody get Redmond on the phone. They did. I mean, you know, there were still, there were still elements that made it into Castlevania games for a while. And then I think the big notable change with Castlevania was Super Castlevania 4. The opening screen is a tombstone being struck by lightning. And then Dracula's spirit flies out. In the Japanese version, there is a cross on top of the tombstone.

And the American version, no, no cross. A thing that always made this make no sense to me was when I would see people get, you know, get really satanic panicky about stuff like Castlevania or whatever, or D&D, obviously being a big one, because it has like demons in it and like monsters. and being like, yeah, but they're the bad guys. Like, you should be all in on this. You should be, like, you should be, hell yes, let's go beat the devil to death with a whip. Or let's go overthrow Asmadeus from the throne of hell. Like, because they're the bad guys. It's like being mad at Raiders of the Lost Ark for having Nazis in it.

It's like, yeah, but the good guy's there to shoot them all. And then it becomes this weird thing of like, even the acknowledgement of of demons in anything that is secular is secretly like you might think they're the bad guys, but then why do they have such good stats? It's to show you their secret power. Yeah, I mean, that definitely hit Final Fantasy games. The most powerful white magic spell traditionally in Final Fantasy has been called holy. And in Final Fantasy 1 on NES, that was localized as fade, so you can make the zombies fade away.

In Final Fantasy 4, Final Fantasy 2 on Super NES, that was localized as white. You use white power to take out evil enemies. I don't know that that's actually an improvement. I think Holy is better, but they were just super cautious about that. Was wholly the third version in Final Fantasy of Hol and Holah? Mm-hmm. Holaga. Holaga, yeah.

You know, I know it's not a video game per se, but we should probably, certainly of the error of its time, we should probably talk about magic cards because I got into magic pretty early, but not early enough because a friend of mine had to show me cards. Like, oh, yeah, I got these cards last year, but they're changed now. You can't get them anymore because people were upset that you summon demons. or, you know, cards that in the black magic, which, of course, it's black magic, would have, like, pentagrams and things in them that were, you know, scary. And those cards just went, they either would be edited to remove, you know, any particular imagery, or they would just be completely wiped out. Like, you can't, no, you cannot summon Lord of the Pit.

We're going to come with a new card that punishes you to summon it. But it's like, that was definitely scary. That was scary to a lot of people right away. And, you know, again, I'm in New York. I'm like, wait, why are people scared of a piece of paper with a, with a pentegram on it? I mean, paper can be the scariest thing of all. I definitely heard a lot of panic about magic gathering and how you could, like, per the text on the cards, you could sacrifice a creature to gain more power. And it's like, okay, calm down.

But like, there's a level where all of this makes sense, right? There's a level where, where, like, you know, yeah, okay, this has demons in it. This has Dracula's and spirits and you're summoning monsters and whatever. Okay, cool. And then you get to the famous backlash against Pokemon, which, look, I love Pokemon. I have three bulbosaurs in easy reach right now. I can grab one right here. That's my boy, number one.

Number one in the decks, number one in my hearts. Pokemon has narrative problems. It is about befriending and loving adorable creatures that then like headbutt each other into unconsciousness. But that's never the problem. It's, but you know, you might know the name of the one pastor who was a frequent fixture on everything is terrible, back when that was a going internet concern. And his whole problem would be that like, Pokemon is about mastering and controlling and control. controlling demons and sending them to do your will.

And it's like, well, they're not really demons. I mean, some of them are ghosts. They're just cute little guys. Sometimes they're a sword or three moles. I got a tattoo with a sword. I think I've talked about this on Apocrypal, so Chris might know. But I absolutely do have a cousin that organized a neighborhood Pokemon burning. And that did happen.

Always on the right side of history when you're gathering together to burn things, publicly. Oh, yeah. So it's worth So it's worth noting that Michelle remembers came out in 1980, which I would argue was the year that home video games in America really became a thing. That was the year that Space Invaders came out for Atari 2,600, and everyone said, I got to own an Atari. And from that point on, aside from that little blip, 1983, 84, who knows what happened there, home video games were a big thing. And arcade games, also very popular. And in the early days of arcade games,

sometimes people would get upset like parent groups or whatever would get upset about contents of games such as death race where you run over stickmen as you drive across the country okay sure I mean it's stickman

but sure the idea is that you're running over people they're zombies but yes they once were people they just like to eat brains now they were upset about the game Phoenix a space shooter in the space invaders vein

where the space invaders are birds there were people who said this is teaching children to kill animals, which is ridiculous. But anyway, in 1982, Midway created a shooter called Satan's Hollow. And I don't remember seeing anyone squawk about that. I don't remember seeing complaints. I don't think it was that popular. No one probably noticed.

But between 1982 and I want to say like 1992, I can't find any game. releases for American home systems that have the word devil or demon or Satan in the title. It's in 1992 that you get devil's crush for Siggenesis, a game about basically playing pinball on Satan's face, which, you know, again, he's there, he's in the background, he's not your friend, he's actually antagonizing you by sending out little pop-ups and traps for your ball to fall into. So, really it's not teaching you to be on Satan's side. It's teaching you that Satan wants you to lose your pinball token. But there is a decade in there where you just did not have that naming convention, that terminology in the title of video games. And I think it was just publishers being extraordinarily cautious. And you did sometimes have imagery leak into like NES games. But a lot of times it was through licenses. So, like, you know, you had Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street turned into video games. And those are pretty antiseptic, but still, it kind of gets you, like, they're sort of gateways into the movies.

The kids play the video game and are like, I wonder what the movie is like. And then they get an eyeful. You know, you had stuff like in Ninja Guidon, you're fighting a demon. We've got to get the demon statues so that you can kill Jackie O, which means demon. king in Japanese. And when you go to his temple where bloody Mars throws fireballs at you before you fight a bunch of ninjas and eagles and then take on Jackie O, it's like just plastered with pagan symbols. But these are all like stars of David turned into pentacles or hecticles or whatever they're called. They're just inscribed in a circle. But the thing is you have to make it,

you have to be like Fred Savage's little brother in the wizard to be able to get to the final stage of Ninja Guiden. So I don't think most people saw that and said, wait a minute, this looks demonic. Like, that's, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a big ask. But, but that was, that was out there. And, you know, like I said earlier, Nintendo got better about finding that stuff and ironing it out and preventing it from showing up in the US versions. So you had something like monster party, that really weird, trippy Bondi game. And it's got excited sort of like hellish imagery in it, but it's kind of cartoonish, too, so maybe people didn't take it seriously. It just becomes less and less common as time goes by.

And you see fewer and fewer crosses and game series that had some imagery, some, you know, like naked statues or crucifixes or whatever, like their sequels, you see less and less of that over time. And it wasn't until, what, really, like the Wii era and DS that. Nintendo finally kind of pulled back and said, okay, we're not going to be helicopter parents anymore. You can have whatever you want. And I feel like, you know, Nintendo's big push to iron that stuff out of their games also

kind of opened up an opportunity for their competitors, Sega, NAC, et cetera, to sort differentiate themselves from Nintendo by releasing games like Splatter House and Devil's Crush and saying, like, hey, we're not like Nintendo. We're not, you know, we're not your mom. We want you to have fun and do cool stuff that's bad and a little evil. So come play Sega Genesis and you can be Jason beating up demons with a two-by-four. That's way cooler than being Mario eating a mushroom on the back of a dinosaur. Actually, that's kind of cool, too.

Anyway, the point is, like, just the caution and the general sort of atmosphere. in the U.S. where matters of Satan were concerned really did have this sort of subtle effect on the content that we saw in video games. And if you look at, you know, the Famicom Library in Japan versus the NES library in America, there's so much more demonic, dark, evil Satan imagery. But over in Japan, they didn't have the satanic panic. And also, Western religions are just like a thing that they sort of co-opt and they're fun. It's like a, goofy, silly, foreign thing kind of like ninjas for us. It's kind of the same essential thing. Or maybe Diamond can speak more to that. I just, it's funny how often I can walk around in modern

Japan and just see a, you know, what I view is the star of David, but of course it's just, you know, it's just two triangles. Or, you know, the not swastika, but the manji, which goes the other way, that's an extremely common symbol in Japan. And you just, you just see it. I mean, I used to work in an elementary school, and there was a big hill outside the elementary school, and someone, probably decades ago, had sort of cultivated, like, these bushes in the shape of a monji. And if I was a, you know, more reactionary, less chill person, when I first got to that school, I might have, like, had a heart attack, but I'm just like, okay, I know what that is. That's got nothing to do with Nazis.

Those are just some bushes in a hill. But it still made me, it still made me giggle. I'm a human being, God damn it. You know, I've worked there for like nine years. I still like, oh, I can see the Monji today. No, it's too foggy. I can't see it. I wonder what could be on that hill, probably anything.

And then it's just funny to me that somehow in this response to, you know, we need to avoid Satan. It became this, okay, we need to avoid everything that could possibly be religious. Just don't get any of them aroused up when it's like, oh, you think having the cross in the game as a symbol of power would be endorsed. by the church. But no, it's better just to not have it at all, which you then have years later where someone says, I mean, I don't know what's going on France these days, but didn't France try to ban all over the symbols because they wanted people to stop wearing, like, you know, um, you know, head coverings? It's like, okay, well, we'll just ban all over those coverings. That's okay, right? So no more crosses or these robes that you prefer to wear outside.

And everyone's like, well, that seems like an overcorrection, but all right. no other problems in France nothing else to worry about I am I do wonder though if like given how even in the absence of things to see the devil in that you start getting

into the pattern recognition apophonia of like everything's actually a secret symbol like I do wonder if Nintendo was right or wrong because I'm honestly not sure I would have preferred it like on a personal level if you know they were just like yeah Simon Belmont's got across in a Bible because he's going to go fight Dracula and you've you know about Dracula that's what he does but I understand why they would just be like no that's an X and and a book that's fine we don't want to deal with it at all I I do wonder if at the time that was the safer choice and that was the more business minded choice there were there were other factors

involved there, such as a general distrust in America in the late 1980s for Japanese businesses having outsized power and influence in the U.S. And I think Nintendo was very sensitive to that and did not want to spark anger and cause problems. They did anyway. People, you know, definitely noticed Atari fans were like, how dare you? But I think a lot of that influenced their overall. overly cautious approach to religious symbolism. But, you know, it's a combination of just the

extreme sensitivities around satanic imagery in the 1980s and also the extreme sensitivities around Japanese businesses, making money and influencing children in America. It's, it really, it all kind of comes back to the children, which is funny because, you know, after all of this complaining and panic and so forth, the saturday. Panic Panic, Pizza Gate, QAnon, all of those purport to be about protecting kids. And yet, I don't feel like American kids are actually safer than they were in the 1980s. I mean, there aren't as many abductions now, but there's a lot more school shootings and horrible things like that happening. So what was it all for in the end?

I guess just media sensationalism, a few people making some money of a stuff, the Catholic Church, fomenting fear. people would go to church and be safe from satanic cults, but I don't know. In the end, it just seems like a really unsavory chapter of American history that did have a knock-on effect with things that we enjoyed and people who listened to this podcast would have enjoyed, but it didn't do anything good. It didn't accomplish anything. It just made some people's lives miserable. And I don't feel like Michelle Smith and Larry Pazder were, I don't feel like they came out of things better for it too. I mean, they got married, but it tore their families that existed already apart. And I don't know, based on what people were saying in the documentary,

which admittedly are subjective, it doesn't sound like they really had a happily ever after together. So I don't, I don't think that anyone came out ahead after the satanic panic. I feel like it just made things worse for everyone all around kind of universally. And that's, uh, that's a shame. Yeah, I, I, I said earlier that like, I don't think they were charlatans, you know, uh, I don't want to give them any kind of a pass on like the, the harm that like, Michelle remembers specifically really kicked off and did like, like, ruined people's lives. for sure. But I don't think they were they were in it for the money. I think there's a sincerity into what they in what they thought they were doing. Virtually everyone that comes after is is a charlatan and a huckster and is trying to scam you. You don't think Geraldo Rivera's three-hour expose on the satanic panic in 1987 was done out of the goodness of his heart? Hard to say.

Hard to say. It's kind of unfortunate that given the evils of capitalism, what happens more often than not is that whenever anything becomes popular, there is a rush to make more of that thing, you know, and whether that thing is, you know, when you look at your, you look at your iPhone or Android device, every single app now has to have their own little version of stories or whatever they call it, like some kind of disposable video feature. Because that's what everyone needs. Everyone needs to have scrolling, I guess, or some kind of TikTok scrolling video horizontally

where you just, you can keep scrolling forever. Like, everyone needs that on every feature. Even Twitter, before everyone left Twitter, decided that, oh, if you watch a video on Twitter, what you want to do is you want us to show you a random video from someone else, right afterwards, right? And it's like, no, no one wants that. No one asks for that, but that's what you get. So in this case, you have a book that made.

a lot of money. You had people who went on TV and got a lot of attention. So all of a sudden, hey, we've got this person. Hey, we got this person. We all have our own story. Let's be on TV together. And it just, it makes money. It made money for people. And that's, that's reason enough, unfortunately. And, you know, whatever, even, even the, the Michelle Remmers, obviously was not made, you know, it was not a charity. They sold that book to, they sold the book to make money at no point, at no point. Even today, Michelle, as far as I know, has never recanted or even just said, hey, you know what, that was exaggerated or even if she tried to, you know, at this point, she could even try to blame Larry, who's been dead for 20

years. She could say, oh, Larry convinced me to do that. It was all Larry's fault. As far as I know, she has just let it, let it go. Like, oh, I'm just going to remove us with this conversation. But, you know, whatever her intent, that's what happened. And she made her money and she got, she got to keep her money. Yeah. And in this case, it's a, it's a factor of like, Not only is there a rush to capitalize on something's sensationalism, but in this case, the more there is, the more it confirms, they confirm each other. Because you might be able to read Michelle Remembers and be like, well, obviously, this is nonsense. But if you read Michelle Remembers and the Satan seller and go ask Alice, and they're all kind of hitting on the same like secret John Wick underworld of Satan assassins everywhere, then you're like, well, are all these? people just making it up? And the answer is yes. But it becomes, you actually have to ask the

question before you answer it. I love that moment in the movie where Pazer and Michelle Smith go to the FBI. They actually address the FBI. And Pazer's up there, it's like, you know what? Most of these stories about satanic ritual abuse are phonies. I'm here today, you know, receiving my speaker's fee to tell you how you can the discern between the the fake stories and the real stories. And the FBI agent who's been behind this whole thing is kind of like, yeah, I kind of stopped taking notes during his presentation. Yeah.

Look, we all know that some of this stuff doesn't make any sense and isn't real. But mine, though. Yeah. That was basically, yeah, boiled down to, like, if I said it, if it corroborates with Michelle remembers, then it's good. All right. Any final thoughts on the satanic panic here on episode 666 of Retronauts? I think it was a bad idea and we should have done that.

I'm going to pass that along to them. Let them know. I wish... The thumbs down. I wish, look at the stand-of-panic and the many decades we've had of the aftermath, I wish it was more unique. But the more, you know, it's one of these things where it's like over the last few years, you know, a lot of things have gotten bad in America.

But if you want to call a silver lining, it's hard to say. A slight gray lining, not quite as black as the rest of the cloud. If there's any bright spot, it's that people who look at this bad, look at the bad things that have happened, it's forced them to look back and realize how much of this stuff is not new. You know, a lot of the stuff that went wrong that, you know, let Sitan of Panic explode and cause people to turn in each other, a lot of that malice and, you know, quick to judgment, a lot of that stuff has been laid in our country for centuries, you know, as a young kid, I went to the Salem Witch Museum, you know, in Massachusetts.

And that is very much, hey, I saw, you know, Goody, you know, Goody Patterley or whatever. She was out by the church and she talked to an animal and that means she's a witch. And, well, if we put these heavy stones in her and she dies, that means she was innocent. Shit. I can't argue with that. I've said it five or six times now, but every moral panic is the same moral. panic and they're all they're all bullshit and it's especially useful to remember that now when we are in the midst of an ongoing like spike in in the current moral panic and of course

the tricky thing is is trying to distinguish the excesses of a moral panic of like you know Satan is coming for your children versus people saying things like like, hey, maybe don't make racisms in your video games. And each side of that debate thinks the other is a moral panic. One of them's wrong and one of them is right. And if you want to determine who, just look at who is being victimized and what they are trying to take away. And in the case of the satanic panic, you can also just read the things they say and go, well, hang on. doesn't make any sense if I say this out loud to another human being.

I agree. Well, okay. So anyway, satanic panic. Not a great idea. Folks, don't do it again. Make sure you avoid it in the future. That's my recommendation. And that's what I'm going to,

what I'm going to go with. Anyway, thank you all three of you for joining me for this episode of Retronauts. Thanks, everyone for listening. I hope you enjoyed this first furtive attempt at trends and influences talking about the bigger social events that helped shape video games. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you didn't, well, next time we'll do better. So, as you may know, Retronauts is a podcast that you can find on the internet

and you can listen to it by downloading it. from many, many free platforms, but also, if you'd like to get it a week early at a higher bitrate quality with better audio and no advertisements, you can go to patreon.com slash retronauts and subscribe to retronauts, and you will get all of those things. And if you subscribe for a little more, $5 a month instead of three, which is the cost of like one six-piece chicken McNuggets now, I think. You can get even more extra stuff, including weekly columns by Diamond here. and cool bonus episodes and so on and so forth. So that's patreon.com slash retronauts.

The vast majority of our ability to create this podcast comes from your subscriptions and enthusiasm for the show. So we highly recommend checking us out on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. Okay, that's the pitch. I'm done. Let's see. Benito, I don't think you've been on Retronauts before. So please tell us where we can find you on the Internet.

Yeah. Well, like I mentioned at the top of the show, me and Chris do a show called Apocrypals. It is a comedy show about biblical literature that also tries to take the material seriously while being fun. But I also do a podcast called Friends Till the End with my friends Matt and Erica. It is becoming a generalized horror movie podcast, but it is nominally about the child's play franchise. So you can check that one out. We review all sorts of different movies. But you can also find me on. on blue sky, benito serino.bisgui.com social, where I talk about all sorts of stuff, and you can find my link in my bio there to my different social media presences, but the most important one is Patreon, patreon.com slash Benito Serino, all one word, where you can check out all the different work I've been doing. I do medieval and early modern Latin translations. I'm writing a long, comprehensive book on Christmas folklore. I post horror movie reviews. all sorts of different stuff, all on my Patreon. And you can even subscribe for free.

There's a free tier. Anything you can do there to support my work is great. Thanks. Cool. Chris Sims. In addition to Apocopal's, I am also on some other podcasts, including War Rocket Ajax, a weekly comic book and pop culture podcast that is in its 15th year, I think. 16th, maybe once we get to, I think it's August, is the,

anniversary. We hit 666 episodes a while back. I do not remember what we did. But you can listen to that every Monday. It is a good time. I host that with Matt Wilson, who is also one of the hosts of Friends to the End. And I do some other stuff that will be coming back in 2025. And I also currently don't have another job. So if you would like to pay me to write things for you or to just come on and talk about things to tell you why cops are bad, because that's generally what it's going to be, then by all means, check out my website at t-H-E-I-S-B.com, where you can read some of the things that I've written, including a very fun new piece that I'm working on right now that is secretly about Star Trek. Why keep it secret? Because I think it's fun to start writing something without people knowing what it is, until I have tricked them into reading about how Persona 5 is my favorite video game.

Fair enough. In this case, it will be about Star Trek. Diamond Fight. Thank you, Jeremy. And thank you for the intro earlier with the Patreon, although I don't know how I feel about comparing my work to the value prospects of Chicken McNuggets. I don't know if I can compare, you know? Chicken McNuggets are not a good deal these days. But Diamond Fight's columns are a phenomenal deal.

Highly recommended. I'm a big fan of that. Yeah, we've been doing this, you know, we've been, I'm writing this weekly columns now since 2020, so we're well past five years, so there's a lot of columns there if you want to read them. But yes, besides retronauts, if you want to find me on it, the keyword there is Fight Club, F-E-I-T is my last name, C-L-U-B is another word for a small circle of people who might be killing babies, but we don't know that. Fight Club, as a website, FightClub.me, which contains zero satanic content.

content guaranteed there's just no Satan on fightclub.com. You can't, there's no S. You can't have a Satan in fightclub.com with no S. It's, it's math. Hmm. Interesting. Well, I'm not into numerology, but I will say that you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Blue Sky, which has no numbers whatsoever. J. Parrish.blusky.com. Um, you can find me at limited run games.com, sometimes creating cool stuff that goes in the video games you purchased from that very website, such as hand-drawn maps of Castlevania games. I do know what they are, Chris. It's so great. Oh, I forgot. I've been doing that for months. How could I forget that? Months of my life. And also, you can find me on,

only months. You can also, I mean, that's what I've been doing, like, day and day out for months. also on YouTube where you can find me under the name Jeremy Parrish and I guess that wraps it up for this episode of Retronauts Retronauts you can find on social media as well

doing its little retronauts thing having little parisocial relationships with other podcast it's really cute highly recommend checking us out listening to us and doing other assorted things

but for now we are going to sign off and say Get thee behind me Satan This can go on I must inform the law

Can they still be real Or just a crazy dream But I feel drawn To watch the chanting Hors Seem to Mismorize Can avoid

their eyes Sex Six Six Six Six The Loma of a Beast Sex Sex It's a world for you and me

I'm coming back