There Are No Girls on the Internet - Satanic Panic of the 1980s Is Happening Again — This Time in Minnesota Daycares (w/ Sarah Marshall)

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

A viral video. A smeared daycare worker. A community in panic. Sound familiar? In the 1980s, a wave of hysteria swept the country, accusing daycare workers of abusing children in Satanic rituals — accusations that ruined lives and were entirely false. Now, a dubious video out of Minnesota is sparking the same kind of moral panic all over again. To make sense of the moment, I sat down with Sarah Marshall, host of the new CBC podcast The Devil You Know, to trace the through-line from the Satanic Panic to today's daycare scandals — and ask what it says about us that we keep falling for this.   Listen to Sarah's podcast The Devil You Know wherever you get your podcasts! Let us know what you think about this episode by emailing [e-mail] or leaving a comment on Spotify!   Follow Bridget and TANGOTI on social media!  ||  instagram.com/bridgetmarieindc/ || tiktok.com/@bridgetmarieindc ||  youtube.com/@ThereAreNoGirlsOnTheInternet || bsky.app/profile/tangoti.bsky.social See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. It may seem like forever ago now, but last month we had a national conversation about daycares. Are daycares all scams? Are they being run by people who are actually threats to our kids? The conversation was specifically taking place in Minnesota. soda, and the baseless attacks on daycare workers felt kind of familiar to me. So I turned to Sarah Marshall, who is pretty much my podcast idol. Sarah hosts the podcast You're Wrong About and has a new show with the CBC called The Devil

You Know about the satanic panic of the 1980s that baselessly accused daycare workers of harming kids as part of satanic rituals. I became interested in the satanic panic initially, and I think about 20, 12 when I was in grad school and I was a baby teacher and I was a teacher whose skills were in their infancy. I was not teaching actual babies. And I remember finding a Texas monthly article about the case of Fran and Dan Keller in the Austin article, which was a big satanic panic case of the 80s and encountering at around that same time the documentary about the West Memphis 3, Paradise Lost.

and just feeling like I had encountered some kind of glitch in American history that we hadn't talked about enough that revealed something that I felt like I had not maybe been given a chance to understand was there before. And this basic, you know, the idea that you could actually maybe convict someone of murder by arguing that they were satanic, even if you didn't have physical evidence to support it. And I was absolutely shocked. And then as the years have gone on, it's begun to feel. feel less like this bizarre chapter of history than maybe a preview of what we're inside of now.

For folks who are perhaps uninitiated, how would you describe the satanic panic? Yeah, I mean, I think I would, unfortunately, we're being forcibly initiated at this point. So, but yes, if you haven't encountered it, basically the satanic panic of the 80s, which is what I've been researching for a long time and what my new show is about is basically this this widespread and pretty mainstream belief that gripped North America and sort of spread outwards as well in the early 80s through through the early 90s and then began to you know lost a lot of its mainstream respectability as a theory but never quite won away as we can see and it was the mainstream idea that they were large-scale satanic cults that had infiltrated

North American society and they were the ones abusing children and they were the ones kidnapping children and if we could just find the Satanists, then we could find the real threat to life, love and happiness, I guess, and the threat to the American family. And so it resulted in investigations and trials and wrongful convictions, generally without a shred of physical or even circumstantial evidence that really

pointed toward child abuse. And now, of course, we kind of, we have a White House that's kind of openly embracing the idea that if anything happens that you don't like, it's Satanism. But this was a very politically bipartisan idea to begin with, and one that, for for really quite a while, it was hard to express doubts about publicly for fear of, you know, being accused of being on the side of if not Satanists and at least child abuse. You might already know some of the big names who pushed the idea that Satanists had infiltrated daycares and were harming our children nationwide. But Sarah's work, the devil you know, focuses on something different. The everyday people swept up in this panic,

teachers and caregivers, people who just wanted to work with kids, only to be branded as members of a satanic cabal. It is wild to me how much this is kind of back in the zeitgeist again. And something I really, really like about the new show, The Devil You Know, that you've done with the CDC, is how the voices that you're hearing are from people who were caught up in this, right? the first voice that we hear is from Diane, just somebody who was doing a photography project with kids in a school. And then everything is going fine. And then all of a sudden one day hears over the school's loudspeaker, the principal saying, if anybody sees that photography lady, send her directly to my office. The way that regular people got ensnared in this

without really a shred of evidence. Yeah. And I love starting off with that story because there's something I find, I don't know, something we really wanted to do that I'm glad you brought up is trying to, yeah, to hear about this as much as possible in the voices of people affected by it, and who kind of were going about their day when suddenly this strange story crept in and maybe even, you know, became something that they had to flee in this case or, in fact, couldn't escape in time and later examples. And I love that story too because it's about, you know, a woman traveling from, you know, from her home in a city to rural Kentucky and with the best of intentions and with this desire to, you know, to teach kids, but also I think to kind of forge

the connections that we need in any culture to feel like we're part of something more unified and not just a bunch of feuding little groups that are all trying to secure our own interests. And so this idea that if you set out that way one day and then you get accused of, you know, literally looking for blonde, blue-eyed children to sacrifice because you dared to be a stranger in town trying to teach skills and because there just was sort of a need to find a scapegoat in that moment and you were at then, you know, these are, and we're, it feels very similar to what we're seeing now. kind of, it feels like part of a healthy society involves people being able to travel around

and meet people different from themselves and to find, figure out what connects us and learn from each other. And that if that causes fear and superstition and anxiety, then that is, you know, Vena's now is taking away a lot of, a lot of the love and care that we have the potential to offer to each other and making us feel more like enemies. who happen to share a country than anything else. That's such a good way to put it. And I do, I do, there's this thread of like the demonization and fear and anxiety around children being in contact with adults who are not family.

Right. Especially I feel that today that, you know, there are all these ways that anxiety is about the family and sort of our current sort of social climate is, translated into it's dangerous if your kid is being watched or taught by an adult that is not a blood relative. I wonder if that's part of it too. I think so. And I feel, I mean, something that is very apparent today that I feel like is, you know, not even difficult to pick out the subtext from. It feels like it's become text at this point. It's this idea that, you know, that in the kind of the political conservatism of the United States today,

which has become, you know, very infiltrated by fundamentalist aspects of Christianity. There's a sense that like someone sexually abusing your child and teaching them about sex ed and about, you know, about gender and about queerness, it feels like people are equally afraid of both those things. And that feels like it's bringing this sort of subtextual part of the satanic panic of the 80s, like straight into the foreground, where it's, you kind of reach this point in a lot of, looking at the fears and anxieties of a lot of people of, well, are you worried about someone harming your children? Or are you even perhaps maybe even more worried about your children learning things that you don't want them to know and then having

the power that comes with that knowledge? You're finding, finding community that empowers them to live a life that you didn't envision for them. Because then it becomes, you know, not about protecting your children from harm as much as trying to maintain absolute control. But then passing that off is your desire merely to protect them when, in fact, you're maybe the thing that they need to be protected from at a certain point. Yeah. And, you know, in the first episode when you talk to Mary, that Grand Valley State professor, who basically is talking, I mean, she really breaks it down that at the time when, the satanic panic was really popping off in the 80s, people were really just the fam, people were very anxious about the family, right? You had these higher rates of what I guess back then you would call non-traditional families. What was that? Is that a euphemism for like

single parent households or I couldn't quite pick up on what the subtext of that was? I feel like that is just the non-nuclear family, which is, you know, which is interesting in its own right, right? Because then if we call something the non-traditional family, for not being a nuclear family. It's like, well, okay. The nuclear family isn't super traditional as evidenced by the fact that it's named after something

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The brilliance and cruelty of these moral panics is how they redirect anxiety away from real structural problems. Because the truth is, supporting a family is really hard. It's expensive. Most families need two incomes just to survive, which means relying on non-family adults, daycare workers, teachers, caregivers to help raise kids. And that dependence can naturally feel vulnerable. It requires trust. But instead of addressing why child care is so expensive, why wages for child care workers are so low, and why parents are all stretched so thin, it's much She is here to create a villain, a satanic conspiracy, a fraudulent immigrant, someone specific to blame, and someone different to fear.

So then you have economic anxieties, more women working. And then on top of that, you have these social commentators who are going on TV and really making people afraid of what the consequences of all of this might be. Yeah. And stoking a lot of fear around the family. And I mean, I wonder, do you see, do you see us as in a very similar moment today? Because, yeah, listening to that episode, I was like, gosh, this could have been written about 2026. I know. That's the creepy part. Yeah. And I guess, you know, it's, I would like for it to be less relevant. But, um, but that's what history does. It repeats. And, um, yeah, I do feel like we're in a similar moment. And it's funny to compare it to the 80s when I think, you know, I was born in the late 80s. So I wasn't, you know, I was limited.

and the things I could learn about what was happening in the news existing only sort of in egg form. And you can't pay very much attention in that case. But, you know, it feels like some of the major anxieties were about the death of the American working class, which in typical fashion, we were like, Reagan, save us by destroying it faster. Thank you. Great work. You know, and the fears about the concept of family value. and kind of an inevitable backlash to women's lib and gay liberation brewing.

And, you know, it's easy to forget now, too, that it wasn't until the Reagan administration that the separation between church and state began to get real weird at the White House. And we, you know, we had kind of a presidency in which Jerry Falwell got to sort of stick a couple of fingers in. and that's never good in my opinion. And also just the kind of the anxieties of the Cold War and this idea of, you know, just I think probably at any time in America you can do this, but especially in times of heightened anxiety, it's so nice to be able to point to a villain

who you seem very far away and kind of inhuman and having completely different needs and values than us. And I mean, I never thought about this before, actually, but it does feel like the satanic panic mimics the Cold War just a little bit, you know, where it's like you have these Satanists, and it's like talking about Soviets where, like, they're not regular people like you and me. Like instead of worshiping Jesus, they worship Satan.

And instead of saying goodbye, they say bad by. I mean, nobody said that about them. But this idea that they're sort of bizarre, of humans. It's such a great way to divert our anxieties away from the places that we should be directing them, which are, of course, you know, generally the people in power who are doing whatever they can to save a little bit of money by cutting welfare a little bit more. Yes, yes. And if you are really worried about your kid being sexually exploited or sexually abused, it's probably not by Satanists, there are probably

of, you know, like, there might be someplace else to, statistically speaking, there might be elsewhere that you could be looking if that was a meaningful concern to you other than the occult. Yeah. And I think the kind of the thing about the, especially in the early 80s that the

satanic panic made possible, which the allure of this makes total sense to me, is you know, to say that this problem of child abuse in America, that at this point in history, we we'd only really recently begun talking about, that the problem, you know, wasn't what we now having had the chance

to really study it, understand it to be, I think, based on all available data, which is that it's people in the family, it's people close to the family. If you're in a church, you have to think about the people in your church and the ways that, you know, very rigidly hierarchical institutions, including, like, quite a lot of Christian ones, really support and facilitate it. abuse because if children are disempowered to speak ill of someone who's in a position of authority

for them or their family, then that's going to be a lot harder for them to do. And so the satanic panic, I think, was so appealing because it was saying not just that there were Satanists who were abusing children, but that the majority of child abuse potentially was being perpetrated by Satanists. And once we, and also this kind of this idea that I think leads to, you know, people struggling to deal with child abuse in a way that's proportionate, which is the sense of, you know, that we've seen a lot in kind of American history and probably everywhere of like, well, you know, dare we remove a pillar of the community, dare we say these things about, you know, someone who is. is in this or that important role who is in a job that is sort of supposed to be for good people. What are we to do with this information? And the Satanic panic just makes it easy that way.

We're like, well, here's a Satanist. And as far as we know, they do have fun sacrificing animals and possibly babies. So there's really not, it allowed, I think, adults to protect a child for, from an absolute villain as opposed to putting them in a position that forced them to really question the world that they had built and questioned the safety of the world that they were enforcing rather than choosing their unprejudices over a child's welfare, which we can see does happen quite a lot when Satanists are not a convenient villain. The Satanists, according to those raising the alarm, weren't equal opportunities.

Predators, they supposedly targeted a specific type of child, white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed kids. This meant the people working in daycares who tended to be marginalized by race, class, or both, became the ones being demonized. And speaking of convenient villains, like something that you say in the, I think the first or the second episode is that, you know, a lot of the accusations being made were falling on the shoulders of people who were marginalized, whether they were lower income folks or strangers from out of town. And the idea that, oh, these Satanists are not just looking for any child. They're looking specifically for blonde-haired, blue-eyed children. Like, those are the children you've got to keep

out of school. It's just very clear to me how much this was a proxy for attacks on the other, using claims that, as you put it, would be comical if there weren't actual lives at stake. Yeah. Yeah, that's the thing, right, is that it's the deep. details of it are so over the top that it really, if it weren't real, it would be very funny. And there's even moments where it is funny. You know, you have kind of cult cops, which is what I think they're happy to be called at the time, or at least not too miffed about it in the 80s, who's, you know, who make a living by traveling from town to town giving seminars, talking about how you can identify like satanic elements in a murder investigation and talking about, you know, oh, I

own a copy of the satanic bible but i'm afraid to read it because it's demonic and it's like you should read it and then you if you read it you would find out that in the satanic bible anton levy himself is like no of course we don't literally worship satan because that would be silly but this is a religion about celebrating selfishness and then you would know that but because i don't know this idea of um of grown adults being afraid of the state of even opening the satanic bible is just like, when you think about them being in charge of what happens to the rest of us, you're like, oh, no, but in isolation, it's hilarious. Or like the story of the people who come into town and they buy yards of black fabric and

that's it, Satanists. I love that story. There's no other reason. Why else would someone need black fabric? I know. I know. And the story behind that is that they were, you know, making dress. for a funeral scene in a movie.

And a funeral itself is like a reason that anyone could reach for. And there's an example also in the McMartin case, which was kind of the first big trial and the satanic panic in these cases of alleged daycare sexual abuse, where one of the women who ran this daycare center was, they searched their house and found a black robe in it. And they were like, oh, my God, it's a black robe. What could explain this except a use in satanic rube?

tools and it was a graduation robe like so many people hang on to you know it's because it's one of these things where you're kind of like I'm not much of a detective but even I can think of a reason just offhand why someone would have that I'm sad to say that not a lot has changed daycares remain targets for people looking to attack those who are different and the playbook today is remarkably similar in the 1970s and eight years. books like Sybil and Michelle Remembers laid the groundwork for the Satanic Panic. Sybil, published in 1973, detailed a woman who supposedly had 16 personalities uncovered through recovered

memory therapy. Techniques later discredited, but treated as gospel at the time. Then came Michelle Remembers in 1980, claiming to document recovered memories of satanic ritual abuse. These books didn't just tell stories. They created a template. They taught people what to look for, what to fear, and how to interpret ambiguous situations as evidence of hidden evil.

And this template was weaponized against daycare workers, particularly those who were working class, immigrants, or people of color. Caregivers who simply wanted to work with kids found themselves accused of participating in elaborate satanic conspiracies, accused of targeting white, blonde hair, blue-eyed kids specifically. The allegations were baselessly sensational, spread through media coverage and word of mouth, but resulted in real destroyed lives and careers. Fast forward to today, and we're seeing that exact same playbook, just with different villains.

YouTuber Nick Shirley baselessly accused Somali-run daycares in Minnesota a fraud, filming empty buildings during off hours and presenting it as damning evidence. His viral videos viewed over 130 million times, led to frozen federal funding, increased deportation threats, and a new wave of suspicion against immigrant child care workers, despite state investigators finding no evidence of fraud at the facilities he targeted. And they're all recreating it because it works. Moral panics about children amplified through media aimed at marginalized communities doing the work of caring for kids. Yes, the details might change, but the pattern remains the same. So many of these allegations circulated around daycares in places like Kern County, California, like prominently featured. Why daycares?

Why do you think that was like the place where so many of these allegations stemmed? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I couldn't say exactly why, but I think there are a few factors and that it started with this case in McMarton where you had. a parent of a preschooler who had some severe mental health issues that she was dealing with and who I think kind of latched on to this idea that was being, you know, already kind of in the air and being talked about by experts and by people who had every reason to be a bit more skeptical about it that, you know, daycare, well, not daycare sexual abuse so much, but just that Satanists were looking for young children.

to abuse and also that this was, you know, if you were looking at sexual abuse, then you would have to wonder about Satanism. And that kind of came from this book that came out in 1980 called Michelle Remembers, which was kind of a smaller scale bestseller at the time, but was actually used to train social workers and police. And so it was, you know, kind of a sensationalistic paperback. It was definitely a sensationalistic paperback on the same scale as like, I mean, it was attempting to emulate Sybil to an extent. That was another highly fictionalized book that was then treated as treated as gospel by people who perhaps could have known better.

And then a lot of people who just were acting on the advice of experts. And this was a book where, you know, a woman went through therapy. And after a lot of unethical treatments that we talk about in an episode too, had kind of been really pushed by her therapist to stand by the story that she had been abused by Satanus as a small child and that Satan had told her what his plan for the 80s was and that that was going to be his decade to take over. And so if you believe that kind of thing, it was extremely stressful, you know, and so it seems as if we had this initial daycare case at McMarton where essentially a mother

became concerned that her child had been abused. There wasn't any actual evidence of this. And in my opinion, it was something that she kind of had on her mind and brought that concern to her child who was kind of too young to confirm or deny it because of being, I think, two or three years old. And of course, you know, it's worth mentioning that at this time, we really didn't know how to forensically question children,

especially young children about whether they'd experienced abuse, because we hadn't, you know, no one had really bothered to learn how to do that before. It wasn't something that the police in North America had too much experience with. The idea of childhood sexual abuse as a social concern or something that people were talking about on a bigger scale was just very new. And so there's this, you know, a combination of we didn't know what to do because no one had had time to research yet. And also the sense of blame of like, well, why didn't, why hadn't we done that? But that was what the situation was.

And then it seems as if there was almost kind of a meme quality to it where this case progressed because then you had police and social workers who didn't know how to question young children. And so inadvertently contaminated their witness pool. and were fairly quickly began pressuring young children to corroborate details that they were able to get other kids to mention and often would get those details through kind of imaginative play. So we ended up with these extremely, extremely strange and elaborate claims against the family that ran McMartin as this investigation proceeded. And it was on the level of there were these tunnels under the school

and the kids were being taken up in planes and taken to other countries and they were forced to kick a pony to death. And, you know, one of their alleged abusers flew through the air, which was supposed to prove that they were using witchcraft. And it was a lot of it,

in retrospect, pretty clearly seems to have been just children told to play with puppets until they said something that could maybe be connected to the idea of a crime. And then being asked to implicate or to confirm each other's stories in the same way that you would maybe ask people to implicate each other when they were your suspects rather than their witnesses.

So just this absolute nightmare of an investigation that was the most expensive legal proceeding in California until the OJ Simpson trial. And that ultimately went nowhere, but it did destroy the lives of the people who were accused to have no choice but to to be caught up in this for several years. But then the issue is that once, in terms of how that gets replicated, I think the McMartin investigation breaks as national news. And then I think there's just something about it where people are primed to look for the devil,

where it's this idea of, could Satanist be secretly abusing your child who's too young to really be able to give you much information about what they're doing all day long? And it's something where similar cases then pop up elsewhere in the country, which can, if you're looking for it, give the impression that, oh, my God, the Satanists really are everywhere. I mean, they're not just in California. There's a case in Florida. There's a case in Massachusetts.

There's a case in New Jersey. So if you're looking for it, you can say, well, this is just proof of how wide the Satanus reaches. but you can also say this is the kind of investigation leading potentially to wrongful investigate. But you can also say that this is the kind of investigation leading potentially to wrongful conviction that is easy for police in different locations to replicate if they want to because if you keep pressuring young children, especially a large group of them, to say that an adult has done something, at some point they're going to.

Like, weirdly, I think these cases replicated so quickly because parents were terrified as they had every reason to be because parents are always, I think, justified in feeling afraid all the time. And then people and authority hadn't done the work that they needed to to be able to really evaluate these stories as thoughtfully as they had to. They didn't know how to question children. And then if you push children to confirm a story, then it's similar dynamics to the way that you get false confessions, you know, where if you, there are some people, and especially people with low IQs, which again puts them in a similar category to kids,

where if you just keep pushing and pushing them to just tell them now that you did it and kind of especially focus on the idea of, short-term relief for someone who doesn't have a great concept of long-term consequences, like a small child, then you can kind of get what you want out of them. And so it feels like, you know, from that perspective, maybe an inevitable pattern, but also kind of a sinister one. Because this, you know, the catchphrase of this was believe the children. And yet a lot of children really had the experience of being systematically disbelieved by the adults in their lives. So let's say that we were in the 80s and we were watching this go down. If I had been like

guys, wait, maybe it's not Satan. Maybe these kids are just saying what they think the adults want. Was taking that stance terribly unpopular when this was all going on? Yeah, I mean, it definitely was and certainly at the beginning. And you can, you look at, you know, especially looking at local newspapers and local journalists, you can see people. I mean, that's another thing I kind of have wanted to emphasize, especially in talking about this show and sharing it, is that,

then as now, right, I think we all probably have a much better sense of what this all looks like in action because we're living through it. Like your country can be doing something awful and you cannot support it a tiny little bit and there will probably be no record of you in the history books. You know, and then people can study your country and be like, wow, it's crazy that everyone just agreed that they were all going to become evil all at once. I would never, right? Which I think is kind of how we were taught about Nazism when I was in middle school. I was just like, wow, sex to suck, wouldn't want to be evil and have that happen in a country where I lived. And then you're like, oh, no, it's slightly more complicated. And so, yeah, you look at, there's, you know, journalists locally kind of in, especially in local newspapers in the early 80s who are like, I just don't know about this.

I have some questions. And this seems strange. And I'm going to bring up some inevitable logical fallacious. and then, you know, it's just would be something that maybe would have, you would hope would have a little bit of a ripple effect and that some people would read and be affected by and that it would maybe kind of slow to some extent the progress of this, this kind of epidemic of conspiracy theories. But it could have, I think could have pretty negative effects for your career because it was the kind of thing where even more the now, I think that you would really be in a position of being accused of being sympathetic to child abuse or even to Satanism. And by people who, you know, were not as conspiracy-pilled, I think, as the people that who, and by people who are not as conspiracy-pilled as the people who would be mad at you for saying that today.

Because it was really more, at least in the early years, much more accepted as a mainstream belief that these Satanists were behind child abuse. And also we're dealing with it for the very first time. So we have to deal with it this way, apparently. And yeah, that social pressure was definitely there. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide,

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This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying. and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode we're cutting through the noise. Breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines.

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Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth.

Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. I guess I just feel like we're in such a different climate now. However, we still have these highly sensationalized, over-the-top claims with little to know evidence, really driving our public policy decisions with like that similar kind of real human cost,

real human consequences. I just don't know what to do with that, that here we are decades later. And it's almost like people have figured out how to turn that into a personal moneymaking or at least attention-generating endeavor. Yeah, I think so. And I think there's, I mean,

I really struggle with that. And it was kind of making this show as you might imagine, or maybe not, because when I imagine other people making creative stuff, I'm like, wow, it must be great to know what to do most of the time. And then you hear about them discuss it. And you're like, oh, no, we're all just kind of, we're just figuring it out, you know, one thing at a time,

if that, for the most part. And with this, there were times when it was hard to work on because I was like, I don't know what I want to say because I don't really feel like I have anything constructive or hopeful, you know, because there's just times. when that's kind of your emotional response to the world that you're in. And I think that in the end, I feel like, you know,

it ended up with a conclusion that I believe in and that, you know, is not telling people that we have to love each other because that's not good advice, you know? It's like, just do it. Just love each other. Just do it. It's not helpful, I don't think.

And so I hope that it, I don't know, that it provides context. in that way and that we also can kind of can encounter some of that frustration of like, oh my God, why are we living through this? We just did this one. And now we're doing it again, you know? But I also feel like there's, you know, we end in this place of inviting the listener to think of it, partly from the perspective of if we have to watch history repeat itself, which I think we do,

You know, and I think it's even if you do understand the past, you still have to repeat it or you still have to live in a world of people who are repeating it and live through the consequences of their choices. But I think that studying those patterns and studying the times when people have lived through something similar to what we're going through now, which there will always be parallels. I think that can be useful. I think there's like a sadness in that that we deserve to let ourselves feel that we really would like to be able to learn more as a species. And yet, I don't know, in a way it feels like studying human history and behavior is like looking after like a dog or a baby. You know, we're like no matter how actually, I mean, dogs are much more trainable, I think. I can confirm that. Yeah, a baby or a cat, let's say.

were like, no matter, like, I can explain to my cats for the rest of my life that if they stick their paw on a glass of water and pull it over, then like, they're not going to get what they want and I'm not going to get what I want and we're just going to get water and potentially a broken glass everywhere. And yet they can't hear what I'm saying because they guess our relationship doesn't happen on that level. But I can leave fewer glasses out for them to do that too. And I do feel like, you know, you look at the satanic panic, for example, and like, there are lessons from it. And there are lessons that we chose not to learn because it would have been hard. But, you know, on the bigger scale, there's the issue that it revealed that

the American legal system was extremely vulnerable to bad outcomes, for examples, like, well, we're very reliant on eyewitness testimony despite knowing more and more about how unreliable human memory is. Not that you can't rely on it at all, but that it's tricky and that there are ways, there's magical thinking around it, which, you know, has been proven not to be true. There's also a belief that the satanic panic really benefited from that testimony under, that you produced under hypnosis was more reliable. And you're not more truthful under hypnosis, but you are more vulnerable to suggestion. And that ended up coming up quite a bit. You know, and so there were things that we could learn and that some people did learn

and that we still, if we look at it, have the capacity to learn today because those lessons don't expire about just not surrendering our common sense to authority figures and about the ways that it's comfortable to shift your anxiety over to a scapegoat when really the people who deserve it are in your community, often in leadership roles. And so those lessons are there. And we can recognize those patterns around us. If we study the past, then we can see more clearly

how it's replicating in the present and try and do something to affect it or to affect things meaningfully and to provide shelter for people who inevitably those myths are going to come for in some way. I guess I think it's important to try and find this middle ground of, you know, if you can't stop history from happening, then how do you live within it and even protect some of the people who are stuck inside of it with you?

And I think that's the goal because it is so tempting to feel despair that we can't just explain something to people really, really well and then they won't ever do it again. Yeah, I mean, one of the points that you make, I think at the end of the first episode is that it really is a story about people encountering something just a little bit unusual or just a little bit not what they were expecting. and then being stirred into such a state of anxiety that it's not just the worst thing that they can imagine. They're jumping to the conclusion that is worse than that. And I think I would love to live in a world where that's not our first instinct. But unfortunately, as you just beautifully articulated, I'm not sure if that's the world that we have today so many decades later. I'm not sure if we have learned those lessons or if we ever will. Yeah.

Yeah. And I also just, I don't know, it was kind of a fun. show for me to do partly in terms of in terms of thinking about who is this cultural figure the devil who we love to blame stuff on because I grow up pretty secular. I've never had actual anxiety about the devil. And so trying to think about what would it be like to have that figure in my life. It would be very scary, you know, to think that someone is always out there trying to tempt me or trying to make me stop doing, you know, the right thing. in life. I feel like I actually, I guess I do have a concept of that and it's just my internal

sense of like anxiety, you know, and that that's, they're like things inside of my brain or inside of my mental health that are trying to sabotage me all the time and that's what I have instead of Satan. But it feels like, you know, there's, that Satan is a character who you may find yourself clinging to if you need to believe in the righteousness of yourself a little bit more than is necessary if you're you know if you're saying well you know i'm breaking a few eggs but i'm fighting the devil um and so it's okay or i'm taking on pure evil and i'm i'm really a warrior for god and all this so i can do whatever and it's like what what if what if we didn't know that we were being these great heroes and we had to actually

keep evaluating our actions one thing at a time and not be so sure that everything we were doing was necessary because I think that would cause us to listen more. And I think we're able to do more good works for each other if we're not so sure that we're the heroes in our own story. And that's like a positive thing that comes from discomfort where I think if you know you look at people in the satanic panic who just got really deep in it,

and became some, you know, fell into some kind of expert role potentially. And they were in a position, especially in, you know, I think in mental health fields where a lot of your victories are very slow and hard won and can reverse themselves out of nowhere. That wouldn't it be nice to just to be the hero and to fix a patient one day and just to like, just to do something kind of impossibly great and kind of impossibly great and good. And I hope it's reassuring for people to hear. I think it's reassuring for me to think about the fact that you don't have to be in that hero role to do good in the world. And even that if you do

find yourself in that role, then that might be a warning sign because it could mean that you're just not thinking clearly enough about what you're doing one thing at a time, you know? Yeah. I have to say, I'm so glad that you brought up just sort of Satan. as a character. I grew up in the South. I grew up pretty religious. My parents were like in the church, but not super into it, but then the like one sphere over.

So like my extended family and where we lived, super, super religious. I went to religious schools, all of that. And, you know, you interview one person in the show that their experience. I was like, oh, that is exactly. Where you see like people with the long denim skirts and all of that. that was my childhood. I was like, oh, definitely recognize that. And when I tell you the role that Satan, like, there was definitely an under,

Satan had a recurring undercurrent role in my childhood to the point where, you know, I remember going to do a school project at someone's house where we had to, it was a project about Ouija boards and her mom made us keep it on the front porch because she was like, if you kept the project inside, it would be like inviting the devil in. our house. And I remember when I was growing up, the group, three six mafias are already right there, six, six, six, six. They had a song called Stay Fly, and the rumor was if you played their song backward, what the chorus actually said was Lucifer is my king till I die. So like all of these like ways where we were taught to sort of be both afraid of Satan, never have any kind of interaction

was Zayton, but also be obsessively looking for him as presence everywhere. Yeah, it's like when you like hate someone who turns out to be your crush. Like it's, yes. That's such a good way to put it. So much of your work, including this project, is about looking back to get a sense of where we might be headed in the future. Where do you think we're headed? Oh, my gosh.

I'm an optimist and nothing can beat it out of me apparently. So I'm honestly very hopeful in a way because the show closes with an episode where we actually talk quite a bit about Jonestown and the People's Temple and about this question of sort of, well, why is it that we felt, A, why did we feel the need to invent the satanic panic when we had a case of a large-scale cult operating under everybody's noses

and that we just kind of ignored that one. And we're like, but what about an imaginary one, though? Let's focus on that. And, you know, this thing that I feel like I can see pretty clearly, especially having done this research where you look at the United States and the past few years politically, and it feels like we're, you know, We've become infiltrated by fascism. And as far as I can tell from this experience,

a fascist government operates similarly to a cult and that a cult operates basically like an abusive household. And then it feels to me at this point like there's just sort of fractals where you have the same logic replicating itself, which is scary and also helpful because it's kind of the same story over and over again. And then maybe you can kind of anticipate,

dissipate the logic of it. And I do tend to think just from looking generally at what happens when people get very attached to kind of a dictator-like figure is that, you know, there's, there have been horrors and will be horrors that can't be undone because of that. But also, it's charismatic evil leaders can't really be replaced. that easily. And I'm just excited for that. I like closing on a little bit of an optimistic note, even though the story itself is like not super optimistic. I guess it's attempting realism. I don't know if I'm ever able to get there with my sort of need for polyanaism, which you can see is very loud. But yeah, I think that within the story of the satanic panic, you kind of, you step away from

the devil and you're like, okay, we haven't met this guy. We haven't been able to talk to him, really. So what we really have are a bunch of stories of individual people who were able to get what they wanted by striking a lot of fear and anxiety into people and getting what they wanted out of them. And the idea of looking forward to a time when that will end because on a human scale, everything ends. Yeah, it's, it's nice to remember that we're not dealing with cosmic evil. We're dealing with very, very prideful individual, kind of often mortifying to look at human control and abuse. And that's, you know, we're not dealing with something that, is inevitable or cosmic or has to take place.

We're dealing with shitty little men being given too much power, and we can deal with that one a lot easier. Hell yeah. The show is The Devil You Know on CBC. Where can folks check it out? You can check it out wherever you get your podcasts. I know that's how we all tell people to find podcasts now, but you know, just your normal platforms,

or if you're my mom and that phrase dresses you out, you can simply search it on your favorite search tension. You can bang it like Andrew Garfield and Spider-Man. And there's a, you can listen to the first episode on my podcast You're Wrong About, which is a show where we have talked over the years about the satanic panic and survival stories and bimboes and so much other stuff. So check that one out too if you feel like it. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech

or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoati.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoity.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and unbossed creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tara Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.

Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. And nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in.

I'm Timbo. And every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. and we're going straight to the source the athletes themselves. Their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to SportsSlic.

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Sliced Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games.

Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's superhuman. Human documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles, so how do you keep going?

On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that. shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports.

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