Thread by @CZEdwards

#TailorSnarkWars #Metabattle: Satanic Panics, Daycare, Memory, Pantsuits, Nerve clusters.
The war for all the marbles.

(Or at least one of the wars.)

ALL THE FUCKING TRIGGER WARNINGS I HAVE EVER MADE.

EVERY CONTENT WARNING.

THIS WILL BE A TOUGH THREAD.

When last we left our protagonists...
our brain’s hacker was deep in the throes of writing subroutines

women were wearing pants as they flooded the workforce in the late 1970s & 80s

breastfeeding & daycare were about to crash into a mess.

Welcome to the collision point.

Growing up an Xer in the late 80s & early 90s (Started sleep away college in 1992) my mental image of the 1960s was really ~22 months: 1968 & 1969.

Started with Tet Offensive, through DNC & Woodstock, ended with the Hells Angels beating the shit out of people at Altamont.

What I thought of as the 60s was mostly the 70s.
Burnt out hippies strung out on too many substances? The 70s.
Feminism getting a real hold? 70s.
Psychedelic design? 70s.
Burnt orange, avocado, neon yellow? 70s.
Shag? 70s.
Prog rock? 70s plus ice pick for ear drums, please.

Recall, the 70s went bad, fast & hard. Multiple economic stressors hit all at once; the world economy barely survived. I talked about the US; Europe was in worse shape. Parts of Canada came close to bankruptcy. Japan surged, but…

… by burning their candle at both ends, and they started paying for it in 1989.

South America had coup after coup.

Northern Africa & the Middle East based their development on rainfall that stopped, and oil that was getting harder to produce.

Sub Saharan? Theirs is gonna wait a little longer, but they held out thanks to dictators and apartheid, and when it fell apart... massacres & HIV and war.

Russia was reaching the end of their ability to mask the nearly fatal wounds of WWII, which meant they withdrew support for Communist insurgents. The insurgents still had weapons, though, and figured out the drug trade, which is libertarian capitalism.

(Most of this turmoil is because the Freshwater Economics/Objectivist cult pwned the World Bank & IMF, forcing those founded-to-be-charitable agencies into the role of pawn broker & mob leg breaker… Go read Austerity by Mark Blyth. He’s entertaining & he’s right.)

In the US, we’ve always had some… oh, jeez, no nice way to say it. Credulous as fuck, magical thinking asshats who LIKE to be scammed.

And people happy to sell ‘em sugar pills, opium as liquor cure, rum as opium cure, snake oil for rheumatiz & Gosh Golly Olde Tyme Religion.

So...

In the 1950s & 60s, the Segregationists were a dominant power in American politics. Since they were primarily in the South, they were also mostly Protestant. Schismatic as hell, but Protestant & more Evangelical than not.

Protestant != Segregationist. They just overlap.

(For the reasons behind this, please read Colin Woodward’s American Nations, which frames the idea of regional culture based on first dominant group. It’s not perfect, it’s VERY white oriented, but it’s a good frame and white supremacy is white dominated.…)

Evangelicals were not then primarily opposed to contraception (They didn’t pillory Loretta Lynn for singing The Pill) or abortion. There was a lot of talk in women’s circles in Protestantism about never going to the Catholic Hospital. It was all hushed, but it was a thing.

What wound the Evangelical clock was preventing miscegenation and maintaining segregation. (Also keeping schools Protestant, at least as prayer and none of that evolution, but that was relatively minor compared to segregation.) That’s what got money in the collection plates.

And the reason for this is simple, if grotesque: relatively rich white southerners wanted to keep poor white southerners as poorly paid employees, and as the bulwark against black people.

So they fostered white supremacy as a means of recruiting foot soldiers. (Oversimplified.)

Because realistically? Poor whites have a lot more in common with poor blacks between 1800 and 1920. Their kids got hookworm & malaria & pellagra at the same rates. Infant mortality was high for both. Income (if any in cash) was low. Diets were bad.

But in the 1920s, socialism & communism start taking hold in the US and the labor movement became reality. Dearly bought with a lot of spilled blood, but real and working.

(When we call Steve Rogers a premature anti-fascist & Red Diaper Baby? It’s because per canon, his parents were poor, Irish, Brooklyn factory workers when he was born in 1918.

lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/10/steven…

Steve would be an FDR liberal, and Steve is the male version of Francie Nolan from “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”, who is absolutely PRO UNION/liberal/gets along with socialists.)

Union organizers in the early 20th century managed to get as far south as West Virginia coal miners, but they didn’t quite manage the southern textile mills & farms.

Woodward (above) makes a good argument about the poor white (borderlander) southerners being too clannish...

... and suspicious of outsiders to cooperate, because their experience of the world was that everyone planned to screw them, so better be screwed by the devil you know than one who might have new, creative torture in mind.

West Virginia is strongly Borderlander territory, but when the mines were being organized, there were also many Italian & German recent immigrants, and the coal mines were so utterly bad that even the devil of an outsider was probably better.

(And note that this only held through the fat years after WWII. When economics reverted to near normal, the unions fell apart, mostly because of greed & internal squabbles.)

(But it gave us the West Virginia pepperoni roll, so… nah, not compensation. Close, though.)

Further south, where subsistence farming & long resentment of the north & generations of white supremacy (indoctrinated via the Southern Baptist’s church’s unholy alliance with Confederacy & slavery)...

No, the hold was too strong and unions never really had a chance.

However, as the first Civil Rights fight wound down after the Civil Rights Act, most people, even in the South, just… accepted that legal equality isn’t so bad.

The churches stayed segregated, black money spent just fine, and black athletes could play some ball.

(The true religion of the South is Football.) Racism never went away or even got better, but integration stopped being something that could be fought and started being the state of reality.

As long as de facto social segregation held, that fight just... stopped.

(Note that since de facto segregation is now falling apart, 50 years later, the fight is back on. It’s mostly extinction burst — the bad behavior that goes away once they’re certain it will never again be rewarded — but we do have to go through this. And it will end.)

So all that money that the white churches raised to maintain segregation... it dried up.

But tent meeting/convention/conclave evangelists still had buses to maintain and planes to keep fueled and big old institutions trying to pay the electric bill.

They needed a new demon.

And they went literal.

The End of The World.

Now, End-Times preaching has always been a money spinner, right up there with The Sex Talk, but now they had … a DATE.

The Year 2000, which was far enough away to be Not Real, but close enough to be titillating.

The people in the room could go, “I’ll be 65 years old when that happens" or 52 or 97 or whatever.

Remember, humans suck at long-term planning; anything over about 24 months is just too far away to really comprehend.

But if they can make it a relatable age, it’s sorta real.

We get Hal Lindsey & Tim LaHaye & Jack Van Impe & Cleon Skousen & all the nut jobs yelling about the end of the world and the Rapture and the Antichrist and blah blah fucking blah.

It’s all Cthulhu Calvinism with the serial numbers filed off. Whoever gets eaten first wins.

And the big bad of this tale is Satan. Who happens to be starring in an Ira Levin novel turned movie and a Blatty novel turned movie, and a trilogy about a little kid and the completely whack people around him who are willing to murder for their delusions.

(And seriously, consider these as a lens on how Boomers viewed having children. We were little demons, images of Satan. Sent to ruin their lives. These movies were POPULAR, and the most successful horror always speaks to the fears we refuse to articulate.)

(N.B.: my religious education was primarily Quaker and Jesuit. Both of which lead with hard rationalist theory from about 2nd grade. Neither of which has any truck whatsoever with pre- or post- millennial dispensationalism, and both are more Universalist than they admit.
...

Which means both emotionally & intellectually, I find Rapture theology to be utter crap. It’s bad reading of the text, it’s inconsistent, it’s… a Scary Story To Tell In The Dark. It’s not even good mythology, as the mess that is the Left Behind series proves.
...

And once again, I credit @slacktivistFred for my understanding of the history of 20th century evangelical thought. He’s better at this than I am. I am exasperated; he takes them seriously. If you’re not reading his Slacktivist blog, start. Best commentariat on the internet.)

Vocabulary:

Dispensationalism: Jesus takes the faithful to heaven
Pre-millennial: before he goes Turbo-Jesus & destroys earth (Rapture)
Post-Millennial: after he goes Turbo-Jesus (who’s left? 🤷‍♀️)
Universalist: everyone goes to heaven eventually; Hell isn’t forever.

70s is also when Jack Chick really cranks up.

And when Heritage House 76 starts publishing their anti-contraception, anti-abortion propaganda. They’re the gold standard press of the Operation Rescue (also starting up in this time) terrorism organizations.

HH76 dug up some photos of very late miscarriages from 1950s medical journals, printed them as pictures of early term abortion. What you see on billboards? That’s their work, and it’s a lie. A conscious lie. An intentional one to make them money.

Also in the 70s, there was a fad for Magic. All sorts - crystals & palmistry & runes & i ching & astrology & fucking everything (used as a verb) & smoking any plant and... (Except actual animal sacrifice & reading entrails…) Also Christian Folk Magic.

No, seriously. It had terrible, horribly appropriative names like “pow-wow magic” (I’m so sorry) and Spiritism...

but it’s absolutely European folk practice minus the serials. Even faithful Christians were OK with laying on hands & protective spells & salt to prevent demons.

So we have this
1) collision course of religious mania
2) a lack of money coming into the coffers
3) societal change
4) folk magic making another run at popularity …

And 5) a lot of men out of work.

And women taking jobs that men once did or men never did but could.

When a het couple both worked, they had to do something with their little kids, so day care came back. It existed before, in the 1940s. It was called a creche, and some ran 24/7 in the big cities or where munitions were being manufactured.

It was heavily subsidized & it worked.

Creches mostly died out after the war ended. What the govt didn’t pay for was a business expense, a perk when they couldn’t offer raises (because of wage freezes).

By the 80s, they were private enterprise. Often run by middle aged women who didn’t have other supports.

Wait, we know this can be a problem. Middle aged women in an age of magical belief and economic turmoil? We’ve been here before. It’s not pretty.

This time we didn’t press them to death or burn them at the stake as heretics. Yay, progress.

The Satanic Panic officially starts with the publication of a piece of fiction masquerading as memoir called Michelle Remembers in 1980.

The book is a lie. Pretty much it existed because the Shrink Author got the hots for the Patient Author, who reciprocated and told Shrink...

... sexy, creepy stories so they could spend time together away from their respective spouses until they divorced and married each other (🙄😲😮😳)

...and made a lucrative career on talk shows & Christian conferences & doing training for police departments ...

... They made about $5K per week in 1981 dollars.

So $13K in 2018 per week, plus travel expenses.

About $600K equivalent a year from 1981 to 1996.

Until they got outed.

I can’t even blame the publisher for buying the manuscript. (I do blame them for not marking it fiction.) Those creepy sexy stories hit all of those fads in the zeitgeist right then: Magic & feminism & sex & SEX & demons & end of the world.

Twilight + Kardashians.

It BLEW UP.

By 1983, there were hundreds of copycats and clones. Suddenly, Satan was EVERYWHERE!

On dish soap (Procter & Gamble BTW: This rumor was started by Amway, aka The DeVos family)
in books (fantasy lit took a huge hit), gaming (duh), music &

...especially in day care.

Because those moms who went to work already felt guilty for doing it. Yeah, they were only getting 74% of a paycheck, but it was theirs.

Being half of the household’s income came with half of the decision making & the ability to ask to share housework.

That’s power.

Work came with empowerment & adult relationships that weren’t about sex, and adult conversation not interrupted by mom mom mom mom.

Being a SAHP without extended adult interaction free of children can cause massive emotional disruption. Work relieved that.

Our society isn’t well equipped to endorse personal satisfaction. Pleasure is not supposed to be a goal or a reward.

We have spent centuries absorbing the idea that desire is a sin, and promoting the idea of motherhood as self-sacrifice.

It causes a lot of problems.

So being happy to be working must be somewhat wicked, right? There will be punishment, and that punishment would fall on the children, because that’s what the Old Testament does.

Even when we’re not Christian, we absorb this mode of thinking. It’s deep in our culture.

(The research on this is clear: we judge mothers who work as far more irresponsible than working fathers; we condemn them for doing the exact things that men get praised for; we look for reasons to shame women. This is an essential misogyny in our culture.)

To be fair, some of the early day cares were not great.

There wasn’t much state or local regulation; anyone could hang out their shingle.

For the most part, corporal punishment was still accepted as normal & laudable, and definitions of it were variable. Kids got hit.

Babies in day care tended to get more diaper rash because 1970s-80s disposable diapers were just awful, and bacteria gets passed around in a group environment. Little kids had more colds because they’re walking Petri dishes whose primary sensor is their mouth.(Like any school...)

But... the emotional & social benefits of crèche & day care are 10K kg of good versus 25 grams of potential bad.

Kids in daycare have more robust immune systems, are more cooperative, play together better, less rigid thinkers. They read faster, retain info better, more words.

(And now that we’ve got day care regulated, it’s SO much better than it was in 1981. And it’s SO SO SO much better for parents to be among peers. SAH is isolating, contributes to depression & anxiety, damages lifetime earnings & retirement. Let’s make daycare public school, ok?)

But in the early 80s, we were still working a lot of this out, and we were also still digging our way out of the dry hole that was Freudian theory. Which had seriously bad ideas about gender, sexuality, bodies and desire.

So there was that.

That matters because... nerve clusters.

Look, the human body, despite our cultural *issues*, is geared for pleasure. We love anything that’s fat+carbs: French fries, ice cream, bread & butter, deep fried food. We love dopamine subs like opiates. GABA subs like booze & benzos.

And the nerve clusters that become genitals — those develop fairly early. They’re in place by 20 weeks of gestation.

One of the things that surprised the early ultrasound researchers & still startles prospective parents: we have lots of pics of fetuses busy with their junk.

Recall: a pregnancy is 40 weeks. 20 weeks is halfway. At 20 weeks, fetuses can’t survive outside. Their lungs are still undeveloped, skin is like wet tissue paper, bones are soft, eyes are barely set jelly. But the critical nerve clusters are up & running.

Now, the brain isn’t yet up for the sensation of orgasm. That does require the oxygen fat pipe of breathing, rather than the narrow pipe of the umbilicus. Brain is not that organized until around (probably? We don’t test this for obvs) 18 months, but pleasure is possible.

When babies are about 5-6 months old, they explore their bodies. They have the attention span of well, babies, so they get distracted easily, but babies without diapers find their genitals and manipulate them, just like their toes. It feels good and fun for them.

AND IT’S PERFECTLY FINE.

There’s no reasonable indication that genital manipulation in infants & toddlers is anything except personal exploration, personal pleasure and (sometimes) an indicator of dermatitis due to incomplete toilet training or diaper issues.

Babies do itch.

But in the 1980s? The best guess research then, based on bad Freudian reading, was that children did not independently discover their own bodies and any self-touching was indicative of abuse or something else broken around or in the child.

And must be fixed.

(The current definition of when childhood masturbation is a problem & might indicate either abuse or an emotional regulation issue is if it is intrusive, invasive, persistent and/or aggressive. If a kid stops when told to stop, accepts private versus public reasoning, doesn’t...

...try to involve others... the kid just has a toy. Yeah, they’ll go back to it about as often as any kid with any favorite toy. Recall that they have short attention spans & will likely get bored or interested in something else.

...

If kid complains of being itchy, get that checked, but most of the time, it’s just self-soothing behavior and it means nothing more than thumb-sucking.)

[What follows has NOTHING to do with Hari Seldon or Future History or Asimov.]

So... in the 70s, there was a Freudian who came up with the idea of psychohistory, and decided that widespread child sexual abuse was the cause of all bad things everywhere, throughout time.

He defined sexual abuse as everything from being an infant in the same room when parents got a quickie, to pre-natal abuse, which AFAICT means the idea of sex during pregnancy squicked him out. Also having the Sex Talk with toddlers to explain where babies came from, or being...

...in the presence of proof of sex (like a pregnant or lactating woman). He was racist AF, called brown cultures infanticidal while giving white ones who did the exact same things a pass.

...

... He is deeply anti-feminist and just generally awful. No, I won’t name him. I want him to die forgotten.

I’m going to yell, because this is such fucking bullshit.

NAPTIME NOOKIE IS NOT HARMFUL TO YOUR BABY. IF YOU’RE CONSENTING & YOUR BODIES COOPERATE & YOU’VE GOT THE ENERGY, GO FOR IT. IT’S GOOD FOR YOUR PARTNERSHIP, WHICH IS GOOD FOR YOUR BABY. Your kid won’t care or be harmed in any way.

There are NO IN-UTERO memories. The pre-natal brain cannot process memory that way. (It’s an oxygen thing - that part of the brain cannot boot up in the relatively low oxygen environment the umbilicus forces.) Nor do we make accessible memories during brain boot-up in 0-6 months.

Reliable memory seems to be part of self-awareness & theory of mind & comes on-line around 20-26 months.

Some people have some earlier fragment memories, but not continuous or strong ones, and the nature of memory makes those exceptionally fragile.

But no, Ma & Pa Ingalls getting it on to make Carrie, Grace & the baby boy did not permanently scar Laura & Mary. (The poverty & griftyness & isolation & lies & starvation did the damage.)

Diapers, swaddling, and toilet training are not abuse. Nor is education and school.

Nor should anyone take this as endorsement of any sort of sexual contact with any child.

Nope, nope, nope.

A kid can put their own hands on their own body. That’s fine.

Nobody else gets to touch that way. (That’s universal. What you do with yourself is your biz.)

Were that one Freudian’s ideas widespread & influential? More than they should have been. Most of what he wrote got dismissed (correctly!) as the ravings of a crank with more unexamined ISSUES than the National Geographic, but otherwise rational people gave him a little credit.

Because... here’s the thing: there’s been a lot of physical & sexual assault throughout history, which has caused trauma & been perpetuated through the normalization of abuse of the vulnerable.

It’s misogyny & racism & classism & the entitlement of the powerful.

But we don’t need to make up abuse. The real ones are RIGHT THERE in the record. Aristocratic parents treated their children as property & bargaining chips on the marriage market. Women forced into sex work for economic survival. Pregnancies nobody could afford.

Marital rape. Young women married to elderly men. Younger boys exploited by elder ones at boarding school. SLAVERY. I’m going to stop because nothing is new under the sun, and this is triggering.

Was sexual abuse under-reported? Yes!

The REAL stuff, and it really is mostly in the family, and not stranger danger. And it’s not the result of consensual adult relationships in pre-modern small houses with limited privacy.

It’s the result of the exploitation of power.

It’s uncles by marriage and older cousins & step-sibs going after little ones in repressive environments. It’s stepfathers, who are far more likely to harm a step-child than their own. It’s close family friends and the ones we trust.

The statistics suck, but it breaks down to this: It’s people who have issues with power and need to dominate and control to make themselves feel strong.

That’s the root cause of sexual assault. All of it.

But… a subset of second wave feminism bought into the widespread exploitation myth, too.

Too many women were abused & ignored.

Pornography of the time WAS exploitative.

So was sex work, because it was primarily controlled by entitled, misogynist, criminal men.

To be clear: child porn has flourished with the invention of the digital camera & small storage devices. When all photos had to be chemically developed and printed to film/paper, it was harder to make and distribute sexual images of children.

The producers had to have their own dark rooms & distribution networks, since even porn photo labs had ethical limits. Conspiracies that are large tend to fail.

Were teenagers exploited? YES. But pre-pubescent children? Not as much.

So Second Wave anti-sex work feminists weren’t really thinking about *child* porn when they opposed porn & sex work.

They denied the idea of consent in a world they felt was inherently exploitative. They saw women as deprived of will & agency, so unable to make informed choices.

How dare we think victims of abuse should govern their own decisions about sex work and their bodies? They cannot possibly make a rational, thoughtful decision about how they want to use their bodies. They’ve lived in too much toxicity…

Second wave had their own misogynistic blinders. We’re still dealing with fallout of their unexamined fears & self-justifications for their own issues. They dislike being told they’re wrong, but they are. We just keep saying it. Eventually they change.

This is a long game here.

But in the early 80s, feminists wanted to be believed about their own abuse. Which is EXACTLY right.

Psychiatrists working with the above scrap of a crap theory and their own flawed theoretical basis were starting to promote the idea of believing the victim.

(This was never supposed to mean believe despite evidence. It meant starting from a presumption of truth & innocence, and verifying their testimony to help them process & prosecute if possible. It never meant blind faith. Should not mean blind faith now.)

And we’ve got para-church people in need of a new grift pushing the idea of demons, possession, satanism, and widespread exploitation and corruption.

(The last is not inaccurate, just projection. The exploitation & corruption were coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE.)

And women in the workforce, men underemployed, men who would prefer not to be Daddy Daycare or Mr Mom because being the Stay at Home Parent is a lot more work than going to an office or factory, & staying home doesn’t come with Social Security credits. (It should.)

So the kids need daycare. But everyone feels weird about it. Because it’s new for the middle class.

It’s not new for the working class; they’ve been doing this forever. But middle class takes time to adjust to stuff like this.

And one more factor: cheap photocopiers & copy paper.

For $1, a person could walk into most drug stores or grocery stores and come out with 20 copies of a typed document.

At work, they could probably run off 50 or 100 & nobody would notice.

Hey GenX: do you remember taking home a memo from school about LSD on temporary tattoos?

Blue Star Acid, usually?

That’s an early example of viral fake news, and the photocopier enabled its spread. As far as anyone can tell, it never happened.

(Acid was even then too expensive to give away to random strangers, especially children. It’s like people thought there was an Acid Fairy. The logic doesn’t even make sense.)

The technical term for this is samizdat, from a Russian word for unauthorized/self printing.

Fanzines and tech/anarchist/both zines (like 2600) were respectable western samizdat.

But so were pubs like Ron Paul’s newsletters and Bo Gritz’ Sovereign Citizen/Militia stuff.

The phrase “I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter” is an artifact of this time frame. Because once upon a time, we sent our home addresses on Self Addressed, Stamped Envelopes to strangers whose addresses we found in magazine’s classifieds.

(The world was so weird, so recently. We also used to answer the telephone without knowing who was calling, and we couldn’t leave messages for most people. If they were on another call, we called back later. No text, except postcards.)

So much of these various, concurrent panics spread via Xerox. Churches started sharing newsletters. Survivors started writing about their experiences. Therapists started mailing lists. Media became personal and mass at the same time and viral became a thing. Slower, but viral.

And because of a weird quirk in the human brain, we filter information we read differently.

We don’t *quite* trust it more, but for about 75% of humans, what we read gets stored differently in our memories, and it accesses slightly more easily than other knowledge.

It’s why we slightly trust print journalism over TV journalism, and why we seem prone to falling for online fake news.

It only takes a slightly favorable cognitive bias to snowball when we’re talking millions of impressions a day.

But emotionally, there’s also the Satan Sellers. And by that, I don’t mean actual Satanists. I mean the Evangelicals who got filthy rich scamming people with inarticulate fears of a social world changing faster than they could adapt, and who felt they were losing privilege.

Mike Warnke was the biggest of the evil. Sold his book for 1970s 6 figures, claimed he was a former high satanic priest who found Jesus in his couch cushions, spent next 2 decades cheating on a series of wives & profiting to the tune of $800K a year in donations.

In 1982. Which would be $2.45 million in 2018 money. Took in 7 figures a year, in those year’s money, from 83-88.

(How come these guys are always high priests & never ordinary members? Oh, yeah, everyone in my family’s been a Satanist back to the old country. We break out great-grandmama’s special goat’s head stew recipe after every sacrifice. It’s the BEST!

And think about it, any ordinary member who grew up in a Satanic cult would be able to write the tell-all best seller of the 1980s and retire wealthy. Given the purported Satanic ethics of selfishness, this is obvious.

Even the Scientologists & Objectivists had disaffected membership who wrote tell-alls. But no satanists? EVER? Really? Just a bunch of Christian dudes talking to other Christians. That’s not even a little suspect??)

(There was one of these asshats who claimed this. Turned out, nope. Just a serial rapist & con artist.)

(Also, hats off to Cornerstone Magazine, which was a Christian publication and was skeptical enough & ethical enough to take on these charlatans. I hope Christian media someday returns to that moral state of probity and righteousness.)

Stryper was a Christian metal band who purposely backmasked bible verses into their shitty hair metal.

Stryper is one of the early “Jesus is my Boyfriend” rock bands. Try it! Read any Christian Rock lyrics. Are they singing about Jesus or getting laid? Just pop music+branding.

Jack Van Impe & his Barbie wife Rexella got in on the grift. Back in the early days, when they weren’t talking Rapture, it was all Satan’s minions.

(I really do wonder if they’ve realized that all of their predictions track perfectly onto the orange one & his puppet master...)

In 1976, Colorado Springs was a base town that primarily supported the Air Force Academy, Fort Carson, NORAD & Peterson Air Force Base. The south end was cheap apartments, liquor stores (we don’t do booze in grocery stores), pawn shops & car dealerships. Base services.

(You can see the growth rings in the developments. It’s kind of eerie, actually.)

In 1984, the first of the Springs’ megachurch leaders moved in, Ted Haggard (he caught snorting meth with a rent boy in 2006).

Attracted by low rents, cheap land, the relatively young & mobile community, the Sagebrush Rebellion, and Colorado’s permissive attitude towards ...

...therapists & homeschooling, a cottage industry of parachurch organizations started growing. Not just Satanism, but adoption orgs, Christian therapy orgs, homophobic/conversion orgs, anti-choice orgs, mission societies. You name it, Colorado Springs had it by the end of the 90s

And during the 80s/90s, those orgs were publishing the lit that fueled the Satanic Panic elsewhere.

(Not in the Springs, though. This shit is disruptive, and they didn’t want it in their backyard.)

Concurrent with the growing Satanic Panic, there’s also the Multiple Personality Disorder thing.

And epidemic. And iatrogenic epidemic. Therapists caused this, specifically a very small (1-2% of practices) percentage who let their imaginations & egos run away with them.

This *was* happening in and around Colorado Springs - mostly in Evergreen & Woodland Park - because in Colorado, you didn’t need to have any degree in anything to hang out your shingle & call yourself a therapist. You just needed to pony up $25 for the business license.

(This is my screaming face.) No ethical boards. And it got bad, especially on the adoption/Reactive Attachment/Multiple Personality Disorder fronts. People died, both adults & children.

Seriously, google Roberta Evers & read the Westword link. Be aware that the Evers are related to the Heritage House 76 anti-abortion people I mentioned way up above.

The adoption racket, the MPD racket, the parachurch rackets? They’re all related, often by blood & marriage.

(Oh, and one of the things that seemed to contribute to this mess: MASSIVE doses of benzos. 50 to 100 times the recommended max. Which are... dissociative drugs. That cause dissociative disorders... right. Yeah, about that.)

It was totally unnecessary.

Look, sometimes someone needs the frame of externalizing trauma onto another reality in the short term. We can work with that metaphor. But it’s just a frame. It’s dissociating. This is trauma. This is PTSD. It’s gonna be life-long, but there’s help.

Trauma does not mean broken. Anyone who says trauma breaks our personality is LONG out of date on how brains work & humans develop & memory. They’re causing harm. Disorders DO NOT GET WORSE BEFORE THEY GET BETTER.

THAT IS NOT TREATMENT.

THAT’S MORE ABUSE.

When we’re not believed about our illness/injury, part of us wants to have the super-rare disorder. It justifies all of the struggle that went before & why we were so hard to diagnose. It makes us feel special and it’s a relief.

But trust me: you want the far more common PTSD. We’ve got more treatment options & better research and getting better can start much faster if it’s something common & known.

(This is where therapists defaulting to trust clients helps. A therapist who tries to blame-shift or diminish what a client is feeling is actually contributing to the misdiagnosis. And it happens in med & in psych. It’s complex & Doc Google is about half useful.)

I came into undergrad in 1992, so just as this whole SRA/MPD mess was starting to die down, and the actual data driven research was being published.

So for me, this was a HS rumor that college proved was all a combination of hoax, grift, paranoia and denial.

I do know what having a client in crisis is like, but I don’t know what it’s like to work without functional meds. Or trying to work with sexual abuse shame when the culture won’t even admit that children are raped. Or that marital rape is real.

I know it was awful for everyone.

Admitting the problem of not believing survivors is the BEST thing that came out of this awful era. This alone changed therapy for the better.

But we had to wade through a river of shit to get it.

I know it’s really hard to have very little to offer a client. I can’t imagine having nothing but valium & tricyclics & post Reagan inpatient.

So while I do BLAME the therapists who did this damage, I can see why they made the mistakes they made.

But for real: I’m a PTSD specialist. For years, all of my clients have been complicated PTSD. I’ve seen lots of fully horrific child abuse. Not one Satanic/Sadistic Ritual Abuse, though I have had clients who have had prior therapists try to convince them of it.

Never happened.

And yes, therapists can and do convince people of all sorts of things. It’s sort of our job. But if we do it wrong, you can see how it might be a problem.

Which brings us to another broken technology that contributed to the Satanic Panic: The Reid Technique.

This is actually an investigative technique, first published in 1955. Every US cop show you’ve ever seen has used a variation of it to get the suspect to spill their guts.

It’s where the cops say “Hey, we know you didn’t mean to kill her. You just got angry, right?”

Suspect spills guts, goes to prison for life, the detective & DA end up in bed at the end of the episode. Next week, do it again.

There’s a PROBLEM with this technique. It reliably produces false confessions.

It breaks investigations.

It can actually implant false memories in the suspect/witness, especially if the suspect/witness is a child, or cognitively impaired, or is sleep deprived or under the influence during interrogation.

(The guy to watch here: Jim Trainum. Start with the This American Life ep.)

The Reid Technique (& its sister, the polygraph, same inventor) were in wide use by 1975.

Yes it was better than the physical torture techniques used before, but that’s saying 5 days of Easy Listening at 110 dB in a bright room is better than 5 days on the rack.

STILL TORTURE.

We didn’t realize how very bad the Reid Technique was until we data geeks started looking at the numbers in about 1999.

The critique of the technique has been coming fast & thick since about 2000, but...

Have you met a cop shop?

They don’t listen to anyone, especially someone telling them their conviction rate is fully bullshit, and they’ve gotten more arrogant since Shrub decided they needed military surplus for cheap.

They’re no longer merely resistant; they’re actively hostile to science & data.

In 80s, though, the cops were using Reid, and the federal government promoted both Reid and polygraph — which is also as reliable as a chocolate tea pot.

Most people in the 1980s were unwilling to challenge the cops, so belief in both pseudosciences took hold.

Hollywood helped.

Polygraph is bullshit. There is no such thing as a lie detector. Only an anxiety detector, which means honest people are more likely to fail polygraphs than practiced liars.

Sociopaths pass poly like nothing. Truly grieving spouses who walked in on a murder scene? They fail.

The funny thing? The CIA & the FBI, which are the agencies that USE polygraph internally on their own employees?

They wrote a shitload of scientific papers in 1978 - 80 talking about how easily Soviet Bloc spies defeated polygraph. They don’t even believe their own bullshit.

They wrote whole field manuals on how to defeat poly if necessary, what drugs to carry, what meditation techniques to employ and how to social engineer the interrogators so you pass.
(NEVER EVER CONSENT TO A POLYGRAPH OR A VOICE STRESS ANALYSIS. And ask why your PD wastes tax $)

And yet people believe this shit.

Because it’s pretty close, at least emotionally, to the pow wow magic (I’m still sorry) & laying on of hands & demonology & all the pseudoscience Americans seem willing to buy if it’s priced at $29.99 and Seen on TV.

Those 2% of therapists who seem to produce almost all of the Satanic Ritual Abuse & Multiple Personality cases? They used the Reid technique + hypnosis.

The therapist asks leading questions, suggests scenarios, rephrases questions to give client information. Suggestibility.

When you do this with a little kid, the little kid eventually
1) parrots back what they’ve been told to say &
2) starts making stuff up,
because little kids want approval.

If an adult refuses to take “I don’t know” or “no” for an answer, the kid will start guessing.

This is how Jesse Miskelley (West Memphis 3) & Brendon Dassey ended up convicted of murder.

There’s a recorded call of Brendon telling his mom that he started guessing when the cops asked questions, because that’s what school taught him to do. (Both are intellectually disabled.)

Those two happen to be at the hands of cops.

I bring them up because no reputable therapist ever releases client video or audio (and I don’t reference disreputable therapists), but both Miskelley & Dassey interrogations are public record, so you can hear how those went bad.

Just start with the (quite reasonable) premise that Jason & Brendon know nothing about what the cops are asking.

Take notes on what the cops tell them, and when that information the boys give right back. Neither one ever says anything the cops didn’t tell them first.

This is what happened at McMartin Preschool, too.

One mother, with significant personal conflict about her child being in daycare & possibly as a result of an acrimonious separation/divorce, accused her estranged husband & her child’s daycare of sexual assault on her son.

It’s easy to forget that she made multiple accusations, all these years later.

She made these accusations in the days before our current generation of antipsychotic drugs.

She was diagnosed with schizophrenia after she made these accusations.

That’s not acquired.

Her son was constipated. (He was probably anxious given the chaos around him, and a little chronically dehydrated, given Southern California.)

Constipation, by the way, can cause minor anal injuries. That look like anal penetration if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

She needed to be taken seriously. I don’t fault that.
This was the first case of this type.
The police and the therapists involved asked the wrong questions the wrong way.

The police were primed to believe, because that part of SoCal had its own Evangelical movement...

... with lots of noise about Blue Star Acid and games that cast spells.
The Mansons, the People’s Temple, the Symbionese Liberation Army were not far in the past.
Hare Krishnas were still hanging out at airports.

Communes were still up in the hills.

I get why it went off rails.

I do blame the docs & the cops for not using their brains and being good rationalists.

But I do see how, in their specific context, they managed to fuck it all up so very badly.

Radicals committed mass suicide, others kidnapped heiresses & tortured her into joining them...

...multiple serial killers & rapists running around CA and US.

Shit was getting VERY weird.

Satanic cults aren’t so far beyond that, especially not with all of the magic & drugs & end of the world stuff being sold by the churches.

And this is relevant, because hey, guess what? Here we are again.

The Q crap is repackaged Satanic Panic.

Down to inter-generational bands of powerful pedophiles hiding in plain sight and building underground empires of tunnels in places that have slab foundations.

(Except, this time? Real talk? Crime is mostly way down. Our really devastating crimes — the mass shootings & cops killing citizens — both have clear paths to mitigation. We know how to fix. Otherwise? We’re nowhere NEAR the rates of the 70s & 80s. This is a very safe world.)

The faith in magic? This time? Less spells and more homeopathy. Antivax. Orthorexia & “clean eating”. Vaginal steaming. Jade balls. Kinesthiology tape. Reiki, energy work...

An upswing in evangelical loudness (even as actual membership is declining) and public conservatism.

Much free-floating anxiety & a global economy headed for crisis.

Both countries with the bulk of the existential weaponry are in the hands of flaky egomaniac mobsters.

And both countries are fragile, run by people with short-timer greed & few years left on their clocks.

I can see why the Q crap people go there: it’s comforting to have a simple monster to fight, like pedophiles. It’s so much cleaner & easier if the bad guys are limited and so clearly easy to target.

It’s also projection: they refuse to see their own communities in these crimes.

In the 70s, those evangelists who were selling demonology & End Times & anti-abortion propaganda? They were also exploiting women in their flocks, and children. They were skimming profits and stashing the cash. Lots of loopholes in tax law, even then.

Especially for cash, when getting onto an airplane didn’t require a search, ID, or even a credit card. A couple of trips to Switzerland every year until it was time to retire.

Or they got caught doing something incredibly stupid like money laundering through a Bible Resort.

None of this is new. History doesn’t repeat, but it does sing its own covers. Usually while drunk, at last call.

It’s never on key, either.

We’ve been here before.

So what did we learn in the 1990s, when we started breaking down the Satanic Panic, the MPD iatrogenic epidemic, and End Times eschatology? What did the research actually show?

The Satanic Panic was a lie that made people very rich by telling scary stories that appeal to Just World Fallacies & the desire to hunt Monsters & needing simple solutions to complex problems.

People bought the lie because they liked it. It was easier than doing the work.

That’s the truth & lesson: the monsters in our culture are the ones who exploit our fears. Who point us at an imaginary shadow while they pick our pockets & poison our water. They’re mostly older white men who look good on TV and pray in public. Those are the ones you watch.

Don’t trust anything if you can’t see how it pays the light bill. Follow the money.
The solution to a problem is at least as complicated as defining the problem.
There are no easy answers.
It takes at least as long to fix broken culture as it took to build it in the first place.

Recognize that yes, children are being stolen, and will likely end up in the adoption trafficking pipe, or the human trafficking pipe.

The child thieves are not a shadowy inter-generational cult.

They’re public servants, acting on orders of greedy, craven men & women.

The vast majority of evil is committed for personal gain. Even down to docs & street level cops.

A big case comes with the incentive of *overtime*. Which pays for a new car. But working extra hours makes worse cops by degrading their judgement.

Let’s stop doing that.

Same for docs: we should get paid, but the Children’s Institute profited off McMartin. Lots of billable hours that got sent to insurers, Medicaid & the civil suit.

Same with MPD therapists & insurance companies & book deals & conference invites & paid consulting.

We fix this by making cops a salary position, with no overtime, and a limit of 45 hours per week, the extra 5 only allowed when actively involved in a declared major incident.

Cap therapists’ hours, too, and make us NHS employees rather than self-employed.

(This is another benefit of single payer, single provider health care. The profit motive has no place in medicine. Pay us well enough. We shouldn’t be in the job to get rich.)

End-times happens.
The world didn’t end in 1000. It won’t end in 2200, even if we blow our carbon budget.

Human civilization will change. We’ll probably go through a bottleneck with a mass die-off.

We may not get off this planet again for another thousand years.

It’s not good.

But the world didn’t end in 1000, or during the Black Death, or from Mount Tambora in 1815.

Humans will survive. The surviving may not be pretty, but something descended from our DNA will be here in 1000 years.

None of us will be, but we weren’t gonna be here anyway.

We’re not the center of the universe. We’re not even the center of the solar system.

And that’s comforting. It takes the pressure off.

Let us not buy the fears we’re being sold.

Instead of looking at apocalypse and the End Times as a literal prophecy, read it as the existential crisis. We all come to a point in our lives where we feel like everything falls apart, and where we can see the end of our personal narratives approaching.

We want to believe our consciousness endures. We almost have to believe it so the hacker in our brains that runs our subroutines will continue to work. The separation of mind from brain from body is necessary for functional consciousness, and we fear the moment when it ends.

Of course we do. How can we not? In so much of our worlds, so much is at least relatively certain. We can predict that if we go to work, we’ll likely get paid; if we exercise, we’ll likely feel better (eventually, in the long run). If we eat the cheesecake, we will feel satiated.

But there’s no certainty on the end. We just cannot know. We might get lucky. My personal hope is the 1987 Made in Heaven (Timothy Hutton, Kelly McGillis, Debra Winger.) Transmigration of souls & continuation of consciousness.

I’ll take The Good Place as a second choice....

...Because I happen to agree with Milton’s Lucifer: To make in hell for us a Heaven.

If our consciousness remains, then our behavior & reactions also remain within our control. We are not condemned. There is no damnation if consciousness endures.

Because heat is energy, so the principles of air conditioning will apply, and a lake of fire makes a perfect perpetual energy source for powering the biggest damn AC ever built. Get enough engineers in hell and it WILL snow.

We’ve got all of eternity, might as well...

And if this is all there is?

Then this is it, and everything we do matters. If our consciousness ends, we won’t know it, but what legacy we leave is our contribution to eternity, so make it the best we can. Feed the hungry, shelter the friendless, love as much as possible.

If we read the anti-christ as metaphor for those who stand against the principles established in the Sermon on the Mount, it makes a lot more sense.

There’s a reason Red Letter Jesus tends to appeal to liberal Christians: kindness, generosity, sharing, peace, comfort.

Let’s oppose the asshats who are out for themselves and do not care who they hurt.

Let’s just take the simple read, not the literal one.

Because literal is weird-fucking-complex-makes-no-sense.

But the simple read of allegory against callousness is obvious.

Even little kids get it: don’t be evil. Don’t be mean. Keep doing better.

(And don’t smoke whatever John had in his bong that day, because dude, srsly, WTF?!? Yeah, probably coded language, but still, dude...)

This is THE meta battle. And it’s a series of choices, every single day.

It’s easy to be mean & evil. It’s hard to good & kind & better, because there is always room for improvement.
Good is Xeno’s paradox. You halve the distance to good with each step, but you never get there.

But it’s a path, and even if you get turned around, you just take the next step. You fix what you broke, go back over your trail, make amends, keep going. That’s it. It’s what we got. Don’t buy fear.

It’s better than dying & it’s much better than giving up. /end

If you’re masochistic or in need of reading material (may I suggest my fiction?) here are the threads that I referenced in passing in this meta-metabattle thread. Yes, I’ve got them and they’re going on the blog....

The Five Metabattle threads: Cognition & why people dress like they’re still 16 when they’re 76.

https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1029094521798242304?s=21

https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1029449327377174528?s=21

https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1029804899792347136?s=21

https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1030224977818046464?s=21

https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1030549509678411776?s=21

Trousers & Pantsuits 1 & 2, or why women in the workforce matters

https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1033771940492656640?s=21

https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1034536045361025027?s=21

Breastfeeding & Nestle, or the rise of Blue Nipple

https://twitter.com/czedwards/status/1016428436766777344?s=21