Satan in Poughkeepsie
January 13, 2016 9:24 AM   Subscribe

The ’70s counterculture and women’s movements had derailed all kinds of assumptions about American family life and sexuality, and, in their wake, a collective nightmare had emerged

"Throughout the Panic, one group was turned to again and again as the best evidence that the Devil had droves of organized followers: the Church of Satan."
posted by the man of twists and turns (140 comments total) 42 users marked this as a favorite
 
(tw: child abuse, animal abuse, religious extremism)
The Stuff you Should Know podcast just did an episode about the satanic panic: In the late 1980s, the United States experienced a "Satanic Panic," leading parents to fear for the safety of their children..
posted by boo_radley at 9:44 AM on January 13, 2016 [4 favorites]


I saw a stellar interview with Ozzy on I think MuchMusic at the tail end of the '80s; he was obviously addled, and the interviewer asked him about Satanism and satanic lyrics and hidden messages.

Ozzy was bemused, baffled, and stoned off his gourd; his response was essentially "If I could record secret messages on my albums, to make people do whatever I want, I would record the message buy ten more of this album. What good does it do me to tell people about Satan? What's Satan done for me recently?"

Which struck me as a very cogent rebuttal to the whole backmasking thing.
posted by Shepherd at 9:50 AM on January 13, 2016 [161 favorites]


Ironically the Satanic Bible wasn't really about Satanism at all; it was more a philosophy text. Kids bought it to frighten their parents. And it worked.

Unfortunately, the philosophy espoused was libertarianism. So, while the parents thought the kids were delving into Satanism, they were instead immersing themselves in a much more dangerous ideology.
posted by el io at 9:53 AM on January 13, 2016 [137 favorites]




No mention of Mike Warnke, the fake former Satanic priest?

To read about that particular con artist and others like him, an essential Slacktivist link with lots of good stuff.

Warnke's influence on this legend and his contributions to its shape and popularity really can't be overstated. He first achieved fame as a "Christian comedian" who became one of the first million-selling Christian-label recording artists. But he went on to even greater fame and wealth as an "ex-Satanist" speaker, author and expert-for-hire. He wrote a series of supposed memoirs describing his alleged past as a "Satanic high priest," leader of a 1,500-member "coven" in Southern California. The books were best-sellers, his speaking tours packed churches and concert halls, and his articles "exposing" the grisly practices and behind-the-scenes machinations of this Satanic cult were published throughout the evangelical press.

Warnke's books and "ministry" created the template for a host of imitators and supposed exposés of Satanism quickly became a lucrative revenue stream for religious publishing houses. Thumb through any of those other alleged memoirs or through the slew of books on the imaginary epidemic of "Satanic ritual abuse" and you will find details and descriptions lifted directly from Warnke's fabrications. Turn to the index or the bibliography of such books and you will find Warnke cited as an authority. His lies have even been cited in court testimony in cases where Satanic panic has brought innocent people to trial for imaginary crimes.

posted by emjaybee at 10:00 AM on January 13, 2016 [24 favorites]


From TFA: “So many people enter the seminary and come out agnostic or atheist,” Jeff says, “because what do you think happens when you start to look more closely?”

I'm curious - is this true?
posted by cynical pinnacle at 10:01 AM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


This is the absolute truth: I lived through the Satanic Panic era, but I attended a Jewish private school, and Jews don't believe in Satan as such. I guess the administration felt they had to jump on the bandwagon somehow, though, so we had guest speakers come in to warn us impressionable children about the seductive wiles of Jews for Jesus.
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:08 AM on January 13, 2016 [14 favorites]


I saw a stellar interview with Ozzy on I think MuchMusic at the tail end of the '80s; he was obviously addled, and the interviewer asked him about Satanism and satanic lyrics and hidden messages.

Ozzy was bemused, baffled, and stoned off his gourd; his response was essentially "If I could record secret messages on my albums, to make people do whatever I want, I would record the message buy ten more of this album. What good does it do me to tell people about Satan? What's Satan done for me recently?"

Which struck me as a very cogent rebuttal to the whole backmasking thing.


I earnestly quoted Ozzy at least once in a grade 10 English essay I wrote about censorship. I'm pretty sure I remember seeing this interview on MuchMusic. Was it perchance on the Power Hour*?

* Which I often set the VCR to tape if I wasn't going to be home when it was on. In fact, I often just recorded the show even when I saw the broadcast because they'd play metal that might not otherwise get rotation. And the internet wasn't a thing yet. What's a late 80s/early 90s teenage metal fan to do?

Anyhow...

A more recent case of Satanic Panic, from the very excellent (IMO) but frequently disturbing Sword and Scale podcast:

When Ella Draper met marijuana-advocate Abraham Christie her life, and the lives of her two young children, spiraled out of control. According to Mrs Justice Pauffley, the presiding judge in the case, Christie was an abusive man who punished the children by hitting them with metal spoons and kicking them in the stomach. According to Pauffley’s ruling, the couple brainwashed the two kids into making up an elaborate story about a satanic cult committing the ritualistic murder of children. Not surprisingly, at the head of the cult, was the children’s father who was in the midst of a bitter custody dispute with Draper at the time.

This story is worth a listen - it's fucking bananas.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:08 AM on January 13, 2016 [7 favorites]


The "Satanic Panic" is one of the dumbest things I have lived through and I am 42 years old, so I have lived through a lot of dumbass shit.

Preach it, brother. "Yes, mom & dad, I'm playing D&D, yes there's magic spells kind of, no it's not "real magic" whatever that means, nobody's getting cut up or lighting candles, yes Pete owns a cat but it's called "harold" and his parents are home, it's mostly dice and graph paper, calm down."

For what it's worth, though, having lived through that garbage experience as a kid has been super valuable to me as a parent. It's useful to remember that "meaning well" and "just trying to keep your kids safe" can easily lead to a lot of anger and resentment.
posted by mhoye at 10:08 AM on January 13, 2016 [42 favorites]


I still remember the photocopied notice my elementary school sent home with the kids to "warn" parents about evil satanic rock bands. This must've been sometime in the late 80s.

The only juicy bits that I recall:
- "AC/DC" stands for "Anti-Christ/Devil's Children" (very catchy)
- The double lightning bolts in "KISS" are the SS symbol (which is, you know, true. Didn't they catch flak for that?)
posted by neckro23 at 10:13 AM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


I remember the Satanic panic period well. Was attending a very fundamentalist Christian school for the first half of the 80s. We would have seminars every year or so on the secret messages in rock. At first, it all seemed plausible to young gullible me, and it made the world seem a little more magical that all these drugged out guys in makeup, spandex and fake blood were really channeling the Darkest Dread Lord and bad shit was going to erupt everywhere. End times upon us, co-habitating felines & canines, and all that.

And then the seminar speaker completely ruined the mood by bringing up Journey. Even being an especially credulous 11 year old, I knew if Journey was considered part of the Satanic Conspiracy to make America a commie nation, then the conspiracy was utter fucking bullshit.
posted by honestcoyote at 10:19 AM on January 13, 2016 [43 favorites]


Knights In Satan's Service
\m/. O .\m/
posted by entropicamericana at 10:19 AM on January 13, 2016 [12 favorites]


I got paddled at my Baptist elementary school for having drawn a CND symbol on my hand. Because it was based on the pentagram or some such.

On the bright side, the Satanic Panic is directly responsible for one of the few genuinely funny SNL characters. "Could it be... Satan?!"
posted by tobascodagama at 10:19 AM on January 13, 2016 [7 favorites]


The BBC did a good two part radio documentary on the ritual sexual abuse panic last year - still on iplayer 1, 2
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:19 AM on January 13, 2016 [5 favorites]


It's funny, because just when you thought the satanic panic was dead and buried, I see a whole crop of Bowie Blackstar conspiracy theory videos.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 10:20 AM on January 13, 2016


KISS-Knights in Satan's Service

Even as a kid, I would look at KISS and think: "doubtful."

Anytime somebody in the county found dead animal bones, it prompted police to come out and look for "ritualistic signs." Sometimes possums just die, you guys. Satan didn't necessarily do it.
posted by emjaybee at 10:20 AM on January 13, 2016 [28 favorites]


It is witch hunt remembrance day on the Blue... sadly one can't joke about it too much because the repercussions are so awful. I remember when all this stuff was going around and it was still a big deal in some religious side circles as late as the late nineties.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 10:21 AM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


There was also a pretty good Satanic Panic episode on Bones. Featuring pre-Breaking Bad Aaron Paul as the head Satanist!
posted by tobascodagama at 10:22 AM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


Ah, the nice quiet quaint Poughkeepsie! While this post lets us in on some of the madness that took place , there is another episode, lasting some 3 days, bringing nearly the entire town to being involved, and it remains a disgrace that the town would much prefer to forget.
posted by Postroad at 10:22 AM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


On the bright side, the Satanic Panic is directly responsible for one of the few genuinely funny SNL characters.

Causing anyone to remember Dana Carvey's career is definitely the work of Satan.
posted by mhoye at 10:23 AM on January 13, 2016 [3 favorites]


As I've said elsewhere on here, we had a "satanic" stabbing at my high school. This poor kid who sat in front of me in assembly stabbed the kids who were bullying him with his pocketknife. No one died, fortunately. Of course, the kid had a denim jacket with punk rock slogans and logos on it in pen, and that was "satanic". There were news crews and everything, etc.

The fact that the bully was just a complete monster and that the kid might have had some cause for what he did got totally overlooked. (The primary victim used to bully me, too, and while I was picked on a great deal in school, he was the one who really went out of his way to find people and hurt them - not just horrible but incidental high school garbage; he was someone who really liked to hurt others and he wouldn't let you get away. You could try to avoid him, but he'd actively seek you out, whereas most of the other school bully types would leave you alone if you hid. I remember feeling so, so helpless and feeling so much dread whenever I had even the faintest possibility of seeing him.)

I only realize now that talking about this on metafilter in a couple of other threads has really helped me to let go of it. When it happened, I identified with the attacker so much, because I felt so trapped and scared by the bully all the time, and I could easily see how some other kid could have felt pushed into a corner. Every time I thought of it for years it brought up really powerful bad feelings, and now it doesn't.

I sure hope that the kid who did the stabbing is okay - he was hauled off to juvvie and no one ever saw him again. Also, the newspapers violated a lot of rules about how they reported the case and got called out by the judge, IIRC.
posted by Frowner at 10:23 AM on January 13, 2016 [32 favorites]


(Also, this was back when you could carry a pocketknife wherever you wanted, to use in cutting up apples and cutting string and fixing little stuff on your bike and so on. It was a wild time, back when you could carry a pocketknife but anyone walking into a 7-11 with a rifle, even in Texas, would have been hauled away as a dangerous criminal.
posted by Frowner at 10:27 AM on January 13, 2016 [47 favorites]


@Frowner: that's appalling.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 10:29 AM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


The average Catholic goes to mass, a lot of weird shit happens and no one really understands what's going on.

To image that there's an opposing team, mentioned in your own Bible, that's doing crazy shit that you also don't understand isn't that much of a leap. If your own theology is barely comprehensible, then there's absolutely no requirement for your enemies' theology to make any sense at all.
posted by GuyZero at 10:29 AM on January 13, 2016 [7 favorites]


Kier-La Janisse (of 'House of Psychotic Women' fame) edited an excellent book on the subject of 80's paranoia about Satanism and the occult - the intro is readable online
posted by remembrancer at 10:31 AM on January 13, 2016 [4 favorites]


Sometimes possums just die, you guys.
Honestly, dying is what possums do best. They aren't built to last.
posted by murphy slaw at 10:35 AM on January 13, 2016 [20 favorites]


High Priest Peter Gilmore (only their second in nearly fifty years) and his wife, High Priestess Peggy Nadramia, relocated church headquarters first to New York’s Hell’s Kitchen and then, more recently, to their dream house in Poughkeepsie. The bland New York college town has become the heart of global Satanism.
I wonder if Bailey Jay and her husband knew about this when they lived in Dutchess County?
posted by stannate at 10:35 AM on January 13, 2016


Sometimes possums just die, you guys.
Honestly, dying is what possums do best. They aren't built to last.


Heck, even one of their (really their only) defence mechanisms is a dress rehearsal for dying.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:38 AM on January 13, 2016 [10 favorites]


The spillover of this onto D&D was where I felt it the most; I loved the game as a teen (still do as an adult, apparently). Anyways, there was enough static about D&D going around that some of my friends stopped playing because their parents forbid it (one of them got involved in playing without their knowledge, I guess, until we as his friends decided chipping in to get him his own Player's Handbook as a birthday present was a great idea. He stopped playing and stopped hanging out with us shortly after that).

Anyways, it did prompt my Dad to sit down with the D&D books and try to make sense of it all. I have no idea how deep his understanding got, but I think he (an engineer) realized pretty quickly that it was a bunch of cross-referencing tables, charts, "spell" descriptions and dice that basically boiled down to a lot of numbers & imagination being used to simulate events in a fictional environment. His only worry was that we not spend too much time playing it because things like going outside were also important, but that there were also far worse things for us to be spending money & energy on doing.
posted by nubs at 10:41 AM on January 13, 2016 [15 favorites]


@cynical_pinnacle: From TFA: “So many people enter the seminary and come out agnostic or atheist,” Jeff says, “because what do you think happens when you start to look more closely?”

I'm curious - is this true?


Absolutely. Especially in more conservative circles where most of the religious tradition is based on respect for authority, not so much on intellectual inquiry. Let kids who grew up in that atmosphere look into what we actually know about Jesus, his times, old Testament times and cultures, learn the languages of the Bible, exegesis, and it can be pretty tough on the beliefs that they were raised with.
posted by tippiedog at 10:56 AM on January 13, 2016 [5 favorites]


Nth the D&D connection. I'm still bitter I lost my 1st edition monster manual and DM guide to this nonsense. Lent them to a friend, his mom found em and gave it to her church pastor because they were "corrupting" her son with devil worship.

My own mom, not normally one to fall for these types of things, even asked me if D&D was "safe" and if I knew it "wasn't real" but I think my laughter helped her understand how silly the fear was.
posted by anti social order at 10:59 AM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yeah the only thing D&D was a gateway to was hard... math. Like the dragon magazine article on testing your dice for randomness with a chi-squared test. Page 62.

I'm kind of surprised more D&D players weren't seduced by accountancy because seriously the rules were, at their core, bookkeeping.

SATANIC BOOKKEEPING.
posted by GuyZero at 11:03 AM on January 13, 2016 [66 favorites]


I really appreciate you sharing that story, Frowner. That's horrible, and I hope the kid managed to get out of the situation and get a decent start in life. (I don't mean the bully. I'm sure he did just fine.)

I was also a kid in the early '90s living in the Bible Belt who was accused of devil worship. Since it was only my peers who said that, nothing ever came of it but some tossed rocks, turned backs and nasty rumors. But I did plan once to stab my bully with a pocketknife. (He had strangled me with a cord to get me to say mercy, but nobody much noticed at the time, and even I didn't draw a straight line between that and being so angry.) I had my time picked out and everything. I was, I think, twelve.

When it came to it, I didn't even try. I was just too tired of feeling furious. I put the little knife away and never thought to pick it up again. It was just as well; that thing was a piece of crap with a rounded tip, and was liable to collapse on your fingers if you put any pressure on it.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:03 AM on January 13, 2016 [5 favorites]


I hadn't heard of The West Memphis 3 until this harrowing Moth episode. I'm not surprised that the presiding judge (who blocked all appeals) has gone on to become a state senator but I'm a little surprised that he's a Democrat.
posted by bonobothegreat at 11:03 AM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


C ursed
O ther
R eady
T o
E xterminate
X tians

Coincidence? I think not.
posted by leotrotsky at 11:06 AM on January 13, 2016 [15 favorites]


At your typical Baptist church, you learn almost nothing about the history of even your own denomination, much less that of Christianity itself. I mean, I understand when it comes to Baptists not wanting to mention that their current shape owes a whole hell of a lot to white supremacy. But despite the constant harping on the centrality of the Bible to our lives, we never learned anything about how the books of the Bible were chosen and when. It might as well have floated down from heaven on a little cloud. I didn't question it as a kid, but the older I got the weirder it began to seem to me.
posted by emjaybee at 11:11 AM on January 13, 2016 [11 favorites]


southern democrats can't automatically be seen as what most would consider democrats.
posted by nadawi at 11:11 AM on January 13, 2016 [5 favorites]


. . . we never learned anything about how the books of the Bible were chosen and when. It might as well have floated down from heaven on a little cloud. I didn't question it as a kid, but the older I got the weirder it began to seem to me.

It really is weird, isn't it? First you have Adam and Eve and that's exactly how it was; then you have Bible Times; then you have a bunch of bad kings; then the holy KJV; then the good Pilgrims leaving England and then Holland and founding the first Thanksgiving on Plymouth Rock; then our Founding Fathers; then a Civil War that is totally in the past and nothing from that time matters except for Heritage Not Hate; and then today, when the Rapture could come at any minute. It was implied that no serious person was really interested in history beyond all that.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:16 AM on January 13, 2016 [15 favorites]


So, while the parents thought the kids were delving into Satanism, they were instead immersing themselves in a much more dangerous ideology.

fwiw, Israel Regardie Manuscripts & Book -- the golden dawn[*] & light in extension my rosicrucian adventure[*] -- on antiques roadshow :P
posted by kliuless at 11:19 AM on January 13, 2016 [5 favorites]


I was a little late for the satanic panic (born 1984) but I was growing up just in time for my intensely methodist christian dad to be concerned about my interest in anime which i'm pretty sure he thought was either the same as or a gateway to hentai but I'd prefer not to think about why he'd even be aware of hentai as I doubt the church group had any anime awareness seminars... actually thinking about it now they might have considering some took part in the protest against The Golden Compass, and regardless, you know, internet

it always felt a lot like the hand wringing with d&d I'd seen/read about. honestly though it would've been pretty hilarious to me on an abstract level and in hindsight if anime had sparked a nationwide terror but I'm having a hard time thinking of a term as catchy as 'satanic panic'. anime alarm? anime calamity?

at any rate hatsune miku being on letterman would've probably been seen as a sign of the end times for the older christian generation. hell maybe it still was.
posted by suddenly, and without warning, at 11:32 AM on January 13, 2016


can't read tfa now...but if you really want to destroy any of your remaining faith in humanity, there's always this Satan-y good time to mull over.
posted by j_curiouser at 11:35 AM on January 13, 2016


> I'm kind of surprised more D&D players weren't seduced by accountancy because seriously the rules were, at their core, bookkeeping.

On the other hand, I think the hassle of trying to keep track of and enforce the encumbrance rules might have put me off math for the rest of my life. At a certain point I just said "fuck it" and let the players carry as much as they wanted as long as it didn't get too ridiculous.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:35 AM on January 13, 2016 [10 favorites]


The Card Cheat: "On the other hand, I think the hassle of trying to keep track of and enforce the encumbrance rules might have put me off math for the rest of my life. At a certain point I just said "fuck it" and let the players carry as much as they wanted as long as it didn't get too ridiculous."

That's what Bags of Holding were for.
posted by Rock Steady at 11:37 AM on January 13, 2016 [3 favorites]


Yeah but even with those some dumbass would want to stuff, like, a dragon corpse in there.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:38 AM on January 13, 2016 [6 favorites]


I always figured Satanism must be the most Christian thing ever. I mean, you've gotta have a pretty unshakable faith to go "I no longer worship God and Jesus. Now, let's see what the Church has to say about that."
posted by ckape at 11:41 AM on January 13, 2016 [9 favorites]


We would have seminars every year or so on the secret messages in rock. At first, it all seemed plausible to young gullible me, and it made the world seem a little more magical that all these drugged out guys in makeup, spandex and fake blood were really channeling the Darkest Dread Lord and bad shit was going to erupt everywhere. End times upon us, co-habitating felines & canines, and all that.

And then the seminar speaker completely ruined the mood by bringing up Journey.


Oh man. I have a friend who was raised Pentecostal*; once in junior high I went to what I thought was his "youth group" meeting but turned out to be a lecture on the sinfulness of rock music. We were all handed a Xeroxed booklet called Something's Messing with My Mind!** with Screaming Ozzy on the cover (natch) and a rather thorough accounting of the various objectionable deeds and lyrics of a whole range of secular musicians.

It had everything from Alice Cooper to Blondie (god, I wish I could remember what their "fault" was) to a bunch of hippie bands (the peace sign was alleged to be an upside-down bent cross [warning: crazy]) to... Billy Joel. Because "Catholic girls start much too late" (and wanting sex is demonic).

I mean, I was raised Catholic in a house that played mostly Contemporary Christian music, but that thing really fucked me up (thank goodness I never went back to his church) and I feel uneasy for all the impressionable youths who didn't get a chance to walk away and breathe in the fresh air of WTF before internalizing that nonsense.

*(...he has since discovered some Jewish roots and gone whole-hog in that direction)
**this is one of those childhood artifacts I most wish I could locate today, no T no shade
posted by psoas at 11:46 AM on January 13, 2016 [5 favorites]


> It had everything from Alice Cooper to Blondie (god, I wish I could remember what their "fault" was)

One of my housemates in university had a hilarious '80s-era book detailing all the Satantic messages in pop music, from the usual suspects right down to Huey Lewis and the News and, IIRC, Toto.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:51 AM on January 13, 2016


The Card Cheat: "Yeah but even with those some dumbass would want to stuff, like, a dragon corpse in there."

I mean, if it fits in the opening... I think we had to create some rules about how long it would take you to find a specific object in a well-stuffed BoH.
posted by Rock Steady at 11:54 AM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


When I was a little kid, around 6, the kid next door, who was older, maybe 11 or 12, got a D&D set for his birthday or something, and his Crystal Cathedral Christian mother FREAKED OUT.

So, naturally, she gave it to me and my slightly older siblings. I guess our souls were already under the spell of Satan since we watched He-Man and She-Ra or whatever and had imaginations and stuff. It went out in a garage sale before we were old enough to actually play it, but I remember thinking the dice were neat.

Later, in junior high, a few friends of mine tried to get me into it, but it was just way too boring for me. I wonder how well D&D would have done without the free publicity of the Satanic Panic; somehow I think the answer is "not as."
posted by Sys Rq at 11:56 AM on January 13, 2016


anti social order: My own mom, not normally one to fall for these types of things, even asked me if D&D was "safe" and if I knew it "wasn't real" but I think my laughter helped her understand how silly the fear was.

When I was in junior high, the fear was kids having a break with reality, unable to discern fact from fantasy as a result of too much D&D. If there was a concern about the gaming being a gateway to hell, it wasn't talked about much.

Ouija boards on the other hand, a total payphone to hades.
posted by dr_dank at 11:56 AM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


its funny, because I went to Catholic high school in the 80s, in northern New Jersey, not terribly far from Poughkeepsie, yet this panic did not seem to bother any of us. I remember it vaguely, but there definitely wasn't any concern in my immediate community and I definitely don't recall being warned about heavy metal at school.
posted by supermedusa at 11:58 AM on January 13, 2016


What a great post & thread. Like many others, I lived in this time in an ultra-Christian household. And I mean ultra- my mother has a copy of a book on demonic possession and how to differentiate it from mental illness; you can bet I hid my Bauhaus, Siouxsie and Cramps records well.

This topic...ohh, hours I could spend. But wanted to say a couple of things. While the paranoia that satanism actually caused anything to magically happen was stupid, there was a lot of occult interest back in the day. (Gavin Baddely's book "Lucifer Rising" is a super-fun read if you like this topic) and both sides of the battle were pretty ridiculous. They fed into each other in all kinds of stupid-ass ways. I liked to refer to it as the Battle of Dumb and Dumber.

(triggers ahead)

And the thing is there really has been ritual abuse of children, not so much proven in satanic cults, but in a few Christian and Mormon cults, where pedo cult leaders like David Berg, in the Children of God, actually photographed the acts and put it in a book that he called sacred (yep, this actually happened).

While the exagerrated claims of the Christian right were ridiculous and funny (there's one recording of Elizabeth Clare Prophet where they talk about satanism in bands like Huey Lewis and Nu Shooz, and frankly, I have to agree that that shit is pure evil), there were corners where weird abusive shit did happen. Just not like they said it did. Sure everyone denies it because who wants to be aligned with embarrassing horrible crap, but The Process was at the very least negligent of their children. I think the part of the problem with the Satanic Panic is the illogical inquiry, the panic, made people overlook abuse where it was really happening.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 12:07 PM on January 13, 2016 [19 favorites]


I think the part of the problem with the Satanic Panic is the illogical inquiry, the panic, made people overlook abuse where it was really happening.

This this this this this this this this. Also, people who use (and used) the church as a cover for their abuse of children are more likely to blame it on big scary "Satan" than nonbelievers are, both to deny their own agency, and to make the children feel more frightened and less likely to tell anyone.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 12:14 PM on January 13, 2016 [16 favorites]


I got paddled at my Baptist elementary school for having drawn a CND symbol on my hand. Because it was based on the pentagram or some such.

Ditto. "What you think is the peace symbol is really an upside-down broken cross--the most blasphemous Satanic symbol! Now repent and pray for forgiveness." (Yeah, recovering Baptist here.)
posted by xedrik at 12:14 PM on January 13, 2016 [3 favorites]


also some of us really were molested as kids in the 80s by people who claimed to be satanists/the antichrist. as such, it's a lot less haha to some...
posted by nadawi at 12:17 PM on January 13, 2016 [10 favorites]


Also, any church kid who grew up during the Satanic Panic surely remembers the god-awful (heh) video called "Hell's Bells: The Dangers of Rock & Roll." Mullets. Mullets everywhere.
posted by xedrik at 12:17 PM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


The Elizabeth Clare Prophet stuff is some of my favorite 80s religious insanity. If you want to hear the list of "Satanic" rock'n'rollers, go here, play track #4 (Preamble - Great Divine Rectors call), and jump to 2:15. But I highly recommend listening from the begining — the theology and world view are utter bullshit, and frequently harmful, but that's some top-shelf religious ecstatic group chanting.

/It's a derail, but I Can't Wait by Nu Shooz is a fantastic song. Anyone who knows any songs that are as good as it should feel free to memail me links.

posted by benito.strauss at 12:20 PM on January 13, 2016 [8 favorites]


That stuff spread deep. Even in quite liberal Arlington, Virginia, D&D was banned from the schools -- we could play anything else in our rpg club, but not D&D by order of the school board.
posted by tavella at 12:25 PM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yeah but even with those some dumbass would want to stuff, like, a dragon corpse in there.

I mean, if it fits in the opening... I think we had to create some rules about how long it would take you to find a specific object in a well-stuffed BoH.


We had a rule that if you could realistically describe how your proposed action would work to the satisfaction of everyone at the table, it would stand.
posted by blnkfrnk at 12:28 PM on January 13, 2016 [3 favorites]


nadawi, the same thing happened to people in my extended family, and to the children of family friends of ours, and thank you for continuing to point out that trying to pretend these incidents never happened is equally untrue as the "the devil is in that D&D board" claims.

It isn’t that children weren’t being abused in the name of Satan during the 80s. It’s just that they weren’t being abused by brand new satanist cults lurking in the sounds of rock and roll records, and it wasn't remotely a new trend in the 80s. They were being abused by people (usually family members, or known acquaintances) who were all too happy to blame the abuse on Satan, because “the devil made me do it” is somehow easier for people to say than "I wanted to hurt children for my own enjoyment."
posted by a fiendish thingy at 12:29 PM on January 13, 2016 [20 favorites]


Even in quite liberal Arlington, Virginia, D&D was banned from the schools -- we could play anything else in our rpg club, but not D&D by order of the school board.

Call of Cthulhu, Kult, World of Darkness, and so on?
posted by sukeban at 12:31 PM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


The Satanic Panic was pretty rough, but it was nothing compared to the Stan Panic. Stan really loses his shit when he freaks out.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 12:33 PM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


I always figured Satanism must be the most Christian thing ever. I mean, you've gotta have a pretty unshakable faith to go "I no longer worship God and Jesus. Now, let's see what the Church has to say about that."

In a lot of ways, Satanism in the "LaVeyan" sense in the US is a more up-front form of atheism than you see in many avowed atheists. Atheism in America largely ends up being about rejecting Christianity and mocking Christians, which I did plenty of in my teens and 20's. I still have plenty of misgivings on how Christianity affects real peoples' lives but can see the pragmatism that underlies most modern-day believers.

Satanism embraces the "adversary / accuser" meaning of the word "Satan" and basically acknowledges that America is a Christian-dominated nation, and then thumbs its nose at it and says "many of us are reformed Catholics who love melodrama and ritual, so we're going to continue that part."
posted by aydeejones at 12:35 PM on January 13, 2016 [7 favorites]


Also gotta say, RTA, it's all pretty laid-out and well-done IMO as someone who had his own Satanic newsletter in high school and had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn't seriously walk around thinking of myself as a "Satanist" after say, 19 years old. Just my own thing, but I did find my future wife in engineering school while wearing a baphomet amulet around my neck.
posted by aydeejones at 12:36 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


Also, here's a funny thing about my upbringing -- my parents were both former Catholics, and my mom tried to cling to it during my childhood but I ended up going to a Lutheran school because it was nearby and had cheap daycare. When my dad discovered my Satanic Bible, he gave me a bunch of shit for it, and then totally outed himself as someone who went through the *exact* same process of "self-discovery" that I did. Now he's like a Dawkins New Atheist and a bit insufferable, but such is life.

In my youth though (born 1980) my first exposure to D&D was a single toy action figure that my mom let me buy before she learned that it was evil and scary and kids were dying under bridges or some shit with axes and such.

By the early 90's I was able to procure gold-box AD&D games without trouble, and now my mom is a New Atheist too.

lulz
posted by aydeejones at 12:39 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


benito.strauss....I can't imagine that anything in 2016 will top track #4. Thank you.
posted by bonobothegreat at 12:42 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


Hail Satan! This thread gives me the opportunity to break this gem out.

Him: Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?

Her: Did you just call me Satan?

As a bonus here's a great track by Mogwai featuring a classic recording of backward masking hysteria.
posted by misterpatrick at 12:44 PM on January 13, 2016 [9 favorites]


Basically AC/DC, KISS, Ozzie, LeVey, et. al. were some of the most successful trolls of the 20th century.
posted by straight at 1:08 PM on January 13, 2016


emjaybee's mention of the Slacktivist's Mike Warnke coverage above is a good one. I enjoyed a Warnke album or two in the day...the guy was funny.

I think there's something deeper about Satanic Panic that Fred at the Slacktivist talk about, though, that's even more important. And that's how so many Christians want this stuff to be true, as if finding the polar opposite of what they believe is some sort of validation...and they desperately need that validation. It seems like we see it more and more lately, Christians leaping on any little slight or disagreement and screaming persecution!. Or, of course, Satan!
posted by lhauser at 1:09 PM on January 13, 2016 [16 favorites]


I always figured Satanism must be the most Christian thing ever.

Well, you have to have a pretty strong belief in everything they're preaching (Biblical and extra-Biblical) in order to commit yourself to following the entity defined as "the enemy". Satanism to me is just another denomination in the Judeo-Christian-Islam collection.
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:11 PM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


Even in quite liberal Arlington, Virginia, D&D was banned from the schools -- we could play anything else in our rpg club, but not D&D by order of the school board.

Call of Cthulhu, Kult, World of Darkness, and so on?


I got around my dad's D&D prohibition by playing Rifts instead. Yeah.

oneswellfoop, that's a decent theory, but as has been mentioned actually honest-to-LaVey Satanism is an explicitly Atheist thing. They adopt the symbols and trappings as a protest against mainstream Christian culture rather than out of genuine belief that Baphomet is real and accepting their blood sacrifices or whatever. (Which isn't to say that no satanist ever has believed that Satan is real, but it's not, shall we say, Orthodox Satanism.)
posted by tobascodagama at 1:28 PM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]




As a freshman in Catholic HS back around '82, our religion teacher was, not surprisingly, a Catholic priest, fairly popular guy in these circles. Now, I'd heard about Satanic music and all that nonsense, but that was stuff those whacko bible thumpers clung to, not us thoughtful Catholics.

One day, priest religion teacher dedicates a class (what would be few classes) to warn us all of the dangers of Satanic rocknroll music the kids are all listening to these days just spin the record backwards and it's plain as day if someone tells you what you're supposed to be hearing don't ya know. Some kids absolutely fell for it. I saw it for utter bullshit, completely lost respect for Fr. Wempe, and a good deal of the institution he represented. Spent the rest of the year being a thorn in his side. Was an excellent exercise in calibrating my bullshit meter. And an excellent lesson in the power of authority figures and their power to influence others.

Pitiful Fr. Wempe eventually spent some time in jail for sexually abusing minors, a punishment that took way too long to come to light. Don't know what that says about it all, but just glad to know his lesson was incredibly valuable to me, though not likely in the way he intended.
posted by 2N2222 at 1:41 PM on January 13, 2016 [4 favorites]


Oh man. During this time period, my older brother found religion and decided that he had to get rid of ALL of his rock albums because they contained "messages from the Devil." So what did he do? Why, he gave all that sweet vinyl heresy to me, his 13-year old sister. Couldn't bear to destroy them I guess. Thanks to him, I was made an instant acolyte of Pink Floyd, Kansas, Jethro Tull, and many more. Thanks, bro!
posted by WordCannon at 1:44 PM on January 13, 2016 [16 favorites]


@cynical_pinnacle: From TFA: “So many people enter the seminary and come out agnostic or atheist,” Jeff says, “because what do you think happens when you start to look more closely?”

I'm curious - is this true?


I did. Rabbinical school dropout due to atheism.
posted by Sophie1 at 1:53 PM on January 13, 2016 [3 favorites]


"So many people enter the seminary and come out agnostic or atheist,” Jeff says, “because what do you think happens when you start to look more closely?”
I'm curious - is this true?"

Certainly not uncommon. Pre-seminary formation is a little more thorough than it used to be, and seminarians a little older, both of which help. But yeah, everyone who went to seminary knows someone who theologied themself into atheism.

For Biblical literalists, if they go to a "real" seminary, virtually all either quit literalism or quit seminary. There's not really a non-delusional middle ground. (Ergo the popularity of non-accredited "seminaries" among fundamentalists.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:01 PM on January 13, 2016 [13 favorites]


As a bonus here's a great track by Mogwai featuring a classic recording of backward masking hysteria.

Here's another great track by Mindless Self Indulgence called, appropriately enough, Backmask. You can also listen to it backwards.
posted by chainsofreedom at 2:07 PM on January 13, 2016


sukeban: Call of Cthulhu, Kult, World of Darkness, and so on?

Yup! I remember Call of Cthulhu being specifically brought up as a sign of how ridiculous the rule was.
posted by tavella at 2:37 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


also some of us really were molested as kids in the 80s by people who claimed to be satanists/the antichrist. as such, it's a lot less haha to some...

I'm so sorry this happened to you. I guess many of us assume it to be all paranoid thinking that it was a conspiracy. But I totally agree that anyone of any religious belief is capable of all kinds of monstrous acts.

It's a big problem when the extreme paranoiacs take over the dialogue because then real abuse gets overlooked when it does happen. I remember this problem with the "Recovered memory" movement and subsequent backlash. After McMartin, people stopped believing anyone who said they had a recovered memory. But there was an excellent episode of 20/20 where a woman not only claimed recovered memory of her father killing her mother, but they were able to investigate her claims and she was completely right! Her recovered memory, of her mother getting strangled with a bright scarf, was validated when they discovered the remains exactly where she said they were.

It was amazing because it showed me how intuition can be wrong; I thought "no her story sounds extreme. She was probably brainwashed by the therapist". Then her dad was interviewed and his denial seemed plausible enough. Then they did a special kind of excavation search in her backyard (he poured concrete to cover the body) and damn, she was right. Her recovered memory was completely true.

I wish I could find that episode to show people because it was incredible. It made you really want to revisit the blanket dismissal of the recovered memory movement.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 2:46 PM on January 13, 2016 [5 favorites]


people who use (and used) the church as a cover for their abuse of children are more likely to blame it on big scary "Satan"

oh yeah, bigtime projection and misdirection there
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 2:53 PM on January 13, 2016


Why, he gave all that sweet vinyl heresy to me, his 13-year old sister. Couldn't bear to destroy them I guess.
pardon if I'm thread-hogging but there are just too many gems here.

Sweet Vinyl Heresy=new record store name
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 2:57 PM on January 13, 2016 [9 favorites]


Anyone remember the TV movie Cruel Doubt? That was another of the D&D panic genre.

My high school wouldn't let us have a RPG/D&D club (for various reasons that were never fully explained but probably not unrelated to this, as my school/area was heavily Southern Baptist). However, the teacher who ran the chess club let us play whatever we wanted there so we got around it.
posted by thefoxgod at 3:09 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


i used to think the church i grew up in was massively uninformed about satanists/witchcraft - i knew some secular satanists and i was a baby pagan - i tried the arguments of "satan is your dude, not ours - why would we worship a figure from your religion?" but then i realized that we were fundamentally using the term differently. i saw him as a figure in their religion. however, to the church i grew up in, anything and everything that didn't enrich the feeling of godly spirit inside of you was on the road to satanism, because to them those were the only options. so, no, d&d wasn't created in a satanic ritual - neither was ozzy or beverly hills 90210 or tinted lip gloss - but to the church, all of those in one way or another could be seen as running counter to their teachings and were on what they saw as a slippery slope to apostasy. now of course, some took this to the lengths of saying they saw or felt demons, but by and large i think most of the people i grew up around used satanism as a stand in for "not of the spirt."
posted by nadawi at 3:22 PM on January 13, 2016 [10 favorites]


> To read about that particular con artist and others like him, an essential Slacktivist link with lots of good stuff.

> I think there's something deeper about Satanic Panic that Fred at the Slacktivist talk about, though, that's even more important. And that's how so many Christians want this stuff to be true, as if finding the polar opposite of what they believe is some sort of validation...and they desperately need that validation. It seems like we see it more and more lately, Christians leaping on any little slight or disagreement and screaming persecution!. Or, of course, Satan!

So I don't know if this is an appropriate place for this, but there's a bunch of Slacktivist fans here, and some of his most recent posts (most notably this one) seems to indicate that he and his family have fallen on some grim hard times. By all rights Fred Clark deserves a Genius Grant for the work he's been doing on the recent history of evangelicalism in America, but since I don't have a Genius Grant to give out I've just given him some money instead. It would be lovely if others here could help out too. Basically I think of Slacktivist as being almost at the same tier as Jon Bois and Mallory Ortberg, the tier of people who Metafilterians tend to both adulate and love. And um he's in trouble.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:40 PM on January 13, 2016 [14 favorites]


Yeah... there was the (public!) junior high that I went to for a couple years where some group of parents convinced the school administrators to send kids home with a sheet for parents about "your child might be getting into Satan worship if they use the following symbols", including: the peace sign (upside-down trident), the International Sign Language for "I love you" (also trident symbolism), etc. I think my parents had a few strong words with the principal about the inappropriateness of such material being sent home by the school itself. Perhaps some other parents did too. It only happened the once.

Other kids did regularly bring what were possibly (in retrospect) Chick Tracts to share with other kids at recess. Which led to the Playground Inquisition. Much like the original, the small group of regular bullies appointed themselves as inquisitors. They went around asking other kids if they believed in god and Jesus, but (again, much like the original) mainly targeted kids based on classism and social standing. There were three towns in the school district, and the bullies came from the more affluent town. The kids with the Chick Tracts came from the town where people nailed cardboard signs up to the telephone poles along the side of the highway with messages such as "Hell [arrow pointing down]", etc., and were not directly the bullies, actually.

The third town (where we lived) was the more working class town. The Playground Inquisition's main victim was a girl from our town, whose family had moved away to another state, but returned a year later, with school rumor being something about them having failed at whatever venture had taken them out of state, and who lived in a shack with minimal amenities. They called her a witch, and made little twig crosses to hold up against her, and it went on for a week or two until one of the good teachers found out and got angry, and rumor had it that back in an earlier generation he had gotten very very angry at some other student wrongdoing and had broken a classroom desk, and the bullies respected/feared that so stopped (yep, that school had some fucked up dynamics), mostly, until they found a new excuse for the bullying of course.

Interestingly, although I was in general a frequent target of the bullies, I avoided such accusations of witchcraft. My middle school level of critical reasoning was sufficient to flummox their middle school theological understanding (note: when your level of theological understanding is that god has a physical existence and lives "up there" [pointing up into sky], this doesn't actually say much about the quality of my arguments - we were only in junior high). Apparently it was sufficient to introduce enough doubt in some of my classmates in fact that, a few days later after they had had a chance to talk with parents, quite a few kids weren't allowed to play with me anymore (which, of course, made the other kids who weren't explicitly prohibited from associating with me quite wary of doing so as well). So they even got some good old-fashioned religious ostracization in. Good times.

I learned some important lessons through that whole episode and its aftermath, though, that have helped shape who I am; solidified my ethical views on not being a bystander and led me to a basic understanding of Arendt's ideas on the banality of evil and that “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." before having ever read any Arendt; taught me important lessons about solidarity and helping others based on their need not my own agenda; and led me to a better understanding of the workings of internalized oppression. So, er, thanks, Satanic Panic, I guess? Probably there were better ways to learn the same lessons.
posted by eviemath at 4:03 PM on January 13, 2016 [8 favorites]


Somewhere around I have an old Psychology Today(?) academic article photocopied from around the Satanic Panic era (probably late '80s) I copied back at uni. If I can find it I'll post some wisdom, but as I recall it basically concluded that D&D was *drumroll* not harmful, and people really were getting too wound up about Satanism.
posted by Mezentian at 4:31 PM on January 13, 2016


There isn't even a word in English to express the sense how, I dunno, anti-scandalized I was when I actually listened to some Ozzy after years of reading all this crap and the lyrics were like, "Maybe it's not to late to learn how to love, and forget how to hate." This? THIS? is what you guys were shitting yourselves over? REALLY??
posted by Wolfdog at 4:39 PM on January 13, 2016 [13 favorites]


Let's see ... 1986 we got the satanic panic talk from our writing teacher (long hair, like Crystal Gayle). That was also around the time of catching of The Night Stalker. Our science teacher used to have him as a student so we had a few sad discussions about that too.

I joined a recreational gaming group a few years later. We made the mistake of trying to recruit by doing a human interest piece with the local news station.

Guess where else we showed up? As B roll footage on an "I escaped from Satanists" story.
posted by tilde at 4:44 PM on January 13, 2016 [4 favorites]


This? THIS? is what you guys were shitting yourselves over? REALLY??

You have to remember, before Sabbath and Ozzy and the like, the world was a lot more Toto.

Hell, I can remember when Poison and Bon Jovi were considered 'demonic'.

I laughed so hard the first time I heard a Poison song.
So very hard.
posted by Mezentian at 4:48 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


I think it is difficult to understand the full-blown sort of spiritual warfare metaphysics that many people are taught in fundamentalist churches. The overarching theme is that "the World" and things that are "of the World" are constantly employed by a literally real Satan to seduce Christians and destroy their salvation. I have heard of people who won't let their kids play in chess tournaments because they are concerned that it is not "Biblical".

So, to these folks, saying look, this game is just some charts and graph paper and dice wouldn't be very effective.
posted by thelonius at 4:56 PM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


thelonius, I was curious enough to look it up, and yes, people still think that. That site even halfway blames it on Catholics.

I have a lifelong love affair with hot Christian nonsense. In part, I think it's because I envy the experience of a world fraught with meanings, tricks and traps, a world in which you are never alone, but always the prize in a battle between God and the Devil.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:05 PM on January 13, 2016 [5 favorites]


I was raised SDA and at the time Nirvana was the goto evil music group. It is so ingrained in me that I still find it unsettling to hear the Muzak version of Heart-shaped Box at the Jiffylube or wherever. Doesn't everyone know listening to that damns your soul?

Of course now I know it's not the song itself that causes damnation it's only the Muzak version of it that does.
posted by M Edward at 5:09 PM on January 13, 2016 [4 favorites]


You've got to admire the artistry in a page that opens with the question "Should Christians play chess?" and really helps you reason out the answer for yourself.
posted by Wolfdog at 5:30 PM on January 13, 2016 [4 favorites]


its funny, because I went to Catholic high school in the 80s, in northern New Jersey, not terribly far from Poughkeepsie, yet this panic did not seem to bother any of us. I remember it vaguely, but there definitely wasn't any concern in my immediate community and I definitely don't recall being warned about heavy metal at school.

Same here, on the other side of NY state. It was like it was happening in another world as far as I was concerned.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:35 PM on January 13, 2016


So, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he existed?
posted by Chitownfats at 6:00 PM on January 13, 2016 [4 favorites]


Mefistopheles
posted by Joseph Gurl at 6:10 PM on January 13, 2016 [8 favorites]


Mefistopheles

No, no, no. The pronunciation is all wrong...
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:11 PM on January 13, 2016 [4 favorites]


A couple of folks have referenced the Jack Chick D&D tract "Dark Dungeons." Looks like the movie version is finished now.
posted by zoinks at 7:21 PM on January 13, 2016 [4 favorites]


I remember some small-form factor christian comic books (thinner and smaller than Archie, and waaaay less fun) that warned of the dangers of rock music. They told stories about how many of the rhythms and drumbeats used in modern ('80s at the time) rock were used by primitive brown pagan people who lived somewhere far away in an obviously backward land, to summon demons and such. Rock and Heavy metal musicians knowingly borrowed these rhythms from these places and incorporated them in their music in order to corrupt the youth... or something... That's just about when my 11-year old BS meter started going off.
posted by Stu-Pendous at 8:17 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yeah, even my relatively liberal (yet Christian) parents fell to this nonsense. We lived in the south. And while I was (and still am) a huge D&D nerd, that escaped their wrath. I think mostly because my father's brother was an even bigger D&D nerd (eventually giving me his chain mail / 1st ed book collection and mini figs) so my dad new that wasn't a problem. Instead it was the music. Every Metallica, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Ministry, Tool, etc CD I had purchased was taken to the garage and smashed with a hammer because the music was "leading me to the darkness".

To their credit, my parents paid me 20% of the retail value in recompense. Weird times.
posted by lazaruslong at 8:24 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


The article was not bad, but it glosses over most of the substance of LaVey's thought and philosophy and focuses on the theatrics. As a result you get a picture more like "LaVeyan Satanism-as-pro-wrestling", which is very incomplete.

Incidentally, I also grew up in an ultra-Christian home. There was much silliness associated with this, but also a few things that were really damaging. These days people are usually pretty surprised when I identify as Christian but mention Christopher Hitchens as one of my favorite authors. It generally takes some convincing before they accept that I'm not using "Christian" as a convenient label since I'm white and Western, or that I'm actually well-versed in Christian doctrine and don't see much problem with Hitchens.

What I think I'm trying to get at by mentioning the silliness and potential damage of a Christian upbringing, and that I don't have a problem with most of what Hitchens says, is that I see what LaVey was reacting against and sympathize. Some of the things he calls out in The Satanic Bible are actually wrong (look for overlap with Hitchens and that's roughly what I'm thinking of). Of course, I also disagree with a lot of it.

All of this is pretty much to say that as a Christian with an interest in cults and heresies and such, I fairly often find myself thinking "great, but you're reacting against something Christianity (at least originally) never asserted."
posted by iffthen at 8:38 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh, and the music I got banned from was Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Yes mother, I'm definitely planning to travel to California to fornicate as a result of listening to this.

(I also got banned from watching Blade Runner. A couple decades later and guess what my favorite movie is? Probably still have a chip on my shoulder about that one.)
posted by iffthen at 8:47 PM on January 13, 2016 [3 favorites]


I'd like to go back to that Slacktivist article, because even though it's got some good info in it, I'm a bit bothered by his insistence that Christine O'Donnell's claims of having "dabbled" in witchcraft can't possibly be true because she's just cribbing it from Mike Warnke, when it doesn't sound like the same thing at all; it sounds like the sort of thing that me and some of my high school friends and acquaintances used to do because we thought we were being daring and wicked and thought that it might impress people when really it was about most of us being too scared to talk to girls.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:51 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


Re: backwards masking - I was semi-idly Googling and ended up at this article in the Bowling Green, Kentucky Daily News on the push to label records.

The little backflip from one of the people who started the whole thing (and his reason for the change of heart), and the juxtaposition with ads for Conan the Barbarian, Porkys, Cat People, and An American Werewolf in London amused me.

Don't forget the catfish special on Fri. Nite…
posted by Pinback at 9:08 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


The satanic panic making it to Mexico resulted in two years of underage gay sex for me.

When my very Christian cousin stayed with us, we would play video games, read comics, listen to music, ride bikes, etc... When I stayed over at his house, the only allowed entertainment was music and reading, which was OK with me. Then their church started with the lists of satanic music and books and we were reduced to some classical music and Christian books, not allowed to go outside unchaperoned. We got so bored that we spent all the time masturbating, and later guiltily and furiously fucking each other like only horny 13 year old boys can.

This coincided with the AIDS panic, where gay = AIDS = HELL. The whole thing messed me up real bad, but I am over it now.
posted by Doroteo Arango II at 9:14 PM on January 13, 2016 [11 favorites]


A few years ago, my heretofore totally rational, well-educated, not all religious colleague asked me if she should worry because her summer au pair had introduced her kids to D&D and back in the day she'd heard it was connected to Satanism. She asked this despite knowing that I played D&D myself and that I'd been introduced to the game by colleagues in that office. I have yet to figure out the logic of that one. Satanic Panic lives?
posted by librarylis at 9:18 PM on January 13, 2016


Fear is the mind-killer
posted by Joseph Gurl at 9:33 PM on January 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


> The satanic panic making it to Mexico resulted in two years of underage gay sex for me.

> When my very Christian cousin stayed with us, we would play video games, read comics, listen to music, ride bikes, etc... When I stayed over at his house, the only allowed entertainment was music and reading, which was OK with me. Then their church started with the lists of satanic music and books and we were reduced to some classical music and Christian books, not allowed to go outside unchaperoned. We got so bored that we spent all the time masturbating, and later guiltily and furiously fucking each other like only horny 13 year old boys can.


Have you ever considered picking up some extra cash writing Kindle Singles? Because I'm pretty sure elaborated versions of the story you just told would make an absolute killing as Kindle Singles. You might have to age up the participants a little bit, but beyond that I'm pretty sure there's great swathes of the Internet that are like TAKE MY MONEY about erotica with the setting and participants you describe. All "Furious queer repressed Christian cousin sex? And this is happening in Mexico, you say?"
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:48 PM on January 13, 2016 [7 favorites]


I think it is difficult to understand the full-blown sort of spiritual warfare metaphysics that many people are taught in fundamentalist churches. The overarching theme is that "the World" and things that are "of the World" are constantly employed by a literally real Satan to seduce Christians

Absolutely. It's very paranoid thinking by definition. My mom would say 'the secular world' with this cringing tone, as if anything outside the quasi-Pentacostals (called Charismatic Christians- they speak in tongues, lay hands, do something called "Slain in the Spirit") was just poisonous. In other words the entire outside world!!

It's very related to conspiracy thinking processes where symbols are everywhere and everything has a coded meaning that relates to some force of evil; like how some folks see Illuminati symbols everywhere, they saw satanic symbolism in everything, Duran Duran whathaveyou. It's apophenia. I think it's a form of religious mania*. I really think that these types of thinking are just milder forms of mental illnesses that run along a spectrum that fits into cultural normality, much in the way that one person can 'hear God's voice' or have a vision and it falls within normal overall psychological states.

And of course, bands and folks cashed in on that in turn and there was some baiting and reacting going on, naturally, which is fair game if you're trying to sort of culturally deprogram yourself from religious brainwashing- and this is actually the valid thing I've encountered in some more philosophical and restrained versions of Satanism.

*Semi-Related: Geschwind's Syndrome, encompassing hyper-religiosity.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 10:06 PM on January 13, 2016


I also apologize for any redudancies or tangentializing due to not reading the article yet (!) this topic just excites me so much I couldn't wait to dive into discussion.
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 10:07 PM on January 13, 2016


Well, we managed to get through the last witch hunt hysteria with relatively damage- some unjustified prison sentences, and a lot of harassment. I'm more worried about the next witch panic.

Some time when society is in flux, and the middle class feels threatened on an existential level, there will be another witch panic. All because the fundamental American beliefs that cause the witch craze still there, as are the People who will take advantage of those fears. All just waiting for the right conditions.
posted by happyroach at 10:42 PM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


I wonder if there's some sort of backlash against this in my generation (born 1989) or just a backlash against religiosity in general, or my current location. Pretty much me and all my friends are anti-religious, although not in an aggressive Richard Dawkins way. In fact, people like Bill Maher annoy te hell out of me with how anti-religious they are. But all of is have St. Peter's across tattooed on us somewhere (his is the upside down one that everyone thinks is a satanic symbol) and I know how to throw up a pentagram with my hands in a way that comes off as a gang sign.

As for the tattoos however, like I said it's more of a perceived satanist thing with them, but also symbolic of us being bratty kids that want to shock and annoy people and enjoying even bullshit satanic imagery. I grew up a shy and lonesome kid who sat on chat rooms and listened to melodic death metal, and also went to an episcopalian school, so nothing too extreme. Only got made fun of for being gay, only because that's the go to for kids at that age though. I'm use to using satanic imagery to shock people, as even in high school going to hardcore metal shows and wearing certain band t-shirts was shocking, and the music itself moreso.

But a LOT of people I know, most of us growing up away from each other, are basically running around with upside down cross tattoos and yelling 666. I'm not sure if my parents bought into this stuff, I highly doubt it and they've never been mad at me for my anti-religious choices (I was basically raised atheist by them), but it seems like satanic imagery is a big thing in my generation, even in non-shocking ways. Remember the band WU-LYF? World United Lucifer Youth Foundation? Or the imagery of the archetypal witch house band, Salem? These things all came to fruition when we were 18-21. Could be totally wrong but it's interesting.
posted by gucci mane at 11:09 PM on January 13, 2016 [2 favorites]


I think it is difficult to understand the full-blown sort of spiritual warfare metaphysics that many people are taught in fundamentalist churches. The overarching theme is that "the World" and things that are "of the World" are constantly employed by a literally real Satan to seduce Christians
I'm responding as someone you'd probably call a fundamentalist (though I also want most drugs legalized, I swear like a sailor and I love reading Hitchens, so make of that what you will).

I agree that metaphysics is difficult to understand, because it seems completely nuts. I just want to mention that I (correctly or not) see a Western bias in this perspective. I've read about and personally encountered people from different cultures to whom this stuff doesn't seem nuts at all (on first glance, not after extended "brainwashing".)
Absolutely. It's very paranoid thinking by definition.
That bit I 100% agree with. A lot of Christians buy into a mindset of paranoia and "seeing Satan under every rock." This is not only silly (and at worst, damaging), it's theologically completely incorrect. In Christian theology Satan is a being created by God, not a spiritual opposite of some sort, and Satan serves a temporary purpose and only causes trouble to the extent God allows. So if there are annoying Christians around spouting that sort of nonsense and you really want to get under their skin, tell them their Satan-hunting is actually a lack of faith, and you'll be right. (Hilarity of the reaction may vary.)
I also apologize for any redudancies or tangentializing due to not reading the article yet (!) this topic just excites me so much I couldn't wait to dive into discussion.
Don't apologize, I think you're on the money pretty much.
posted by iffthen at 12:44 AM on January 14, 2016 [4 favorites]


I grew up in the '80's, and my parents weren't concerned about any of this at all.

Punk? Noisy, but meh.
Metal? Noisy and screamy, but meh.
D&D? Can we join in? Sure! Mom valiantly played a Mage, for the 1/2 hour she gave it a go.
Satan? Didn't really register on their philosophical or theological radar. Both Dad and Step-Dad were staunch Atheists, and Mom was a Pagan, into crystals and meditation and 'Moon Ceremonies'. Satan didn't even rate a blip in the Pantheon.

Want to know how to rebel against that, as a teen/young adult? Convert *to* Christianity. Mom completely lost her mind over that. Which just solidified it more, and I then joined the Roman Catholic Church. Still Catholic, in fact.
posted by spinifex23 at 12:48 AM on January 14, 2016 [6 favorites]


Hello to my fellow Satanic Panic survivors!

My mother wanted to get rid of my Cabbage Patch Doll, because the middle name was a Satanic name, and by having the doll, it would bring Satan into the house. (Thanks, Bill Gothard!) Thankfully, I think other people talked her out of it.

When I was 15, my mother made me go to a Christian summer camp. I was an epic nerd, I had a pile of books I wanted to read (all "classics", because I was buried in my school's summer reading list), but I was also obsessed with Oingo Boingo. I wore this t-shirt, and, suddenly, one of the chaperones came over and sat down with me and started talking about how easy Satan makes it, and how the occult is so tempting, etc. etc.

So at the end of the week, when the hip young pastors wanted to know what people thought of the entire week, mullets gleaming under spotlights, I raised my hand, and said that I had been accused of being a Satanist just because I wore a t-shirt. How it hurt my feelings, how I didn't like being not trusted, how being here proved that I wasn't a Satanist, and I was really upset by being called as such.

They had a minute ranting about how people shouldn't judge other people, the chaperone apologised, and I got to go back to reading The Scarlet Letter and trying to figure out how the fuck I could get out of there.
posted by Katemonkey at 1:16 AM on January 14, 2016 [11 favorites]


I was given Turmoil In The Toybox as a sunday school prize. Reading it woke me up to the fact that a lot of the adults in my life were frightened idiots.
posted by gnuhavenpier at 4:50 AM on January 14, 2016 [5 favorites]


Looking back on this, it just seems weirder and weirder, especially as I read people's accounts of actually being thought witches when they were kids. Come to think of it, one of my friends went through that in junior high, but I thought it was just some weird situation. It's really scary that you can have a powerful panic like that when it's so obviously stupid.

Because that's the thing - this wasn't a society-wide panic. A huge number of people thought it was incredibly stupid, or some weird one-off thing that happened in backwards parts of the country. My parents were sort of taken in by the Dungeons and Dragons thing, but that was more in the wake of the bad reporting on that poor kid who killed himself than a satanic thing, and I know that nobody in our immediate social circle believed all this nonsense about satanism. Even when there was the big media fuss at my school, everyone I knew understood that the kids who were "satanists" were the heavy metal kids, and they were "satanists" in the same way that they were, like, Metallica fans; it was just something to do, and something that seemed badass when you were fifteen.

It was something that was extremely powerful even though a lot of people - probably most people - knew it wasn't real. I think there's a reluctance to challenge these bad narratives - no one wants to come out and say "come on, how would huge networks of ritual satanic child abusers actually work? Where is your material evidence?" because it seems like you're taking the genuine problem of actual child abuse lightly. And it seems so ridiculous that it's really just relegated to something to laugh at when it's parodied on Saturday Night Live, even though it's actually a set of ideas that are really harmful.

That's what is scary to me - the twin powers of stupidity and silence.
posted by Frowner at 5:47 AM on January 14, 2016 [6 favorites]


...we could play anything else in our rpg club, but not D&D by order of the school board.

Hah! No one cared what we did, so we played Car Wars in middle school. Now that I think aboiut it, it is probably the only paper-and-dice game form that era which can be directly tied to later violence (i.e., road rage). I mean, not by us, of course, but just as a more recent phenomenon in the broader society.

(In grade school we played everything from Dawn Patrol to Wabbit Wampage, too.)
posted by wenestvedt at 5:56 AM on January 14, 2016


Every time I go back to the page about chess, I'm more struck by how much it looks like those angels are siphoning off our atmosphere.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:04 AM on January 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


It's good to know that radian measure is Jesus-approved, though.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:07 AM on January 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


Every time I go back to the page about chess, I'm more struck by how much it looks like those angels are siphoning off our atmosphere.

Chess is a game. One of the ways to improve your game in chess is to memorize openings. Who else emphasizes memorization, could it be, THE CATHOLICS!?!?!
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:19 AM on January 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


I've commented on MeFi before about my own experiences with this stuff, and how at the Christian private school I went to all this was common knowledge, and I personally have a strong memory of a kid calling Carl Sagan a Satanist. And I'll tell you, there are plenty of people in those church-based communities who believe in all this to this day, that Satan's claws are in everything that's not "of the Lord." They literally believe that, and there's a lot more of them than you think. They don't tend to post to sites like Metafilter, though.
posted by JHarris at 6:24 AM on January 14, 2016 [4 favorites]


It was something that was extremely powerful even though a lot of people - probably most people - knew it wasn't real. I think there's a reluctance to challenge these bad narratives - no one wants to come out and say "come on, how would huge networks of ritual satanic child abusers actually work? Where is your material evidence?" because it seems like you're taking the genuine problem of actual child abuse lightly. And it seems so ridiculous that it's really just relegated to something to laugh at when it's parodied on Saturday Night Live, even though it's actually a set of ideas that are really harmful.

I don't have a great understanding of how these kinds of panics happen, but I suspect it's not unconnected to the fact that you have widespread abuse being condoned in multiple major religious institutions during this same period, as a few people mentioned upthread. Watching Spotlight recently and reading this thread, I kept thinking about how the survivors of abuse by priests who came forward in the '80s and '90s and whose cases were settled were often painted as hysterical, as disreputable as the McMartin case that is trotted out every time a child abuse coverup is alleged. From what I recall (I was in Catholic school then), those survivors were talked about in hushed tones, dismissively, if the subject came up at all. I wonder if the Satanic ritual abuse panic manifested through an inability to recognize and address the genuine abuses of the time, like a referred pain appearing elsewhere in the body. I mean, I don't know, but I'd be interested in somebody smarter than me exploring the idea.
posted by thetortoise at 6:52 AM on January 14, 2016 [5 favorites]


One odd off-the-cuff memory: as a member of my brother's wedding I was paired off with the bride's best friend, a pretty, young school teacher. When we met at the church, she noticed the Bob Marley lapel button I had on the tux (just to amuse myself). "Oh, Bob Marley .. the satanist?" her arch comment. Needless to say, I didn't "get lucky", but, in retrospect, I guess I did.
posted by Chitownfats at 6:53 AM on January 14, 2016 [3 favorites]


there will be another witch panic

I would argue that some of the recent Trumpist islamophobia crap can be seen as the first stirrings of a new witch panic. Especially once you consider the "Obama is a secret muslim!" stuff -- oooo, who might be a secret muslim? They are among us! We must root them out with their signs and portents!
posted by aramaic at 6:53 AM on January 14, 2016 [6 favorites]


No, the Satanic Panic was a product of a Conservative Christian movement establishing itself as a mainstream political force (including an internal purge of multiple denominations) and anxiety about the persistence of new religious movements from the 60s and 70s counter-culture. Most of it was focused on establishing shibboleths of in-group/out-group differences.

Current Republican proposals involve a fundamental shift in American religious liberties. At a minimum, they amount to complete nullification of the Civil Rights act with respect to religion. At worst, they're a prelude to pogroms.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:22 AM on January 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


Although there's a certain ethnocentrism involved that leaks through to popular culture. I'm plowing through a novel that's explicitly Universalist, except when we get to the one-page interlude describing the Indian serial killer who worships a Kali straight from Temple of Doom. African Diasporic, Buddhist, feminist, and queer religious movements are other popular punching bags for this kind of stuff. For that matter, Baphomet was likely a product of medieval Muhammad is Satan thinking.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:40 AM on January 14, 2016


The inculcated fear of Hell is such a useful tool for making people do what you want, no matter how stupid or evil. "But why?" "Question us too much and you will go to Hell and suffer torture forever!"

So much so that I'm not sure it's possible to break away from a lot of churches without deciding that Hell doesn't exist. Otherwise you're too scared to take the risk.

And yeah, it seems stupid to believe in Hell to lots of people. But when they get you young, and that fear is also tied up with the actual normal fear of dying/supernatural/superstitions, and constantly reiterated by people whom you are taught to respect...it's hard to get rid of. I had occasional misgivings for years after I stopped believing in it.

Fear of "witchcraft" or "Satanism" serves the dual role of keeping people in line and elaborating on the reality of Hell. Because if witchcraft is real, if Satanists do in fact commune with demons, then Hell must be real too.
posted by emjaybee at 7:51 AM on January 14, 2016 [3 favorites]


Eh. I don't know about all that. Hell ain't got nothing on cultivated paranoia.

I'm pretty sure it's just a lesson learned from Jim Jones: Make your followers trust you and distrust everybody else, and they'll do absolutely anything for you.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:49 AM on January 14, 2016 [1 favorite]




That's a great story, Katemonkey, and I think Danny Elfman would have loved to hear it.

I must know what on earth the Cabbage Patch Kid's name was (if you even remember it -- I renamed mine right away). I definitely remember hearing that the Cabbage Patch Kids were Satanic, probably because magic was involved in their backstory. A distaste for the very idea of magic, in practice, drained any attempt at fun from a fundamentalist Christian childhood. I remember my uncle, a commercial illustrator at the time, telling me that he couldn't put a toy unicorn figure as set dressing in a drawing of a generic "little girl's room" because that was too magical for the client.

Luckily I grew up in a good demi-secular home, but I remember wondering what really Christian kids were supposed to do with themselves outside of church, chores and school. The Little House on the Prairie series seems like about it.

I picked up a copy of Turmoil in the Toybox and its companion volume, Saturday Morning Mind Control, as penny books from Amazon. What was surprising was that about half of each book gave solid, if slightly dated, advice about encouraging your kids' imagination and preventing aggressive play by cutting down on TV. It was the second half that told you that He-Man was attempting to declare himself the actual Master of the Universe and Rainbow Brite was a New Age covert op.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:28 AM on January 14, 2016 [3 favorites]


The overarching theme is that "the World" and things that are "of the World" are constantly employed by a literally real Satan to seduce Christians and destroy their salvation. I have heard of people who won't let their kids play in chess tournaments because they are concerned that it is not "Biblical".

True, but I think for some of the stuff in particular, especially D&D and anything related to paganism, there's this belief in something like one of those horror movies where the teenagers find a cursed book or ouija board, and start playing with it as a joke, not realizing that they are inadvertently doing the actual rituals that will unleash real demons or evil monsters.

And, like you say, the fact that Ozzie Osborn or Gary Gygax think it's all fictional or a prank to get a rise out of fundamentalist parents just means they are unwitting pawns in Satan's schemes to corrupt your children.
posted by straight at 1:25 PM on January 14, 2016


And yeah, it seems stupid to believe in Hell to lots of people. But when they get you young, and that fear is also tied up with the actual normal fear of dying/supernatural/superstitions, and constantly reiterated by people whom you are taught to respect...it's hard to get rid of. I had occasional misgivings for years after I stopped believing in it.

This is so true. I realized I did not believe in God, Heaven, Hell, or anything supernatural at all by the time I was 8 or 9. It took me decades of feeling broken inside, and some very expensive therapy, to realize that I had internalized Sin and Hell in a part of my mind that was not accessible to rational thought. A part of my knew I had an indelible stain, that I would go to Hell, that I did not deserve to be loved or cared for. All because I did what horny teens do all the time. I am so sorry for the partners I had who had to deal with my weird moods and awkward sex.

It took a lot of hard work using the rational parts of my mind (the only tools I know how to wield) to talk the emotional parts of it (which are a deep dark jungle I am just starting to map) into believing that there is no such thing as a Mortal Sin and no way I could have committed one, that I will not go to Hell, that I can forgive myself if I want to without needing absolution from an all powerful father figure.

So yeah, the threat of Hell is such a powerful tool that it kept its hooks deeply anchored in the heart of this atheist for over 25 years, and pulling them out hurt a lot.
posted by Doroteo Arango II at 2:09 PM on January 14, 2016 [8 favorites]


"Luckily I grew up in a good demi-secular home, but I remember wondering what really Christian kids were supposed to do with themselves outside of church, chores and school. "

That's just it. I grew up in a Christian house, and we were *only* supposed to be concerned with church, chores, and school. Ok, Boy Scouts was OK, but if we sang, it was in church; when my brother learned piano, my mom kept tight reign on what he played, caving in eventually in letting him learn the "Star Wars" theme in addition to the religious dreck. TV was a "special privilege" (exept when mom wanted to watch something) and highly censored. We had to attend Sunday church, always arriving early for choir practice or to usher, and staying late so our parents could socialize (and they never cared that all the other families with children left after 10 minutes or so -- we'd say an hour or more). Monday was Scouting, a very Christian organization in the region, tuesday was my patrol meeting, Wed. was usually a school thing (Great Books, play rehersal, or similar), Thursday was the scouting Patrol meeting, and most Saturdays either camping with scouts, on a retreat for church, or household chores.
posted by Blackanvil at 2:23 PM on January 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


D&D? Chess? No, Diplomacy is the game that was invented by the father of lies to corrupt the souls of all who play it.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 2:31 PM on January 14, 2016 [8 favorites]


Some kind person put a reverse Stairway to Heaven up on youtube.

The Church of Satan is Mister Milktoast. This is the HOWTO for terrorizing your relatives.
posted by bukvich at 5:45 PM on January 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


I wonder if there's some sort of backlash against this in my generation (born 1989)

The only thing to be certain of is that in 25 years you will be talking about things you never could have believed would happen.

Because that's the thing - this wasn't a society-wide panic. A huge number of people thought it was incredibly stupid, or some weird one-off thing that happened in backwards parts of the country.

This is what fascinates me about history, it’s so full of generalization. Most people thought it was stupid, but even now, and as times goes on it will become the thing that everyone believed at the time.

I don't have a great understanding of how these kinds of panics happen,

There’s usually, as Frowner pointed out so well, some reason reasonable people don’t object, something that really is a concern perhaps, so even though reasonable people object to the methods and framing they don’t want to dismiss the underlying concern. The people pushing an agenda use forcing you to take a side as part of their plan.

At this time child sexual abuse was coming to the forefront, to object to the witch hunts also meant you were defending child abusers, or at least appearing to. Think of how hard it’s been in the last few years to object to government data collection when they’re trying to save you from child molesters and terrorists, do you like child molesters and terrorists or something? During the Communist witch hunts ordinary people really were concerned about Communism. To object to the heavy handedness was to support Communism. Think of how hard it is right now (perhaps on this very website) to object to people who have completely over the top arguments about issues you actually support, and the internet shaming that will be rained on you.

Looking back we see it as people who went crazy about something vs people who knew better. But it’s really usually that a lot of people were concerned about the issue without condoning the craziness, they just had a hard time objecting. It just looks different in hindsight because we can separate the issues.

It’s the oldest technique in the world; you’re with us or you’re against us. But the joke of history is that every generation thinks they’ve moved past that, and that was something stupid people in the past did. This time it’s totally different because this is a serious issue and we’re right dammit! It’s OK if you’re fighting the forces of evil, religious or not.
posted by bongo_x at 7:07 PM on January 16, 2016 [3 favorites]


The only thing I've learned from history is that people don't learn from history.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 7:24 PM on January 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


That's not true! Well, not completely.

I recall around this time, there were news articles that even the humble Cabbage Patch Kid doll could be POSSESSED BY SATAN, and this was in secular Australia, pre-Chucky (although, the news was probably out of the US).

Now, we all felt silly, and I don't think we have a mass hysteria possessed doll scare in decades.
So, we all smartened up our act on that front.

(And hey, while we're in Poughkeepsie, The Poughkeepsie Tapes is a pretty solid horror flick. Trailer. Full movie).
posted by Mezentian at 8:00 PM on January 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


OK, besides the giant parasitic space-angels sucking our atmosphere away, just why is the entire earth floating above a bed of clouds, anyway?
posted by Wolfdog at 5:56 PM on January 22, 2016


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