The buttheads on the Star-Ledger editorial board owe Sussex County an apology
/By Rubashov
People in Sussex County have just spent most of the week without electricity, heat for warmth or washing, and hot food. They’re used to waiting for the government and government-sanctioned utilities to get around to them last. Sure they provide the drinking water to New Jersey’s cities – but that hasn’t stopped Governor Phil Murphy from wanting to turn the county into a dumping ground and cutting education funding to the county’s children.
Now the editorial board of the Newark Star-Ledger have directed their collective bungholes in the direction of Sussex County – to engage in a bit of unreserved dumping themselves. Over the weekend, the Star-Ledger let go a massive dump on folks still in the process of dealing with the damage done by that early December snowstorm.
According to the Star-Ledger, the arrest of two social outcasts – members of a biker gang – is a sign of a vast underlying social and political movement in Sussex County. The editorial board claims that in “sleepy Sussex County” there has been “a troubling uptick in hate crimes lately.”
Of course, this isn’t true. According to the official Bias Incident Report put out by the Murphy administration earlier this year – signed by Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, State Police Colonel Patrick Callahan, and Civil Rights Director Rachel Apter – Sussex County experienced no increase in bias crime between 2017 and 2018 (the latest available figures). No increase… as in zero.
The same cannot be said for counties like Passaic, which experienced a 286% increase; or Union County, with a 200% increase; or Camden, with a 55% increase in bias crime; or Hudson County with its 43% increase. Of course, these are all Democrat-controlled counties, so the Star-Ledger would be hesitant to tie these genuine “up-ticks” to something like “White Extremism”. Far-better to just fashion a narrative around the arrest of a couple biker gang members in a relatively peaceful county – and then use them to characterize and smear the entire population.
The official figures – the data – reveal something else as well. Statewide, “bias crime” or “hate crime” has fallen. Since figures began in 2006, reported incidents have fallen from 825 that year to 569 incidents in 2018. Such crimes are actually quite rare – from 151 arrests in 2006, “bias crime” has fallen to just 59 arrests in 2018. Those are the official figures, direct from the Murphy administration.
In fact, the only “bias crime” evidenced by the Star-Ledger’s editorial board is the crime of bias committed by said board against the people of Sussex County.
In August of this year, NJ 101.5 went through the Murphy administration’s Bias Incident Report and listed the 49 municipalities with the worse incidence of “bias” or “hate crime”. Guess what? None of those municipalities were in Sussex County. None.
Now guess which towns were listed? Number one for “hate crime” was East Brunswick, in Middlesex County. Number two was Evesham Township, Burlington County. Woodbury (Gloucester), Hoboken (Hudson), South Brunswick (Middlesex), Cherry Hill (Camden), Fort Lee (Bergen), Princeton (Mercer), Hackensack (Bergen), Livingston (Essex), Montclair (Essex), West Orange (Essex), Jersey City (Hudson), Edison (Middlesex), and New Brunswick (Middlesex) all appear to be hotbeds of “White Extremism” if the Star-Ledger is to be believed.
Funny thing… some of these towns are the places of residence of those very same members of the Star-Ledger’s editorial board. Which means, next time they want to take a dump on somewhere, they should just step outside, pull down their drawers, and do it on their own front steps – because apparently, that’s where all the action is.
So why would the Star-Ledger just make this crap up and defame a whole county and its people? Well, we’ve been here before…
All this puts us in mind of the Great Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s. The media went crazy reporting on every salacious detail, hundreds of suspected “witches” and “cultists” were investigated while politicians and prosecutors pontificated and made their careers, dozens were arrested, many of whom were convicted and spent years in jail – before the truth pushed through to reveal that it was all just media hype. A public circus of show trials and fake stoked fear.
The New York Times covered this in one of their Retro-Report series…
Those convicted were eventually released. Instead of the media, the politicians, and prosecutors who convicted them being made to pay – the taxpayers paid out millions as some measure of restitution to the people whose lives were destroyed (for a story, a headline, a conviction). Writer Aja Romano wrote an interesting piece on the Satanic Panic a few years ago…
In 1980, a since-discredited memoir called Michelle Remembers became a scandalous bestseller based on its purported detailing of a childhood spent undergoing a wealth of shocking occult sexual abuse. Its co-authors were controversial psychologist Lawrence Pazder and his wife Michelle Smith, a former patient Pazder claimed to have regressed into childhood through hypnosis. Pazder purportedly helped Smith uncover memories of past abuse at the hands of members of the Church of Satan, which Pazder insisted was older than LaVey’s group by several centuries.
Almost from the moment of Michelle Remembers’ publication, its claims and allegations were repeatedly and thoroughly debunked. However, thanks to widespread and credulous media praise, Pazder and Smith were able to double down on their story, and Pazder became seen as an expert in the arena of what would come to be called satanic ritual abuse.
Despite the wild implausibility and unverifiable foundation of its stories of grisly abuse and sex orgies, Michelle Remembers was presented during the ’80s and early ’90s as a textbook for legal professionals and other authorities. It also spawned numerous copy-cat memoirs like 1988’s Satan’s Underground, all equally false, which embellished and mainstreamed the idea of a massive, intergenerational, clandestine satanic ritual sex abuse cult — one that could be occurring in your very own neighborhood.
“The devil worshippers could be anywhere,” writer Peter Berbergal said in summing up the zeitgeist. “They could be your next-door neighbor. They could be your child's caregiver."
The false narrative of Michelle Remembers would directly impact the nation for over a decade. Its dark occult fantasies helped to spark the rash of wildly dramatic, highly unfounded accusations of satanic ritual abuse that were attached to a string of daycare centers throughout the 1980s…
This fear would ravage communities and ruin multiple lives before it finally subsided — and lead to two of the most notorious criminal trials in US history.
…In 1980 in Bakersfield, California, social workers had been reading the just-published Michelle Remembers as part of their training when a number of children came forward to declare that they had been molested as part of a clandestine local occult sex ring. Two of the girls had been coached by a grandparent who was believed to have a history of mental illness. Over the coming months, their story of strange occult sex acts would grow more and more bizarre, as they claimed to have been hung from hooks in their family’s living room, forced to drink blood and watch ritual baby sacrifices, and much more.
Between 1984 and 1986, the investigation into these labyrinthine claims of satanic ritual abuse would send at least 26 people to jail in interrelated convictions, despite a complete lack of corroborative physical evidence for any of the claims.
Nearly all of those convictions have since been overturned, including that of a local carpenter named John Stoll, who spent 20 years of his 40-year sentence in jail. Parents Scott and Brenda Kniffen were each sentenced to 240 years in jail after their own sons were coached, through coercive investigative techniques and overeager therapists, to accuse them of child molestation. Both children later recanted and the Kniffens were released after serving 12 years in prison. As adults, several of the children involved in the trials professed to have been traumatized by their own earlier false testimony and the subsequent damage it caused.
But these children weren’t alone; the Kern County abuse case was the first, but would not be the last, to spiral hopelessly out of control.
…Among the many failed prosecutions of satanic ritual abuse in daycares was the McMartin trial, which became the largest, longest, and most expensive trial in California history. This massive investigation began in 1983, when one parent accused one of the staff members at the McMartin pre-school in Manhattan Beach, California, of abuse. During the police investigation into the abuse claims, a child-service nonprofit group known as the Children’s Institute conducted examinations of 400 children who attended the daycare. The examinations were run by a woman named Kee MacFarlane, who was an unlicensed psychotherapist.
MacFarlane had no psychological or medical training, and boasted a welding certificate as her highest academic credential; still, she and two other unqualified assistants were allowed to conduct the investigations, famously using “anatomically correct” dolls and other questionable methods of interrogation. These extremely coercive interview processes led to false memories among children, which then led to highly fantastic claims of abuse directed at even more staff members. Out of 400 children, the interviewers determined that 359 of them had been abused.
The accusations collected by the Children’s Institute resulted in a staggering 321 counts of child abuse being leveled at seven daycare staff members by 41 children. (Pazder, now considered an “expert” in satanic ritual abuse, was among the consultants in the case.) Among the litany of outlandish claims children made in the case were that daycare owners would flush them down toilets, that they had built secret underground tunnels to transport them to ritual ceremonies, that they had ritually sacrificed a baby, and that they could turn into witches and fly.
After six years of investigation and litigation of a five-year trial, the case ultimately essentially evaporated due to an utter lack of evidence. The original accusing parent in the case was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, the investigative techniques used by the Children’s Institute were thoroughly discredited by the psychological community, and one by one, all charges against the daycare staffers were dropped due to insufficient evidence.
Due to the over-the-top nature of the allegations in the McMartin case, the public gradually became skeptical of claims of satanic ritual abuse. “After scouring the country, we found no evidence for large-scale cults that sexually abuse children,” Dr. Gail Goodman, a psychologist who conducted a wide-scale survey of US case workers about the hysteria, told The New York Times in 1994. What criminal allegations were made had generally come about due to a mix of mental illness, false memories implanted during therapy and witness investigations, and, most frequently, reports from people who were being influenced by histrionic media reports of satanic ritual abuse — a pattern very similar to the current outbreak of clown scares.
The writer goes on to outline a dozen or so similar prosecutions. All built on literally insane allegations. All debunked in time – but not after causing a remarkable degree of harm on those who were falsely accused.
Where were the members of the Star-Ledger editorial board in the 1980s and 90s? Maybe they were covering the Satanic Panic? Maybe they were fanning the flames of illogic and fear? Maybe they believe enough time has passed, that people have forgotten, and that maybe they’ll do it again? Let’s hope not. But then again, it’s not the 1980s… and who reads newspapers nowadays (besides the advertisers, many of whom rely on customers from… Sussex County)?
