Is “White Extremism” the new “Satanic Panic” scare?

By Rubashov
 
On September 16, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law. More than $30 billion was spent during the Clinton presidency to work with state and local law enforcement to drive down crime.  It worked, crime declined sharply during the 1990’s.  But President Clinton would later complain that voters’ perceptions continued to reflect concerns about the “high incidence” of crime, despite the empirical evidence of its decline.
 
Why?  Well, news coverage of crime had changed.  Facing an increasingly competitive environment, media outlets fought to attract more customers.  From Agatha Christie to True Detective, crime brings in an audience, so the media began to spend an enormous amount of time covering crimes that in the past would have been noted, if at all, by a line or two in the “police blotter”.  The media’s increased coverage of crime made people believe there was more of it, despite the evidence.
 
Democrats like Congressman Tom Malinowski would have us believe that there are “white extremist” cells in every town and neighborhood where average working class folk account for a significant portion of the population.  Of course, this is not the case within the precincts of those bubble lands inhabited by rich One-Percenters like Tom Malinowski.  There only good-will and tolerance abide, so says Malinowski.    
 
The New York Times, that bastion of unbiased journalism, supports the Democrat narrative of “white extremism” (aka “white supremacy”).  Of course they would.  Despite having plenty of opportunities to do so, the New York Times hasn’t endorsed a Republican for President since 1956.  If you voted that year based on the Times’ recommendation, you would be 84 years old today. 
 
The evidence suggests the New York Times has a record of bias that is surpassed only by the newspapers of the former Soviet Union.  And yet day by day we receive missives from the New York Times, begging for money, suggesting that by paying them money we are somehow performing a public good.  One recent appeal for money stated this bald faced lie: 
 
“The freedom of the press is essential to our democracy, and subscriber support is vital in helping journalists follow the facts wherever they lead and report without fear or favor.”
 
The sales flunky who penned that howler either doesn’t read the newspaper he’s shilling for – or he has a set of grapefruit-sized cojones.  Follow the facts wherever they lead… tell that to the millions of murdered Ukrainians defamed by the New York Times.  You can read all about the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize winning genocide-denier here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

Hey, now don’t get the idea that the New York Times is some wild radical or revolutionary media outlet.  Far from it.  The New York Times is the newspaper of record of the Corporate/Government/& Academic Establishment of these United States.  It supports all the wars, all the foreign interventions, all the big spending, all the government intrusions into private life, it is a champion for the slow decline of freedom in this country.  Just look at how the New York Times trashes Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard… 

In pushing the Democrats’ “white extremism” narrative, the New York Times seizes upon the affinity that some biker gangs have for WW2-style German military helmets, Nazi-insignia, and other pointedly non-conformist paraphernalia. Of course, such has been adopted and worn by anti-social delinquents since at least the 1950’s (as any of a number of popular “biker” movies from that and later eras will illustrate).

It would be monstrous for a serious newspaper to argue that the members of a criminal biker gang with ties to illegal narcotics represents a “political” force, or is representative of a specific community or region, or is somehow the face of a significant piece of the American working class – if it wasn’t so patently silly and ridiculous. Married up to this are the efforts of individual Democrats like Tom Malinowski – who is forever on the hunt for “evidence” of the “looming threat” of “white extremism” (too bad he forgets the role he played in selling out the Rohingya people to genocide).

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.

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.

Perhaps the New York Times writers are too young to remember the 1980s and 90s. Perhaps they failed to study it at journalism school. Perhaps it wasn’t offered. In any event, let’s hope the Times and its political fellow-travelers are not heading down this well-beaten road again… only this time the accused, the victims, will be whole communities, regions, a whole class of working people, or anyone from anywhere not likely to believe the New York Times.