Post by ck4829 on Feb 16, 2022 17:48:33 GMT
The first time sociologist Mary de Young heard about QAnon, she thought: "Here we go again."
De Young spent her career studying moral panics — specifically, what became known as the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s, when false accusations of the abuse of children in satanic rituals spread across the United States.
Decades later, echoes of that same fear had emerged in QAnon. The seemingly novel conspiracy theory has grown in far-right political circles since November 2017. Adherents of QAnon believe that a shadowy cabal kidnaps children, tortures them and uses their blood in satanic rituals. The alleged perpetrators in the QAnon conspiracy theory are Democratic politicians — not preschool teachers, as had been the case in the 1980s — but the accusations are eerily similar.
"Every moral panic has to have a folk devil," says de Young, the author of The Day Care Ritual Abuse moral panic. "It has to have a person — or more likely a group of people, whether real individuals or fantasized individuals — who are the devils in the middle of all of this."
The McMartin Pre-School case became one of the longest and most expensive criminal cases ever tried in the United States. It ended when Buckey was acquitted of dozens of charges in 1990.
Attempts to find tunnels underneath the preschool failed, and since the trials, several of the students who accused Buckey of abuse have admitted their stories were fabricated.
But the lack of physical evidence in cases like the McMartin Pre-School trial didn't stop allegations of satanic ritual abuse from spreading during the 1980s. National broadcasts like 20/20 ran long specials featuring children claiming to have been abused by satanists. Academic conferences discussed recovered memory and satanic abuse, and psychologists like Pazder began to train law enforcement to recognize warning signs in their communities.
www.npr.org/2021/05/18/997559036/americas-satanic-panic-returns-this-time-through-qanon
De Young spent her career studying moral panics — specifically, what became known as the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s, when false accusations of the abuse of children in satanic rituals spread across the United States.
Decades later, echoes of that same fear had emerged in QAnon. The seemingly novel conspiracy theory has grown in far-right political circles since November 2017. Adherents of QAnon believe that a shadowy cabal kidnaps children, tortures them and uses their blood in satanic rituals. The alleged perpetrators in the QAnon conspiracy theory are Democratic politicians — not preschool teachers, as had been the case in the 1980s — but the accusations are eerily similar.
"Every moral panic has to have a folk devil," says de Young, the author of The Day Care Ritual Abuse moral panic. "It has to have a person — or more likely a group of people, whether real individuals or fantasized individuals — who are the devils in the middle of all of this."
The McMartin Pre-School case became one of the longest and most expensive criminal cases ever tried in the United States. It ended when Buckey was acquitted of dozens of charges in 1990.
Attempts to find tunnels underneath the preschool failed, and since the trials, several of the students who accused Buckey of abuse have admitted their stories were fabricated.
But the lack of physical evidence in cases like the McMartin Pre-School trial didn't stop allegations of satanic ritual abuse from spreading during the 1980s. National broadcasts like 20/20 ran long specials featuring children claiming to have been abused by satanists. Academic conferences discussed recovered memory and satanic abuse, and psychologists like Pazder began to train law enforcement to recognize warning signs in their communities.
www.npr.org/2021/05/18/997559036/americas-satanic-panic-returns-this-time-through-qanon