Sympathy For The Devil:The Satanic Panic and Why it Refused to Go Away!

Is there a secret global network of powerful paedophiles who are kidnapping, raping, and killing children so that they can harvest their adrenochrome (a mythical elixir of life) so that they can remain forever youthful? Is the only person who can stop this horrific crime the former, and potential next, president Donald Trump? Is Trump the saviour of planet Earth?

 

Spoiler alert. No, no, and thrice no. I was back at The Bell in Whitechapel and I was back with the London Fortean Society to hear investigative journalist Dr Rosie Waterhouse talk about the above subject in 'From Satanic Panic to Pizzagate and QAnon' and if Rosie struggled at times (she had a cold and her voice was croaky but there were a few too many irrelevant digressions for my liking) then the talk itself, and the subject matter, was fascinating - and depressingly topical.

If not new. This is something that Dr Waterhouse has been investigating, on and off, for thirty-four years. She's watched something spread from a fringe, though very worrying, story into a global conspiracy theory. Dr Waterhouse came to the story in the early nineties following the 1990 publishing of the now widely discredited book Michelle Remembers in which patient Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder (whom she later married, hmmm) made lurid claims about how she had repressed memories of Satanic ritual abuse and now, with the help of her shrink/husband, was able to access those memories.

It was a misery memoir based entirely on lies but it made Pazder and Smith a lot of money and set into a motion a chain of events which is still snowballing today. Christian cranks, 'cult cops', tabloid - and broadsheet - newspapers, and well meaning leftist social workers propagated the lies without question and by 1994 there was a widespread belief in North America and the UK that not only was Satanic ritual abuse happening but that it was widespread.

I remember the stories and the headlines of the time. Certain places (Cleveland, Rochdale, the Orkney islands) were said to have particularly large paedophile rings. The British anthropologist Jean La Fontaine looked into these allegations of cannibalism, children being forced to eat faeces and drink urine, bestiality, forced abortion, and teenage girls being made into 'brood mares' to ensure a steady supply of babies and children to be abused - and in her 1994 report, The Extent and Nature of Organised Ritual Abuse, she came to the conclusion that there was no evidence for any of this whatsoever.

The Daily Mirror had already reported that children had been made to take part in Satanic orgies and been forced to eat human hearts at events where babies were put in microwave opens like jacket potatoes. Further research, however, proved that all the available 'evidence' was anecdotal. Dr Waterhouse, for her part, was initially convinced that these events were happening. Not least because the NSPCC were involved in a campaign against it.

But when she asked the NSPCC how they could be certain that Satanic ritual abuse was taking place, a spokesperson for the NSPCC said their 'evidence' had come from an organisation called the Evangelical Alliance who had, in turn, got all their information from unspecified sources in America. The eight girls who had 'confessed' to taking part in these Satanic orgies had all done so while undergoing a process to become born again Christians.

Pagan and occultist groups were horrified that they were being defamed as child abusers and got in touch with Dr Waterhouse and asked her to look further into this. Much like Jean La Fontaine, Dr Waterhouse found no evidence whatsoever so she wrote about what she saw as, and clearly was, a 'moral panic' in The Independent on Sunday (who, bravely in the climate of time, published it) before following up in several other publications.

Things moved on, the media and Dr Waterhouse herself focused their attentions elsewhere, but in 2016 a Satanic sex fantasist came forward with claims that former Prime Minister Edward Heath (who, by then, had been dead for over a decade) had abused them in a "forest ritual" that was, for unspecified reasons, lit by candlelight. Dr Waterhouse covered this story for Private Eye but this time it was clear that this was the work of a fevered mind or an opportunist rather than a true story.

But it showed that the 'Satanic panic' had not gone away. A few years later, the pandemic and its lockdowns - as well as the rise of social media - became a fertile breeding ground for soon to be turbocharged conspiracy theories. Disinformation and misinformation spread so quickly, and with such malice, that, in one instance, a child was kidnapped in Anglesey, ostensibly to protect them from their own parents who somebody had decided, with zero evidence, were Satanically abusing the child.

Boris Johnson was accused (he's done a lot of very bad things but he's not a paedo), the Queen was accused, the Queen Mother was accused, the rest of the Royal Family were accused (Prince Andrew isn't a Satanist) and all sorts of people were accused. As the American Republican party continues to remould itself into a Trumpian cult, it is now fairly standard procedure for them to accuse anyone they don't like, anyone they disagree with, or anyone who dares to question them of being a paedophile.

In the USA, the Satanic panic morphed first into Pizzagate and then into QAnon. Pizzagate sprang up from the hacking of Hillary Clinton's e-mails where the use of the word 'pizza' was said to be code for child sex abuse. Believers in this conspiracy had it that the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. was where the abuse was being carried out. The Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. does not, and never did, have a basement.

QAnon (which I've written about in some depth before - see here) tied up with Pizzagate with all manner of conspiracy theories to become an all-encompassing, ever evolving, belief system that explained the world to its followers. It played a major role in the January 6th Capitol Building insurrection and has been endorsed by Donald Trump who has reposted QAnon related materials over eight hundred times on his own Truth Social media platform.

At the same time the anti-democratic activist, openly fascist, richest man in the world Elon Musk is now illegally bribing people to vote for Donald Trump as well as having donated $75,000,000 to the Trump campaign. Will Musk get Trump back into the White House? We'll find out soon enough but one thing we know for certain is that Trump and Musk will continue to spread these damaging and dangerous lies and conspiracy theories and that people will get hurt and people will die because of that.

A Q&A session took in witch trials, Dungeons & Dragons, voodoo, The Wicker Man, David Icke, the Spanish Inquisition, The Cook Report, speaking in tongues, aliens, Elizabeth Loftus, Professor Chris French, spiritual warfare, backwards masking within music, The Sorcerer's Apprentice bookshop in Leeds, and ORCRO - Occult Response to the Christian Response to Occultism.

Thanks to Dewi, Sean, Paula, and Tim for joining me, thanks to David V Barrett for hosting, thanks to Pizza Union on City Road for tasty grub (paedo free too, though I didn't venture into the basement) beforehand, and thanks to Dr Rosie Waterhouse, The Bell, and the London Fortean Society for another memorable night. One I won't need access to a spurious therapist to recover my memories from.