Interview: The Devil You Know, with Sarah Marshall

We've all heard the phrase: "Satanic Panic." Not too long ago, the United States -- and, later, the world -- was gripped with fear. According to the story, powerful devil worshippers conspired to kidnap, abuse, torture and even murder innocent children all in the service of Satan. So, what actually happened here? How did Patrick Swayze get mixed up in all this? In tonight's interview segment, Ben, Matt and Noel welcome Sarah Marshall, the creator of the new hit podcast The Devil You Know, to learn more about the Satanic Panic.

Listen to The Devil You Know here.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radio.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Nolan.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
They call me Ben.

Speaker 4 (00:31):
We're joined as always with our super producer Dylan the
Tennessee pal Fagan.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
Most importantly, you are you. You are here.

Speaker 4 (00:39):
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
Friends and neighbors, longtime fellow conspiracy realist of a certain age,
you may remember that not too long ago, the United
States and later the world was gripped by a paralyzing fear.
The Devil is real, people claimed, and not only that

(01:00):
his followers are actively doing horrible things to children. This
was an outbreak, right, a moral panic that metastasized across
the cultural landscape, evolving into something we now call the
Satanic panic.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
But you know what exactly was this? What is this?

Speaker 4 (01:17):
How did it happen? What does it teach us? To
answer these questions more, we are thrilled to welcome none
other than Sarah Marshall, the writer, media critic, and creator
of the new hit podcast, The Devil you know, Sarah,
thank you for joining us today.

Speaker 5 (01:33):
Thank you so much for having me here. Then, thank
you for calling it a hit podcast. I love that.
Oh yeah, oh it's especially a hit and we have
it in quotes.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Well, it's a fantastic podcast. It's a dark listen. I
might say, uh, I've set the kids off to school
a couple of times in the past few weeks and
put on an episode and oh it's it's heavy because
of the subjects matter, right, but you handle it pretty
beautifully by talking to people that were truly affected by

(02:05):
what Ben just described there.

Speaker 5 (02:07):
I thank you.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
I wonder if you would just let us know how
the Satanic panic came into your.

Speaker 5 (02:12):
Life, sir, huh, yeah, I mean it came in via
old Texas Monthly articles, because about fifteen years ago, when
I was in grad school, I was reading a lot
of Texas Monthly because they've always been very generous or
at the time at least, they were about putting their
archive online and have always had great true crime reporting.
And they had some articles about one of the nineteen

(02:36):
eighties Satanic panic daycare bease cases involving a couple named
Fran and Dan Keller, who had a childcare facilic kind
of at home childcare that they as many people do,
and did that they ran in the Austin area, and
they got kind of swept up in what reading about them.
At the time, I was just learning more apparently fairly

(02:59):
commonplace allegations in the early to mid eighties where parents
would become concerned that something was amiss at their child's daycare,
which is a very easy thing to wonder about a
place where your child goes all day and can't really
tell you what they've been doing even if they wanted to,
depending on the age. And it was at the time,

(03:21):
you know, police officers, detective social workers, a lot of
people kind of in the mainstream of the legal and
therapeutic communities were on TV, kind of in the media,
in the news saying, well, you know, it's just kind
of a known fact that there are a lot of
Satanists around that they like to work in daycare centers

(03:41):
and they abuse children there because it's apparently important to
their rituals. And at the time I just thought, wait, what,
this is something that had you know, had happened in
a huge way. But I think in about twenty ten,
our culture was not far enough removed from to be
to have started really reckoning with in a big way.
And I was just absolutely shocked because I had a

(04:05):
very you know, I grew up watching Law and Order,
and as people who grow up watching law order and
not having to actually tangle with the legal system often believe,
I was like, well, surely we have a basically good
legal system and things are basically fair, right, right, And
so in this way that I think that my interest
in the Satanic Panic kind of set the tone for
everything that was going to happen in actual day to

(04:28):
day American life for the next fifteen years, because it
felt like this astounding part of history that I was discovering,
and then as soon as I started learning about at
present day events started basically mimicking it as far as
I can tell. And so now it feels maybe less
shocking than today, and maybe in a way I think
even it can offer some comfort, which we try and
get to by the end of the show of saying,

(04:49):
you know, this is it's shocking how deep into conspiracy
theories people can get and how easy it is to
have a legal system. Certainly our legal system corrupted by
stories that have no actual evidence to support them. But
also if it's not an anomaly but something that humans
do a fair amount, then maybe that's something that we
can study and undermine rather than just being shocked by.

Speaker 6 (05:12):
For sure, did the documentary Paradise Lost the child murders
at robin Hood Hill cross your eyeballs when you were younger?

Speaker 5 (05:20):
Yes, that was actually after the Texas Monthly articles. That
was the second thing I encountered, which, again, you know,
this is kind of a fairly late case in terms
of the initial spread of the Satanic Panic, because this
is in the early nineties and West Memphis, Arkansas. But
I think that as happens with a lot of things

(05:40):
are kind of widespread phenomena, the Satanic Panic kind of
spread initially through mainstream media, and then after it had
begun to be taken less seriously in kind of in
big cities in the United States and North America, it
kind of stayed lodged in more rural areas, I think,
and certainly in the Bible Belt. And that was a

(06:02):
documentary that I remember watching and things and coming to
the closing arguments. I think of Damien Eckles's trial, and
I believe the prosecutor saying that there was not a
soul in his body. I was like, but surely you
can't say that in a trial, right.

Speaker 6 (06:19):
It seems outside of the realm of legal jargon.

Speaker 5 (06:25):
Say that at a trial. And they did, and they
got a conviction. And I was like, well, God, what
else is in law and order telling? We do? Go
back and watch lawn Order, And I gotta say, I
don't know if McCoy is that good at his job.
Actually he says a lot of pretty lammatory.

Speaker 3 (06:41):
Some of them are.

Speaker 4 (06:43):
Yeah, there may be built more for the stage than
the courtroom.

Speaker 5 (06:47):
Yeah, maybe we need to cancel McCoy. Maybe I need
as well.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
But you heard it here first, folks.

Speaker 4 (06:56):
One thing that stands out, Sarah, not just in or
latest project.

Speaker 3 (07:01):
But in a lot of your earlier work is.

Speaker 4 (07:04):
The concept of moral panic and in st in the
phenomenon that we call the Satanic panic. I think you
hit on something really interesting with how much it has
in common with other outbreaks of public concern and paranoia,
like the infamous Red scare of McCarthyism, where you know,

(07:28):
high level US politicos thought dar near everyone was a communist,
or maybe more recently, things like Pizzagate, Wayfair QAnon, right,
those all three take cues from the panic, the Satanic Panic.
So the question here is, if we're defining the Satanic
Panic in like a window of time, what would that

(07:51):
window of time be?

Speaker 5 (07:52):
You know, I think that everybody seems to break it
down a little bit differently, and I tend to put
the sort of need the big tent, polls or fence posts,
I don't know, Yeah, the trees between which we can
put the hammock of the Satanic Panic at its most powerful, maybe,

(08:15):
and it's big enough for everyone. Feminists, fundamentalists, whoever claim
in there figure it out later, but I would I
would put it between the publication of Michelle Remembers in
nineteen eighty because that was, you know, a book that
was marketed as nonfiction. And not only that, but he
used to train you know, new social workers and in
these police trainings that you see throughout the eighties of

(08:37):
you know, not only is this book published in the
non fiction genre, but we're going to believe absolutely everything
it says and go out looking for the things it
tells us to look for. And then in the early nineties,
and I want to kind of put this at about
about nineteen ninety two, we had the publication of the

(08:57):
Landing Report, which I believe was that year Landing's FBI report,
because he was the person whose job it was to
try and do student diligence and see if he could
find any evidence of actual Satanic cults in the US
the way that was being described, and despite using all
of the FBI's resources, could not ever find anything suggesting

(09:23):
that there was cult activity the way that people were describing,
you know, you had occasionally, like I guess learned recently,
there was a case in Long Island in the eighties,
for example, where a teenager murdered his friend or murdered
another teenager that he knew and said that that was
for the glorification of Satan, you know, and there were
kind of Satanic elements, and this was I just learned

(09:47):
to kind of the inspiration for the song Teenage dirt Bag,
which has been stuck in my head since I learned that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
this idea of like, you know, being profiled. Were also
enjoying Iron Maiden back in the day, right, So you
have cases of you know, an individual sometimes will do
something violent and bring up Satan somewhere adjacent to that.

(10:10):
But this idea of organized cults, especially with some kind
of a hierarchical like top down structure, who have kind
of goals and principles and are functioning like a church,
there is never any evidence of any of that. And
then of course you have the Church of Satan, which
says in its literature that they don't literally believe in Satan.
But if you want to hide a fact in America,
you should put it in a published book. And then,

(10:33):
of course, in the early nineties also Ensures stopped covering hypnotherapy,
which I think was a big part of this, because
if you have therapists who believe it's their job to
recover repressed memories and every patient, then it stops being
lucrative to do that. And interestingly, I think, you know,
some of the reasons that we moved moved on from

(10:56):
the Satanic panic as a culture is partly because we
you know, the evidence that we expected to define wasn't there,
but also because people were kind of I think, getting
tired of it being in the media. We've done a
lot of specials, you know, it's not being something you
could make a lot of money on as a therapist,
and so I think the financial incentive is also kind
of dried up.

Speaker 6 (11:15):
Just to jump up this idea of the media, it
occurred to me that, like, you know, obviously we have
moral panics that resemble the Satanic Panic, because things like
the same witch trials and the Spanish inquisition. Is the
thing that makes the Satanic Panic sort of more of
a modern construct, its relationship with the media and the
legal system, and just this the way that it was

(11:35):
elevated in this very modern way.

Speaker 5 (11:39):
Yeah, I think so. I think that one of the
interesting things about it is that it you know, we
have the first daycare you know, like satanic ritual abuse
case is famously the McMartin case and eventually trial in
southern California, and then you can see pretty clearly that
once that reached his national news, then some number of

(12:00):
parents who have their kids in daycares or some number
of local police see those stories and it's it's just
kind of it's almost a meme of an idea, right
where it's one of these things that just replicates itself
so easily in different communities because it's just such a

(12:21):
it's a fear that feels very easy to catch, right
and kind of speaking about, you know more in the
present day, the wayfair stuff and the way I remember
in the summer of twenty twenty one people were, you know, saying, well,
you know, actually putting your child in a mask is
just deployed by human traffickers, because if the traffickers get

(12:41):
your child at the food Lion, then you won't know
that it's your child because they'll have a mask on,
because you won't recognize any of their clothes or shoes
or hair.

Speaker 4 (12:51):
Well, well, first off, thank you for that food Lion
shout out.

Speaker 3 (12:57):
I like that reference there, Sarah.

Speaker 4 (12:58):
We also we also see kind of the commonality that
you and nol are speaking to. There's a really great
point here about you know, what we described as the
phenomena of satanic panic metastasizing across a culture going viral.

Speaker 3 (13:18):
As we would say.

Speaker 4 (13:21):
Now, it appears though, to persist in some form even now,
in increasingly secular twenty twenty five, we will find allegations
of ritualized, satanically themed or as you said, adjacent abuse.
So is it is it persistent? Because it's so binary,

(13:43):
like very evil, powerful people and the most innocent victims
imaginable or like what's the what is this story telling
us about society?

Speaker 5 (13:52):
Yeah, well, yeah, these are such good questions. I mean
that makes me think of a couple of things, which
is a I think, yes, I think that it is
because it's so binary and this idea of I mean,
for a while I was really fascinated by and this
is you know, about ten years ago and a lot
of the things that seemed to be coming have come true,
but kind of fascinated by the language of kind of

(14:14):
the pro life movement and especially the number of people
who were fixated on, you know, not protecting actual babies
that had been born in children who we already exist
in this country because like who cares about them? But
like in this idea that sort of in conservative American
doctrine that like babies were interesting only to the point

(14:36):
of birth and then after that they were like too
old to take care of or something, you know, because
the idea of we're gonna cut benefits, we're gonna cut
any kind of access to resources that parents need, but
if that baby is still inside or even like a
frozen embryo, we were going to do everything in our

(14:56):
power to protect that theoretical baby. And then even that
they were kind of. There was a subset within the
pro life movement that was fixated on snowflake babies, which
they named them, which is, you know, basically, when people
do IVF, you often get left with extra embryos and
you can either decide to keep them in the deep
freeze forever or donate them or just you know, I thought.

Speaker 3 (15:17):
Snow snowflake babies were like soft liberal baby.

Speaker 5 (15:19):
I think that's what it is now. I think now
we're all actually snowflake babies and today's parlance. But but yeah,
this idea that like that rather than chucking your unused
embryos down the drain or whatever they do with them,
that you should donate them to some fundamentalist Christians who
will then raise them with corporal punishment or whatever, which is,

(15:41):
you know, a great thing to invasion happening to my
imaginary embryos. But I guess this idea that like we
were turning away from actual babies because we'd found a
smaller baby, and then even with fetuses, it was like,
but what if there was a smaller and even more
innocent baby because it was just a blast cysts that
barely existed at all. Like that, you can't get more

(16:03):
innocent than that, right, And I'm sure just event yeah,
I'm sure we'll find an even smaller version of life soon.
But yeah, this idea that it almost feels like it
came up as a form of smoke and mirrors because
we were starting to talk in the seventies and a
way we hadn't before about sexual assaults and rape as
an endemic problem, and about child sexual abuse is something

(16:23):
that was happening in significant numbers, which as a culture
we hadn't really reckoned with before. And I think it
was very It saved us from a lot of difficult
conversations and from a lot of you know, pointing the
finger justifiably at having, you know, our society set up
in a way that kind of does facilitate abuse, you know,
where we can see now that like a lot of

(16:44):
abuse happens in churches and not Satanic ones, and that's
because of you know, kind of a very rigid hierarchical
power structure, for one.

Speaker 6 (16:51):
And there is proof of that, by the way, right, there's.

Speaker 5 (16:54):
Actual evidence of those ones. And so I feel like
the idea of having you know, this cross can who's
getting abused and who's committing the abuse it's like, well,
only tiny children and or you know, once it moves
on to adults, you can use it to say like, well,
you know, you know, babe, you weren't satanically abused, like
you weren't ever tied up in a field and made

(17:16):
to you know, stab a baby like you were. Only
you only experienced garden variety abuse of the kind that
women have experienced forever. So who cares? It was interestingly
like a way of saying who cares while claiming to
care so deeply about a problem. And then I think
there's just the fact that we've had the Devil as

(17:36):
an American character since the very beginning, and so we
just can he'se him, We're used to him. He kind
of he he's ready.

Speaker 6 (17:44):
Okay, we're gonna take a quick break here, aware from
our sponsor, and then come right back to our conversation
with Sarah, and we're back. Let's jump right back in.
You pointed out a neat distinction. I just wanted to
ask you about the moment when the devil became a
thing that's just around versus the devil of the Bible

(18:07):
that you see when you go to hell after you've
lived a bad life, this idea of taking the devil
and inserting it into everyday life and becoming a thing
that you can find all around you.

Speaker 3 (18:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (18:22):
Just how that sort of you know, propelled.

Speaker 5 (18:24):
This kind of thing, right, Yeah, And there's like there's
this interesting unspoken thing and the initial sproad of the
Satanic panic, where if you're secular, then you can say, well,
you know, these people believe in Satan, and there's do it.
They're doing all these things because they believe in Satan,
and so belief is scary enough. We don't have to
believe in actual Satan. But then within the movement there's

(18:45):
always people who you know unspoken or very much spoken reasons.
The problem is no, like the devil is showing up.
People hold these rituals and he's there, you know. And
then Michelle remembers the devil turns up as a character
and the last portion of the book and he speaks
in dogg girl. It had to be very hard to

(19:06):
come up with all those rhymes, and I can't believe
Michelle followed through it, to be honest, But I don't
know the thing. I always feel like I have an
interesting blind spot here too, though, because I grew up
pretty secular, and like, I am so much more ready
to believe in God than I am to believe in
the devil. I just have no interest in the devil,
you know. And I think that you can see in

(19:27):
kind of modern American Protestantism, the strain of thinking that
you know, goes through different denominations by different names, but
this idea that no, the devil is actually responsible for
the thoughts that you don't want to be having, for
your depression, you know, for the feelings that are inconvenient
to you, for the things that you feel tended to

(19:48):
do that maybe are very reasonable but are forbidden by
the religion that you're stuck in, you know, So that
the devil just becomes an interesting character, partly because I
think everyone kind of means some one slightly different when
they when they refer to that person.

Speaker 3 (20:04):
Absolutely right.

Speaker 4 (20:05):
It's it's not only its names, but its definitions are legion,
I think, is what we're saying here. And Okay, we're
gonna have to talk about Patrick Swayze at some point.
How However, before we do that, there's something that I
think is really connecting with a lot of our fellow

(20:25):
listeners tuning in here which is Michelle Remembers, with which
Matt and you mentioned just a minute ago, but it
also ties into the psychology. So up there with mass media,
I think we also see something akin to the earlier
spiritualism movement, the idea that science can answer the supernatural

(20:49):
or allegations thereof. So can you tell us a little
bit more about the origin story of Michelle Remembers and
the psychology and evaluation controversy involves.

Speaker 5 (21:04):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, spiritualism is such an interesting thing
to compare it to because it feels like a feel
that we created out of kind of the things that
we desired to be able to figure out. And so
Michelle Remembers is a book about this real woman. Her
name was Michelle. This was in Victoria, BSI in the

(21:24):
nineteen seventies, and she went back to her former therapist
and I think late nineteen seventy six because she was
experiencing depression following a miscarriage, and interestingly, her therapist was like,
there's no reason for you to be this depressed. You're
simply too depressed, which I like to think a therapist
wouldn't say today. But you know, half of the time

(21:46):
people seeking therapy have to just just talk to someone,
you know, who's like eating popcorn in the whole time
and working for better help. So it could probably happen today.
But he just felt that, like he had given her
such good therapy in the past, this is according to
the book, that there had to be something more, and
so he put her into some kind of a trans

(22:06):
like state. The book never refers to it as hypnosis.
It seems at least hypnosis adjacent. And you know, hypnosis
is also kind of a complicated concept that is not
as magical as we would like it to be, because
what we kind of know now about the way hypnosis
works is that you're not going to be more truthful
in a hypnotic state than you would be in a

(22:28):
non hypnotic or non trance state, and some people are
more susceptible to it than others, but you are going
to be a lot more open to suggestion. And so
he started doing this therapy with her where he believed
that he was age aggressing her to the age of five,
and she began, in this first session, described kind of

(22:48):
this kind of dream like scenario where she was on
a table, there were women in the room lighting candles,
and her mother wouldn't look at her. I think was
part of the dream because she also had, you know,
a very traumatic bringing with a lot of abuse in
the home and a mother who died when she was
very young, and her therapists again kind of rather than
looking at her life and thinking, all this trauma that

(23:11):
you've experienced that I know about is a reason enough
free to be traumatized. We don't have to go looking
for more stuff, kind of took these images from the
first session they did and said, you know, that sounds
like sounds a bit satanic, sounds a bit wichy to me,
and kind of guided her. And this is in the
text of the book toward the conclusion that her mother
had given her to a Satanic cult. And then suddenly

(23:34):
they had to keep doing these long sessions where he
also had to apparently start hugging her the entire time
because she was recovering memories of a Satanic cult that
had imprisoned her for a sustained period when she was five.
And again she had siblings at the time who very

(23:57):
easily contradicted this. She was, you know, we have her
attendance records from school. She was never out of school
for a week's long period, and there's a lot of
stuff in this book that's sort of physically impossible, but
it does. If you see it as sort of visions
of the kinds of you know, the kinds of emotional
pain that she had been through, it makes sense. But
the problem was that they tried to kind of make

(24:20):
it into a story where they were going to find
out what these cults were up to and what the
devil's plan was for getting power on earth, and so
they kind of became these spiritual warriors and their own estimation,
and then we're able to publish this book, leave their spouses,
marry each other. Unclear what order all of this happened in.

(24:40):
I feel like we got a little bit more information
when we did the interviews for the show about just
kind of how this relationship kind of started between doctor
and patient, which I know we all know this, but
you're not supposed to do that. And so it's just
this wildly unethical book that kind of inspired a Satanic

(25:03):
panic that progressed along the same lines of people. You
can see a lot of people throughout the whole Satanic
panic who grabbed onto that hero role and wouldn't let
go of it.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, if you're listening to the show The Double, you
know that's episode two Marilyn Remembers, And just quick spoiler.
Marilyn is the name of the former spouse of Lawrence
Larry Padster, who is the guy who wrote the book
with Michelle Smith, the one we're talking about. Michelle remembers.
I've seen to recall that the divorce occurred in like

(25:34):
seventy eight, and then the book came out, and that's
when they're writing the book, and then the book comes
out in nineteen eighty. So it certainly seems as though
there's a romantic nature to that relationship, as some of
these tapes are being recorded and as some of it's happened.

Speaker 5 (25:49):
Well, let me tell you, when you're reading the book,
it is clear, and all the copy and all the
promotional material they're just co authors. They're just doctor and patient.
And but you know, the I think we I can't
remember if we have this exact excerpt in the episode.
I'm pretty sure we do, but you know that it's

(26:10):
the book is showing us Larry seeing Michelle and she
was a pretty young woman with masses of curls and
a heart shaped mouth, and you're like what are we doing.

Speaker 4 (26:19):
Yeah, there's a whole subreddit called men writing Women and
this is this is a top notch example cardinal sense. Yeah,
because in the like you're saying Siah in the text
which we did check out, there's there's stuff that calls
into serious ethical question the objectivity of the research, even

(26:43):
just bracketing way the the very challenged and controversial techniques
that you're describing, like regression therapy. There there's something else
that there's something else that we have to go into
when you're talking about not just in the second but
the third episode, and it kind of speaks to something

(27:06):
you alluded to earlier, the idea of satanic panic as
a business word industry.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
What is.

Speaker 4 (27:15):
How does asking a child about this kind of situation,
these allegations of satanic abuse? How does that occur? How
are psychologists tackling that? And what is this idea of
confession versus compliance?

Speaker 3 (27:31):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (27:31):
Well, I mean the McMartin case where this all started
as a great example, because I mean one of the
things that it's easy to take for granted now is
that we do, you know, with as many problems as
we have with our system and as many reasons we
can see that it was you know that it's not broken,
but is functioning as designed and designed to oppress. We

(27:53):
at least have been around long enough to have best
practices around questioning small children. You know, like theres been
enough work done in the past few decades that police
and social workers have some kind of a sense of
what the norm is if you're going to try and
forensically question a child, especially a small child, about sexual abuse,

(28:16):
and that we just really didn't have that in the
early eighties. This was a field that was really just
beginning to be created, and so if you were going
to question a child who was, you know, maybe three
or four years old, as the kids in the McMartin case,
and a lot of the cases that followed were. I mean, interestingly,

(28:38):
you didn't hear about satan as infiltrating elementary schools. Generally,
you heard about them infiltrating daycare centers and nursery schools.
And I think that one of the reasons for that
is because these cases can actually be replicated if you
asked a new group of children, you know, he is
kind of any nursery school about the things that social

(29:02):
workers and police officers at this point were starting to
think about has indications of satanic stuff. Right, So there's
this thing that happens in the McMartin case, and then
in other cases kind of following after that, where you
have a child, they initially say that nothing happened or

(29:22):
they don't know what you're talking about. And so, for example,
I believe in McMartin, the concern was that a teacher
had abused children at the guys of taking their temperature.
So you ask a child about that, they say they
don't know anything. And then so what you would do
in this case is to kind of guide them an

(29:42):
imaginative play, you know, bring out toys. And then if
they say something weird the way that little kids very like,
the way little kids do very very frequently, which I
think is you know, developmentally appropriate, they say something yeah, yeah,
if they say something a little bit odd or violent,
or if they like, you know, this is this. I'm

(30:03):
not basing this on anything this example, but say if
I'm interviewing a child and they pull a doll's head off,
and I'll say, is that what is that? What they
may do?

Speaker 7 (30:12):
You do to the baby? Right?

Speaker 5 (30:15):
And if I'm blurring the line between imagination and reality.
And if I'm working with a three or four year
old who doesn't fully understand, you know, the difference between
play and in reality in some ways, or who has
a very strong imagination, and who also maybe just wants
to be done with this conversation, I can probably get

(30:35):
them to agree with me that yes, they did cut
the baby's head off. And then I will go to
all the other children and say, tell us about this
baby whose head you cut off? And if I say it,
like it definitely. Like even adults, if they're told that
something happened that didn't happen, can generally be counted on to,
at least some of the time, be like, hey, yeah,
that does sound familiar.

Speaker 6 (30:56):
Well, you're a small kid and you're speaking to someone
who's in a position of authorities, with a sense of
authority and confidence. They're kind of painting reality for you.
They're the like person you're literally looking up to, like,
how are you maybe not going to be taken along?
They keep asking you these questions that are describing these
odd scenarios.

Speaker 3 (31:13):
Well, you know what, it was kind of weird.

Speaker 6 (31:14):
Actually, now that you mentioned it expertly, that's that seems
off right.

Speaker 5 (31:18):
And then as a kid, adults are really writing the
reality that you live in. And so one of the
counter arguments of the idea that these you know, that
these cases are flawed is well, kids don't lie. And
it's like, well, a, they do, and that's fine. We're
not saying there's anything morally wrong with that, you know,
it's I think I would often, maybe more you could
call it fibbing.

Speaker 3 (31:40):
And b.

Speaker 5 (31:43):
They will say what they need to to get out
of a situation where they know that they can't escape
unless they give you what you want, and that's kind
of your fault as a hetault. In fact, it's definitely
your fault. Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
Keep thinking about it's horrific reality that we live in
where there is so much child abuse that occurs in
all kinds of different institutions. Like it's just the reality
that we live in this world right where that just occurs.
And then trying to imagine that the con even the
concept of a Satanic based version of an organized group

(32:20):
that does that to children is seem silly, But the
fact that it is reality that other people do it
just under the guise of you know, scouting, scouting or
something that seems completely innocuous to us and did for
a long time, But in reality there was there's a
whole group of kids who became you know, men and

(32:41):
women who had just been abused by systems that never
said anything about it because they were trained not to
say anything about it, right, and then it was too difficult.
There's so many reasons. It's just it's striking me that
it does seem so almost silly, the concept of a
satanic abuse system like that that was alleged so many times.

(33:03):
But at the same time it all in a weird way,
it's not silly at all. I guess for the people
who were living through those times in that moment, maybe.

Speaker 3 (33:12):
Is it a comfort?

Speaker 6 (33:13):
Is it a way of explaining away the evils of
the world by like making it superbinary, like a lot
of conspiracies kind of do or a lot of conspiracy
theories kind of do?

Speaker 5 (33:22):
I think so it's not. But yeah, I mean, speaking
of the silliness, I think there is something reassuring in
that way of saying, well, why would someone abu as
a child, Well, only because they worshiped the devil, So
no one who's worshiping God by definition abuse a child.
And it's like Oh, no, they can.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
It's a very very sneaky decision. Tree. I agree with you.

Speaker 4 (33:43):
There one question here as well, when we're talking about
I loved your phrase of adults painting reality for children.
That leads to a question that I know is on
all of our fellow listener's minds after all of the
research that you have done on this aspect in particular,

(34:04):
and we can't commend you enough for your objectivity there
by the way, oh thank you, because you take pains
to fairly and accurately describe the methods right that these
evaluators employ. We have to ask, in your opinion, were
these folks acting in good faith? Like did they believe
what they were asking the kids about?

Speaker 5 (34:26):
I do think so, Yeah. I think that people generally
did believe. And in fact, it's hard for me to
think of anybody who I think was acting in bad
faith in all of this. But I think that maybe
in a way, you know, someone who is.

Speaker 7 (34:44):
Truly deeply committed to a belief system can be much
more dangerous than someone who's just kind of in it
for themselves, you know, because someone actually I got to
speak once to Ken Lanning, the author of the Landing Report,
just to a phone call, so I didn't get to
record this, and I wish I had, because he had

(35:05):
this amazing metaphor about how it's all like the music man, right,
because if you have someone who's a true believer, they're
not going to give up on that belief.

Speaker 5 (35:13):
But if you have the music man coming to town
and creating a moral panic about pool Hall so they
can sell brass instruments to everybody, and then if Ron
Howard confronts him, baby Ron Howard, about how he's scamming everyone,
then he will maybe admit it. Like the music man
is less dangerous. The con artist is maybe less dangerous

(35:34):
than the true believer. Emany have somebody like our current president,
who I think is like a corrent artist who lies
about TENCSI because he believes his own lies and sort
of that way of I don't know, narcissism, and also
uh is losing his mental faculties for so many other
great reasons. But yeah, I really I think that this

(35:56):
is a great example of how passionate belief in something
can be extremely dangerous. And I think it's it's the
idea of I don't know, I don't you look at people,
especially who wanted to do something to make the world
safer for children, and you think, yes, that's always a

(36:17):
good goal. And then I think you had people who
kind of believed that they could eradicate child abuse if
they could guests get rid of these Satanists. And it's like, well,
we let's not try to Let's not have our only
reason for being involved in a cause or trying to
make the world better this idea that we can do
it in a heroic role. Because I think that if
you're gonna be committed to doing good work in the

(36:40):
world as it is, then you have to accept that
it's going to feel like not very much a lot
of the time. Because I think that the Satanic panic
stuck around for so long partly because it sold people
this very appealing narrative where you know, as with Larry
and Michelle is they're writing Michelle remembers they're not just

(37:02):
two Catholics too were cheating on their spouses with each other.
They're actually stopping Satan from taking over the earth, and
that's the most important thing they could be doing with
their lives.

Speaker 3 (37:12):
And a little sin is fine if it's for the great.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
Yeah, yeah, say it's.

Speaker 6 (37:16):
Okay to lie, I mean, I was going to just
ask you about this other book in episode four. I'm
the name of this author is escaping me. But she
was on Oprah. Yeah, famously wrote a book where she
participated in breeding babies for the purposes of Satanic sacrifice,
and literally Oprah platforms this person and speaking about it

(37:38):
very objectively as if all of this were fact, and
of course Oprah no hard questions at all, and all
of that was proven to be complete fabrication. Do you
think that person was good had good intentions? Is this
like a breaking the few eggs argument? Or is this
the person? Because then didn't she move on to another
grift immediately after?

Speaker 5 (37:56):
Yeah, that's right, Yeah, because she is a good example
of a grifter actually because she uh Laurence Stratford, she
wrote a Satanic panic memoir, she claimed, because there is
a question that kind of came up through the eighties
of like if Satanic cults were always talking about or
if we're always talking about the Satanic cults sacrificing like many, many,

(38:16):
many babies, where are they getting all these babies? Because
like it's the eighties, we actually keep a pretty close
eye on these babies. Yeah, and then he had, you know,
Lauren Stratford strapping up to be like, actually, I was
used by a cult to breathe these babies. I have
one of those baby breeders you've been hearing about. But
although even then she only ever talked about producing three

(38:38):
to be clear and imaginary babies. And it was also
in her story. I've read these the most horrible books.
I'm so happy to be able to take a break
from the literature. But you know, she her story also
involved kind of getting involved in pornography and then this,
you know, the most out there thing for a pornographer
to do next is to start a satanic cult? Was

(39:00):
I think at how it went in her book.

Speaker 6 (39:02):
So it's well snuff films, right they were making, which
we also know is an urban legend.

Speaker 3 (39:06):
I mean, yeah, sorry, thank god.

Speaker 5 (39:09):
Yeah, a lot of things are real, but not that
that what Harry, who's your who's your distributor going to
be for that? I ask you. It's hard enough to
make a midbive yet rom com these days. Yeah, So
this idea of like, well, you know, out in la
they're all doing drugs and making pornography and killing babies
and it's all one and the same to them.

Speaker 4 (39:29):
So it's it's a very interesting point you bring up there,
because one one piece of the one missing piece of
the puzzle for the Satanic panic as a conspiracy theory
is qui bono, right, who benefits? So, uh, you raised this,
You raised this excellent point where he said, you know,

(39:50):
a lot of times, if you're a member of the
concerned public at large, it may not necessarily matter whether
or not a devil exists. It's the the fact that
there are people doing crazy, evil, horrific things. So what
would if we were to complete the jigsaw puzzle here
as members of the concerned public, what would we say

(40:13):
the ultimate end game of these devil worshipers would be?
Like is it just a ruin stuff or is there
like a greater goal at play.

Speaker 6 (40:25):
To glorify the dark Lord?

Speaker 5 (40:27):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (40:28):
Yeah, but why right?

Speaker 5 (40:29):
Why do we have sewing circles because it's a nice
way to spend Saturday night. I mean, I think the goal,
and this comes up, and Michelle remembers, is that like
Satan is going to take over the earth like pretty soon,
and so if you take it to its most extreme,
then you're like trying to then you're you know, we're
getting into the end times because of course late twentieth

(40:49):
century and early twenty first century Christianity has been very
apocalypse oriented, as we just saw when you know, we
had like a TikTok rapture, panic and September, which is
so funny to me because especially because this thing where
like people are like, I'm going to get raptured, but
who will take care of my pets? And it's like
your pets are going to be raptured and you're going

(41:10):
to stay. Don't worry about it.

Speaker 4 (41:12):
Also, speaking of speaking of narcissism and inserting oneself into
the heroic moment, I think the appeal of cultic activity
and the appeal of apocalyptic belief is always that it's
going to happen while I'm around.

Speaker 3 (41:29):
Yes, you know what I mean.

Speaker 4 (41:31):
So maybe that is maybe that is part of the aspect.
But we keep going back to this when we were
talking off air about it a little bit, We keep
going back to this concept that there was actually no
proof of this like of a larger conspiracy.

Speaker 3 (41:51):
Can we confirm that? Is that true? That there was
no proof?

Speaker 5 (41:54):
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, if you trust
the FBI and the Landing report, which you know, I
don't trust every single little thing the FBI has ever done.
They did try and get Martin Luther King Junior to
kill himself, but I generally think they do pretty good
work a lot of the time. And that's one of
the examples. And you know, it's just the amount of

(42:15):
effort that went into because I mean, okay, so like
to compare it to other forms of organized crime, right
if you compare it to like the mafia, Like the
FBI was working on that and had you know, probably
thousands of hours of wire tapped conversations. We had trials
involving physical evidence. You know, there's like if you look

(42:36):
at other cases of religious abuse, right, like if you
look at I think that there was a you know,
there are cases in Canada, which of course our show
is also looking, you know, to some extent, how this
phenomenon got transported down to the United States and then
embiggened and taken back up to Canada to some extent,

(42:56):
you know, it was already there culturally, but American police
also did training and kind of brought our particular spin
to it. But you know, there's if you think about,
you know, what happened at Canadian residential schools and the
presence of you know, mass graves of First Nations children
who you know, of Indigenous people who never, never were

(43:20):
mourned and who never made it out of a system
that saw them as expendable. You know, we're just kind
of graves of of unclaimed people. Kind of one of
the things that we get into, and the final episode
actually is that, you know, it's kind of easy to
forget that in nineteen seventy eight, that was when the

(43:43):
Jonestown massacre happened, you know, and it was I think
the largest loss of American civilian life until September eleventh,
and about a third of the people who died in
Jonestown were miners. A lot of them were quite young.
There were a lot of babies there, and nobody wanted
to take the bodies of the people who had died

(44:05):
of Johnstown after the fact. Nobody wanted to to bury them,
and they were very difficult to identify, and I think
most of those people were never in any way identified
or reunited with their families. And so we have this
presence of you know, if there is an actual mass
baby grave, like we usually know where it is, people know,

(44:29):
and it just doesn't matter that much to us, you know,
and that's happened pretty routinely throughout history. You know, there
are bodies and we keep finding them. And so this
idea that there are these satanic cults acting in a
way that would leave massive amounts of physical evidence that
would require huge amounts of infrastructure to do what they're saying,

(44:50):
what we're saying that they're doing. And this is kind
of a prosaic comparison, but I think a lot about
the fact that one of the things that was a
huge concern for the People's Temple and kind of caused
the unwrap veling in Jonestown was just like, how do
you feed this many people? Like if you have a cull,
they only need food, and they got hungry, like you have,
you know, a long worship session, and then you have

(45:10):
to feed them afterwards. And so where are these satan
Is getting all their food? You know? I mean it's
a serious question I've always had and nobody has ever
you know, the idea of something this big functioning without
leaving any kind of of evidence in terms of just
you know, physical evidence or the kinds of resources that

(45:31):
they needed to operate. You can only believe that if
you believe that the magic of Satan himself is just hiding,
you know, hiding all this physical evidence after the fact.

Speaker 4 (45:41):
We sometimes refer to that as the bigfoot question, because
you know, if there is a if there's a large
cryptid of that size, no matter what it eats, it
poops somewhere, right, it lives, it dies, So where where
is the physical evidence. The Jonestown comparison there is is

(46:04):
quite harrowing because I think it teaches us that there
are real life consequences for people enacting beliefs, even if
those beliefs cannot be proven.

Speaker 5 (46:17):
Yeah, yeah, well, and also I think what and again,
I think the sight handing panic was a way to
distract ourselves from this because I know that, you know,
Americans saw what happened, you know, in Jonestown after the fact,
after it was too late to do anything about it.
And what that revealed is that you really don't need
Satan at all. You just need one guy who's able to,

(46:40):
you know, just got a stranglehold on the lives of
a lot of people and systematically take away any sense
of power that they have over their own lives, make
it physically impossible for them to escape, and then you
don't need anything supernatural at all, you know, because normal
human abuse is enough.

Speaker 2 (46:59):
And he use a sin a bunch of troops into cities.
Oh wait, wait, that's a different we're talking about.

Speaker 5 (47:03):
Different thing to fight the evil of public nudity here
in Portland orgh.

Speaker 4 (47:10):
We're gonna pause here for a word from our sponsors,
which are hopefully not wayfair, and we'll be right back
with Sarah Marshall.

Speaker 3 (47:22):
And we've returned.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
I wonder about underground worship sometimes, and that's not to
say speak ast anything we've been talking about. I just
wonder about, historically, over time, when there's a prevailing religion
that is in some way entrenched in the power structure,
let's say a city or state or something like that,
and then the underground worship that occurs. And I'm thinking specifically,
guys about some of the Freemasonry things that were discovered

(47:47):
over the years, where there was a really awesome almost
cave system, like small cave system that was built underneath
buildings so that people could, you know, go there small
groups and worship just the way they on it to
and they needed to without being persecuted by anybody up above.
I just wonder if that kind of thing. I don't know,

(48:09):
I get I'm kind of obsessed with this concept that
I feel like personally I'm dismissing some of it in
a way that I'm almost uncomfortable with because it feels
so it feels like movies that I've watched it write
this the whole concept of everything in the Satanic Panic.
It feels like a fictional story and there is no evidence.

(48:30):
But at the same time, I almost feel like I'm
being tricked into not believing it's there's any sand to it.

Speaker 5 (48:37):
Well, I mean, is it helpful to think of it
in the sense of like, because I think the great
lie of the Satanic Panic because like, I could start
a Satanic cult with you right now if we all agreed,
we could be like our colt. Yeah, and as our
first cult activity, we're gonna write to our senators because
the most satanic thing you can do, because Satan is

(48:58):
all about asking uncomfortable questions.

Speaker 2 (49:01):
Well, according to Peter Teele, it would be we would
protest some form of AI data center.

Speaker 5 (49:06):
I think, well, I've been fine with that too.

Speaker 3 (49:08):
Oh call Greta right now, guys me, I'll text.

Speaker 5 (49:12):
Let's get satanic let's conserve some water for the humans,
like satan let us do.

Speaker 3 (49:17):
Like classic lucifer as you were saying.

Speaker 5 (49:19):
Well, so, I think that a key part of kind
of the Satanic panic is like is not sort of
what not even exactly what it's identifying, but this idea
of like the Satanists have already basically taken over and
we're in the minority, and therefore we have to fight
with you know, all of the force and all of
the resources available to us, because the Satanists have already

(49:40):
won basically and we're like late to the party. Because
I think that one of the functions of a moral
panic is to kind of identify real anxieties and real
problems and then target, you know, find some kind of
a useful scapegoat, and to never look at who's in
power visibly and actually and you know, one of the

(50:02):
things I find interesting about the context of this is
that Reagan comes into office, you know, in early nineteen
eighty one, gets shot, immediately bounces right back, and then
one of the first things that he does, as he promised,
is to cut the federal budget. And one of the
things that he cuts the budget for is childcare, and

(50:23):
so part of the reason people are so stressed about
childcare and daycare in the early eighties and kind of
setting the stage for McMartin is because there's less there's
fewer viable resources than there used to be because of
the direct actions of the president, you know. And so
it feels like part of the function of a panic,
or of a moral panic, is to identify the wrong

(50:46):
cause for the thing that you are worried about, because.

Speaker 6 (50:49):
It is tricky, right, because I mean, every flavor of
depravity and evil and you know, despicable act exists. Like
I think films aren't an urban legend anymore, talked recently
about the first like proven Stuff film out of Yasha.

Speaker 5 (51:04):
I mean, we do have a different distribution model now
it makes sense.

Speaker 6 (51:09):
Yes, every corner of the Internet, you're going to find
some thing that is equally as bad as what we
imagine Satanism to be, is not entirely worse. So we
don't even need this organized version of it. It's just
a way, like a stand in for something that already
exists in worse ways than we could possibly imagine. But
it's being weaponized in a way that isn't for the
greater good.

Speaker 5 (51:29):
I think is the right. And there's this kind of
you know, this idea and the satanic panic of when
we look at who gets accused in these trials, there's
a statistically very out of line with what we know
about you know, who's abusing children. It really goes after
a lot of women and a lot of queer people,
and also just you know, anyone who's kind of a

(51:51):
low wage daycare worker, because that's who's available, and that's
who's easier to crush legally, to be sure, right, gotable, Yes, right,
it's a great m uh.

Speaker 4 (52:06):
And this this also leads us to this interesting complication, right,
because as we said, we're kind of establishing the fingerprint
of a moral panic. That being one, there's a binary
good and evil.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
These are absolute right.

Speaker 4 (52:22):
Two, Uh, the people who are in power are in
a weird relationship with the underclass right as ever, Right,
And it turns out that the folks who are, as
Noel said, scapegoatable usually aren't the folks who have a
high uh high level Uh. They're the folks who historically

(52:46):
don't have the means to defend themselves against accusations or
are so big ticket sociologically that that they don't have
to worry about it. And this takes us to the
quot U Shu we teased earlier. As we're wrapping up
Patrick swayzey, Sarah, just give it to us straight.

Speaker 3 (53:07):
Guy doesn't worship Satan right well, you know, as a
force for good.

Speaker 5 (53:16):
Like Patrick Swayze is sitting at the right hand of
the Lord as we speak. Let's be real here, he's
playing pickleball with Simon Peter. Not really pickleballs, pickleball belongs
and help.

Speaker 3 (53:28):
Yeah stuff.

Speaker 8 (53:31):
Wait, so but please please just a story, the story
that we start off with, and this because you know, yeah,
the story is kind of we're trying to maybe give
you a little sampler platter for what the whole experience
will be like.

Speaker 5 (53:44):
Because basically, we tell the story of this woman we
call her Diane and the show who uh was you know,
living a few hours away. Came to the small town
in Kentucky as an arts educator. She had a grant,
I believe, so she is going to teach photography at
locals and especially teenager is like this very nice, you know,

(54:06):
just thing of the country, people from different parts of
the state, different parts of the country, kind of sharing
skills of each other. Getting to know each other. And
during that same period, this is real East Kentucky. In
the late eighties, a film crew had come to town
because they were making a Patrick Swayze movie called Next
to Ken, which is about Patrick Swayze going back to

(54:27):
the holler where he grew up and you know, getting
vengeance as you do sometimes, And they had to shoot
a funeral scene, which actually didn't make it into the movie,
but to do that, they had to purchase a bunch
of black dresses. Like I haven't listened to it in
a while, but you know, it's late ten or twelve,
but a largish number, and a number again that you
would is not unimaginable, like feral is maybe the first

(54:49):
thing that you would think, maybe in reasonable frame of mind,
but because there was so much anxiety about kind of
Satanism and satan cults in the air. You know, this
is the era of the you know, Heraldo special where
they're like, please, if you're if you're an impressionable child,

(55:09):
don't watch this. We're putting it on right after school
and or right in prime time, and it's got a
lot of gory, scary, violent stuff in it, so don't
watch it. So Obviously everybody watched it, because if you're
a kid, you're going to watch that.

Speaker 3 (55:24):
And a disclaimer is an invitation.

Speaker 5 (55:28):
Yeah, and they knew that. And so there's just this
general anxiety that Satanists are around. And so when somebody
buys a bunch of black dresses all at once, that
kind of is enough for the local rumor mill to
kind of reach a flashpoint. And aside, the Satanists have come.
There's a Satanic cult. They're looking for blonde, blue eyed

(55:48):
children to sacrifice. Interestingly, and this woman who has come
to town trying to just like educate some kids in
basic photography skills. Because she's she's the outlier, she's the stranger,
she's a new person in town. They decide, well, this
is our Satanist and so she basically has to flee

(56:11):
with a very reasonable fear that you know that her
life is in danger, because if you have a scapegoat,
then you get to come at them with all the
force then that the person truly in power deserves to
get from you. So because of Patrick Swayze, there was
enough of a disturbance in everyday life that people felt,
you know, things feel weird. And I have been told

(56:35):
by people smarter than me that that means Satanists are
here right now.

Speaker 2 (56:40):
As it reminds me a lot of the the FEMA
camp rumors that were started by those the black Liners
for Grave Grave Liners. Do you guys remember this, Yeah,
it was just storage, but the images circulated on social
media in such a way that it was panic really.

Speaker 4 (56:57):
Began launching Jade Helm and their similar conspiracy theories. That's
a great call, mat it. Also, it reminds me of Oregon.
Theft conspiracies were common in theories that were common in
Latin America, like back in they had real world consequences, Sarah,
kind of like what you're illustrating with the Satanic panic.

Speaker 5 (57:16):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (57:17):
Specifically, there were Japanese nationals in Guatemala who were killed
by people in a rural area because the assumption was
by taking a photograph of the kid, you were planning
to abduct them and steal their organs.

Speaker 3 (57:33):
No proof of it, but you.

Speaker 4 (57:35):
Have confirmed officially on stuff. They don't want you to
know that Patrick Swayze is not a devil worshiper, And
we couldn't be more grateful.

Speaker 5 (57:45):
And I'm just glad that there's not any question about it.
I mean, I that's why you're here today, right.

Speaker 6 (57:52):
He's a bit of an agent and dirty dancing started dancing.

Speaker 3 (57:57):
To the summer camps.

Speaker 5 (57:58):
He does teenage to move cross first and you know what,
I'll take it.

Speaker 3 (58:04):
It is, Yeah, I'll take it.

Speaker 4 (58:06):
So we we have we always like to end on
one final question. First off, folks, we hope you can
tell that we're huge fans of this show. We think
it's extremely important, especially in an increasingly divisive and paranoid
society right these days. Sarah, what do we hope our

(58:26):
fellow listeners can take away from the Devil?

Speaker 3 (58:30):
You know?

Speaker 5 (58:32):
Yeah, thank you for asking that. I just I hope
that you listen. It is a very as we've been
talking about, in many ways, depressing subject matter. But I
hope that we've told the story, or allowed the people
who experienced it to tell the story in a way
that also highlights just how many amazing people have lived
through this, and who've survived it and who are you

(58:55):
motivated in all things by really just the search for
truth and love. You know that that's not going to
go out of style. And I would also say that
this really we tried to tell the story of the
kind of the origin and the spread and the shape
that this took. But also this is, you know, really
just the tip of the iceberg. And I think that

(59:17):
as much media and as much reckoning as we've done
with the Satanic Panic in the past few years, there's
so much more to do, and there's so much more
history left undiscovered. So I hope that this inspires people to,
you know, if you get curious, to do your own research,
to find more of those stories that we haven't heard yet,
and also just to as we're living through this moment,

(59:38):
to maybe take some perspective and useful knowledge and comfort
from the fact that this is something that seems to recur.
Moral panics seem to be a part of not just
the culture we're in, but kind of the people that
we are, and to learn how to ride those waves,
because there's a lot of us all all in this

(01:00:00):
trying to he's trying to keep telling the truth and
keep taking care of each other, you know. And I
think that when I when you're younger, you might have
the idea of history that, like, you know, especially before
our country descended into fascism, it was easy to look
back at history and be like, why didn't Germans just
simply stop it? Why didn't they say, hey, stop that?

(01:00:21):
And now we have been humbolt and and so that
you know, you can you can live in a culture
that's going out of its mind and you can't steer it.
Maybe on the scale that you would have liked to
believe that you could be, can still make more of
a difference than you may realize you're doing at the time.
And that's what we're trying to tell too with the

(01:00:41):
story Amazing.

Speaker 3 (01:00:42):
This reminds me so much of your earlier work on
You're Wrong about Thank.

Speaker 5 (01:00:46):
You Yeah, thank you Yeah, And that's you know, and
we love making that show today and just kind of
sharing sharing stories and and getting to laugh about it too.
I think that's important. These are all really hard, sad stories,
but we get to laugh about it together and that's

(01:01:07):
gonna help us get through all this.

Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
For my final question, sir, do you still talk to
Tonya Harding? And is she doing okay?

Speaker 5 (01:01:15):
I have never met Tanya Harding. I really want to,
but I want it to happen organically. I want to
us like get really into skating and then one day
we're going to run into each other and then We're
just gonna like kind of nod. It'll be like the
end of Francis Ha.

Speaker 3 (01:01:35):
Okay, perfect.

Speaker 6 (01:01:36):
The only thing I know about Francis Haw is the twirl.
I actually need to get a bit of a blind
spot for me.

Speaker 4 (01:01:43):
It's gonna happen. We're manifesting it. Sarah are our final
thank here. First off, thank you for being so generous
with your time. Thank you for your excellent work as
a media analyst, as a writer, as a as a podcaster.
Uh where can outwur Fell listeners go to learn more
about not just The Devil you Know, but your many

(01:02:04):
other projects.

Speaker 5 (01:02:05):
Yeah, well yeah, so of course check out The Devil
you Know. It's out from CBC Podcasts. Listen to it.
Wherever you got podcasts. You can listen to my week
to week I guess once every two weekly Fortnightly you
can listen to my fortnightly show You're wrong about as well,
which is also wherever you fine podcasts. My mom, if

(01:02:27):
she would listening, would say what what does that mean?
And I would tell her just google it, Just google
it's my name and it'll it'll come up. And I
feel like I should tell you to visit a website
or a newsletter or something.

Speaker 3 (01:02:44):
Oh remember Sarah Marshall.

Speaker 5 (01:02:46):
Yeah, that's my website. Yeah, I have a website. I
really need to update it. But it's it's pretty good.

Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
I love it.

Speaker 6 (01:02:53):
You just gotten ahead of the forgetting Sarah Marshall jokes
with your r L.

Speaker 3 (01:02:56):
I think it's key.

Speaker 5 (01:02:58):
I'm sure you love.

Speaker 6 (01:02:59):
It when people bring that up.

Speaker 5 (01:03:00):
I got right on top of that one. Yeah, that
was important set. But if you want to find out
more about the Satanic panic, also listen to American Hysteria,
another great show that is made by my friend Chelsea
Weber Smith and I got to go on there and
guest sometimes, which is an amazing show. And there's just
so much There's so much great stuff out there. Read

(01:03:23):
some old Texas Monthly articles, watch the Paradise Lost documentary.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
There.

Speaker 5 (01:03:28):
We've mentioned some some good stuff here today. So yeah,
listen to my show, listen to other shows. If your
brain is too overwhelmed to listen to anything right now,
I also really understand. Just take a nice walk.

Speaker 3 (01:03:43):
And there you have it.

Speaker 4 (01:03:44):
Folks, get thee to thy podcast platform of choice and
check out The Devil. You know, we had a great
time with this. When we can't wait to hear your thoughts.

Speaker 3 (01:03:54):
Guys.

Speaker 4 (01:03:54):
This was I think this was a great accompaniment to
our earlier episode about how so your soul works?

Speaker 3 (01:04:01):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:04:01):
Oh yeah, and our episode are there real devil worshipers
and Italy's Satanic murders and gosh we've been talking.

Speaker 3 (01:04:09):
About snosis work. Yeah, we we went deep.

Speaker 4 (01:04:14):
As you can tell. We're big, big fans of Sarah.
Do check out you're wrong about as well. If you
dig our show, you'll love that one and hit us
on folks, We would again love to hear your thoughts.
You can call us on the phone, you can send
us an email, you can find us on the lines.

Speaker 6 (01:04:29):
Oh please do find us at the hammlic Conspiracy Stuff
where we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group Here's
where it gets crazy, on XFK, a Twitter and on
YouTube or we have video content just galore for you
to dive into on Instagram and TikTok. However, we are
Conspiracy Stuff a show.

Speaker 2 (01:04:45):
We have a phone number. It is one eight three
three std WYTK. Why don't you call in tell us
what you thought about the episode and maybe your experience
with a satanic cult. When you call it, give yourself
a cooal nickname, and let us know if we can
your name and message on the air. If you want
to send us an email, you can do that.

Speaker 4 (01:05:03):
We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence
we receive. Be well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void
writes back, would you like a random fact? Would you
like a random quotation? Something that Sarah referenced in our
conversation reminded me of a quote we've shared in the past,
but it's terrifyingly relevant for this Methodist pastor David Barnhardt said, quote,

(01:05:30):
The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for.
They never make demands of you. They are morally uncomplicated,
unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor. And when
they are born, you can forget about them because they
cease to be unborn. They are, in short, the perfect
people to love if you want to claim you love
Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe, prisoners, immigrants, the sick,

(01:05:53):
the poor, widows, orphans, all the groups that are specifically
mentioned in the Bible. They all get thrown under the
bus for the unborn conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:06:22):
Stuff they Don't Want You To Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.