Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Host, Morgan Sung: Just a note – this episode includes mentions of sexual abuse, so listen with care.
So Labubus blew up this year, right? They’re the super trendy, colorful little blind box plushies.
[TikTok Clip]
The dolls, which are usually listed for $22 are now in some cases fetching hundreds of dollars on resale sites.
Morgan Sung: But is there something darker hiding behind these collectible plushies? Something demonic?
[TikTok Clip]
Look beyond the little sharp teeth, the little mischievous grin and those little eyes, these names can be linked to ancient spirits.
[TikTok Clip]
On top of that, there’s an actual demon named Pezuzu, which sounds very similar to Labubu.
[TikTok Clip]
It’s a real demon from Mesopotamian mythology. It’s about plagues, chaos, and fear.
[TikTok Clip]
Y’all, when I say different toys that give you the hey jeebies or you feel that nudge in your spirit, it is warning you to not open up the door and allow that demonic spirit into your home.
Morgan Sung: People have gone super viral by claiming that they unwittingly bought their child a little boo boo, only for it to spiritually terrorize their family.
Others are pulling up Bible verses about Satan’s disguises, which apparently now includes super trendy collectibles with exorbitant resale value.
[TikTok Clip]
Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. That particular verse means that he doesn’t come with horns or fire, but he can come marketed and gift wrapped and trendy just as these dolls do.
Morgan Sung:This kind of moral fear mongering is not new. Back in the 80s, it was known as the satanic panic.
[Clip]
Members of satanic or occult groups share common traits such as the access to perform perverted sex acts, such as homosexuality, bisexuality, sodomy, bestiality, and necrophilia. All of these acts are carried out in the name of Satan.
[KABC Devil Worship Clip]
When kids will do their, their sacrificing and their animal mutilation, they’ll do it within a pentagram, and allow the blood to drip into some kind of container because they use it for bathing in or drinking.
Morgan Sung: Today, we’re seeing the same moral fear mongering take place online. Once, some people thought Furbys were the devil’s toy. Now it’s Labubus.
Journalist Sarah Marshall has been trying to understand why these cycles keep repeating.
Guest, Sarah Marshall: I’m Sarah Marshall. I host a podcast called You’re Wrong About, about misremembered history.
Morgan Sung: And now she has a new show called The Devil You Know. It’s a CBC podcast miniseries about the satanic panic.
Morgan Sung: So, do you think Labubus are demonic?
Sarah Marshall: I think it depends on how you use the word demonic. I think one of the questions that I try to look at in the show and also want us all to look at in this time of rolling satanic panics is like, what are people using the words Satan to mean?
Because there’s a good solid slice of that pie chart, I think throughout history is anything that we don’t like and want to vilify as strongly and as quickly as we possibly can.
And so at the time I was first learning about this, it felt like something the country hadn’t reckoned with yet, and it was very shocking to me, and feels much less shocking now because we’re doing it again after all this time.
Morgan Sung: Sarah’s new miniseries got me thinking about what satanic panic looks like in the digital age, beyond Labubu conspiracy theories. As somewhat of an expert in this particular moment in history, Sarah is going to explain how satanic panic spread so quickly. And what to look out for to avoid falling for it again.
Ready?
This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.
To understand the way fear mongering spreads online and targets innocent people, we have to go back in time by opening a new tab: What was the satanic panic?
Picture this: The year is 1980. The North American Mall is thriving.
It’s the golden age of arcades, VCRs are the hot new thing, and there’s big hair and acid washed jeans. Oh, and seems like Satan is lurking around every corner, because a rapidly spreading fear is taking hold of North America, that satanic cults are indoctrinating and ritually abusing children.
Sarah Marshall: There’s a bunch of kind of roots to that phenomenon, but a really big moment is the publication of a book in 1980 called Michelle Remembers, where a woman goes through what I have always imagined to be hypnotherapy. I have no confirmation of this, but she ends up in some kind of trance-like state that her therapist puts her in. And he develops the idea very quickly that she has been abused by a satanic coven.
Ultimately, the story ends up being a very sensational bestseller, and then it’s treated as a textbook by police and by therapists and so on who are learning how to recognize child abuse and who are told that satanic abuse is the kind they should really be looking for and things really take off from there.
Morgan Sung: Like you said, there are these major cultural flashpoints that sparked this massive panic. There was Michelle Remembers, and then there’s the McMartin preschool trial, which is this highly publicized case investigating claims of child sexual abuse in the 80s.
[Newsclip]
The allegations went beyond sexual molestation. They were tales of satanic rites, of pornographic pictures, of the mutilation of animals to frighten the children into silence.
But from the beginning, the defendants in the case, the teachers, have insisted that they were the victims of a latter day witch hunt.
Morgan Sung: But then throughout the series, you also connect the spread of satanic panic to the progressive direction that culture was moving in. How did marginalized groups gaining rights suddenly lead to satanic panic? Like, what’s the bigger cultural context here?
Sarah Marshall: I mean, ironically, so much of this appears actually to be a backlash to the idea of people getting out from under the thumb of some of the more dangerous aspects of American Christianity, you know, and this idea of women’s liberation is a very recent phenomenon. We’ve successfully struck down the ERA in the United States, of course, but it was still, still a real concern as the 80s started that women might get real rights at some point.
Morgan Sung: By ERA, Sarah’s talking about the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment to prohibit sex-based discrimination.
It was passed by Congress in 1972, but then it was sent to the states to be ratified. Religious groups and conservatives stalled the process.
Sarah Marshall: Gay liberation is also a movement that’s underway, and so I think it’s always pretty easy to sell to people the idea, like, wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to accept your kid as who they were? Wouldn’t it be great if you could just say that the Satanists were making them do that? You know, I think that’s a big part of the sales point for this.
Morgan Sung: That explains some of the cultural context.The media landscape also played a huge part in fueling satanic panic. In 1987, the fairness doctrine ended.That was the FCC policy that required broadcasters to present different perspectives when reporting on any issues of public importance.
When the fairness doctrine ended, local TV stations went all out with sensationalized reporting and pretty much no fact checking.
Sarah Marshall: I think one of them is that historically, you know, to my understanding, if you’re, if you’re working in media really at any level locally or nationally, you have been allowed to say, well, the police said this, so that’s probably true, you know, like only very recently has it become, I think, to any degree normalized to even early on in the conversation, be like, well, the police say this, but they’re just one of many sources, you know, by, by American journalism for quite a long time.
There was an area in Ohio where law enforcement wasted an astounding amount of money searching for the mass grave of satanic sacrifices that they believe just had to be there because somebody had found a little piece of red thread hanging off a tree limb and was like, well, that’s got to be Satanists.Who else could, no non-Satanist could put thread in a tree like this. And there’s, you know, and they didn’t find anything, arguably because there was nothing there.
It’s kind of a horror story about what happens when we give the police too much power and credibility. And also, as you can imagine, and it’s hard in many ways to fault people for this-In…if you’re working in media and you’ve got to try and get your story on air and maybe, you know, you’re trying to advance your career, you’re trying to get places, there is nothing that will make people stay on your channel more than saying satanic sacrifice, you know, it’s just, it’s hard to beat that.
Morgan Sung: I mean, how profitable was the satanic panic machine?
Sarah Marshall: Man, I don’t have numbers in front of me, but I mean, if you look at the kind of media that was on TV throughout the 80s and into the 90s, it just spread like wildfire through, through primetime news and also through daytime TV because this is a time of like many competing talk shows on TV. Oprah was kind of getting her sea legs at this point, and I think every single one of them covered satanic cults at some point in the 80s.
For example, the author of Satan’s Underground was uncovered very thoroughly. As an acknowledged fraudster who once she got tired of pretending to be a satanic abuse survivor, started pretending to be a Holocaust survivor. Um, and so it also became over time like really fertile ground for con artists. So it’s just there’s kind of something for everyone in this.
If you are pure of heart, it gives you something really important to put your energy behind and if you just want to scam people or get attention, you can also do that. And if you want to scare adults, you can paint a pentagram on something you can have that as well, and boy did they freak out when they saw those.
Morgan Sung: Satanic panic often targeted people who didn’t fit into society’s mold, who didn’t abide by traditional values. They weren’t into the occults, they were just different. And more often than not, the targets of satanic panic were queer, like in the case of the San Antonio Four. That was a group of four friends who were all openly lesbian in Texas in the mid-90s.
One of the women hosted her two nieces for a weeklong visit in 1994.
The nieces, who were 7 and 9 at the time, accused the group of sexually abusing them as part of a satanic ritual. The ensuing media frenzy and the prosecutors portrayed the group as a perverse lesbian cult, indoctrinating and sacrificing little girls.
The women were convicted and spent nearly 15 years in prison before one of the nieces recanted her testimony. She admitted that she had been coached into accusing her aunt and her friends because her family was upset that her aunt was a lesbian. Satanic panic was laced with homophobia from the start, and that was true in the case of the San Antonio Four.
Sarah Marshall: I mean, at the core of this case, we have this, to me, just so intensely bittersweet story of these four young women who are able to kind of create a safe home for each other and their children and who were accused of organized and ritualistic child abuse by a male family member who had a grudge against one of these young women for resisting his advances, you know. And so I think one of the things it shows is that by the 1990s, when this case took place, and into the 2000s, but when all this began, you could argue that, some men might have figured out that accusing a woman who got in your way or who didn’t do what you wanted her to, especially a queer woman, of child abuse or ritualistic abuse or satanism, that that was maybe going to be very useful to you, because we had created through the satanic panic, this idea that if you were queer, you are much more likely to be one of these Satanists.
Um and again, that was also a way for mainstream culture to Pretend to not notice that the majority of people committing child sexual abuse are men who the child knows already. We had to sort of figure out an opposite direction to put our energy in so we could keep ignoring the real problem, I think, in some ways. And so it’s just It becomes a very useful myth, and it’s very scary to see that in action.
Morgan Sung: Does any of this sound familiar to you: Scary gay people, grooming and indoctrinating children?
[News Clip]
Critics are tearing into a drag story time for toddlers held at a public library.
[News Clip]
The library told a local news site that there wasn’t any sexualized content planned for this drag storytime.
Morgan Sung: We don’t always call it the satanic panic today, but this moral fear mongering and backlash against marginalized communities isn’t all that different. We’ll dive into that after this break.
The San Antonio 4 case started just before I was born, and the openly lesbian women who were wrongfully accused and convicted of satanic ritual abuse, weren’t exonerated until I was in my 20s. In pop culture, satanic panic seems like an era of cultural history that happened decades ago, before it was neatly wrapped up and put to rest. But in reality, echoes of satanic panic still exist today, and thanks to the internet, that fear mongering is more insidious than ever. Let’s talk about what it looks like in a new tab: The new satanic panic.
Morgan Sung: Did satanic panic ever really die out?
Sarah Marshall: There was a time when I would have said it did, and now I’m like, no, yeah, it’s still there. It’s like when you go camping and they’re like, please dowse your campfires. Please just pour so much water on them and stare at them for a long time. And sometimes, you know, the American legal system is like, I think that’s fine, let’s just go home. And then it just sort of like just keeps smoldering away. And I think that nothing has been more helpful in its desire to to spread and grow and become as big as it once was, than the Trump administration, as, as you might imagine. Surprise!
Morgan Sung: Let’s cover the satanic panic of today. I mean, there’s obviously the conservative backlash to provocative art, like, I’m thinking of Cynthia Erivo playing Jesus and Jesus Christ Superstar, and then it goes a little further where people were convinced that Lady Gaga’s Coachella performance, which had like occult references and biblical imagery.
[Clip]
Lady Gaga has been blaspheming Jesus for basically her entire career.
[Clip]
Lady Gaga is a practicing witch and has been very open about the spell that she is casting and the hex that she is casting in her song Abracadabra.
Morgan Sung: People genuinely thought that was a satanic ritual, but moral panics aren’t always as overt as that. I mean, they’re not, oh my God, this thing is demonic, this labubu equals Pazuzu kind of situation. What are the more subtle moral panics you’ve seen recently?
Sarah Marshall: I think one of them that seems, and this is my personal diagnosis of a moral panic, or kind of an aspect of our satanic panic of today, because the anxiety parents feel over trans kids in school sports, which is something that I, you know, personally believe politicians whipped up out of really the clear blue sky in order to give them something to do.
And this idea that your child is somehow more in danger from another child on their soccer team than they are from, again, the adult men in the world generally who they already know.
And so it’s so interesting that we always have the search for theoretical Satanists who are always just kind of right out of reach when megalomaniacal white men have always been right there, front and center.
Morgan Sung: Yeah, in the series, you dive into this concept of moral entrepreneurship. What is that? And how does that connect to the kind of more insidious, quieter moral panic that we’re seeing today, that isn’t strictly like, look at Satan?
Sarah Marshall: I mean, you know, a classic example that many of us have probably seen at this point is one of these like very cheesy 80s, how to spot Satanism in your community, you know, law enforcement training videos.
[Clip from Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults]
In satanic occultism, that which is good is bad and that which is bad is good, and as you view this learning and educational tape, pay attention to notice the reverse of everything that is normal becoming abnormal.
Sarah Marshall: And so I think one of the things the satanic panic did that I think we’re seeing today and what pops to mind for me is, you know, some of the really fraudulent businesses that have been built around our fear of human trafficking and sort of creating in people the idea that human trafficking, you know, and which in reality is about wage theft and about undocumented workers, you know, being enslaved essentially, and that’s typically how it, I think happens statistically most often. But which is reinvented into a theory that, like, 37 year old white women such as myself are going to get kidnapped at Michael’s, you know, and, and be put on a slave ship, which is something white women love to think about ourselves inexplicably.
And so I think that there’s, there’s this idea in the 80s satanic panic and that we’re very much seeing today that it’s so nice to be able to get rich and be the ultimate hero protecting women and children from violence and Satanism. At the same time, it offers what feels like a virtuous heroic way to make so much money.
Morgan Sung: I mean, speaking of those anti-trafficking videos or those like warning, there’s a creepy guy in the Michael’s parking lot stalking women. Like I, I always watch so many of those and like I, it gets to the end, you know, they’re showing all the different ways to protect yourself against these scary faceless people, and it gets to the end and I’m like, oh, it was an ad. You’re selling me, you’re selling me a product to supposedly protect myself.
Sarah Marshall: I’ve seen those too, yes, and that’s so depressing that they, yeah, that there’s a real, real push to commodify women’s fear. And yeah, and it’s always like if if you come back to your car and someone’s taped a banana to the door, never eat that banana, it’s like, well, I could have known that.
Morgan Sung: Yeah. So how do moral panic spread today? What goes into feeding them?
Sarah Marshall: You know, things were volatile enough in the 80s when we had at the time, this what felt very instantaneous form of spread of information through cable news and through magazines and papers and and things like that. And now, of course, I mean, our, the lifespan of all of our trends is like 20 minutes, you know, and so we, the way that misinformation can spread around the world.
I think it feels to me like there’s some kind of unwritten law that misinformation must always be faster than information. And I don’t know why, but there is, there is the adage that, you know, a lie can spread around the world before the truth can get its shoes on. And now that time is, is even shorter, I would say.
And so I think it’s, you know, just in social media, whether people are attempting to tell the truth or not, there’s a real bias towards what we know will get people’s attention, and, you know, if it bleeds it leads famously. And if it bleeds from a little Satanist dagger, then then that’s even better.
I, I think to me, one of the big problems, and this does feel very different from the satanic panic of the 80s, is that we now exist in our very own little media worlds most of the time, you know. It’s one of the things that’s so unsettling about the satanic panic of the 80s, is that everybody was watching the same nightly news and hearing the same stories, but I think, currently it worries me even more that today you have, you know, people walking around in their very own pockets of information and not even having to consume the same media as each other. So if I want to get really deep into a conspiracy theory, I can, and I don’t have to see anything that’s critical of it necessarily. And the sort of the way that people can shield themselves from information today, I don’t like it. I don’t like that part.
Morgan Sung: Yeah, we really are just all in our own little bubbles.
Sarah Marshall: Yeah, and I think that, you know, one of the things, probably the most meaningful thing that helps us to realize that we’re not the only person who exists in the world is not what we consume, but how we interact with each other. And that feels like something that a lot of people have to put real effort in trying to just be around other human beings. Um, and I guess that’s the promise of Satanism too, you know, they’re just, they’re like always getting large groups of people together to do a hobby. It’s really very impressive.
Morgan Sung: Pickleball really is just Satanism. That’ll be the new danger.
Sarah Marshall: That’s the takeaway from this conversation. Yeah, look, anything that people adopt that quickly, I do feel a little suspicious about. I got to be honest.
Morgan Sung: So queer people are still largely the target of these moral panic campaigns, particularly trans people. And back then the panic was over children and satanic ritual abuse cults, and now it’s over children who have access to gender affirming care. What Mechanisms are being rehashed here, like, what nachos are being reheated?
Sarah Marshall: Oh God, not very bad nachos, just stay away from the nachos. But I, I mean, I think that what’s, what’s kind of interesting is that in many ways we’ve cut out the middle man and taught people not to fear for their child, but just to fear their child, you know, and to feel that, if your child starts living as as their identity tells them to, in terms of gender or in terms of any aspect of belief, questioning your belief system, then they become your enemy, it seems like in a lot of the rhetoric that we’re seeing today.
And so this idea that your child who you love, that that love you feel for them is allowed culturally and really encouraged, I think at this point to become weaponized, into that same amount of anger if they don’t become the person that you’re trying to mold them into. That to me is so scary.
I like to think that some of these people know that what they’re doing is wrong, because like the the degree of child abuse sanctioned by some Christian religious authorities in this country has been absolutely shocking, puts, you know, the satanic panic stories to shame and it’s led to the death of like an appreciable number of children, you know. And I like to think that you have to at least maybe know what you’re doing is wrong in order to become so obsessed with accusing Satanists of it, but I’ve always overestimated the American mind when it comes to self-awareness.
Morgan Sung: What advice do you have for people to avoid falling into the same moral panic cycle?
Sarah Marshall: Yeah, I will say that none of us are above moral panicking, you know, it’s, there’s a, there’s a lot worth panicking about, but I would say just by staying curious, you know. I think that a lot of how the satanic panic spread and had people as credulous as it did is that it really discouraged any kind of asking of questions even about very reasonable concrete things that were seemingly impossible in many cases, but through the magic of Satan, you know. There’s never any physical evidence. Why? Satan, OK.
It’s so much more likely that it’s the person who’s right there in society, in a, in a position of relative power who’s, who’s doing harm than some perhaps mythical figure off in the shadows somewhere. We just, we have enough to cope with with the, with the people we can already see, you know. And there’s a, there’s a lot of, of, people in power who get to stay in power longer by making it seem like there’s a bigger threat to our safety than they actively are while in Congress or whatever.
Morgan Sung: So are Labubus demonic tools of Satan’s witchcraft? No. Fear mongering over trendy dolls is easy to write off as a silly harmless conspiracy theory, but it’s part of a larger, more pervasive moral panic that incites fear and anger and hate at any perceived threat to the status quo. And like the satanic panic 40 years ago, the so-called threats are more often than not, queer and trans people.
If you peel back the layers, the fear of children bringing home demonic plushies isn’t that different from the fear of drag queens reading picture books to children. What we’re seeing play out today isn’t necessarily a new satanic panic. It’s the same tactics preying on the same fear of breaking from tradition. It’s just packaged a little differently and adapted for the internet.
There are real consequences to acting on this fear. What starts as seemingly harmless can expand and become extremely destructive. We’re seeing how this fear continues to endanger and disenfranchise queer people today. But we’ve seen how satanic panic spread, and we don’t have to fall for it again and that starts by learning how to spot the signs of it, from silly Labubu conspiracy theories to the videos that prey on our fears and anxieties in order to go viral.
OK, now let’s close all these tabs.
Sarah’s series, The Devil You Know, is out now! For me, as someone who loves horror movies, learning about this era of history was fascinating, and it’s out just in time for Halloween. Turns out the real horror was … well, you’ll find out more when you listen. You can find The Devil You Know wherever you get your podcasts.
Close All Tabs is a production of KQED studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Chris Egusa and edited by Chris Hambrick. Close All Tabs producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our senior editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s director of podcasts.
Our theme song and credits are by Chris Egusa. Additional music by APM. Brendan Willard is our Audio Engineer. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Katie Sprenger is our podcast operations manager and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor in chief.
Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local.
Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dust Silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches.
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Thanks for listening.
