#satanic panic tw

[flightyalrighty]

Somebody accused you to spread satanic messages throug 'infested'

I normally mind my own businness, but, in first place, she didn't credit you when she posted pictures from your comic, second there are two choices:

Laugh

Facepalm

Mine was facepalm with the eggman's Quote: "No way, I can't believe this!"

Since the picture that I'll show you contains the name of the user, you can censor the message if you want to share it. Is just to let you know.

I'm surprised in her obsession with Shadow, she didn't realized Shadow is a lefty. Is shown in several games such as Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic Free Riders (0 gravity in particular) and Sonic 2006, advertisement like "Tripod Baby" and "Shadow The Hedgehog Basked" and series like 'Shadow Dark beginnings', though the trait is often forgotten due to the WiiMote where all left handed characters were 'corrected' to conform the right handed majority (and also most people pay little attention to that detail due to the diffuse lack of ability to recognize left from right).

okay 😭

[sysmedsaresexist]

Could you please dive into the RAMCOA controversy that's been going around? I've literally never heard someone say "RAMCOA is antisemitic" until like a week ago and now there's multiple blogs (I'm sure you can guess who at this point) who are saying this and calling RAMCOA a conspiracy theory from the satanic panic.

It's being said by the same 3 blogs that all reblog the same bad takes so I wasn't putting any stock in their word. Just the latest misinfo spreading unchecked, would appreciate your thoughts on this.

You know what, I'm not going to lie, I've been dreading getting this question.

Terrified. Harassment in this area of discussion is rampant.

We are currently debating making a post and how to approach it.

I will make our stances clear right now.

I think the conversation as it is now is full of misinformation and confusion. I think no single post can cover that amount of history and the theories and controversy.

I don't think anyone understands what they're arguing about, or the histories they're trying to bring up, and how they overlap. I think many members of the conversation lack access to resources and education that the mods of this blog DO have access to. Most of the links being thrown around lead back to the same single sources.

To shorten a very long, complex, and honestly unfinished conversation: the satanic panic and RAMCOA are two completely different entities. The satanic panic was a religious political movement of the 90s pushed by conservatives as a way to scare people back into church and scare women back into their "place" at home by attacking child care facilities. It called on a lot of tropes. And many of them were, yeah, ridiculously antisemitic. As the movement got more and more sensationalized, it began to call attention to therapists (some of them bad faith) and to RAMCOA survivors as a "Look! It's real!" kind of thing. If anything, this attention hurt far more than it helped. It painted an inaccurate and insulting picture that's still utilized to harm people today.

To be very clear: programmed DID is a well documented occurrence and it can occur in several ways.

We support survivors, no matter what they call it. We support clinicians trained in treating people who have gone through that extreme level of horrific abuse. We support people learning to separate fact from fiction, in whatever way that may apply to any given situation.

SAS supports ramcoa and oea survivors.

Here's something we suggest reading, though it's very long.

Stay safe, everyone ❤️

[arachniasbride]

Satanic Panic (2019) dir. Chelsea Stardust

[sophieinwonderland]

Sophie, of course Jews are not satanists but you’ve got to understand the idea that Jews are satanic and perform satanic rituals is literally centuries old antisemitism, going back to before the eleventh century. White supremacists frequently refer to Judaism as the synagogue of Satan. Do you know what blood libel is?

Saying “um you do know Jews aren’t Satanists” in response to criticism about antisemitism is either intellectually dishonest or just ignorant.

Sure, but that doesn't mean the Satanic Panic was primarily about Jews. The idea of secret cults of Satanists has been around for centuries. Much of the same accusations that have been made about Jews and Satanic cults in the 80s have also been made about witches who were believed to be consorting with the devil for hundreds of years.

The tropes about witches eating children, to be fair, likely sprang from the blood libel and antisemitic tropes. But it's complicated, and we're talking about beliefs that had evolved over centuries. So even if they had related origins historically, these origins would have been largely forgotten by the culture in the 80s. (And not particularly easy to research pre-internet.)

The Satanic Panic was hundreds of years after the Salem Witch Trials, where accused witches were said to be consorting with the devil and cannibalizing children.

These ideas were ingrained in our cultural idea of what a Satanist was in America.

Again, it's complicated. Because if you go back hundreds of years, you would probably find that a lot of the tropes surrounding witches were probably based at least in part on antisemitic tropes. But I think these diverged pretty significantly over time to the point where I don't believe hardly anyone, aside from the most fringe groups, actually considered their fears over Satanist cults to be related to Judaism at all.

You say I'm being intellectually dishonest. But I think it's intellectually dishonest to describe the Satanic Panic as primarily antisemitic when the majority of the people involved likely weren't associating Judaism with Satanism at the time. And to the point that antisemitic tropes were involved, these tropes have been associated with fictional Satanic witches for centuries and were largely divorced from whatever association with Judaism they originally had in the public consciousness in America.

And in regards to RAMCOA, I find this particular talking point to be incredibly manipulative.

"Don't use RAMCOA because RAMCOA is related to Satanic Ritual Abuse which came from the Satanic Panic and the Satanic Panic was antisemitic because Jews have been accused of being Satanists before, therefore you're being antisemitic for using RAMCOA."

Let's all be 100% clear on what's going on here.

The anti-RAMCOA side is trying to emotionally manipulate cult survivors into not using accurate language because of tenuous connections to antisemitism.

And I don't particularly like how calling the Satanic Panic as a whole antisemitic, for the purpose of manipulating cult survivors into not identifying with RAMCOA, perpetuates associations between Judaism and Satanism that should never have existed to begin with.

I don't see how accusing people who talk about Satanic cults of antisemitism could possibly do anything but cause harm to the Jewish people who I assume would be happy to not be associated with Satanism at all.

Which brings me to one final point:

This particular talking point is disguising itself as being in support of Jewish people. But it's not. What it is, is anti-cult survivor.

[roland-the-farter-stan-account]

I am such a fucking hater and extremely picky about the music, books, movies media etc I consume, and I finally figured out why. Did you guess ✨religious trauma✨? Took me long enough!

I was always encouraged to read Christian books, watch Christian media, and coerced-cajoled-chastised into listing into Christian music *especially.* It was so goddamn fucking important. Preached from the pulpit, prodded by my mom changing the radio station, SCOLDED by my PEERS in front of other peers (which is so humiliating and something I’ve never experienced outside my old Christian life). Listening to Christian music was both an in-group signifier of belonging and a sign of devotion. Could *you* abstain from the temptation of worldly music? Like dieting, are you one of the righteous whose tastes are satisfied with saccharine imitations?

I had to fight so hard to protect and justify my tastes. Why was I compelled to listen to what I wanted to listen to? I knew it wasn’t due to my unrighteousness (although I knew I was queer and therefore unrighteous). From a young age I didn’t like a lot of Christian media and the trend only got stronger over time until I couldn’t stomach it for aesthetics alone.

Only just this morning the capitalistic angle of this attitude dawned on me. Is it a coincidence that in the 90’s as the Christian media industry was really hitting its stride pastors regularly spent entire sermons wailing about the horrors or even demonic influence of secular media? In my Christian school’s chapel, in main service, and of course perennially at youth group the corrupting effect of secular media was hammered home. Which conveniently the church had an entire alternative industry for, sometimes even available for sale on your mega church’s premises.

[tuulikki]

Okay so is there any pseudo-psychology that doesn’t assume that everything wrong with you is due to repressed memories of childhood abuse? They all seem to do it! Satanic panic, Freud, gay conversion therapy, cult leaders… the gang’s all there. It’s been so resounding disproven but yet the idea that you can have secret repressed memories persists so strongly.

I assume it succeeds because it’s easy to tell someone in pain that the answer is simple. I can understand why people who are told that believe it. But what I don’t understand is how someone in a position of authority could tell another human being such a horrifyingly destructive lie.

The sheer amount of human misery this has caused breaks my fucking heart

[kafus]

i’m still only 20 minutes into this video but damn hearing someone talk about the topic of CSA with this much clarity & proper information is SO fucking refreshing holy SHIT. the active deconstruction of all the very loud and sensationalized narratives about CSA that are rampant on the internet, where they come from and what the actual reality of protecting kids looks like… i wish everyone who talked about predators online gave even half a rat’s ass about proper research of the topic like this guy obviously does

was not expecting such a great discussion of the topic in a video that clickbaits you with chris hansen in the thumbnail but i’m emotional to see someone being so for real about the topic even id it’s a speck in the vast ocean of the bullshit people say about CSA under the guise of “helping” on social media everywhere

[kimwexlers-brownhair]

This video helped me conceptualize a lot. I am now Longlegs's biggest defender. Spoilers under cut.

Longlegs is a satire of the Satanic Panic. The plot and tone parallel the growing fears that shaped kids and teens of Osgood Perkins's generation. The movie starts out framed as an FBI procedural, straightforward enough to follow. By the end, it's all unbelievable and fable-like, almost hokey in its revelations, with the mother dressed as a nun covered in blood saying Hail Satan and monologuing point by point the macabre ways she's been manipulated into carrying out Satan's plans. Just before the credits roll, Longlegs winks at us: none of this is real. There is no Satan. It's just T-Rex; it's just rock and roll.

We're taken in because the fears fostered in the beginning are reasonable. Families are getting murdered. When you hear something like families getting murdered, you take it seriously. Just as you'd take it seriously if you heard a bunch of preschool teachers were molesting their students. You're so horrified that by the time the story has morphed from horrifying but believable into a gigantic Satanic cabal, you're so invested in protecting the children you lose sight of the inherent ridiculousness behind it.

There is no Longlegs. There is no androgynous boogeyperson led astray by glam rock waiting to inject Satan's essence into your little girls.

But that's what these fears look like and transform into when given free rein in your mind. This is what they look like when they're encouraged by what you see on the news and in what your parents lie about. The fear is real and creates devastating consequences, but that's what it was all along, just fear.

And it's all so silly. So silly he winks at you to let you in on the joke. Cuckoo.

This might be the scariest movie I've ever seen, and I don't get people who say it isn't. 'Unsettling' doesn't begin to describe it.

[arconinternet]

Hell's Bells: The Dangers of Rock 'N' Roll (Videos, 1989)

The Christian anti-rock-n-roll documentary. You can watch it here.

[granulesofsand]

Satanic Panic

I saw a post about Satanic Panic, so I felt the need to write an overview of what actually happened for those who don’t know.

What is Satanic Panic?

Satanic Panic can be viewed as either part of the Memory Wars or as an entirely separate entity. If viewed as aligned with the False Memory movement, it might be seen as proof of False Memories and a near complete lack of the existence of ritual abuse. The other takes Satanic Panic as still harmful, but removes the blame from those claiming to have experienced it.

I believe that a crucial part of enabling healing is giving survivors the benefit of the doubt. People who are speaking out about abuse might be doing so for the first time, and are particularly vulnerable to disbelief even if they have told their story before. Talking about maltreatment takes a lot of courage, especially when a stigma already exists around the topic.

Fundie Satanism

That said, the Satanic Panic was weaponized by Christian groups expecting to gain power from it. Some genuinely believed Satanic Ritual Abuse was a primary concern, others knew it was only a face for the politics.

Fundamentalist groups wanted to have the kind of attention they were no longer getting, and the instatement of mandated reporter laws and influx of unsupervised children gave them a fighting cause. They saw that child abuse was becoming popular in media, and they used it as leverage to frighten well-meaning folks into their way of thinking.

Satanic was the word for non-Christian, and Christians were quick to disown anything that hinted at rot within their own organization. Christianity was still popular, and nobody wanted to believe they could be involved with a group that caused harm. So they took any religious abuse, and some non-religious abuses, and slapped Satanic on it.

Satanic Ritual Abuse

Ritual abuse refers to maltreatment that is both standardized and associated with symbols or ideologies. At the time, many kinds of organized (involving multiple perpetrators and victims) and/or coercive (intentionally manipulative) abuse were grouped under that name. Extreme abuse was also called ritual abuse, and we still don’t have a solid definition for that one.

Given that all ritual abuse would have been considered Satanic, fundies basically screwed over anyone who was abused in this specific way. Ritual abuse as we know it now did and does happen. An abuser doesn’t have to believe in their symbolism or ideology to misuse it, and many forms of religion and other structured beliefs can be applied to hurt and intimidate people.

RAMCOA

Ritual Abuse, Mind Control, and Organized Abuse are grouped together under a metric ton of buzz words. The survivors of this collection of abuses are left with research that is out of date, chock full of misinformation, and unable to communicate with people outside of the community.

I know the words are conspiratorial. I get that the books have fear-mongering content. I need people to understand that there is no better option, and pretending bad things don’t happen doesn’t make them go away.

Government Mind Control

Mind control is manipulation with intent. Coercion. Using psychology to get your way. Implanting false memories would be mind control. Again, it doesn’t sound good because cultural contexts have evolved over time and clinical language for this kind of abuse has not. Not all mind control is abusive at all. McDonald’s using targeted ads is mind control. But also training children like dogs is mind control.

There have been government-sponsored projects on mind control. There probably still are. Governments do sketchy things like that for military advancement and because they don’t face consequences, and there was a time where government employees admitted to it. Similar to McDonald’s and their hot coffee campaign, there were some strategic moves to look better to newcomers.

The government has sponsored lots of things they don’t want to acknowledge, and people are still suffering the effects. People in poverty, black and brown communities, and so on can probably agree that government is not synonymous with benevolent.

One of the things the government did was talk to criminal organizations. I don’t know if this is news to anyone, but it was a good way to get information and resources. There were wartime experiments on drugs and interrogation, and those were mind control.

Enough survivors agree about their experiences that it doesn’t seem worthwhile to dismiss them, so until there’s better information we would do well to try to understand them. You don’t have to agree full heartedly to sit with people in their own stories.

Cult Mind Control

I would describe a cult as any group that uses unhealthy practices as a defining feature of their cultural norms. Not everyone agrees on what is or isn’t a cult, and that mostly fine. This is the definition I’m using because it makes the most sense to me in context.

Cults members are not the only ones to use or receive mind control tactics, but the post I saw mentions cults this way. The specific technique is called Trauma Based Mind Control, which is the application of psychological responses to danger and overwhelm for the purposes of an abuser.

TBMC is the primary method for what the RAMCOA survivor community calls programming. Programming is the use of cues associated with PTSD triggers to achieve a desired response in a subject. When programming is done to a small child (under age 6-12, depending on the source), a common response is Dissociative Identity Disorder.

HC-DID

Abusers create alternate self-states within one body to react to the cues given. Depending on how knowledgeable the perpetrator(s) is/are, a child might have a very structured system of alters with little control allocated to them. These systems are designed by and for abusers to create long term obedient subjects.

Not every DID system is formed this way. Most are naturally developed with the induction of trauma in a child’s life. Some organic systems have complex structures anyway, but not for anyone but themselves. These systems are polyfragmented, or C-DID systems.

The level of control and organization found within a programmed system is almost always more than those found in organic systems. In the RAMCOA community, this is called HC-DID. The key difference isn’t true complexity, but the type of prerequisites to qualify.

Highly Complex DID isn’t particularly difficult to groom in a child, but it does require intent. Cult groups, as well as other high control groups, are quite capable of figuring it out by sheer cruelty and observation.

Why Does It Matter?

Making blanket statements about what abuse is and isn’t real doesn’t actually help anyone. While people prone to worry who didn’t experience RAMCOA might feel temporarily safer, it’s likely they’ll figure out they were lied to.

People who did experience it struggle with doubt and disbelief from others, and may have been told that nobody would care. This field is still considered taboo, and there are victims of torture and adjacent who are ashamed or afraid because of the state of the larger population.

I survived RAMCOA. My family and friends survived RAMCOA. Not all of my friends survived RAMCOA. Watch yourself.

[arctic-hands]

I am warning and begging non-Christians in Indiana to be be very extremely careful. I'm not just talking about pagans, but anyone who doesn't fit the evangelical Christian mold, or even if you are Christian but not white, and especially if you're a non-white, non-Christian. I'm from Indiana, I know how badly this will get. Even in the two thousands I had a friend who got the shit kicked out of her just because she wore goth clothing because my schoolmates "clocked" her as a witch. We're already in the middle of Satanic Panic 2, this is going to get very bad and very ugly very quickly, whether or not Odinists did this or why.

[satanicpanicart]

silly no context frame from a project I'm working on :3 Still trying to figure out if I like it better without the lineart.. tbh I think it vibes better

[interstellar-elf]

Today I learned that Phil Arms, aka the infamous Demonic Pokemon Preacher guy was also heavily into drugs and ran his church like a cult in order to get money to fuel his narcotic addiction.

[fletcherwilbury]

@whumpuary Day 19: Can't Stay Awake

Warning for Overworking, exhaustion, illness, fever, medication

[arconinternet]

Hell's Bells 2: The Toll Continues (Videos, 2004)

The sequel to the Christian anti-rock-n-roll documentary. You can watch it here.

That last screenshot is from a sequence demonizing this song from... Sonic Underground.

[heyyoupikaboo]

Heavy metal's bad rep is just fucking unfair.

I need to rant. But first, a little backstory time. When I was twelve, I stopped liking modern female rap music. I decided it was time for me to change. So, in January of 2022 I started listening to Alice in Chains. Later, in March-April 2022, Coal Chamber and Rage Against the Machine. In May 2022, Korn, Slipknot, Primus, Attila and probably Otep. In July 2022 I took on SOAD. In August and September, I listened to Drowning Pool. So, throughout 2022 I tried to build on my new fondness for heavy metal. And that's basically how I got into the heavy metal genre. Don't get me wrong, I really like old school rap.

But the people who think we're still in the Satanic Panic era... prepare to be proved wrong. Heavy metal ain't satanic. Hear me out. My parents, when they found out I was into heavy metal, they said "That metal shit's gonna screw your brain up." And when I was jamming Mudvayne in probably June/July 2022, my stepdad told me to turn that satanic shit down. And then he asked me "How do you even think?" I just laughed and told him "You're so full of sh*t." I didn't let that stop me from being a metalhead. Later in December 2022 I was playing SOAD on my computer one night. The next day while I was eating a meatball sub, my dad said when I was playing SOAD he asked me what kinda satanic shit I was listening to. Chelsea (my godmother) said that I was into heavy metal now and I added that there was nothin' he could do about it.

Now, why do I think heavy metal's bad rep is fucking unfair? Because heavy metal is not satanic. Well, most of it isn't. But not all of it. The bands I listen to (Attila, Johnathan Young, Breaking Ben, etc.) do not talk about satanism in any of their songs. Dance with the Devil by BB was about suicide. And Johnathan Young does covers of Disney songs. So, what's got people so pissed off about heavy metal? I just never got the hate for heavy metal.

Rant over