Here’s a question about the analogy of the Rape Culture Hysteria of 2014 to the Satanic Daycare Hysteria of the 1980s: Wasn’t the 1980s frenzy more of a Bottom Up affair? My vague recollection is that the previous madness was promoted by, say, local prosecutors, disparate media outlets, and maybe some ambitious ministers rather than by the President, university administrations, and the New York media.

Here’s the Wikipedia article on the Day Care Sex-Abuse Hysteria from 1982 into the 1990s.

I have a vague sense that the Satanic Daycare insanity was culturally related to the rumors being pushed by a few ministers around 1983 or 1984 that the logo of the Procter & Gamble company was a satanic emblem.

I was working on the P&G account at the time, and our boss called us in to tell us that P&G was being plagued by a stupid rumor about their 19th Century logo having satanic connotations and that we should never, ever make jokes about this because P&G was dead serious about stamping out these rumors. We would be fired if we joked about the rumors. (P&G was the biggest, most prestigious, and by far the most important client of the market research start-up where I worked, so nervous jokes were common: e.g., P&G stood for “Procter & God.”)

As a Chicago Lakefront yuppie, I’d never heard of the rumors before I was told never to joke about them.

My impression is that the rumor was pushed by a few preachers and Amway multi-level marketers and maybe preachers who were also Amway multi-level marketers. In 2007, P&G won a $19 million judgment against Amway for spreading the rumors in 1995. Here’s one of the chain letters that was going around in the 1980s: hicks-in-the-sticks stuff.

I don’t have any proof, but I suspect the satanic daycare craziness of the same era wasn’t too distinct in cultural / demographic origins from the P&G rumor: you might call it the Fringes of the Core.

In contrast, the current madness about Rape Culture on campus and in the military has been inculcated top down by the Core of the Fringes: the Obama Administration, the universities, and the Responsible News Media (e.g., the New York Times) as part of the Democrats’ campaigns and as part of the overall feminist ideological-industrial complex.