Although the roots of “gaslighting” (in the sense of sowing doubt) go back eight decades, the term has become more prevalent in recent years, being named the “Most Useful/Likely to Succeed” word of 2016 by the American Dialect Society (Yagoda). This timely surge in interest in the practice of “gaslighting” is a good thing, because anyone with a critical understanding of the techniques employed by those who engage in “gaslighting” will more easily perceive how the “Satanic Panic” meme being seeded by The Satanic Temple and its “Grey Faction” aids the perpetrators of sexist and sexual violence.

“Gaslighting” has been variously been defined as “an attempt to destroy others’ perceptions of reality, and ultimately, their sanity”; pushing “a perfectly healthy person into psychosis by interpreting his own behavior to him as symptomatic of serious mental illness”; “psychologically manipulat[ing] a person into questioning their own sanity”; and as “the act of distorting reality to suit a dark purpose” (Rush 262, Yagoda, Brownmiller). The term derives from a story popularized by the 1944 film Gaslight, which stars Charles Boyer (1899–1978) as the perpetrator of “gaslighting” and Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982) as the victim, and which was based on a 1938 play written by Patrick Hamilton (1904–1962). In Gaslight, an Italian confidence artist marries the wealthy niece of a murdered London singer and tries to drive her mad so that he can have her committed to an insane asylum and take control of her inheritance. Set in the 19th century, the couple live in a house with gas-fueled light fixtures whose brightness diminishes when lights are turned on in another room of the house. One of the tactics the con man employs to make his wife doubt her sanity is to cause the lights to flicker and dim while he is out, to make it seem as if someone else were in the house turning on the lights in another room, and then, when questioned by her afterwards, to deny that it really happened. Central to the idea of gaslighting is that “if one is ignored or not believed too long and too often, one can lose one’s bearings, panic, and even go mad,” (Rush 261).

A key figure in the emergence of “gaslighting” as a commonly understood term was the second wave feminist and psychiatric social worker Florence Rush, who used it in connection to her thesis of a “Freudian coverup,” which she began to elaborate in the 1970s. The notion of a “Freudian coverup” of the phenomenon of child sexual abuse was also brought to the public’s attention by a writer named Jeffrey Masson during the early 1980s (Cheit 21). The essential claim of the “coverup” narrative is that Sigmund Freud, the “father” of psychoanalysis, helped to conceal “the extent of the sexual abuse of children” by downplaying the existence of a causal link between “sexual abuse in childhood and [psychological disorders in adulthood]” (Brownmiller, Rush 263). Freud had originally upheld the existence of such a link as the basis for his “seduction theory,” which he presented to the public in 1896 and which challenged biological-determinist explanations of mental disorder, positing a social cause instead (Rush 266). Rush and others have argued that Freud was troubled not only by his fellows’ lukewarm reception of his “seduction theory,” as well as the theory’s anti-patriarchal implications (fathers being most often the wrong-doers), and the idea that “perverted acts against children were so general” (Blumenthal), but also by his suspicions that the roots of his own mental issues with anxiety might be traced back to his father having “seduced” him (Freud) at a young age (Rush 273). It is therefore said that, largely in response to these factors, he supplanted the “seduction theory” with the “Oedipal theory,” thereby moving the locus of poor mental health’s etiology from the realm of reality to that of fantasy and, with notions such as “penis envy,” also returning to a more biological-determinist explanation. With the Oedipal theory, actual childhood sexual abuse as a pre-eminent or leading cause of mental disturbances manifesting later in the life of an individual was left by the wayside; instead, it was posited that, more often than not, “women were fantasizing childhood abuse because of their subconscious desire to sleep with their fathers,” (Brownmiller).

The fact that the “Freudian coverup” debate coincided with the day-care center abuse case “phenomenon” in the 1980s is revealing. The concomitant backlash to these cases involving allegations of abuse at day-care centers, which resulted in the formation (or rehashing) of the “Red Chinese brainwashing”-induced “false memory syndrome” and “Satanic Panic” memes (already fed to the public in prototypical form during the 1950s and 1970s as The Manchurian Candidate and “Black Magic Fear”), is supportive of Rush’s claim that despite the fact that trite dismissals of Freud and his theories as “outdated” and “passé” have become commonplace, the attitudes and tendencies which critics like Rush and Masson show to be linked with Freud’s Oedipal theory (victim-blaming, gaslighting, incredulity, etc.) nevertheless “linger on,” a case in point being the anti-feminist moral entrepreneur and Protestant minister Ralph Underwager (Rush 271). As late as 2017, the Washington Post described a three-year-old girl who in 1991 brought forward accusations of sexual abuse by a day-care provider as having “known behavioral problems” in a piece misleadingly titled “Falsely accused of satanic horrors, a couple spent 21 years in prison. Now they’re owed millions,” (WaPo). In fact, Cheit, who discusses the same case in The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children notes that “[t]he actual conviction in this case […] did not involve any claims of satanic ritual abuse,” but was based largely on the testimony of an emergency room doctor who swore that the allegation of sexual abuse was credible due to the discovery “a tear [and] lacerations” upon medical examination of the girl on the same day that the abuse was reported, which is considered “unusually strong [evidence] for a sexual abuse case” (144–147). Cheit also notes that, while accusations of ritual abuse were later connected to the case in the press after the trial was already over, “only a small number of the parents and children who were interviewed in the case” levelled claims of ritual abuse and these were not the basis upon which the couple was found guilty (ibid.). This is a good example of the way in which the “Satanic Panic” meme can be used to aid in the cover-up of sexual abuse and the generation of unwarranted skepticism. By sensationalizing child abuse investigations as “Satanic Panic,” a doctor’s sworn testimony of genital laceration and tearing becomes a story about witches flying on broomsticks. As with the supplantation of “seduction theory” by Oedipal theory, wild fantasy takes the place of plausible reality when it comes to sexual abuse.

It is easy to see how the labelling of “Satanic Ritual Abuse” as a “hoax” and “moral panic” provides abusers with a reliable cover and powerful weapon. Simply by making sure some basic religious ceremonial paraphernalia, such as black robes, candles, thuribles (incense dispensers), or even antependia (altar cloths), are present during the perpetration of a crime such as gang rape, abusers can cause serious doubt to be cast upon the credibility of anyone coming forward to report the crime, particularly in the case of delayed disclosure, at which time the religious paraphernalia may have been discarded, destroyed, or well-hidden. To make matters worse, a survivor of a crime committed in these circumstances is liable to be told that their disclosure of abuse is a sign that they suffer from psychosis, that “false memory syndrome” is “appropriately descriptive terminology” for their condition, adding an extra level of shame and stigmatization to their victimhood; not only is the survivor disbelieved, they are also alleged to be mentally ill. The fact that crimes such as gang rape and sadistic murder do happen, and the fact that such religious paraphernalia, or materials for their making, can readily be purchased, make it clear that anyone who argues, like Douglas Misicko, that belief in the reality of sex offenders having adopted the religious trappings of Satanism within the context of committing illegal acts can be equated with beliefs in “alien abduction” and “past life regression” is downright disingenuous. Even if such crimes were not already known to have occurred (see several examples, such as Eddie Lee Sexton, Daniel and Manuela Ruda, the “Ripper Crew,” and others, below), “Satanic ritual abuse” would be an eminently plausible criminal modus operandi.

Thanks to the invention of the “Satanic Panic” meme, it’s not even necessary for abusers to go through the trouble of performing Satanic cosplay. Any widespread effort or collective action to redress sexual violence can be dismissed as an exaggeration by highlighting the ways in which it shares similarity to “the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and ’90s.” Once the narrative has been sown that the “profane masses” are quite vulnerable to regular hysterical fits of irrational “sex panic,” any particular sexual abuse accusation must then be ascribed to this general social climate and viewed through the prism of “witch-hunting.” This allows abusers to frame themselves as the real “victims” of an irrational “moral panic,” and to frame sexual abuse as a figment of the imagination.

That the “Satanic Panic” meme provides a ready-made device to dismiss any progressive movement in the realm of sexual politics as yet another “moral panic” (or “the new Satanic Panic”) is obvious when we look at the backlash to #MeToo, one of the most recent feminist mass movements against sexual violence. Comparison of #MeToo to “the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s” has become a staple of the current wave of reactionary backlash. (See: Galloway; Sommers; Wypijewski; Tavris; Levine; O’Neill; Dianny; Schulte; Carlson; Carter; Beck; /r/MensRights users on Reddit; etc.)

The fact that reactionaries and sexual violence apologists are invoking the “Satanic Panic” meme in an effort to gaslight the public and neutralize the rising tendency, associated with #MeToo, to treat victims of sexual abuse as credible eyewitnesses to their own life experience presents a dilemma. When we analyze this dilemma, a couple of important conclusions can be discerned. First, to accept at face value the reactionaries’ narrative of “the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s” (which, lest we forget, was concocted by open pedophilia apologists who blamed allegations of sexual abuse at day-care centers on feminists using “Red Chinese brainwashing” on children) already means surrendering in the fight to affirm the credibility of survivors. Second, and following from the first point, it is a moral outrage to respond to the reactionaries’ equation of #MeToo with “Satanic Panic” by throwing victims of abuse, whose credibility has been assaulted through widespread “Satanic Panic” propaganda, under the bus for a second time by saying, “Sexual abuse investigations in the 1980s and 1990s were a real moral panic, but now things are different.” This kind of pseudo-opposition only furthers gaslighting and preserves the viability of the “Satanic Panic” meme as a shield for abusers.

Rather than attempting to play up “respectability politics” by buying into the backlash narrative of a previous generation of Red Scaremongering anti-feminist reactionaries and rebuffing suggestions that the recent and likely to be ongoing disclosures of sexual abuse associated with #MeToo are similar to the disclosures of “Satanic ritual abuse” associated with “the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s,” we would do better to consider the renewed spotlight on “Satanic Panic” as an opportunity to reassess the legacy of the so-called “Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s,” the duplicitousness with which the narrative has been constructed, and the ways in which the attribution of the “moral panic” label has been, and continues to be, weaponized against women and the Left. A new feminist and antifascist movement might then recognize the role which Satanists have played in legitimizing and covering for fascists under the trite pretexts of “free speech” and “individual defiance [of the ‘oppressive collectivity’].” This would also allow the political Left, with its emphasis on the collective and the social, to reckon with its naturally anti-Satanic connotations; i.e., with the moral judgement that the scourge of class society—with its social atomization via racism, sexism, and militarism—being evil, is Satanic. The Left must morally judge that modern Satanism, being (1) materially, recently concocted, with strong links to imperialist-militarist psychological warfare operations, and (2) theologically, a reactionary, double-mystifying inversion of the Judeo-Christian worldview, is not a legitimate world religion, but rather a fascist sectarianism antithetical to all ethical standards, against whom ruthlessly repressive direct action is therefore necessarily justified. If, for Karl Marx, legitimate world religions were the opiates (painkillers) of the masses, let us now consider that fascist cults and pyramid schemes passing themselves off as “new religious movements,” no matter what religious tradition they may culturally appropriate or pretend to devolve from, or what pseudo-historical “secret tradition” they claim to be based on, are their lethal injection cocktail.

It can also be observed that peddlers of the “Anti-Satanic Witch Hunt” narrative employ the gaslight treatment in their continual moving of the goalposts when it comes to defining “Satanic ritual abuse” (sometimes abbreviated as SRA). Groups such as The Satanic Temple’s “Grey Faction” typically define the term “Satanic ritual abuse” in such a way that the phenomenon necessarily comprises a maximally elaborate conspiracist outlook. “SRA skeptics” essentially demand that there must be proof that any crime alleged to be “Satanic” in nature was perpetrated by a Satanic cult which is “multigenerational,” highly organized, CIA-backed, and even “secretly in control of the nursery school/day-care center industry,” in order to be recognized as bona fide “Satanic Ritual Abuse™.” Unless a Satanist goes the whole nine outlandish yards, drowning bats in pools of blood and feeding black cats on nothing but human flesh for five days at a time before decapitating them for their rituals (as described by Éliphas Lévi), they can be dismissed as mere “dabblers” and it can be said that “real” Satanism is a therefore a figment of the imagination of witch-hunters. This makes it easy to maintain the “SRA hoax” narrative by summarily dismissing any case that doesn’t fit this bill, such as those of “lone wolf” Satanists and small groups of Satanists pursuing a “leaderless resistance” strategy and operating as autonomous cells, as not constituting solid evidence of genuine “Satanic Ritual Abuse™.”

In this way, the issue of “lone wolf” Satanists such as Richard Ramirez, who perpetrated a series of brutal murders and rapes in 1984 and 1985, infamously forcing his victims to “swear to Satan” whilst sexually abusing them (Associated Press), can essentially be ignored and considered as not meeting the maximally conspiracist criteria of the “moral panic” narrative’s conception of “Satanic ritual abuse.” The problem with this rote dismissal of “lone wolf” ritualistic crime by Satanists, as though it were completely irrelevant to assessing claims about the reality of “Satanic ritual abuse,” is of course the fact that religious Satanism is known to strongly favor idealistic notions such as “individual autonomy,” which The Satanic Temple terms “personal sovereignty” (Blackmore). Although TST appears to try to temper its language by claiming to merely stand against the exercise of “arbitrary authority” (as opposed to legitimate authority), we have seen that TST does in fact esoterically pay homage to the Process Church, a group which interpreted the principle of “personal sovereignty” in an absolutist way. It was this “personal sovereignty” absolutism which provided the basis for the Process Church’s antisocial conception of the Satanist as a person who is hostile to “all the standards of morality, all ethics, all human codes of behavior,” (Introvigne 331–332). Make no mistake about it: the “free speech” and “personal sovereignty” absolutism associated with TST and its neo-Nazi platforming associates (e.g., Bugbee) implies nothing less than an antisocial assault on all ethics and morality. Representing the Order of Nine Angles, “Stephen Brown” (said to be another pseudonym of David Myatt, or possibly a man named Richard Moult [Kaplan]), in his “philosophical” dispute with Aquino’s Temple of Set stemming from the latter’s refusal, starting in the late 1980s, to cooperate with the former any longer due to its association with open advocacy of ritualistic human sacrifice and child sexual abuse (via “a group calling itself The Brotherhood of Balder,” whose magazine claimed “working relationships” with the ONA and another sect led by a certain “James Martin,” a “Setian” Satanist who advocated pedophilia), puts it this way:

“In the [Left Hand Path], there is nothing that is restricted or forbidden – each Initiate make [sic] their choice, and acts. By proscribing certain things, and having a code of ethics, the Temple of Set is acting like a restrictive [Right Hand Path] organization. It is also not being Satanic when it insists that members be submissive to its doctrines and views. Satanism, of the genuine kind, is concerned with individual defiance – a Satanist never submits to anyone or anything,” (32, my emphasis in bold).

Satanism’s penchant for idealizing “personal sovereignty” is an expression of the practical unity between Satanists and neo-fascist ideology. The meme of Satanism-cum-“personal sovereignty” is a close cousin to those of so-called “lone wolf tactics” and “the leaderless resistance strategy,” memes which have gained widespread traction among right-wing fanatics in no small part due Tom Metzger, a leading neo-Nazi and Klan figure in the US since the 1970s and an open associate of Satanic Temple leader Douglas Misicko. If neo-Nazis embrace so-called “lone wolf” tactics, and individuals who profess to be Satanists are themselves often openly neo-Nazi, then it stands to reason that there is considerable overlap between the Satanic formulation of “personal sovereignty” and the neo-Nazi formulation of the “lone wolf.”

“Lone wolf” ideology weaponizes the notion of “personal sovereignty” in that it conceptualizes the white supremacist struggle as being decentralized and primarily advanced by autonomously acting individuals. This cultivates the impression given to outsiders that the practical operations of adherents to white supremacist ideology are decentralized to such an extent so as to not even constitute the organized activity of a singular entity, making them harder to counteract. Although the goal of “lone wolf” ideology is to give the impression that phenomena such as mass shootings can only be attributed to atomized individuals and not an organized group or groups, we see that, in reality, white supremacist terrorism is memetically coordinated through the cultivation of “lone wolf” subcultures which psychologically program virtual armies of “lone wolves” who all share a certain set of ideas in common. It is this common set of ideas—or, more accurately, shared feeling of reactionary hostility to the international working class—which shows the “lone wolf” narrative to be a farce, a way of disguising the elephant in the room. As one writer puts it, “Today’s ‘lone wolf’ killers are actually a pack” (Thompson). That was the title of an article responding to one of the more recent (23 April 2018) terrorist attacks by another festering branch of the contemporary far-right known as the “incel” movement. (NB: incel or “involuntary celibate” is a net-centric and misogynistic reactionary movement of men who seek to hold scapegoats responsible for their own apparent lack of social skills adequate to the establishment of romantic or sexual relationships).

The Order of Nine Angles, which is linked to The Satanic Temple through its origins in the Church of Satan as well as through semiotic indicators tying it to the TST-linked Temple ov Psychick Youth and Tempel ov Blood (see: 3.2.1.1 and 6.1.1), evokes this cultivation of a subculture to psychologically program Satanic “lone wolves” in no uncertain terms, referring to “conditions [which] provide […] opportunities [for] increasing the number of genuine practitioners of the Black Arts and of making available […] the methods and techniques of those Arts” as “opportunities for seeding Satanism” (26).

As we have seen, key Satanic Temple figures such as Douglas Misicko and Shane Bugbee have openly flaunted their cordial relations with white supremacist Tom Metzger, who popularized the term “lone wolf” among white supremacists as the best approach to “Racial Holy War” (Burke). It is clear that this approach has struck a chord with white supremacists in recent years, with a significant number of attacks, such as the 2015 Charleston African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting and the 2018 Stoneman-Douglas High School shooting (NB: almost half of the Stoneman-Douglas student body is Jewish [Lifson]), having been carried out as “lone wolf” style attacks on ethno-religious groups which leading Satanist ideologues have expressed disdain for (including Misicko, who—lest we forget—has said that he thinks “it’s okay to hate [religious] Jews” and openly tried to convince neo-Nazi leader and former Ku Klux Klan “Grand Dragon” Tom Metzger to support his model of “intelligence”-based eugenics by insinuating that it would be just as effective in decreasing the number of Black people in existence as would a race-based eugenics program). Moreover, in multiple recent “lone wolf” style mass shootings (namely, the May 2018 attack on Santa Fe High School in Texas and the March 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand, which together resulted in the deaths of 60 people), the perpetrators posted Satanism-denoting symbols (the “Sigil of Baphomet” and the “black sun”) online before carrying out the attacks (see: Introduction; Edison; Buntovnik).

In another sign of the times, the recently apprehended suspect of the April 2019 arson of three predominantly African-American churches in Louisiana was revealed to have “commented on posts about neo-Nazi black metal musician Kristian ‘Varg’ Vikernes” in the run-up to the crime spree (BBC News). Vikernes (1973–present), who took part in an organized Satanist arson campaign targeting churches in Norway during the early to mid 1990s, now runs a neo-Nazi propaganda channel on Youtube called “ThuleanPerspective.” In a video published there in 2016 and titled “About Satanism in the Norwegian Black Metal Scene 1991–1993,” Vikernes disingenuously claims that “many [of the arsonists] used Satanic imagery, many used a Satanic theme, many said that they were Satanists or claimed that they were Satanists and some even thought they were Satanists, but none of them were Satanists,” going on to use innuendo (presumably to avoid censorship), with a sarcastic caption reading “Oy vey! Stop this goy! Shut him down NOW!” appearing on screen as he talks about LaVey having changed his name from Levi (sic) in order to imply that, because members of Norway’s “original” Satanic black metal scene disliked the Church of Satan on account of Anton LaVey’s “Jewish” identity (dubious, for reasons that will be explained in 6.3.3), they can’t be considered “real” Satanists. Vikernes’ other claim, that the black metal scene never engaged in “ritual” and therefore wasn’t “really” Satanic, is also demonstrably false, since the action of repeatedly burning down churches in the name of Satanism and performing Satanism-themed music obviously entails “a set of fixed actions and sometimes words performed regularly” (Cambridge Dictionary, “ritual”).

Also revealing of the relationship between organized Satanism and “lone wolf” Satanic crime is a statement made by Douglas Misicko’s old friend Shane Bugbee, who (besides having been instrumental in the creation of The Satanic Temple) declared in a podcast recorded sometime in 2004 his “respect” for “lone wolf” Satanic serial rapist and murderer Richard Ramirez, saying:

“I’m for doing. And I’m for people that do stuff and I don’t care what they do, as long as they can accept their responsibility, for what they’ve done. A lot of people think I worship serial killers ’cause of some of the stuff I do, [but] I don’t have a whole hell of a lot of respect for [serial killers] ’cause they always cry, ‘Mama made me do it,’ or ‘I didn’t do it’—I respect Richard Ramirez, ’cause he said he liked it. He did it [i.e., embraced Satanism and committed numerous rapes and at least thirteen murders], and he liked it. So I can respect that.” (Bugbee, 18:20)

Even when proof does emerge that Satanists form groups, conspire to commit ritualistic crime, and inspire one another not only to commit “lone wolf” crimes, but also organize their own “covens” or cells, proponents of the “moral panic” narrative find ways to dismiss this, usually by holding these cases up to a maximally improbable set of “SRA skeptic”-approved standards and criteria according to which “authentic” Satanic Ritual Abuse™ is, by definition, consigned to the realm of fantasy. Since “SRA skeptics” posit that Satanic Ritual Abuse™ is a hoax by definition, any case in which the religious trappings of Satanism were incorporated into the commission of a crime is “No True Satanism.” Representatives of the “modern Satanism” movement claim that “true” Satanism is based on “individual defiance” and “personal sovereignty,” but when Satanists act out as individuals, or in very small groups, to commit crime in apparently “isolated cases” (as one would expect most Satanic ritual crime to be committed, if the rhetoric about “personal sovereignty” were to be believed), this is paradoxically claimed to not constitute “real” Satanic Ritual Abuse™, because, according to “SRA skeptics” and Satanic Panic™ narrative propagandists, believers in the existence of Satanic Ritual Abuse™, like “former” COINTELPRO agent and Nazi-sympathizer Ted Gunderson (see 6.3.1), claim that Satanist groups conducting rituals of a criminal nature are highly organized (bonus points for “Illuminati”). This is of course completely arbitrary; a conspiracy is a conspiracy no matter its scale.

When mainstream media organizations such as the Washington Post and the Independent report, as both did in 2017, that organized crime groups do indeed conduct “satanic rituals, such as hacking a victim to death and scattering the organs on the ground in a pentagonal shape,” Satanism apologists chime in in the comments section with statements like, “Satanists reject the existence of Satan as an entity. It’s Christians who believe he exists. These folks are just deluded Christians who are siding with that religions [sic] adversary,” (Miller). Similarly, Satanic Temple frontman Douglas Misicko disavows criminal practitioners of Satanism with statements like, “I’m sure [they] held no active role in any established form of religious Satanism,” and “supernatural belief in […] Satan […] is almost certainly the product of a Christian upbringing,” (Dancyger). This of course ignores the fact that a Satanist who does not believe in the supernatural can nevertheless engage in Satanic rituals either as a way to keep their victims silent (knowing that a report of rape or sexual abuse in a Satanic ritual setting is unlikely to be believed) or as a way to exploit fear of the supernatural in victims, as Misicko himself did when he engaged in an act of grave desecration in an attempt to provoke members of the Westboro Baptist Church (see: 7.2), or as British military intelligence did during the Troubles in Ireland (see: 6.1.1), or as the FBI did during COINTELPRO (see: 6.1.1 and 6.3.1). For the “modern Satanism” apologist, the Satanist is, by definition, a harmless creature, who would only ever use Satanic rituals as psychological operations for morally upstanding, politically “progressive” causes like “separation of church and state,” crushing Irish Republicanism, and disrupting the anti-war movement; if anyone does do something harmful in the name of Satanism, they are a psychotic Christian whose religious programming has simply gone haywire.

Needless to say, this insinuation that theistic Satanists are not “really” Satanists (but rather Christians, in actuality!) because “supernatural belief in […] Satan […] is almost certainly the product of a Christian upbringing,” is incredibly hypocritical, considering that the “literary” Satan which members of The Satanic Temple claim to “non-superstitiously” believe in is a product of Christianity (or at least of heretical strains of Christian thought) as well. For example, TST often refer to the Satan that they believe in as a “Miltonic Satan” (an allusion to the portrayal of Satan in the epic Paradise Lost [1667]), but that work’s author, John Milton (1608–1674), was a Puritan. William Blake (1757–1827), another literary figure cited as providing the basis for TST’s version of “Satan,” was a proponent of neo-Marcionism, the view that there is enmity between Jesus Christ (or the God of the New Testament) and the God of Israel (or the God of the Old Testament), considered a heresy by the Church, but nevertheless an idea which is inherently grounded in debates within Christianity (see: Chapter 8). Moreover, based on the facts that (1) it is not rare to encounter comments like, “Satan is a pretty big dive down for many of us […] who grew up in very religious families and then somehow ended up here,” on “The Satanic Temple official forum” (the crypto-fascist sect’s Facebook group), (2) TST says it “embrace[s] blasphemy as a legitimate expression of personal independence from counter-productive traditional norms,” (Raymond), and (3) so-called “Unbaptism rituals” are a staple activity of TST, we can see that atheistic or “literary” Satanism, as an act of aestheticized anti-religious rebellion, is just as much “the product of a Christian upbringing,” as practicing theistic Satanism is. In fact it is probably more so, because the young person wishing to rebel their oppressively religious, perhaps Christofascist family, is immensely more likely to view negation of belief in God–not affirmation of belief in an evil god–as the rebellious thing to do.

Examples of organized Satanic crime groups are numerous and include the “Ripper Crew” of Chicago, Illinois (a group of three men who performed Satanic rituals involving the torture, rape, breast amputation, cannibalization, and/or murder of at least 18 women in 1981 and 1982); “Atomwaffen Division” (the currently active Satanic neo-Nazi group whose ideology is rooted, like that of The Satanic Temple, in the ideas of the Process Church [4.2]), which, as of 2018, had been implicated in at least five murders; and Daniel and Manuela Ruda, a Satanist couple from Germany who, in 2001, taking inspiration from an earlier Satanic murder in 1993, ritually sacrificed a man in the presence of “a black oak coffin, models of human skulls, upturned crosses and Nazi SS rune stones” in a room whose “walls were covered in black cloths” and which had “the slogan ‘When Satan Lives’ […] scrawled on the window” (Connolly). Proponents of the “moral panic” meme dismiss and ignore these and other known examples of multi-perpetrator Satanic crime, falsely claiming that “Satanic ritual abuse” can, by definition, be nothing other than a figment of hysterical imaginations. In this way, an intentional misrepresentation of how modern Satanism actually operates is propagated.

We see the same pattern of negationism when proof of “multigenerational” Satanism emerges, such as with the case of Satanist father Eddie Lee Sexton (1942–2010), who manipulated his children, some of whom he also impregnated, into committing multiple murders during the 1990s. Short of discovering in Sexton’s possession cuneiform tablets detailing a Satanic family tree going back 3,000 years to Ancient Babylon, or some such outlandish and fantastical thing, the negationists can smugly downplay the significance of intergenerational trauma, insofar as it comprises a causal link between “sexual abuse in childhood and [psychological disorders in adulthood]” theorized by Sigmund Freud and Florence Rush (263). Once again, this off-hand dismissal of evidence and steadfast, dogmatic adherence to belief in the narrative that Satanic organized crime is “a hoax” is of course completely arbitrary; a process or phenomenon is “intergenerational” or “multigenerational” so long as it involves interaction between members of distinct generations, no matter for how many generations this process repeats itself or whether the number of generations involved is a multiple of one, two, or ten. One might also here ponder the fact that Anton LaVey’s daughters, Karla LaVey (1952–present) and Zeena Schreck (1963–present), also became prominent figures within modern Satanism in their own right, the latter further cultivating the neo-Nazi cult of personality surrounding Charles Manson by starring in Charles Manson Superstar, a film directed by her Satanist and neo-Nazi husband, Nikolas Schreck. (We may also note that, like Douglas Misicko, Nikolas Schreck has taken part in cordial broadcast interviewing with “lone wolf” propagandist Tom Metzger [“Nazi Interviews Satanic Goth, Nikolas Schreck”]). LaVey’s grandson, Stanton Zaharoff LaVey, has similarly carried on the family “tradition” of being a Satanist. In 2011, he and his girlfriend were accused of holding a teenage girl hostage in their home and sexually assaulting her (Sun Gazette).

In summary, we can see that the (mis-)attribution of the “moral panic” label to a historical episode (in this case, the uproar over Satanism and child abuse which is claimed to have begun in the 1980s and involved several organizations whose leaders advocated evil, murder, Nazism, incest, and pedophilia, and which was precipitated by the endorsement by Western military and intelligence officials of a policy of cultivating and weaponizing the fear of Satanism) is a significant psychological weapon in the arsenal of groups seeking to gaslight society and discredit and neutralize social movements. Those practices which we have seen to be quintessential to gaslighting, such as sowing doubt about one’s ability to accurately perceive reality in order to undermine confidence in said ability, are at the heart of what the “moral panic” narrative is all about.

CONTINUE READING… 6.3 Scientology’s Anti-Psychiatry Protocols: “Brain-Washing” and the Myth of the Judeo-Bolshevik “Psych”

OR RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS (Anatomy of a Crypto-Fascist Sect: The Unauthorized Guide to “The Satanic Temple”)