Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Pa…

Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"

For three years I have wanted to write an article on moral panics. I have collected anecdotes and similarities between today\u2019s moral panic and those of the past - particularly the Satanic Panic of the 80s.

This is my finished product: https://t.co/otcM1uuUDk
— Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) September 29, 2018

The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.

Never mind most of these disabled people weren't even looking at the keyboard while their helper guided their hands over it to spell out words. Or that most never went to school and learned to spell in the first place.

People WANTED TO BELIEVE it worked, so they did.

Moral panics/hoaxes like the Satanic Panic, Repressed Memory Syndrome, and FC flourish because they are abuses of the POWER OF BELIEF.

"I believe the children!" - no matter how absurd the stories got.
"I believe the therapy!" - I just remembered my dad killed 20 people!, etc.

FC was the most sympathetic hoax, since these parents desperately wanted to believe actual communication was happening, that their kids were typing real words.

But a delusion is a delusion. Humoring people has limits.

Once a moral panic gets started it's hard to stop. That's why there MUST be good solid evidence, and assuming it gets to the court state, all due process rights for the accused.

We had a minor panic just a year and a half ago where some moron looking for the satanic dungeon in the basement of a pizza parlor that didn't have a basement showed up with a f**king rifle to investigate and 'free the kids'.

Social media is not reality. 1 of the most troublesome aspects of it is how quickly bullshit spreads on here.

I'd ask people to be smarter and far more skeptical, but I know I'd be wasting my time if I did that.

Frontline documentary on the Facilitated Communication scandal:

https://t.co/RX0QIN0IiA

To get an idea of what massive problems were created by FC, watch this segment when a 'therapist' helping a child to spell, 'spelled out' that her parents were sexually abusing her & the legal case that resulted.

https://t.co/chxOwMofy5

Mistype: the child was a male, not a female.

this court case resulted in one of the FIRST attempts to scientifically verify whether FC was actually real or not.

Ponder that.

It was already being used in many schools by that time.

Of course, in a double blind test, the investigators proved the facilitator was faking it. They would show the child a cup, and the facilitator would type out the hat that they saw.

Even with this evidence, many parents refused to believe FC wasn't real.

The brutal truth is these facilitated communication facilitators who were 'helping' their students to type words were putting these words in their mouths. And it turned out many of these facilitators had very active imaginations.

Like the child therapists in the McMartin & Little Rascals day care cases, the stories tended to get more and more fantastic over time.

As you can see from the video, like the McMartin/Little Rascals cases, FC ended up with people facing CRIMINAL CHARGES.

A simple double blind test NOBODY had thought to try before managed to keep a man from being sent to prison based on a bogus hoax.

Now watch this part, which points out most of the students aren't even LOOKING at the Keyboard while typing:

https://t.co/uJ15ugs0gZ

What you're watching there is the power of belief; people simple WANTED some thing to be true so badly, they simply discounted all the evidence against it.

That's your first sign. BACK AWAY. TAKE ANOTHER LOOK. Put your skeptic cap on.

Wow. People are not too bright. I am in no way saying Jeff Sessions didn't spent the last 2 years rolling up sex trafficking & pedo rings like a mofo. That's one of the main reasons Sessions was an awesome AG.

Are people really this stupid?

I guess have to explain to the stupid people out there the Satanic Panic in the daycare centers in the 1980's, that wasn't real.

You don't like my pointing that out? I could care less.

Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"

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