Satanic Panic of the 1980s Is Happening Again — This Time in Minnesota Daycares (w/ Sarah Marshall)
There Are No Girls on the Internet
iHeartPodcasts
4.1 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
A viral video. A smeared daycare worker. A community in panic. Sound familiar?
In the 1980s, a wave of hysteria swept the country, accusing daycare workers of abusing children in Satanic rituals — accusations that ruined lives and were entirely false. Now, a dubious video out of Minnesota is sparking the same kind of moral panic all over again.
To make sense of the moment, I sat down with Sarah Marshall, host of the new CBC podcast The Devil You Know, to trace the through-line from the Satanic Panic to today's daycare scandals — and ask what it says about us that we keep falling for this.
Listen to Sarah's podcast The Devil You Know wherever you get your podcasts!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:04.6 | It's begun to feel less like this bizarre chapter of history |
| 0:09.2 | than maybe a preview of what we're inside of now. |
| 0:18.8 | There are no girls on the internet as a production of IHeart Radio and UnBoss Creative. |
| 0:26.9 | I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. |
| 0:32.1 | It may seem like forever ago now, but last month we had a national conversation about daycares. |
| 0:39.5 | Are daycares all scams? Are they being run by people who are actually threats to our kids? |
| 0:46.8 | The conversation was specifically taking place in Minnesota, and the baseless attacks on daycare |
| 0:53.3 | workers felt kind of familiar to me. |
| 0:55.9 | So I turned to Sarah Marshall, who is pretty much my podcast idol. |
| 1:01.2 | Sarah hosts the podcast You're Wrong About and has a new show with the CBC called The Devil |
| 1:06.8 | You Know about the satanic panic of the 1980s that baselessly accused daycare workers |
| 1:12.7 | of harming kids as part of satanic rituals. |
| 1:20.5 | I became interested in the satanic panic initially and I think about 2012 when I was in |
| 1:25.8 | grad school and I was a baby teacher |
| 1:28.6 | and I was a teacher whose skills were in their infancy. |
| 1:33.5 | I was not teaching actual babies. |
| 1:36.8 | And I remember finding a Texas Monthly article about the case of Fran and Dan Keller in the Austin article, |
| 1:43.8 | which was a big satanic panic case of Fran and Dan Keller in the Austin article, which was a big |
| 1:44.3 | satanic panic case of the 80s, and encountering at around that same time the documentary |
| 1:50.1 | about the West Memphis 3, Paradise Lost, and just feeling like I had encountered some kind |
... |
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