Please be aware that this episode talks about child sexual abuse. Also, you'll get a better picture of this panic as a whole if you listen to part one first. And, and conspiracy theories that shape our psychology and culture and why we end up believing them.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American hysteria.

The children were made to chew pieces of these children's harms.

We dig up the caskets from the graveyards, and children were made to lay in the remains of whatever was in the casket.

Everything is attempted to be destroyed and killed.

In that child and in society, everything of goodness.

Almighty Satan, destroy those who love God.

If we could do a deep dive into the subconscious of America, if we could lie America down on an overpriced psychotherapist Chase Lounge, I'd really want to ask America about the 1980s, about what exactly America remembers.

In a Satan-obsessed nation where, according to one poll, 68% of people said they believe in a Satan-obsessed nation where, according to one poll,

68% of people said they believed in the devil and 60% believed the devil worship was a serious

problem. Two new characters, Stranger Danger's murderous pedophile and the Satanist

started to blur into a force, literally hell-bent on depravity that reached

unimaginable levels, or more accurately, levels of depravity that could only come from the imagination.

America created its own modern psychological archetype of evil, combining an ancient religious

villain with a brand-new social boogeyman and

voila, the satanic pedophile, not to mention his or her network of cults, materialized from

the ether. In part one of satanic panic, we touched on the cultural anxieties that were

growing through the 1970s, as women began careers and left children for the first time in the hands of relative strangers.

As the moral majority movement pushed fundamentalism into politics, we saw how the seeds of satanic hysteria were sewn through pop culture, sensational media, and religious hucksters,

directing parents' attention to the possibility that the devil and his cults might be influencing their kids.

For part two, I'll cover what's been known as satanic ritual abuse, the belief that this network of cults were also using daycare centers as fronts to physically, sexually, and emotionally abused children in grotesque

religious rituals. I'll attempt to understand how this could have happened, how for a time,

...