Panic

You won’t find Michelle Remembers on many lists of the most destructive books of the 20th Century. Published in 1980, the book focused on a hip new psychiatric practice known as “recovered-memory therapy,” which claimed the ability to draw out suppressed memories of trauma. The authors were a Canadian psychiatrist named Lawrence Pazder and a patient of his named Michelle Smith, who supposedly had recovered buried memories of Satanic ritual sexual abuse that occurred during her childhood. Pazder left his wife and married Smith just before the book’s publication.

Michelle Remembers and the therapy it peddled caught on like wildfire in the psychiatric community, which had been thrown into chaos during the 1960s and 70s as academia became rife with Marxist and “New Age” ideas of false consciousness and subjective reality. In practice, recovered-memory therapy was built on the idea that whatever a normal person thinks is true is a lie at baseline — that true experience could only be uncovered in the shrink’s chair — and it used reckless leading questions and greater reinforcement for “recollections” that were more deviant from previously believed memories. It was insane on its face, but psychiatry is a soft field even at its most rigorous. With so many “experts” onboard, the therapy soon found an especially vulnerable target population — distressed and unhappy children.

Soon thousands of children ended up in the “care” of therapists who started off with the assumption that if children were distraught, it was because they had been abused. This was all about the “discovery” of a condition that was already declared extant. And so they pried and prodded the children until they got the “memories” they wanted, like crooked cops beating a confession from a suspect. The boundary between reality and fantasy is uniquely hazy in childhood, so the process was often able to instill delusions that felt like real memories. The more nimble childhood imaginations tipped things toward the colorful and the dramatic, but therapists helped push them toward the lurid and the sexual. Children all over the country began producing psychiatry-certified accusations of wild demonic abuse at the hands of parents, teachers, day-care workers, and church pastors — the people children typically knew and spent time with. Parents balked and the accused resisted, but this was the “Science” we were talking about. The recovered memories were considered evidence enough to lock someone up. Children were pure, after all. They would never lie about such terrible things.

By the time the panic waned in the late 1980s, over 12,000 formal accusations of ritual or religious abuse had been made across the country. Families and communities were torn apart, and many went to jail for long periods of time before their sentences were overturned on lack of evidence.

Debunked and infamous, recovered-memory therapy faded into history.

The “Satanic Abuse Panic” of the 1980s is often laid at the feet of hysterical conservative Christians, but it was in fact born of progressive psychology. The accusations centered on white schools and daycares in the suburbs, and often sprang from local psychiatric practices staffed by young women that had recently gotten out of graduate school — ripe for a wave of professional claptrap that might give them a way to break from the “old-fashioned.” The Satanic part of all this came more from pop culture that the fears of those communities. Starting with Rosemary's Baby in the 1960s, demonic plotlines had become commonplace in movies and paperbacks, and provided quick and easy visual signposts for children and their parents. Remember these were Gen-X children — the “latch-key” kids — and they were consuming much more adult media than their parents had at their age, with few guidelines on how to process it.

Money was a factor. Like so many Great Society-style programs, the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act was flush with federal money and bereft of any thought-out standard for dispersement. And so funds were thrown to states on the condition that they set up some kind of system for abuse reporting, which created a feeding frenzy from cash-strapped states that competed with each other by ratcheting up the number of abuse cases they could report. In typical Great Society fashion, the more you could present yourself as a complete shitshow, the more money you could gulp from the federal spigot. Perverse incentives like this have been the order of the day in American politics for a half century now.

But this wasn’t really about money, just as the current trans mania isn’t really about Big Pharma or greedy surgeons, though such opportunists will happily capitalize. This was about poisonous ideas cooked up by high-IQ “experts” and disseminated to the ground level, where hapless people mostly trying to do good ended up ripping their communities to shreds. The target, as is ultimately the case with all leftist projects in the West, was the nuclear Christian family. It’s no coincidence that this “therapy” wasn’t rolled out among the troubled youth of the ghettos (to their credit, black parents were probably more likely to spill shrink blood when confronted with such nonsense). Some middlebrow conservatives today will point out that there actually were demonic forces that needed to be battled in the wake of America’s rolling cultural revolution — that cultish child abuse and even satanic sacrifice are very real. Any they’re right about that, but missing the point in a way only Conservatives can. Mainstream media at the time actually lambasted Christians for trying to stop the madness, not for perpetuating it. The history was rewritten later.

The Satanic Panic was about instilling false identity in the minds of children so that they would become dislocated from the parents and their community institutions. Yes there were other factors mostly connected to the general moral chaos that occurred in the wake of the 1960s, but modern psychiatry is above all about stripping the individual of their “unchosen” bonds. This lunacy of the 80s was squelched because it pitted a feminized psychiatric movement directly against parents and teachers, as well as a core American Christian culture that still had some gumption. But the core ideas didn’t go away.

And now today we have the “trans mania.” The hallmarks of social contagion and moral panic are obvious to anyone actually trying to look, as is the familiar “therapeutic” imperative of prying the addled and vulnerable from their natural foundations — this time from the very nature of their birth and their physical being. It’s worth noting that the biggest research engine behind the Satanic Panic was the UK’s Tavistock Institute, led at the time by nefarious quack Valerie Sinason. Last year, the NHS forcibly shuttered Tavistock’s gender clinic, which had been chemically castrating children in obeisance to modern trans ideology.

The trans panic promises to go on much longer than the Satanic Panic did, and do far more damage. This is because the Left has only marched further in the decades since, and now parents have the combined force of the entire system arrayed against them - psychiatry, media, teachers, schools, the state, sometimes even their own churches. Christian families are no longer permitted to publicly instill their values in their children, nor to even affirm the reality of sexual differences and immutability. They’re under attack, and aren’t even really allowed to know it. Hence the coverup of Audrey Hale’s manifesto after the Covenant School shooting in Nashville. The radical trans activists got White House accolades after that one, and were able to turn a slaughter of Christian children by one of their own into a media-lauded MLK-pantomime Civil Rights clown show in the Tennessee state house.

The malignant trans movement is moving into a pressure phase now, eager to prompt a violent reaction from conservative Christians. They’ll probably get it eventually, and that’s when this new Panic really goes into overdrive.