This article appeared on the "Loompanics" website around 2001 - the original owners were no longer able to maintain the site as the personal website days were often a very expensive hobby and when they changed such as essentially unlimited and 100% Letter of the Law Free Speech - via Dreamhost and others - the "Social Media" trend was taking over. This article has been archived in various places for years but I found it impossible to find recently and so have decided to "Mirror" it myself for nostalgia and relevance.
Thus for the sake of and with permission stated at the end of the site by the owners I am -re-archiving this article originally posted from Loompanics about the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s. This is for the TTRPG community of today experiencing a fake "Woke" politics that masks Omega Stage capitalism and will likely lead to "Satanic Panic 2.0" once the looting and smearing rainbow fecal matter phase is over.
The Article will be presented fully as original - and commentary made after:
Again this era had it so most sites allowed and begged others to "Mirror" them as when a site got popular it could instantly become obscenely expensive and ruinous before the popularity could gather any advertisement to compensate.
Another thing - This was written by "Thom Metzger" who wrote a lot for them - anarchist free thinker no relation save common in some areas last name to another more notorious Th Metzger... link to books on Goodreads!
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----Article Begin - "The Satan Sellers"--------------
[2001 Online Catalog] [Writer's Guidelines ] [Articles and Features] [Author of the Month]
© 2001 by Th. Metzger
Artwork © 2001 by Nick Bougas
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The Satan Sellers
by Th. Metzger
In a police state, crude and unwieldy, the populace fears the police. But higher up the chain of political evolution, fear is not just a tool of the thug with a badge and a truncheon. It is amorphous, almost gaseous, the air we breathe.
Fear, like nerve gas, paralyzes some and destroys the minds of others. It reduces us to simpering, sniveling children. Fear is a vaccine, inoculating us against autonomous thought.
What better way to short circuit reason, burn out logic and self-control than to steep us in nebulous fear?
What better way to short circuit reason, burn out logic and self-control than to steep us in nebulous fear? And what better way to toxify the atmosphere than to convince a nation that its children are in grave danger? Rumor, innuendo, paranoid fantasy, the photo of the so-called crime scene flashed so fast before your eyes that all you can see is a daub of crimson and a cryptic, supposedly Satanic, symbol: these are more insidious than an occasional nightstick party.
When the sentimental and naïve cult of the child is confronted by images of ultimate evil -- drug-addled murderous pervert devil-worshippers -- fear saturates the air like the miasma of plague. Competent, reasonable adults become dim-witted and docile as sheep. We fear -- we believe what we re told -- we obey.
In schoolroom lectures, seminars, sermons and sensationalist books, the word went out: Satan is on the loose again, ravaging the land, ravishing the young. And on TV, reporters blew their noxious breath on the flames, stoking the coals to a high hysteria.
Who better than the 1980 s prince of self-satisfied sleaze, Geraldo Rivera, to sum up the mania? There are over one million Satanists in this country. The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secret network. The odds are that this is happening in your town.
The warning bells rang in church towers, and the populace, like medieval peasants, swarmed out to hunt and kill the invisible enemy.
Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority had ushered their senile spokesman into the White House. AIDS killed more in a week than authentic Satanists killed the entire bleak decade. Rambo refought the Vietnam debacle as a muscle-boy wet dream. Schwarzenegger murdered his way into America s heart, the new Aryan Avatar. TV s sermonizing shysters bilked millions from their viewers and the biggest theft in human history -- the great S & L scam -- reached its abysmal peak. Pop culture metastasized into every cell of the body politic and the sirens screamed Satan is here, Satan is back, and he wants your kids.
Yes, the eighties were a dismal decade, but the bad clothes and worse music were a pimple as compared to the cancer that seethed in America s guts.
In the wake of Reagan and Falwell and their ilk, a form of hysteria gripped the country and through thousands of nutcase conferences, TV schlockumentaries, college-level courses in health education and the inexhaustible grindings of the vast idiot rumor mill, the hysteria was kept alive. Satan s minions were stalking the land, searching for new kiddie victims. They thirsted for blood, hungered for child-meat, lusted for fresh virginal flesh.
And this imbecilic hysteria, which would be funny if hundreds weren t still in prison for their imaginary crimes, reached its tentacles into every state, every city, every school, and every fear-mired soul.
Satan-hunters claimed repeatedly that nearly 60,000 Americans were killed every year in secret occult rituals. This figure is greater than the yearly suicide and murder tolls combined. But the absence of reason and proof were no stumbling blocks for the self-appointed guardians of public safety. One source of supposed victims were the so-called altar-babies, secretly conceived and born to Satanic breeders, specifically for sacrifice. No birth certificates and no record of a missing child. But a far greater threat was kidnapping and near-term babies murdered by their own mothers in the abortionist s clinics and then quietly taken by the Satanist nurse or doctor for his or her own uses.
Cult cops such as Mitch White of the Beaumont, California, Police Department claimed that 95 percent of all missing children are victims of occult-related abductions. This, at a time when the F.B.I. recorded 200 to 300 stranger kidnappings a year nationwide (the rest being child custody tug-o-wars). But why did no mutilated, violated corpses come to light?
Bizzare explanations abound. Some say that cult members burned the bodies in portable high-temperature ovens. According to some, the bodies were buried in double-decker graves under other, legitimately buried bodies. Another explanation: the bodies were disposed of in a crematorium by a mortician cult member. Some say the offenders cannibalized the corpses, while, according to others, Satan used his magical powers to make the bodies disappear.
This imbecilic hysteria would be funny if hundreds weren't still in prison for their imaginary crimes.
Such statements make plain the fundamentalist underpinnings of the anti-cult cult. Though some nonreligious DAs exploited the fears to get reelected and some TV ratings whores used the panic to prop up their careers, Satanic hysteria is at its roots a religious movement.
If one truly frightening thing happened in the 80s, it was the way paranoids and hate-mongers got slick, high-tech and media savvy. They were no longer unwashed yahoos and products of inbreeding. They learned the subtle and sophisticated ways of manipulating the populace: TV, mass mailings and later, the Internet. And though their mania was clearly religious in nature, in order to make it sell to the general, nonfundamentalist population, it was cast in terms of sadistic crime, not blasphemy and sin. You didn t need to believe in a real, personal Satan to be terrified of Satanists. It doesn t matter if the Lord of Darkness exists, as long as his vicious acolytes do. They were real; they were widespread, powerful, insidious, secretive and virtually impossible to detect.
For obvious reasons (no body, no crime) very few arrests were made of accused ritual murderers. But hundreds of men and women were arrested for an infinitely easier crime to prosecute: sex abuse. The little victims were everywhere. And even if there was no evidence that would stand up outside a kangaroo court, even if the claims were ludicrous (kids spirited away on secret airplane rides, biologically impossible couplings, implanting bombs in kids stomachs, chocolate-covered feces, etc.), even if not one frame of kiddie porn has ever been found that shows children from the ritual abuse cases, still the fear-mongers had their so-called victims.
The most prominent instance was the McMartin preschool abuse case. This longest criminal proceeding in U.S. history managed to convict no one, but it stirred up such a frenzy of fear that dozens of copycat cases sprung up, in some instances putting totally innocent people in prison for life. Eager DAs, therapists who used the Satan-scare to milk millions in grant money from the government, cult cops like Sandi Gallant and Ted Gunderson who made paranoia pay, were more than willing to travel and speak, to give lectures and flog books about the devil-worshipping conspiracy, to serve as expert witnesses at trials where ridiculous claims, tissue-thin evidence, and such novel techniques as interrogating preschoolers with devil puppets and dismembered Barbies, sent dozens to prison.
The McMartin case begins with a motif that recurs endlessly in this wretched tale: a strange interest in other people s rectums. Judy Johnson, the initial fingerpointer and hysteric, was quite simply obsessed with her son s anus, taking him to the hospital for imaginary rectal problems and making repeated inspections on her own. A woman with a long history of mental illness (she later told the police that someone had broken into her house and sodomized her dog) Judy Johnson used her rectal obsession as a kind of psychic lightning rod, directing much of her anxiety, hatred of medicine, and paranoia toward the offending orifice.
On August 11, 1983, she came to the delusional conclusion that her son had been sodomized at the McMartin preschool. From this seed grew the 28-month-long McMartin trial, ruined lives, the blossoming careers of Satan-hunters and the flourishing of protective agencies such as the Children s Institute International (C.I.I.).
Looking back a decade and a half later, it s obvious that Johnson was a pathetic, delusional drunk. She claimed to have divine powers, threatened people with a shotgun, and ended her life in a pool of vomit, dead from liver failure. Yet she was the prime accuser on which the case was based: tales of rampant sexual abuse, child pornography, Satanic rituals and cannibalism. The extent of the investigation that followed -- which gleaned not one single scrap of incriminating evidence -- is astonishing. Hundreds of families were interviewed by dozens of investigators (all at public expense). Twenty one homes, seven businesses, 37 cars and even a National Park hundreds of miles away were ransacked for evidence. Thousands of pornographic movies and photos were checked over, searched uselessly for the face of any children who claimed to have been abused. The F.B.I. and Interpol in Europe were called into the case. Excavations were made under buildings, looking for the secret tunnel system where Satanic rituals were thought to have taken place. Known pedophiles and supposed Satanists and a psychic were questioned. The result? Absolutely no sign of abuse. But, of course, this didn t stop the crusaders from targeting new enemies of purity.
Judy Johnson s obsession with blood rites and the goat man, candles and her son s anus might seem now to be the stuff of bad jokes. But local police and the state of California took her very seriously. In 1983 and 1984 over 400 kids were extensively grilled about alleged sex crimes and for each of these interviews, the C.I.I. billed the state $455.
Dr. Bruce Woodling, whose testimony was crucial in many of the sex abuse cases, developed the anal wink" test to determine if a child had been sodomized.
In the McMartin case, and dozens that followed, the rectal and genital inspections constituted real sexual abuse. However, it was doctors of medicine, not the dark arts, who performed the bizarre rites. They stripped hundreds of children naked, stretched and measured their private parts and then took close-up, high magnification photos. Many of these crotch-shots were then shown in courtrooms, a perfect example of the moral watchdogs becoming, or acting out, exactly what they claim to most hate. Like the Meese Commission s total immersion in rough sex, bestiality and fecal love, the Satan-hunters dove deep into their own private pools of filth.
Dr. Bruce Woodling, whose testimony was crucial in many of the sex abuse cases, developed the anal wink test to determine if a child had been sodomized. In the exam room, he pulled apart the child s buttocks and touched the rectum with a cotton swab. If the anus came apart -- winked in Woodling s testimony -- this was proof of sodomy. With his anal wink test and by sticking glass tubes in kids rectums, Woodling convinced juries and judges that Satanists had indeed abused their innocent little victims. In one case, pictures of little girls with their vaginal lips spread wide apart by Woodling s fingers were waved at a jury like placards at a football game. In a rancid-smelling theater full of scummy old men, this would be the vilest of kiddie porn; in a court of law, it is scientific evidence.
Similarities to the Salem witch-hunters search for the devil s marks on supposed slaves of Satan are impossible to ignore. In Puritan Massachusetts, but hundreds of times elsewhere too, women were stripped naked and inspected by divines and learned men to find witch s teats or other secret marks where the devil had fed on the witch s vital juices. An egregious example is Rebecca Nurse, aged 71, who was stripped and publicly examined. The witch-hunters found a preternatural excressense of flesh between ye pudendum and anus, causing the judge to demand a guilty verdict from the hesitant jury. Nurse was hanged by the neck as a confirmed minion of Satan.
Naked children on display, human sacrifice, bestiality, ravening murderous rage, cannibalism and anal violation: these are endlessly recounted as the evil fruit that springs from Satanic seeds. For fundamentalists, Satan is real, a perfect repository for all their fears and intolerable impulses: rebellion (especially against God), sex for pleasure, aggression, disgust with the family, self-defilement, furious hate and utter selfishness. Satan is the monster who rises from the sink where we ve flushed away all our dreads and damned desires. With a black face, he s the weed that grows in foetid nightsoil. Or cloaked in crimson, he s theatrical, throbbing in the light of his raging ego, demanding that we look. With goat s legs and hooves, horns and bristly fur, he s a perfect image of our repressed animal natures.
Satan-hunters, in short, see him everywhere because they can t bear to see him in themselves.
But America has always been the promised land of repression. Why did Satan make a comeback, talons sharpened and eyes lusty-bright, in the 1980s?
Rumblings of his return could be heard in the 1960s. He slithered into the limelight in such films as Rosemary s Baby and The Exorcist. The Manson murders too gave Satan an updated, real-life face. Stephen King and his legion of imitators found an eager audience for their literary equivalent of a flu virus: causing chills, nausea, faintness, and the shakes.
Oddly enough, feminism, or one flavor of feminism, helped to call the Prince of Darkness from his abode. Before kids were supposedly disappearing into secret tunnels for Satanic abuse, they were appearing on milk cartons and shopping bags. In 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz vanished in New York City. Not long afterward, the most famous kidnapped child since the Lindbergh baby -- Adam Walsh -- was snatched and beheaded. A grassroots movement, made up largely of women, developed, claiming to struggle for child safety. But a deeper impulse was at work. The obsession with child abuse and abduction is a perfect outlet for female rage: it s highly emotional, gives the impression of doing something very valuable without shaking up the male-dominated status quo. It substitutes hatred for the generically-male child molester for hatred of fathers and husbands. Women in child-saving crusades have it both ways: their traditional nurturing role is rewarded and simultaneously they can fight the oppressive, sexist family in the name of saving it. Aiming their spleen at traditional male role models, crusader mothers claimed that children were being abused by Satanists wearing police uniforms, by secretly devil-worshipping Christian clergy, and repeatedly said that high-ranking officers in the U.S. military were also involved in the conspiracy.
A strange coalition developed to fight the devil. Fundamentalists joined with child-saving activist moms. The twelve-step movement lent its particular combination of egomania and self-loathing. Books such as Sybil made victims into celebrities. In an atmosphere of crumbling social order -- gays and real feminists challenging sex roles, mainstream churches losing members to cults and new age cliques, horrific violence everywhere in the news and pop entertainment -- the malefic presence of Satan was bound to reappear.
Somewhere, I m afraid, Satan is smiling.
It took only a few hysterical first-hand accounts to set off the entire avalanche of fear and recrimination.
The first, however, was published almost ten years before the McMartin case hit the headlines. Mike Warnke s The Satan Seller is a shabby, preposterous, and by current standards rather tepid call to arms. Claiming that he d been a part of a Satanic cult in the mid-sixties, Warnke (now know mostly as a preacher and evangelical comedian: Jester in the King s Court) paints a picture of drug use, sex slavery, brainwashed illuminati and, of course, bizarre and disgusting rites. It s probably generous to say that Warnke s book is half outright lies and half junior high school power fantasy. An indepth investigation by the Christian magazine Cornerstone outlines all the fabrication, twisted truth and feverish figments that Warnke cobbled together to build his story. One example will suffice to show the degree to which Warnke will remake his past. At a time when this self-styled High Priest of Satan supposedly had waist-length hair and six-inch fingernails, a serious drug habit and 1,500 crazed devil-worshipping followers, a photo shows him with his fiancée in a slicked spaz-boy haircut and classic mid-sixties nerd suit. His ex-wife, acquaintances and friends from the time all agree that Mike Warnke was a great story teller, but the contents of The Satan Seller are just self-serving and highly lucrative fantasy. He even tried to get two friends to sign affidavits affirming that everything in this book was true. Baffled and insulted, they refused.
Warnke made a bundle on his book when it came out, and when the cult craze hit ten years later, he was ready to exploit the fears he d helped stir up. He appeared on a 20/20 report called The Devil Worshippers, and in his traveling road-show cum ministry talked frequently of a mythical boy named Jeffy, who Warnke claimed to have saved from Satanists.
Supposedly, Jeffy was this little boy who had become a vegetable, because all the Satanic abuse he d had, explains one of Warnke s former employees. The story was used to raise money to help all the Jeffys in the world so there wouldn t be so many Jeffys. Mike would say What if your child was sent to a preschool and this happened? How d you like this to happen to your child?
The ploy raised tens of thousands of dollars. Of course, there was no Jeffy, but in the Ronald Reagan say-it-often-enough-and-it s-true mode, Warnke s fabrications become part of the cult scare mythos.
As America s soon-to-be Robot Prez stumped around the country in 1980, tapping into the country s phobic fury, a book called Michelle Remembers appeared, and with it the full-blown Satanic abduction and abuse scare was upon us.
Michelle Smith s autobiographical tale of torment was the first to make an explicit link between Satanism and missing kids. In it, she claims to have been imprisoned by cultists in 1955. Then followed an amazing parade of grisly high kitsch: five-year-old Michelle forced to smear feces on a Bible, locked in a cage full of writhing snakes, being raped and buggered with candles, watching the murder of other children, trapped in graveyards and tombs, and -- my favorite -- having a Satanic tail and horns surgically attached to her body. Finally, however, Little Michelle s faith in God defeated the cultists and they had to release her. She conveniently forgot the entire year of torture until memories of it were awakened by her therapist, coauthor (and sharer in royalties) Dr. Lawrence Pazder.
A poster child for false memory syndrome, Smith conjures a life of secret horror out of a fairly mundane existence. There s almost no evidence that any torture could have taken place, let alone did. But in the overheated atmosphere of the early 1980s, evidence and logic were in very short supply.
We have Dr. Pazder to thank for coining the term ritual abuse, and as a devout follower of the Roman Catholic Church, he s perhaps responsible for transplanting the grotesque images of violation and redemptive torment from the pulpit to the psychiatrist s office. Selling well, especially to folks who responded to its Catholic damnation/salvation motifs (it even includes photos of the Virgin Mary s apparitions), Michelle Remembers set off a Klondike run of ritual abuse gold diggers. Suffer the Child, Satan s Underground, The Edge of Evil, Satan Wants You! and a book for preschoolers, with large print and big colorful pictures called, Don t Make Me Go Back Mommy: A Child s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse (showing kids being whisked off by robed and hooded teachers to backwoods Satanic rituals) and dozens of others reached a market eager for thrills and paranoid fantasies. Stephen King may have sold better, but for real devotees of disgust and titillation, he was nothing compared to the real thing.
In 1984, tens of millions of dollars were diverted by Congress for child protection programs. How was this money spent? Not surprisingly, the loudest voices in the scare ended up with new, high-paying jobs in the therapeutic/government bureaucracies or had barrels of money delivered to their doors to beef up anti-abuse efforts. For instance, the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect had its nearly two million dollar budget quadrupled, with $146,000 earmarked for more interviews with McMartin sex-ring victims. The C.I.I., in 1985, received $350,000 from the state of California to fight ritual and sadistic child abuse. Certainly the authors of the panic-driving screeds did well. And TV talk shows and documentaries about abuse got great ratings too. But money is only one part of the puzzle. Deeper, and in a way more disturbing, forces were at work.
For conservatives, the normal target of paranoia -- the federal government -- was hard to hate in the 1980s, because their man was in the White House. The economy congealed at the same time greed and success were touted as basic American values. Instead of demonizing the president for the social chaos and collapse of values, conservatives went for a more obvious target: Satan himself.
Lunatic right-wingers howled about bloody murders and violated rectums. McMartin tunnel excavation leader Ted Gunderson buddied up with crackpot militiamen and claimed that demonic forces were at work in Washington. He also told Geraldo Rivera that Satanists had set up a secret rest and relaxation farm and were involved in political assassination. Not surprisingly, ultra-conservatives pointed the finger at the C.I.A., convinced that the agency was involved in ritual abuse of kids and the creation of preschool age Manchurian Candidate murder drones. The usual suspects -- big government, Jews, and secular humanists -- were at work to destroy our children. But as a novel twist, intelligent sea-life was also implicated. The C.I.A. was, according to breathless revelations, using trained dolphins to rape children underwater -- the brainchild plan of a malign Hasidic doctor named Greenbaum.
Echoing the old Protocols of the Elders of Zion anti-Jewish slander, a book called the Wicca Letters was supposedly discovered by a San Diego cop. He, of course, never showed the original in public, but his transcriptions describe a Satanist convention in Mexico, where witches, cult leaders, and devil worshippers from around the world gathered to create a master plan to conquer the world by infiltrating daycare centers and corrupting America s preschoolers.
Cult cops, self-appointed to fight the Satanic threat and keep the U.S. pure, spread out across the country, stoking the fires under their own careers, but more importantly, adding another dose of paranoia and hatred to the already-poisoned American psyche.
Many cult cops were evangelicals and fundamentalists and their obsession with the demonic invasion was the outgrowth of their belief in Satan and his intention to destroy America s youth. Though not all Satan-hunting police touted the Wicca Letters as authentic, many did do workshops in which the features common to ritual abuse cases were spelled out. Among these one might find: sticking needles into children s feet, cutting up Barbie dolls, playing with feces as a kind of demonolatrous fingerpaint, using the American flag and the Bible as toilet paper, and the use of occult implements such as a chalice, capes and robes, liturgical candles and sacrificial foods. From the small town lecture circuit to presentations to F.B.I. agents in Quantico, on credulous newspaper writers, college professors and local lawmen, the traveling occult cops dumped their great steamy loads of hysteria. Setting up displays to wow the believers and convince the skeptics, self-appointed cult experts showed off collections of skulls, candles, makeshift altars, alchemical and occult texts, Dungeons and Dragons figurines, and out-of-focus photos of supposed ritual sites. Sandi Gallant, devil-hunting cop from San Francisco, reveals the level of her forensic sophistication with such statements as this: Satan s goal is to defeat God s plan of grace and to establish his kingdom of evil in order to ruin man. Satan needs men and women alive to accomplish his work for him, because he is a disembodied spirit.
Perhaps Gallant knows more than she s letting on. Satan may indeed need men and women. But if the number of real Satanists is a thousand times smaller than the crazed army of Satan-hunters, if cult cops have an infinitely larger collection of occult accouterments than any deluded cultist, if child-protective activists are the ones with the real passion and devotion to the idea of Satan, then who exactly might Gallant be talking about?
And what was the result of the Satanic scare of the 1980s? Bigger government bureaucracies, more ammo (real and spiritual) for the police in their efforts to exterminate all deviants. But most important is the higher level of helplessness and dread. Americans are now even more fearful, distrusting each other and often themselves. Americans are weaker, more dependent and more apt to run mewling in sheeplike stampedes. Fear -- narcotic, addictive, poisonous -- is churning through the American bloodstream.
And somewhere, I m afraid, Satan is smiling.
References
Lanning, Kenneth. Child Sex Rings. (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: Washington, DC) 1989.
Larson, Bob. Satanism: The Seduction of America s Youth. (Thomas Nelson Press: Nashville, TN) 1989.
Nathan, Debbie, and Michael Snedeker. Satan s Silence. (Basic Books: New York) 1995.
Rivera, Geraldo. Devil Worship: Exposing Satan s Underground. NBC TV. October 25, 1988.
Smith, Michelle, and Lawrence Pazder. Michelle Remembers. (Congdon and Lattes: New York) 1980.
Spencer, Judith. Suffer The Child. (Pocket: New York) 1989.
Richardson, James, Joel Best and David Bromley. The Satanism Scare. (DeGruyter: New York) 1991.
Warnke, Mike. The Satan Seller. (Bridge Books: Plainfield, NJ) 1972.
Wedge, Tim. The Satan Hunter. (Daring Books: Canton, OH) 1987.
Th. Metzger is the author of The Birth of Heroin and The Demonization of the Drug Fiend.
Fall 2001 Supplement * Loompanics Unlimited * www.loompanics. com
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Post commentary:
Opinion of Author Maxx Feral
My opinion is my own and I do not imply whoever did Loompanics and Metzger endorse me or vice versa though I loved said site and writings of.
I have read this article many times over the years and luckily I saved it, finding it again during another data recovery for files anticipating another computer upgrade and file transfer. Loompanics is long gone and so are the sites that archived it but the "Satanic Panic" of the 80s is still a painful memory along with looming Nuclear War that besmirches the rosy tinted goggles of the 1980s. Even if I could go back in time knowing WW3 wouldn't happen then I'd still deal with aggressive hate of my creative projects if I could be an adult or kick my immature young A-- to do some projects. (a Mellotron successor but with 555 timer synth boards for each key and a central EEprom controller... essentially a polyphonic synthesizer a decade ahead of the curve vs wasting time trying to master a specific machine language that only 25 then maybe 255 Adult Engineers could do for another Atari game...)
It made me nostalgic for the 90s and early 00s when believe it or not the Left was still HYPER Free-Speech even speech others found disgusting and it was the "Right Wing" that was for censorship and banning, de-listing and later de-platforming. DARE you to read some cool stuff like "Apocalypse Culture" or "Temporary Autonomous Zone" or the "Happy Mutant" stuff the "Netizens" put out - that was when Mondo 2000 was bleeding edge and bOINGbOING wasn't a pre-woke WokeTard memebers only site to affirm fashionably radical bias and be sold 'hipster' gear that didn't make the cut for WIRED again what used to be cool but now is dry and commercial...
In recent years I've seen most of my childhood memories and hobbies simply BUTCHERED by pathetic snowflake NPCs and the companies that hired them. It's nothing I'd have dared put in a "Cyberpunk" fiction because well "Don't reality TRUMP fiction" What we have is some Omega Stage capitalism of "Buy high, sell low" where they buy up hobbies, RUIN them and bet against the company or franchise they owned. The "Woke" are FAKE. Con artists, grifters, "Useful IDIOTS" there to ride the train off the hill insulting the competent people keeping the boiler from exploding while some Snidely Whiplash evil capitalist twirls his moustache on the way to collect his insurance against the disaster he's caused.
Dare I dream I'll inspire a ton of people to write their congressmen and senators and the SEC - to make sure these companies are denied tax breaks and bailouts and the SEC stops the "Short-Sell" the bets taken against the companies they own and set on a path to ruin? If it was a fiction even one person exposing it would be a nightmare to these vultures but sadly it probably won't happen. Too bad we are going to be TAXED to pay for the woke garbage by direct bailout or inflation which is what happens when stock is juggled or bet against to make someone a profit.
However - and this is speaking to the TTRPG community - we have "Satanic Panic 2.0" brewing. Just when we'll start to recover and the woke and token market get sick of the expensive dry monty hauls but the activists and capitalists have run the "Fundies" will likely come screaming back.
Why?
1 - They've gone after about every "Witch" they could go for. Most are entrenhed, have lawyers or aren't worth the effort.
2 - They'll probably get a big boost with a right wing shift BUT the jobs and prosperity will NOT come back. Right or left the guys at the top feed the rich elite, NOT their people.
3 - They'll remember the "Good old Days" being able to shout at D&D even in an age where being political cost "Tax exempt status" instantly.
4 - Thanks to the legacy of the "Woke" era the pathetic, worthless failures - the husks of "People" the RL NPCs will create a bunch of suicides, mass shootings and nutzoid behavior that will no longer be "essentially insignificant".
Remember this WONDERFUL movie!?
Well get ready for a bunch of people who played D&D a few times... Their PSYCHO-Therapist recommended it, note that Hasbro marketed it as "Cheap Therapy"...? I can imagine some modern FRAUD whoops "Freud" writing "And I got patient ... socializing. Please send me the last checks from his parents insurance. Don't make me call legal again..." Leading to a MonteCOOK contract lousy player and worse human disrupting the gaming group and storming off... Then be it weeks or years later his 17th "Suicide Attempt" works...
And a SWAT team visits "The Satanic CULT that lured this innocent fragile man into this world of DEMONS and Satan Worship and DRAGONS...!"
Because:
Blame time - who dodges blame and puts it on the players and the game?
A - the "Shrink" - he'll not want to risk his license. AND look at the book opportunity! He'd have offers of "Mazes and Monsters redux" in his inbox before the first news article.
B - the "news" - what do you think? They'll dig up real news about who is causing the wrong in the world? Nope. Fired instantly. Who else hires them? The same 100 companies and elites destroying the world. Better to go for fluff, trash and hype and try to be the next Geraldo.
C - The suicides "Roommate"? Nope, he wanted that ONE time the fruitbat he had to watch to not ruin his date night Cloppin' to Pony Pon in the main room right in front of his date so he went to her place. And that was the night he played with the plastic bag again.
D - the Police? Accidental suicide to Pony Pon? Hasbro would get them FIRED. Pay the mayor a million or just order the insurance company to fire them and blacklist them. Besides, not worth losing time and their bonus hiding from dangerous criminals and getting up early to "Safety Check" all the worker slaves. Just run through the "D&D Satanic Cult" script, might even get lucky and coerce a confession - a few murderers thrown away for life (even if 100% innocent people) helps that score as long as regular ticket dispensing is not messed with.
E - his Parents? They should have either provided for him in some isolated estate or locked him in a nuthouse. Nope, try to force him to be a functional person. Blame anyone but themselves for inflicting a person unworthy of life on the world.
F- last and LEAST the "Fundies" - Society is shit and they are only plurping more. They are farther away from God than their boogeyman of a legit Satanist cultist eating a baby who if real is at least not a hypocrite. They do NOTHING save scream for people to give them money and blame others but only those who are not really evil or causing harm. If they really tried to be socially relevant they'd lose tax exempt status and be harassed and blocked. They didn't become "Good Christians" to struggle, sacrifice, hold the standard of right and goodness. They only dryly bleat "The Word" interpreted by some higher up corporate authority or screech the Devil is everywhere but when you look in the mirror for $. They'll get a 'charity' to send $ to feed starving children in ...wherever... and 99% goes to them and 1% a cousin gets a vacation where he flings Chick Tracts in the faces of starving gloating it means they'll go to Hell since they got 'witnessed' to.
So - we'll be able to wash our hands with "The Woke" and with any luck get some good game companies restarted. The hobby will expand and reclaim the base. We'll have tons of games, IRL and virtual, PDF and deluxe printed versions (in the USA I hope) and cheap photocopy/printer perhaps hand copied silkscreen or block printed? Virtual minis and 3D print and CNC new toys?
A third Renaissance of gaming? (1st mid 80s, 2nd late 90s to early 00s)
And then we'll face outright assault again.
No problem - the 80s and the Satanic Panic 1.0 taught me the importance of fighting for real speech and standing for what you believe in, even with "Armageddon" looming.
We'll have to fight - for our right "To Paarty!" heh - to pretend to be ELVES with friends in private. Holee FRUIT of the Gods...
But we will. The 90s taught us to use the legal system; They tried to re-start the Satanic Panic and a few gaming companies hired lawyers. Hot air to scare books off shelves meant costing business. Even if 100% legal, the free market of the store they could SUE them for it and WIN thousands. Cops in Florida sue people who complain over graffiti because they aren't going to cost themselves time they could write tickets to chase punk kids who might stab or shoot them but too many reports hurts the Federal money they get. Likewise the minister who screams and rants to remove a game from a store can be sued and lose big $ and even if he has a lawyer in his 'flock' after a year of trials he'll get a big bill whereas lots of lawyers like "Free Speech" points as long as they get the lion's share of a settlement they'll wring out.
Next "Satanic Panic" we'll fight back hard and through it get the media and hobbies market we deserve. We'll make it happen and hopefully first "Preacher Man" making a public apology to not lose thousands will lose a lot of them the Social Security $ of many seniors and other donations. World has 1,000,001 problems but TTRPGs and smutty magazines and violent video games are NOT on that list.
I'll be prepared to battle again.
I'm like a "Cyberpunk Samurai" a Ronin I have no master but my honor does not come from one - again the struggle for what is right that is my Honor;
The first is the STORY - the act of having verse and art and music inside and doing one's best to express it. That is my greatest struggle and hardest battle and one I do my best to face daily no matter what 'real life' will throw at me.
There is also-
Free Speech.
Free Expression.
Freedom to forge your OWN way.
Respect of this in others as long as they share the respect.
My enemies outside the negative aspects of myself are the liars, the "woke", the panderers.
Those that claim to help people when they only care their profit, those that claim to fight for causes but merely re-hash battles of last century with a chance to lose and those that will play either side of the game to make money and those who have SOLD OUT.
Make it clear;
I will remember.
I have taken names.
The "Professionals" who had a foot in the genre before and sold out to the false causes of this Omega Capitalist and fake "Social Justice" era; You are the real enemy. You could have stood up to this and gotten them laughed out before they did 1/10th the damage. But you added legitimacy to their LIES.
If I wish to truly waste time I could come to the "Woke" 10 years from now- if they are alive and were ever alive versus complete fake personas (all the million 'followers' on social media but barely a dozen active accounts) they'll be soulless NPCs trying to maintain a job at 1/4 compensation what their education/status will give them. Human sheep. Or they'll be basement dwelling shitlords pretending to be "Neo Alt right" like they were "Alt-Right" last decade before Woke or if old enough "Griefers" on the Usenet and Chan boards. NPCS. Never alive, just husks that breathe, eat and SHIT.
But traitor "Pros" will be trying to make and sell TTRPGS (and comics, video games) but whoops they have "Chicks in Chainmail" on the covers again and say "I'm an old school Grog-Nard" when they were CUCK-Nardz. Creatives who betrayed their muse for comfort and safety.
There will be LISTS. We will REMEMBER.
This is not a threat of any violence - boy do you love to harass then claim to be threatened so I'll be proactive here...
I'll openly say we'll make sure you have to beg each and every person to buy your lousy products, to get let in ANY gaming convention once the false "Woke" era vanishes and to beg customers not to cancel payment once they hear about you. It's what you attempt to do now to those who haven't bent the knee to the "Woke" even if they aren't hate-mongers, bigots, sexists but you try to portray them as Neo Nazis and the like for refusing to censor and pander even if no real 'problematic' aspect to their works.
You'll wish we threatened you or tried to hire a darknet hitman, whatever lie you'll excrete in silence and loneliness. A threat is - at the purest - a form of RESPECT. IF anything happens well we do have lawyers thanks to all your harassment, lies and attempts to "De-platform" us so we'd smile and give them their card and "Da Fuzz" hides from such people just as they stop worker slaves driving to work in the morning then take lunch when the real criminals wake up and burglarize the sheep's homes. Far worse if you publish some dumb D&D "Supplement" and the young of next decade SPIT in your face; "I heard you were a pathetic SELL-OUT!" One thing I know "Social Justice" types can not take is to be NOT "Fashionably Radical", you'll be on suicide watch after the third one.
You'll be forgotten and NOT missed.
The genres will be rebuilt and new ones will emerge.
We can be "Neon Samurai" - carrying on the true Edge of the Semiotic Ghost of the 80s (and 70s, 90s, beautiful islands of nostalgia) even if we'd be laughable "Mall Ninjas" IRL. (I ought to make a character class of such!) Our cause is to reclaim and defend the hobbies - to make new and more material for it - to uphold and defend the "Indie" market which will have so many players and marketplaces no amount of censors or fundies can do anything to it. Maybe we'll even help re-lauch a REAL "Free Press" with real journalist standards that doesn't become mired in a niche or sold out?
Thank you - Maxx Feral
(larger article around Metzger's archived text - no connection otherwise)
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