As the 1980s vanish in the rearview mirror of the speeding clown car that is America, Generation Y’s role as the last cohort with personal memories of that era gains added importance. The closest thing to a political vision that Conservatives have pushed for Millennials’ and Zoomers’ whole lives is rolling back the clock to 1988.
“Give us congressional majorities,” they say, “and we’ll set the corporate tax rate so Ronald Reagan will return in glory and lead America into an eternal dawn.”
Even to people who lived through them, the 1980s have taken on mythical status. Most people who aren’t End-of-History Death Cultists think of the 80s as the last time the world made sense. America was on top, and things just worked.
It’s something of a shopworn axiom at this point, but every past era did have its problems. That’s because not even Ike or Reagan managed to usher in Heaven on Earth. The West has been glissading down the slippery slope for a long time now. And while church attendance and public moral attitudes get healthier the further back you go in recent history, the Modernism was already sapping our immune system like a wasting disease.
A phenomenon that’s emblematic of 80s revisionism is the so-called Satanic Panic. Even oldheads who know better like to rile up the youngsters with tales of rosary-clutching moms burning D&D books and dads threatening kids with military school for buying hair metal records. To hear folks tell it, a sinister current of paranoia ran under and behind the 80s’ sleepy suburban façade.
They’re not all wrong. It’s just that looming fear of nuclear annihilation weighed more on everyone’s mind than rumors of nerds LARPing in steam tunnels. Most people’s main contact with the Satanic panic was via parodies of Bible-thumping rubes on MTV and SNL. What everybody forgets about the 80s is that the Left had already controlled the media for twenty years by then.
But if the intervening years have taught us anything about the Left, it’s that their favorite game is gaslighting normal people. For every Dead Kennedys track lampooning Boomer parents for suing Ozzy over their son’s suicide, you could be sure there was some real crime you were being distracted from.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And in keeping with that metaphor, the fire came first. 1980s Satanic panic stories followed a pattern that anyone who’s followed Alex Jones will be familiar with today. News of some enormity breaks in the media. Reporters follow the lurid story until indications of occult involvement surface. The hype machine then kicks into high gear, flooding the zone with hit pieces against snake-handling hicks. People remember the parody, and the truth gets lost in the noise.
Propaganda dissector Devon Stack offers a perfect example of how the media runs interference for witches. You might laugh, but Stack’s detailed analysis of a 1993 HBO documentary on an occult-tinged child homicide case shows that’s just what they’re doing. It’s damning, and it’s not for the faint of heart. If you have the fortitude, watch it here.
That’s what happened with the Finders and the McMartin Daycare cases. When accusations of ritual child abuse surfaced, the system was quick to call in experts paid to discredit the victims. To this day you’ll have online libertines chuckling about “debunked tunnels” in glib reply to warnings of diabolical influence.
We now know, thanks to declassified FBI documents, that the tunnels were real, and the CIA was in cahoots with Satanic, child-trafficking hippies. I wish that was a rarer term on this blog, but circumstances are what they are.
The takeaway is that the media’s job isn’t to inform you. Nor is the entertainment industry there to entertain. Instead, they both work hand-in-glove to shape your perception of reality to the regime’s benefit. That’s how teenage Satanists murdering second-graders becomes the Church Lady finding Satan hiding in the laundry hamper, and citizen journalists exposing elite pedophilia rings turns into tin foil hat paranoia.
What distinguishes the regime’s current diversions from their 1980s gaslighting is the escalation from comedians mocking concerned Christians as rubes to elected officials calling for the arrests of dissenters. The next time a “Let’s go, Brandon!” Boomer parrots “Repressed memories are BS! the TV told me so,” remind him that trusting the TV back then is why he’ll be jailed tomorrow for buying a hat in 2016.
On a positive note, more and more holdouts are coming around to the reality that turning off CNN isn’t enough. Overt regime agitprop wouldn’t be half as effective without entertainment industry skinsuits backing it up.
Don’t consoom product.
Don’t hate watch.
Don’t give money or attention to people who hate you.
There was a documented rise of satanic cults in the 1970s, including many high profile murders that spilled over into the beginning of the 1980s. Boomer parents of the time didn’t randomly get spooked and paranoid about metal records or D&D because of their silly stupid superstitions, but because of real cases that existed that, as usual, the media glamorized at every turn.
The problem with a lot of the “Satanic Panic lol” discourse is that it is entirely taken out of context by people who have never looked into the subject themselves. They don’t know who the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was created by, nor that everyone involved has ties to actual glowies. It isn’t a vast conspiracy, it’s just literally who these people are.
The debauchery of the 1960s led to the moral decay of the 1970s led to the rise in weird and abhorrent crimes of the 1980s (Unsolved Mysteries and America’s Most Wanted existed because there was no shortage of this stuff that was far less common before) led to the nihilism celebration that was the 1990s, bottoming out at Cultural Ground Zero. It isn’t just America, either, since the West copied the US’s lead at every opportunity and followed their example. They are all in the same place now, one perfect blend of bland people.
It’s not an unfounded conspiracy if it’s out in the open and no one cares to look into it. The Order of the Solar Temple, multiple times, had many members all turn up dead on the same day. They still operate to this day. There is no “panic” of any sort. It’s just reality.
Bring up Son of Sam’s Process Church connections to a Boomer, and he’ll nod along. Then, for a taste of how strong the media’s hold on NPC’s is, bring up McMartin Daycare’s relationship to similar cults.
From my childhood memories, the Satanic Panic was definitely a thing, at least among my group of Evangelical Protestant (mostly homeschooling) Christians. A few examples:
We weren’t allowed to watch the Smurfs because Gargamel did magic (okay, no big loss there, admittedly).
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was similarly verboten. Basically any ’80s kids show that was magic heavy we weren’t allowed to watch.
Nobody I knew played D&D, because that was definitely going to lead you into straight up Satan worship. Which is why the first RPG setting I really got into was the Fallout CRPGs of the mid-90s when I finally got a computer of my own.
I had to toss out a Calvin & Hobbes analogy, because there was one week’s worth of strips where Calvin tried to use an Ouija board. My folks failed to see the humor in Calvin asking the board if he’d be President someday and the board responding with “G-O-D-F-O-R-B-I-D”.
My friends at the time all had similar stories.
In hindsight, it’s mostly pretty goofy, and we certainly weren’t harmed by not watching more garbage ’80s cartoons, playing Final Fantasy on the NES, or whatever else was on the banned list. That said, the panic and overreaction was definitely a thing in some circles in the ’80s.
There was something weird going on with The Smurfs.
Later viewings of a handful of episodes definitely confirm that. Was it worthy of the parental banhammer? Probably not, but again, we weren’t harmed by its absence. It’s not like ’80s boys were obsessed with the Smurfs like we were with action shows. Now being (seemingly) the only kids on the block missing out on G.I. Joe, for reasons that no one now recalls, that was worth some mild childhood trauma points.
I really got hit by how much the younger generation has become unaware of pre-millennial times when I saw a discussion of a supposed “plot hole” in Jojo part 4 about how it would be impossible for a character to call another knowing only his name.
They could not accept the answer of “That was 1999. He opened a phone book and looked up the number.”
In fairness, I wouldn’t necessarily blame them for assuming plot holes. Jojo likes to play very fast and loose with the rules, most notoriously the fact that on more than one occasion the main villain of the season’s powers function radically differently in his first appearance than they do in all later appearances.
I can’t say I recall this being an issue in any part of JoJo.
Most notably in parts 5 and 7. King Crimson’s first appearance features it working differently than it does in its future appearances, and part 7’s entire fiasco about who actually shot Johnny Joestar. Apparently, every single version of Funny Valentine was supposed to have his own copy of D4C, but that was retconned afterwards due to it being too limiting in terms of story-telling. Though in fairness, both of those Stands have notoriously confusing abilities.
Well, I only watched the part 5 anime, so maybe this was in the manga. As for part 7 I have to admit I don’t even know the plot hole you’re referencing and HAVE read it. Arraki haas reconned things before.
That said off really has no bearing on the non-plot hole of part 4.
One of the reasons I can’t stand the YT commentator Styx is that he lives in this alternate fantasy where muh evil evangelicals stopped Ozzy, Metallica, and Marilyn Manson from ever having a career. He can’t go more than a minute without sperging about this alternate history where, “yes, the government is currently shutting down farms and forcibly injecting people, but don’t forget those evil Christians and what they did in the 1980s!” My little brother is a metalhead and has the same kind of fake history instilled in him, and he get constant confirmation from the media about it, because the left have been peddling this narrative for decades now (if not centuries). You have to hand it to the left, they market self victimization like no other.
Healthy Christian societies used to keep people like that out of trouble by steering them into more respectable occupations like distracting bulls at rodeos or guessing people’s weight. Only in Clown World is anyone expected to take them seriously.
In a rather timely event, Hololive did a stream yesterday where a “30 year old boomer” (read: Gen Y) and a Zoomer explained their respective cultures to each other. Highlights include the Zoomer being completely bewildered by the concept of a pager (if you’re going to call a number anyway, why not just call the person directly?) and not understanding the concept of dial-up internet (you just connect to the wifi to get online! and isn’t the plug in the wall you put phones into just to give it power?)
Would be interesting to see something similar discussing political and religious culture. But you’d need a specific group, even a lot of Gen Y has convinced themselves that the lies about evil theocratic Republicans controlling everything in the 80’s and 90’s were true.
At this point, would it be fair to consider “hate watching” slothful? I mean, there’s so much for all of us to do to prepare for what’s sure to come. “Hate watching” is not useful, and it’s not true leisure, either.
Sloth is a form of despair, and those who keep consuming IP skinsuits because “There’s no other choice” are rationalizing their unwillingness to seek out better options.
Then there’s the “I hate this trash, but I’ll review it to get clicks” motive, which is indulging in greed.
A Youtuber that I sometimes watch advocated hatewatching because he seemed to be under the impression that leaving bad reviews is “what Amazon is really afraid of”, that avoiding the Skinsuit was like passively refusing to knock your opponent down when he’s teetering on the cliff, that “inaction means defeat”, etc. Thankfully, even the majority of his commentariat seemed to realise he was wrong and called him on it.
My stars. In what world is Amazon teetering on the edge of a cliff? Here in Clown World, Conservatives and Libertarians met defeat years ago.
In moral terms, consuming their content isn’t pushing them down. It’s standing on the tracks in front of a runaway train demanding it observe the speed limit.
Bizarrely, this same Youtuber just today released a video crowing about Rings of Power’s low viewer numbers…even though he had been calling for people to hate-watch it. Well, nobody’s perfect, I guess.
Why are you still watching him?
Even if Amazon really were scared of bad reviews, they would just delete them.
I don’t know if Amazon has done that before, but negative comments have been deleted from controversial youtube videos again and again and again.
Note that Amazon also owns IMDB (which is why the pick for most anticipated September series there just happens to be The Rings of Power.)
They’ve been deleting problematic reviews for years. It’s happened to me and other authors.
The concept of “Don’t give attention to people who hate you” doesn’t seem to be getting through. So from now on I’m deleting any further comments on this post that mention Big Brand X Skinsuit of the Month.