The Satanic Panic, as inverse phenomenon

The same fifteen-year window in which Aquino was a serving Army officer and a working Setian — roughly 1980 to 1995 — was the peak of the Satanic Panic in American media and law enforcement. Claims of organised satanic ritual abuse of children, of national networks of Satan-worshipping abusers operating within day-care centres, families, and small communities, became staple coverage in television and tabloid journalism. The McMartin preschool case in California (1983–1990) was the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history to that point; no convictions resulted.

In 1992 the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit published Kenneth V. Lanning’s Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of “Ritual” Child Abuse. Lanning, who had been the bureau’s principal expert on organised paedophile networks for over a decade, concluded that no credible evidence supported the alleged satanic-cult conspiracy. The cases were either ordinary criminal child abuse without ritual context, or — in many cases — claims that survived investigative scrutiny only as a function of suggestive questioning and the moral panic itself. The Lanning Report became the bureau’s standard position on the question.

The historical contrast is direct. At the moment the federal law-enforcement establishment was formally concluding that organised satanic conspiracies did not exist, a documented Setian was running Army PSYOPS programmes and publishing on strategic information operations. The intersection that the conspiracy register inverts into a national network is, in the documentary record, a small, specific, biographical phenomenon.