Tract
The Satanic Panic
A documentary history of the 1980–1995 wave of allegations, prosecutions, and television coverage claiming a national network of satanic abusers — and what the FBI, the appellate courts, and the professional psychology establishment formally concluded about it.
The Satanic Panic was a wave of allegations, criminal prosecutions, and prime-time television coverage in the United States and Canada between roughly 1980 and 1995, claiming the existence of a national network of Satan-worshipping abusers operating from day-care centres, families, and ostensibly ordinary small communities. The wave produced hundreds of criminal cases, dozens of long prison sentences, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history at that point, and a 1992 FBI report concluding that the alleged conspiracy did not exist.
This tract follows the disciplined-skeptical position the FBI’s principal investigator took at the close of the panic: the alleged organised network was not supported by the evidence, the cases collapsed for documentable methodological reasons, and the wave is best understood as a moral panic in the established social-scientific sense. The strong-skeptical consensus has been challenged on case-specific grounds — most substantially by Ross Cheit’s The Witch-Hunt Narrative (2014) — and that challenge is engaged below. The companion tract on the American security state covers the inverse phenomenon: a documented Setian operating as a serving Army psychological operations officer during the same fifteen years in which federal law enforcement was formally rejecting the alleged satanic-conspiracy claims about ordinary people. For the editorial standard governing what is and isn’t asserted here, see the site’s methodology.