O P I N I O N
LIZARD THINK
By Izzy DelOrfano
I wasn’t around in the ’80s, but lucky for me it was such an iconic era that there were lasting echoes which managed to reach even us kids from the late nineties and early 2000s. One of those echoes was the satanic panic. It’s a fascinating yet devastating situation that started as a mistake and snowballed into a conspiracy that affected thousands, resulting in decades of trauma, jail time, and, more relevant than ever, the modern interpretation of the Epstein files.
So what happened? If you weren’t around, like me, you probably could spend weeks pouring over the hundreds of hours of testimonies, documentaries, and literature. Lucky you, I’ve done that already. In the 1980s, a psychiatrist published a book about a patient of his who recalled satanic ritual abuse using recovered-memory therapy. Recovered-memory therapy is a pseudoscientific type of therapy which has long since been proven to be not only ineffective, but sometimes traumatizing on its own. Read: It’s not real and it doesn’t work. It relies on the therapist or psychiatrist “guiding” the patient into recreating memories. This method not only led to the satanic panic, but also a whole bunch of people believing they were abducted by aliens and saw flying witches.
As the practice of recovered-memory therapy spread, so too did the satanic ritual abuse allegations. Patients from all over the U.S., especially children, were reporting to their therapists that they were tortured, made to torture other children, and other horrible stuff I won’t write about here. If you want to learn about the details of individual cases, I suggest you start with the McMartin preschool trial. Famously, between the ’80s and ’90s, there were over 10,000 documented reports of satanic ritual abuse. None of them were substantiated. Children were being guided into believing they’d been involved in cult rituals and rehearsing what they thought the adult in front of them wanted to hear. Usually, what they were “recalling” was stuff they’d most likely seen in ’70s horror movies.
The most tragic part, to me, of this cultural phenomenon was that there were real victims of abuse, usually at the hands of someone they knew well and trusted. Regular people, horrible ones, but not satanists or wizards or anything, do abuse children. Famously, in 1993, three 8-year-old boys were found dead in a ditch. Three teenage boys were convicted of the murders, two given life sentences and one, death. The evidence against them was shaky at best and the public highly suspected that they were victims of the satanic panic – convicted on the basis of being a little weird and in the area at the time of the crime. At the trial, they were specifically accused of satanic activity. While the West Memphis Three were eventually freed, the victims of the crime never got justice. There is evidence that suggests the boys were killed by other suspects, but the original accused weren’t exonerated; they got a plea deal (much to the chagrin of their supporters. From my research, it seems like they took this deal because it would be an embarrassment to the courts to admit a mistrial and they were never going to get exoneration. In my opinion. Allegedly.) The case is closed. Whoever killed three innocent children, was never convicted for it.
So why am I telling you about this horrible stuff? It’s because I don’t want you to believe it. I know, you probably read all of that and thought it sounded horrible, but ridiculous. How could so many people be tricked into believing something that isn’t true? How could a whole nation fall for one bad book? But it’s happening right now, and I don’t want us to do this again.
Let me make it clear – the victims of Jeffrey Epstein deserve justice. Every individual involved in the goings on of Epstein Island, the abuse, the trafficking, they all should be investigated, tried, and if guilty, held responsible to the fullest extent of the law. It not only would be an insult to their victims, but also to yourself to decide that since information has been released, it now means that every conspiracy, rumor, and story about nonsense in the news is true. It is absolutely essential that the truth – the real truth, not nonsense about satanic rituals and demons – is revealed. The implication that somehow a higher – or lower – power is at the epicenter of the worst case of documented child sexual abuse in history, is an implication that the people responsible are not the same flesh-and-blood as the rest of us. And they are. Below I have compiled a short list of topics I have seen circulating since the latest file release, which I encourage you to look up yourself, if you don’t believe me.
Pizzagate: A pizzeria in Washington, D.C., Comet Ping Pong, was accused of being a hub for satanic abuse and child trafficking after the 2016 Clinton email leak. Several other restaurants nearby were also targeted. Several alt-right news sites added to and circulated the claim that the restaurant was somehow being used to sell children to government officials. Employees of the restaurant were not only targeted online as suspects, but also implied to be victims themselves. All of the information of alleged abuse was based on the suspicion of coded language being used in the Clinton emails. Since the Epstein releases, many articles online have reopened the conspiracy that the term “pizza” in both the Clinton and Epstein files is code. While it’s certainly probable that individuals involved in human trafficking may be using coded language, there is no evidence that any actual pizzeria is in any way involved.
Qanon: It’s hard to condense all of the information I’d like to debunk about Qanon into one paragraph, but here are some cliff notes. First of all, Qanon’s leading prediction was that President Donald Trump would expose the secret satanic league of elites who control the world through child trafficking. Seeing as Trump is mentioned in the files so far over five thousand times (“pizza” is clocking in at under one thousand, by the way) this seems unlikely. There is substantial evidence that Q was not one person, or a person involved with the government at all, but one or several of the owners, moderators, and administrators of the websites they posted on, 4chan and 8chan. One of them even came extremely close to admitting exactly that on camera. I recommend that you watch the clip yourself – as Qanon always said, do your own research.
Adrenochrome: You can buy adrenochrome on the internet for $60. It’s not even a controlled substance. We have Hunter S. Thompson to blame for this one, as he claimed in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 that he consumed adrenochrome, as well as in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that “it’s no good if you get it out of a corpse.” He doesn’t appear to mention satan in relation to it, marking our first topic on this list which does not have anything to do with rituals or the devil. If you’re wondering why he would even mention adrenochrome, I recommend looking up gonzo journalism. Which is what I wish I was doing, instead of explaining how satan has nothing to do with the very serious topic of abuse which seems to have been reduced to a conspiratorial fairy tale.
There are plenty more topics I could dive into in this way, but let me close with this: Attributing satanic rituals and conspiracy theories to serious topics is unfair to victims and perpetrators alike. What I mean by that is, we are watching the mythology of a dead man unfold into a legacy that attributes him power which he does not have. And same to his co-conspirators. These are not devils, monsters, cryptids – they are humans. To ascribe them some sort of supernatural power is serious, because it encourages not only a conspiratorial culture, but a helpless one. Humans can be tried, convicted, juried, imprisoned. They cannot fly away on a carpet or disappear into a pentagram. Yes, there’s a wall of capital between us and them, but that’s it. I think there’s a degree of escapism that the public adopts, unconsciously or not, when they believe these things- there is nothing we can do, because of the powers that be. They are so evil, so devilish, that it’s beyond the ability of the common man to even protest – all he can do is know.
I abjectly reject this belief. We can, and we will, grant justice, somehow and some way.