Clive Simpson is a gender-critical gay man, who vlogs against the trans ideology and its promoters. His videos are good, but I’ve avoided putting them up here because I know some of the great peeps who comment on my blog differ from me about this issue, and I don’t want to offend them gratuitously. But in the couple of videos below he touches on an issue that ripped apart families and destroyed people’s lives and reputations. This was the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare. This held that there were real Satanic covens across America, Britain and elsewhere, in which children were raped and abused as part of its worship. Young women remembered being raped by the cultists. After they gave birth, their children were seized and sacrificed to the Devil.
It was all nonsense. A report by Jean La Fontaine concluded, as had the FBI, that there was no evidence such cults existed. The supposed memories on which the accusations were based were false, confabulated either from the witch hysteria itself or from spurious psychological techniques like regression hypnosis, the use of play puppets to bring out further testimony and leading questions from the investigators. Members of New Age sects, like the Wiccans, suffered public suspicion and hostility. Wicca considers itself the survival of the medieval witch cult, but this has been extensively critiqued by Bristol University historian Ron Hutton in his book Triumph of the Moon, This is a history of the modern occult and pagan revival from its origins in the 19th century. There’s no unified cult or authority in Wicca, but it’s really about Earth Mother Goddess worship and the Horned God. There’s a lot of ecological consciousness and concern in it, or there was, so they’re far more likely to be involved in a protest against climate change rather than anything like human sacrifice. The late Anton La Vey’s Church of Satan did apparently hold ‘human sacrifices’, but this was toned down to a spanking in which the victim wore a pair of padded trousers and was entirely voluntary.
Simpson has produced two videos which are part of trilogy looking at the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare and the links between it and the trans craze with the involvement of Diane Ehrensaft. In the first video he discusses the origin of the craze with the publication of the book Michelle Remembers. This was co-written by the woman and her psychiatrist, and based on her weird and horrific memories. She remembered not only being abused, but also Satan himself turning up along with Christ, Our Lady and one or two other saints to fight over her soul. I don’t dismiss religious experiences, but I think that it’s highly unlikely that such events as ‘Michelle’ remembered actually occurred.
Michelle Remembers set off a craze, and its publication was followed by the McMartin preschool scandal. This started with the allegation that one little boy may have been abused. The police mishandled the investigation by sending letters to all the parents of children at the school, telling them they were investigating allegations of child abuse and asking for further information while urging them not to discuss it among themselves. Which is, of course, what they naturally did. This resulted in large numbers of the children being examined for signs of abuse. One of the methods the investigators used to get them to talk was using dolls and puppets. The children were asked to show with the puppets how they had been abused. The investigators also asked leading questions like, ‘Are you going to be bright, or are you going to be dumb’. As a result, the kids came up with more false memories of terrible abuse.
In his second video, Simpson talks about another notorious incident across the pond, this time at a US army child care facility in its Presidio quarter in San Francisco. One of the accused was a male assistant at the facility, who seems to have been targeted because he was a gay man. The accusations were stoked by a Christian minister, and ended up with one of the supposed victims, a little girl, accusing Michael Aquino, a Lt. Colonel, and his wife of being the other people in the cult who abused them. Aquino is, or was, the head of a genuine Satanic organisation, the Temple of Set. Now he has performed some tasteless stunts. He once visited Heinrich Himmler’s Wewelsburg castle, which the Nazi leader intended to be the headquarters for the SS. Despite allies the stories and speculation about Nazi occultism and was Hitler a black magician and so on, the evidence is that very few of the Nazi party with one or two exceptions took it seriously. Hitler said he was initially sympathetic to them, but had the neo-Pagan sects banned because he feared they would divide Germany. Himmler was one of the exceptions. He seemed to have seen the SS as some kind of Teutonic pagan elite and had the castle’s basement remodelled so that he and the SS could perform occult rituals down there. Way back in the 1990s Aquino went there to perform his own occult rites in the basement. It’s grotesque and at the very least, massively tasteless but I don’t doubt that Aquino and his wife are innocent of the charges of child abuse. And in this instance, apparently, they didn’t stack up because Aquino had a cast-iron alibi. He really was somewhere else at the time.
Unfortunately it seems that some of the child abuse was all too real. On examination, four of the children seemed to have suffered sexual molestation. But as Simpson states, this was probably at the hands of their parents. This was literally unthinkable to the witch hunters, who found it far easier to believe in lurid tales of evil Satanic rites.
I well remember the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare and the immense harm it did. In Scotland it resulted in something like 75 children from different families being separated from their parents and taken into care in the Orkneys. One of the accused was the local minister, who was supposed to have an inverted crucifix in his home. No, what he had was a model airplane hanging from his ceiling when he was investigated. There are some very nasty individuals, who have killed and mutilated animals and people in the guise of Satanic worship. But sociologists and criminologists call this ‘pseudo-Satanic’ crime, because often they’re just sick individuals doing it for kicks and add the Satanism to give it all an extra bit of excitement. Some of them may also be really mixed up kids from repressive Christian households, who’ve become convinced that evil is stronger than good.
And there is a danger that, despite the scare having been largely disproven, the witch hunters haven’t gone away. They’re still meeting, and every now and then Private Eye reports their latest shenanigans in its ‘In the Back’ section. I don’t know who Ehrensaft is, and eagerly await the third part of the video series. I have said before that I do not wish anyone to be persecuted or discriminated against because of their sexuality or gender presentation. I think that there are people, who have been helped by transitioning into the sex with which they identify. But I believe that the massive expansion of the numbers of people claiming to be trans gender is a psycho-social contagion, in which vulnerable young women and men have been falsely led to believe that they are the wrong sex through an aggressive ideology and the greed of private gender clinics who have sought to exploit this craze for their own gain.
If Ehrensaft was a part of the Satanic Abuse Craze, using techniques that were accepted at the time but have now been utterly disproven to get the testimony the witch hunters wanted, then it may cast serious doubt on the legitimacy of her views on the trans gender phenomenon. Obviously depending on what it’s like, I’ll put up Simpson’s third video on this topic in due course.
In the meantime these videos are an excellent reminder of the origins of the abuse and how destructive it was.
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