I'm old enough to have lived through the satanic panic. It was mostly a bullshit witch hunt. Pedos exist, bad parents exist... there is not a large underbelly of hidden ritualistic sex/blood cults in suburban America.
During this time my bother-in-law was taken away from his family because the school took him a slightly odd ADD kid locked him a room away from his Adderall and over the course of the school day convinced him to say his father was abusing him (his family got him back quickly, but It's scary what society can do very quickly when it stops thinking rationally)
A lot of the "evidence" for prosecutions that came out of this panic, were coerced testimonies from pre-teens against their parents. I don't know how many of you have tried to elicit testimony from a small child even about something as simple as who ate the candy, but they are crazy unreliable, even when they aren't guilty.
This is the same moral panic that tried to ban video games and D&D, which have no causal link to violence and/or suicide. Many of my friends could not play D&D because their parents were stupid.
The goal is avoid these witch hunts with all your being whether it's about racism in America, or sex cults in the churches, or even communist supporters in Hollywood [which was probably true, but didn't need the McCarthy response].
communist supporters in Hollywood [which was probably true, but didn't need the McCarthy response].
You're confusing the rambling, over-broad 'House Un-American Activities Committee' (HUAC) of the 1950s with Senator Joseph McCarthy's targeting of foreign agents in the State Department in the 1960s.
McCarthy went after literal communist infiltrators in positions of power, from a different legislative body, in a different decade than the Hollywood folks. The two have been conflated because there were communists in the State Department, and the communists in the media don't like people knowing about it.
During this time my bother-in-law was taken away from his family because the school took him a slightly odd ADD kid locked him a room away from his Adderall and over the course of the school day convinced him to say his father was abusing him (his family got him back quickly, but It's scary what society can do very quickly when it stops thinking rationally)
McCarthy never even spoke about Hollywood publicly.
You're confusing the rambling, over-broad 'House Un-American Activities Committee' (HUAC) of the 1950s with Senator Joseph McCarthy's targeting of foreign agents in the State Department in the 1960s.
McCarthy went after literal communist infiltrators in positions of power, from a different legislative body, in a different decade than the Hollywood folks. The two have been conflated because there were communists in the State Department, and the communists in the media don't like people knowing about it.