QAnon’s focus on the concept of “Satanic ritual abuse” can seem absurd, but it is not unprecedented. The movement’s fixations on child-trafficking and occult abuses are built on the ruins of an earlier hysteria: the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, when the fear that otherwise normal professionals around the country may be abusing children in Satanic rituals suddenly became an urgent issue. Both QAnon and the Satanic Panic demonstrate how adults who often have the best intentions can lose all sense of what is real when faced with grotesque stories about children being abused by devil-worshipping
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