Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America

by Will Sommer

Historians and psychologists have pointed to several factors driving the Satanic Panic. One, it came as America was grappling with a history of ignoring genuine allegations of sexual abuse, making people more willing to believe claims no matter how improbable they seemed. It has also been described as a symptom of larger fears about social change, including the increasing number of working mothers reliant on daycare. “Recovered memory and the day care and ritual abuse hysteria drove the social repression of two ideas,” Beck writes in his account of the Satanic Panic. “First, the nuclear family was dying. Second, people mostly did not want to save it.”