Satan Wants You

The Popaganda Podcast

In today’s episode of The Popaganda Podcast, Tashmica introduces Shannon to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s through the award-winning documentary, Satan Wants You.

To scare people back into a Sunday pew, the Catholic Church funded the publication of a book based on the account of a woman who claimed to have survived satanic ritualistic child abuse. Michelle Remembers was a bestseller and the survivor Michelle Smith and Dr. Larry Pazder, her therapist, coauthor, and eventually her husband, spent their time promoting the book on talk shows or training law enforcement to spot this new crime spree targeting children across the country. Cops started training therapists and suddenly, more than 200 people across the country had been criminalized without a single shred of evidence.

It was all based on a convenient lie. Does any of this sound familiar? Pun intended. This is a Tim Ballard and the Sound of Freedom origin story. Check out our last episode for context!

Join Tashmica and Shannon as they fall down a rabbit hole where they discover that when it comes to resistance, bodily autonomy, and knowing who the real enemies of children are, the Church of Satan may be the church for a time such as this.

Come for the pop culture. Stay for the abolition.

For this week’s pop culture homework, visit www.popagandapod.com.

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Sponsored in part by: Accountable Communities Consortium and The Firecracker Foundation.

Access: Transcript now available on Apple Podcasts!

Content Warning: The Popaganda Podcast explores the intersections of transformative justice, prison abolition, and pop culture. We will be talking in general about the existence of domestic violence, sexual violence, and state violence and our experiences with these forms of violence throughout the season. In this episode in particular, we will be talking about these themes and our own survivorship. We will not be talking in high levels of detail about specific experiences of violence. We invite everyone to use this information to make choices about what is right for you.

Credits:

• Executive Producers: Shannon Perez-Darby and Tashmica Torok
• Audio Production: Shannon Perez-Darby
• Show Notes + Art: Tashmica Torok