This comment really means the world to me. Thanks so much!

@@TheEsotericaChannel I saw a lot of good people targeted and harmed by the Christian evangelicals who pushed this crap. I was censured by my department for not pursuing a couple of cases the community said was satanic but I knew was just teenager pranks. i noticed that the evangelical hate preachers are starting to raise it again, especially Greg Locke and Bob Larson. The nutters from that group are all jumping on the bandwagon. I fear for those who may get swept up in it. Stay safe.

@@TheEsotericaChannel Good Sabbath, my friend.

In short, you threw away all your training and experience for sensationalism and the fantasy of being Holy Warriors. Evidence? Objectivity? Civil Rights? The Law? Nope. Just bigotry, peer pressure, and bullying. It was a disgraceful time to be a cop, and the profession has never truly recovered

@@Old52Guy Sorry you're unhappy. But that doesn't really matter. Police response to the Satanic Panic was a full-out disgrace. Law Enforcement betrayed every principle of impartiality, respect for the Law, evidence, investigation, and pretty much everything back to Robert Peel in order to be Holy Warriors Fighting for Christ and teach those weirdos a less. They weren't duped. They jumped at the opportunity. They ostracized cops and prosecutors who didn't by into the lies. And they never EVER admitted they were wrong. It was a stain on the profession, and the fact that it was never cleaned up is a large part of why we have lies and pseudoscience putting innocent people behind bars to this day. Grow up and own your mistakes and the mistakes of the people you identify with. Lives are at stake.

Well done, mom. Well done.

I forgot to thank you for your work!! Tapadh Leat!

@@uponeldritchshores carson a' Ghàidhlig an-sin? Chan eil i aig an Dotair, a bheil? Agus, mura bheil sinn a' leantainn air Buffy is a: smaointinn gur e cànan nan deamhan a th' inntese, carson a bhitheanaid ga bruidhinn?

@@viktorkardell9366 love the sinner, hate the sin I guess. A thank you is a thank you where I come from, no matter how it’s spoken.

And now you're destroying your soul by imbibing Satan's video jizz. They were right!!

That is so sad. Christ is about love. I am sorry for what those folks did both to her and to you. I hope you can meet true examples of Christ's followers, people who inspire compassion, not contempt. I will stop there. Be well.

@@Svensk7119 Sounds like your Christ is a friend while the Christ or the God of those elders was a little closer to old testament.

I sincerely hope that young woman eventually found herself again. The arrogance and the lack of insight so often plaguing the super religious never fails to amaze me. It shouldn't, I suppose. As the religious themselves sometimes say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

@@mjinba07 He is friendship defined, even well-sprung. That is, He is the Well-Spring of friendship. He died for me, and then returned. He did that for everyone. How could there be a better friend?

@@Svensk7119 Every evangelical Christian I've ever met is 110% convinced that their version of Christ, their beliefs, are the correct ones.

I'm sorry. I was never allowed to learn how to play either. And still to this day I wish I could. Try the video game dragon age.

Did they ever realize their irrationality?

@@pappenheimer1510 My best guess is that those people don't even remember doing all that stuff.

​@@Aurora.369I mean I might be down to dm a session for y'all

It's never too late! D&D is alive now more than ever. At the RPG meetup group I used to frequent we had a lady well into her 70s who played along with everyone else and we had a great time.

As a former goth kid (well, current aging goth man, more like lol) who was born in 1985, I was lucky enough to have come of age shortly after the Satanic Panic had calmed down - Unfortunately, this also put me right square in the post-Columbine moral panic. Weirdos in black just can't win, apparently :P

It did seem like the overwhelming majority of adults had lost their minds. I was 6-7 years old when claims of backward masking in music became popular again. I was an advanced reader and carried around Nancy Drew books, a book on FBI investigations, a magnifying glass and other investigative tools everywhere I went. Like Tinker Bell bath powder used to collect finger prints 😂 I was 99% sure the claims were bogus (my father kept saying they were and telling me about similar claims when he was growing up) and I had to test it. My older brothers had most of the albums in question. I played them all backwards, to their dismay. Nothing, just as I suspected. Luckily I was too cute to kill.

I love your investigative fervor! @@pollysshore2539

@@pollysshore2539 Not surprising to see that a little girl had more common sense and comprehension skills than a bunch of boomers. Well done.

@@Nefylym I was quite sure most adults had lost their minds then. Sadly, I am sire a lot of kids feel the same way for many of the same reasons today.

Of course, I was in one of those working class families

That’s scummy, the bastards

💯👏👏

The persecution of the "Satanics" in the early 90's Egypt is an interesting parallel in some ways, except it was lower class conservatives getting sympathetic intelligence officers to persecute the nascent heavy metal scene in Cairo.

Absolutely! We had a mix in America. Most of the day care panics and general panics about children were centered around the middle - upper classes. Of course you had many working class daycare employees that were caught up in this process but the owners were financially stable and most of the panicked parents were upper middle class families with stay at home moms who put their children in daycare part time for socialization. The teens - young adults that were targeted, along with their families, were primarily working/lower class. I started researching the spread of the panic in 1993-94 (thanks to the World Wide Web) and came across stories of impoverished families being explicitly targeted in the U.K. Some children removed from their homes during the panic ended up spending a decade in care because their families were poor. There was no other reason or explanation. The BBC documentary When Satan Came to Town illustrates this to a sickening degree.

Blessed be. ✌

I have a very similar story. My father was not religious but I was questioning my mum (still goes to “mass” every day) from the age of 4-5 years old. Getting to the truth of Who We Are etc. has completely fascinated me my entire life. I’ve tried to make sense of nearly every mystical experience known to mankind in an 8000 word body of work. It now has to be changed into an “animated” series - perhaps a comedy - And. you. know. why. Kathy Prince Lioness Networks Australia 🇦🇺

Good for you ;)

That's the first time I heard Goosebumps attacked

I'm so sorry for you and your family. Your poor dad.

It’s jus the modern continuation of the witch hunt insanity. It’s baked into Abrahamism and manifests in various ways throughout the centuries. This is the current manifestation of it and it’s pretty pathetic as it always is. They can smash our statues, but will we never die! Those who resist Abrahamism will remain despite their desperate efforts to destroy us, our temples, and our statues.

There were more perpetrators than not. There's a reality there that sucks

One of the many grand schemes of causing damage to humankind. They are piling up on each other these days, with new ones coming before the old ones are in any way processed; maybe exactly because of that. It may not be an easy lesson to learn, but it is simple: The masses keep choosing to serve fear, because it seems personally beneficial (at the expense of others, especially those of higher virtue).

Hey man, I'm hoping his situation has improved since this comment. Or at very least, you and your family have been able to heal somewhat. Wishing all the best.

So what I've met a Satanist that plays dungeons and dragons.. he got his little baal ring from his grandma in Tennessee where they have some big name in catholic/civil war fame/italian circles. Baptists? Lol man there's a whole denomination that believes John the baptist was the real messiah and says Jesus was a fraud and of the devil. So from someone's perspective... thinking John the baptist is Jesus is satanic.. Hey plus the cia used some satanic cults to hide within and do their thing. Probably find dirt and blackmail ppl who were already used to lying so they could be leveraged as assets. Sorry your past was dumb.. It's no reason for you to be dumb though. Call your sister idiot

_Unfortunately many people think BS only happens in the past._ This hits so hard... So many of today's problems are so similar to what's already happened. I'm so saddened by how short our cultural memory is.

word

nodding and smiling huh? no... if you just nod and smile no one stops bullying you, you need to act preferably in a violent way if you see someone bully you or threaten your life

​ @mpo48 I don't think you understand the situation or you misread. What I wrote about isn't bullying, it's indoctrination by authority figures at a time when I had no power in my life. It wasn't some kid at school, being a jerkwad that I could have punched and dealt with, it was a whole system. It was all the adults and authority figures in my life. Being violent in that situation would have put me in a worse situation not only short term but possibly long term as well, especially as a minor. I was in a new place and had no support from anybody. What are you proposing I should have done? Be verbally and physically violent with my older sister's family? Punched out the pastor burned down the house? Deviousness and subversion isn't cowardice, sometimes it the best option in a shitty situation.

That's too bad. Is he an avid collector of any of those things today?

Unfortynately I can't blame them for trying to protect their child. It was foolish to believe such nonsense like "yer kid is going to become a satanist because of a dice rolling game", but then again, the 24h news cycle didn't work. Especially when someone had lived through the 60s and 70s and saw people lose their lives or become homeless addicts because of joining some imaginary cause. In hindsight yes, they were terribly wrong and misjudged your dad's hobbies. But we aren't them, then and there.

Did they ever realize their irrationality? Did your father talk to them later about all that?

@@pappenheimer1510 No. Not really. My Grandma hates everything I do and like. She ended up cutting me and my dad out of the family recently because of her beliefs. Makes me wonder if she ever was rational. Made my dad and I closer though and we still play D&D.

@@vegastrina Yeah he got me into D&D and Magic the Gathering. He doesn't collect too much since we share all of our nerd stuff.

yea ive seen such tings, its disgusting. Now in the south "hippy shops" and weed shops now sell crystals and sage. you might get lucky and find a crystal shop but its still hush hush because people will throw a fit.

Mystic shops are as much of a scam as the counterpart is

@@mikukene1998 Caveat emptor, to be sure, but in my experience, growing up in Imperial Center (Texas), such shops allowed me to meet and mingle with other like minded freethinkers who were tired of being lied to by the Christian dogmatists. I rarely bought anything from those shops, yet walked away with a fortune of knowledge relayed to me by true elders who regarded the youth with kindness, patience, and understanding. Unlike the Christians who seem so eager to leap at any chance to destroy autonomy, creativity, and compassion.

The Streisand Effect in action. I'm glad the festival was a success and I hope you were able to hold it again!

2/3rds god, 1/3rd man

Much inner-standing and shalom!

Yikes - this is why it's so important to be aware of our own ideologies and what they do. Without a proper frame of understanding, an entire lifetime of experiences is wasted.

It's sad, but I try to remind myself that people don't chose what they believe, becoming convinced is typically a subconscious process, at least it certainly is in my experiences. This helps me "hate the belief, not the believer" in a manner of speaking..

@@trybunt I get that. I've told plenty of people you can't help what you believe. You simply believe it.

I remember one expert being quoted as saying, "Sometimes a lack of evidence is the strongest evidence of all."

​@@eshaftowow, heads I win, tails you loose... thinking of the indoctrinated.

Jersey was a bastion of satanic panic in the 80’s!

And all that attack came from “loving” religious people. 🤨

My religious upbringing prevented me from getting a bipolar diagnosis till I was 29 years old. I spent my 20s soaked through with booze to self medicate

@@JonahPleatherbooth While I wasn’t soaked in booze, I literally became a shell of a human being, I would lay in bed all day not watching tv, reading, or even listening to music. I would have multiple panic attacks daily and would need to have someone nearby in case I tried to hurt myself…. It was actual hell…. It lasted in that form for 3 years. It ruined a lot of things. I’m just lucky I was on disability benefits from the government so I didn’t *have* to work.

@@JonahPleatherbooth I’m sorry you went through that…

@@tangentreverent4821 What bullshit…My best friend’s little sister was/is treated that way by my former church…

@@JonahPleatherbooth cannabis is a better medication.

That Rapture Fever was no joke.

@@jnanashakti6036 Haha! Which one? There were so many! The satanic panic thing pretty much resulted in 1980s metal bands trolling all the churchies for twenty years. And since there isn't really an expiration date, I just saw a Nevada senator speaking about it. Hilarious. But not as funny as the rapture people and their Hard Out dates. How do they retain ANY credibility? Some of their parishioners go into debt or ruin their lives, because they think their Just Reward is acomin. And no court would allow them to sue the Revelator, because it's bananas to take them at their word.

Omg. Those teen leaders should be held responsible for traumatizing us about the rapture. Showed us Image of the Beast when I was 10. I was sure I was left behind in more than one occasion.

Born in 83 here and yes, growing up pentecostal in the midst of this madness was no joke.

Me too! The funny thing is that I mentioned it to my parents and they didn’t even know what the Satanic Panic was. It seemed all normal to them. Rapture Fever was fun for me. I had already pretty much separated myself from religion so reading the books and seeing the conspiracy connections was like a game.

America has issues.

@@mcsmith732 Oh yeah, we’re f***ed 17 ways to Sunday. Inability to face ourselves and our past/current demons collectively has made our society neurotic, anxious, violent, confused, complacent….

@@mcsmith732America, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, France, Sweden, Norway, South Africa… all experienced the Satanic Panic. America is a baby in relation to witch hunts when compared to the rest of Europe.

I’ve spent the majority of my life worried about the (now) adults that experienced the Satanic Panic as toddlers in daycare centers. Some won’t remember it, others do and know it was a panic, and some became believers. Unfortunately some became grifters as well. Geraldos’ Satanic Panic special contained interviews with older alleged abuse victims from McMartin pre school. He failed to mention that they were not a part of the court case at all. Their families were grifters looking for a payout. Most of them claimed to be abused by Ray Buckey when he was a teenager/high school student and didn’t work at the daycare. The accusations they made were the most absurd and extreme of all. Oprah failed to mention that the same group participated in her show about McMartin on her network 5+ years ago. They tried to hide the identities of some of the parents but not well. They’ve been part of the same group insisting there were tunnels under McMartin for decades.

27 here too, moved from Michigan to Virginia when I was 11. My mom is awesome, she says she's a Christian but it's easy to see she only holds the love she picked up from being raised by decent catholics (ive never heard her say a single theological thing in her life) , she was all for me being into Slipknot and wearing all black and doing whatever I wanted. I was a little bigger and kind of precocious about my interests and "didnt care what people thought," but wow, be thankful you didnt make it obvious back then. I did say I believed in god and would argue about how to blend theology and science but in my heart I didnt believe in anything. I never got physically attacked but it probably was only because my size as well.

I knew someone like this, mentioning Harry Potter was like reciting de Sade out loud.

I got a lot of free books in the 80s from christian parents

I grew up with “Harry Potter is recruiting your child for Satan” flying around my house. Watched the movies when my stepchild started getting into it. Coming to it that late had a detrimental effect, I actually sympathize with Snape!😂 I saw nothing more objectionable than there was in Star Wars, which had become blasé to most religious by my youth (still some people saying the Force was the devil, but my parents still let me watch it as a kid).

Did you hear of the instance at some PTA meeting somewhere, I think it was Wisconsin or another midwestern state, where a parent referenced The Onion newspaper as a source for the satanic influence of Harry Potter?

Yeah Harry Potter is bad but Lord of the Rings is ok. I think most ppl just fall in line with group think because it’s easier and takes less studying and research. LOR was ok because it was written by a Christian and Harry was not. Wtf? 😮

Yeah, that's what scares me. I think we should honestly bury a 🪣 of D&D

It’s probably because getting into the occult actually goes against the bible and they’re right to have been mad about you doing that. It’s just a matter how how they deal with it that could go anywhere from them yelling at you to burning you at the stake as they did to others like us. This is a major reason why I abandoned the church and would never go back even if they paid me.

The Satanic Panic was saturated in antisemitic beliefs. The folklore involves a Jewish, Satanic, Nazi, doctor who was allegedly brought to America by the CIA in the wake of WWII. “Dr. Greenbaum” allegedly conducted mind control experiments and Satanic programming on the masses. It’s baked in at every turn. I grew up in southern Baptist land but thankfully the church my parents attended was very moderate. There was no promotion of Satanic Panic. My father was a part time bluegrass musician and a lover of rock & roll. As soon as he heard the claims about backwards masking he rolled his eyes and said, “not this s**t again!” 😂 My parents realized it was a panic rather quickly. I remain grateful for that.

Coven? Curiois choice of word as it is more commonly used for wicca and other witches, and not any modern form of satanism.

@@Duchess_Van_Hoof Did you respond to the wrong comment?

It's the supposedly "straight laced normal" people who are *most* likely to believe that nonsense. 🙄😒

@@Domriso seems likely, I thought I was going crazy lol

Heh heh... You discover the "freak" in people when their true religious beliefs are revealed. You characterized your principal as being "straight-laced". The Satanic Panic was/is fully in the domain of the Straight-Laced. The "ultra normies" can become the REAL demons more often than not. ;-)

Same here - just in the UK. And it was my (Christian) dad who got my siblings and I into sci-fi and Tolkien. We grew up with "kids' version" books of Greek and Norse legends. The only things my parents never understood or approved of was my interest in war history. My mum hated the models I had of German tanks. Wasn't allowed to have toy guns even, until they gave up when we started making our own out of lego and bits of wood. And any porn that I saw was outside the confines of the family home. Would never have dared face the consequences of mum finding it. But yeah.. they let us play D&D at school.

That is awesome. I was born in '88 and when I was in high school, I had a 2nd period study hall and played D&D during it (3.5 Edition at the time). But to have played the Mentzer BECMI set in it's heyday, man, that must have been incredible.

My dad was also a southern baptist preacher. I haven’t met many others, but it really does feel like I had been brainwashed in many ways. Wishing you all the best in your journey.

Was there an obituary I could look up?

@@GredelsRage It wasn't your fault. I'm sorry that you still feel that it maybe was your fault. I wish I had a brother like you that introduced me to cool stuff.

Of course like usually parents who don't want to face that the blame lays on them and then blaming it on fantasy creatures instead. Disgusting waste of oxygen these so called parents.

⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠@@teijaflink2226Some adults can and will have a hard time facing reality. I don’t think it’s wise to blame anyone for a persons suicide. There are generally mental health issues involved. I was still floored by the number of parents that blamed every problem in their family on some outside source. The music or game was allegedly causing mental illness. No. Genetics are most likely involved. A rejection of reality was seen at every turn. Researchers were well aware that the majority of abuse faced by women and children was at the hands of someone they knew in the 1970s. Many preferred and still prefer to place the blame on strange monsters.

All Love, Lightness, and the Warmth of complete Acceptance protect you. May all/any who have felt the separated from the Divine by narrow thinking be healed completely... even if it requires a hard learning for those whose hearts cannot see OR THINK...Namaste, dear Soul...

I suspect the Satanic Panic drove more away from mainline protestantism than from D&D...

Isn't that essentially Freemasonry?

i had a cousin that had a book about "satan in rock music", something like that, and i remember how ludicrous part of it was, they were talking about the crowd chanting "die, die, die" during the song "creeping death", which is pretty hilarious when you read the lyrics to the song, which is about the exodus of the jews from egypt, basically a bible story, seeing them paint a song that comes from the bible as evil and satanic is sort of funny/sad/and scary all at the same time

@@Shlogger probably shock and panic

Sorry that happened to you! I got called all kinds of stuff in school. Many thought I was a devil worshiper and I got in many fights but many years later my life is good and I’m thankful. I don’t do the nail polish anymore but I still rock my metal shirts and some do have pentagrams 😂🤘🏼

At least now a days we can call them what they are. The christian taliban. These people need to be ostracized and excluded from society imo. We should have no room for religious fundamentalists in our society.

but if you embrace the current liberal/leftist agenda then you are supporting the exact same type of thinking that caused you so much trouble back then.

@@joejones9520 Really? There are liberal cops harassing kids like during this era?(The answer is no) Read some of these comments. People who literally grew up with small town schools, churches, legislatures, cops harassing people for real, during this era. Even neighbor against neighbor, like the freaking East German Stasi.

@@Neenerella333 gotta read history and look at the bigger picture...the kind of society libs think they want ultimately leads to total loss of individual freedom and a rise to the top of the kind of people who in a free society can only cause petty and localized troubles like you describe.

Thanks for the kind and thoughtful comment!

I was going to comment this, but you beat me to it! I appreciate the more nuanced takes - I've never been religious (parents gave me a Catholic baptism and haven't taken me to a church since - sometimes I joke the water sizzled), so seeing to me what seems like pointless and misguided death and suffering just boils my blood.

Absolutely, but society has a maddening habit of chasing these unfounded phantasms rather than doing the dirty work of going after the real monsters you’ve described. I believe that is what Dr Sledge was trying to say; I doubt he meant to invalidate your very real trauma.

Abusive things do happen and they hide it with " conspiracy theory ". Good people can't believe the bad things people can do. Seems dangerous to write off the possibility that people could be doing evil things intentionally or unintentionally.

@@cindysmith9087 My point exactly. I am not saying that the good Dr. is denigrating my experience, at all. AI just believe that when one hasn't encountered their shadow in the Jungian sense, then it is difficult to believe that anyone could perpetrate such horrors and those that have encountered their shadow and are comfortable there indulge in, aid, and abet these crimes. They can wear anything from ceremonial robes to 1% patches but believe me,they exist. I heard that a paranoid person is merely someone who knows more than you.lol. Of course, there is a line that one must draw with reason and experience of human nature but God bless anyone that has never experienced that type of perplexing ,unfathomable evil.

Many that work WITH children are perverts and pedophiles indeed. It’s not organized or anything. It’s worldwide. Church, school, coaches etc

yeh i think the image of what ritual abuse actually is is often sensationalised by the church and online conspiracy theorists which unfortunately has the opposite of the desired effect. its essentially just organised sociopathy and contemporary slavery with ideological justification. as a sufferer of DID i am in a community full of people who have experienced SRA and RA, and theyr'e experiences are real, they are taken seriously by law enforcement because these people are trafficking victims whos claims have lead to real arrests in the past - iv'e even read that a vast majority of recovered child porn takes place in a ritual setting. this type of anti-satanic-panic discussion never really addresses this and just feeds the culture of disbelief surrounding these forms of contemporary slavery. i cant find a link but a victim of sra from the city im currently living escaped, studied a double degree in law and psychology, then sent them to prison by representing her self in court.

Yep, without grasping the concrete, material conditions which give rise to these things I don't think we can accurately understand them. If we don't understand them we can't stop them from happening again.

@@TheEsotericaChannel "Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress". I think of this all the time when I see seemingly bizarre conspiracies or new spiritual movements sprouting in our current climate. It's not simply a matter or ignorance as some of my friends believe, but rather that these serve a function, that they're an expression of and response to some real issue in the world.

It said !noertaP ym nioJ

I had to try 5 times to catch it! Lol

I took chuckled as Joy Division was and is one of my very favorite punk groups of all time. Their songs really spoke directly to me as a teen.

Yvan eht nioj

I'm sure all animal shelters refusing to sell black cats in the weeks prior to Halloween is about absolutely nothing... What is there to having a pentagram tattooed on your skin right? 'Nothing to it really. All made up.

I like the colour black more than it liked me when I discovered that it tends to attract negative energies. Shalom

@@theresefournier3269 oh come on! Zen Buddhists wear black. Black is a color of depth and of spaciousness, like the night sky. It doesn’t attract negativity.

@@DionysosThanateros11 Not what Sadhguru said, but it's easy to see why an authentic monk could get away with it, there's no negative vibe to even attract in the vicinity. KISS (... SIMPLY SIMPLE)

@@DionysosThanateros11 I wouldn't discount they theory. Think about how dark colors absorb light. It may work on the same principle, affecting other energies beyond the EM spectrum. There are many things outside the understanding of science - such as subtle energies. Nevertheless, there are still mechanisms in place that govern these phenomena.

Thanks so much, friend! It was a very difficult time in my life, but no roses without thorns. I'm just blessed to be doing what I'm doing now in such wonderful community as people like yourself. Hope you are well!

Are you familiar with Damien Echols?

I'm not a scholar of occultism, but having had the messages of the Satanic Panic crammed down my throat as a child, I now love many things goth, heavy metal, "dark" symbolism, fantasy literature, etc.

@@oaxacachaka I’ve heard the name but otherwise not really

@@stellabee2026 He was wrongfully convicted of a "satanic child molestation, torture, murder" during the Satanic Panic and spent like 10-15 years in solitary confinement while there he learned magick as a way to keep himself sane(sane-ish). There are some good documentaries on it, not the magick part but the wrongful conviction. Now he tours the country teaching magick to people. It's an incredible story.

I do my best to praise when due and blame when due and be careful in doing so

Robert Stack overcoat in fog GOAT

​@ESOTERICA lol yup we can call him that 😂

My dad made me put it in the trash, lol. I was pleased with myself for offended him.

I'm sorry you went through that. You raise a good point about substituting the fear of one fictional danger for facing one's own actual trauma. One wonders how many of the guilty "bystanders"/low-key promoters of these moral panics are doing a similar displacement.

@@sparklesparklesparkle6318 I don't mind whatever or whoever anyone wants to worship as long as no being is hurt, but no matter what those other people thought they were talking to, it was not real. If you were practicing "Satanism", you would not think it was real either. Actual Satanists are atheists

Same here.✌

Just to say something regarding conspiracy theories. As far as political spectrum goes, I hate both the mainstream left/right, anarchists/statists equally, and all the ideologies including Fascism, Nazism (got beaten multiple times by Neo Nazis and Far Right extremists in my country), Bolshevism, Marxism, Libertarianism, Voluntaryism, Wokeism, Transhumanism, Technocracy, and all that shit we're being peddled nowadays. I've been called a conspiracy theorist multiple times by the Left, and I can see why. There's a lot of brain-dead, Christians in this camp who make the rest of us look stupid. There's a lot of right-wingers and fanatical people in general. The boomers are especially frustrating. Once they were hippies, now they're newly baked Christians or they "fight the cabal!"... And yes, their illiterate, can't use Internet properly, they trust every meme on the internet however ridiculous it can be, and they have a poor use of humour/satire. But that doesn't mean that there aren't real, documented conspiracies. There's loads of them, you don't see them either if you: don't want to see them, or you weren't exposed to them. I'm sure there's a lot of people who fall into the latter. Because of social media echo chambers, we're all in feedback loops that just compound the ideas we already know. What if things you know about Kovid are from only small number of mainstream sources and that happens to be wrong? We've been proven that so far. Do you check everything you hear? I do! From both sides. I mainly read the mainstream media first, and then alternative news sources. There are a lot of great journalists out there! Unfortunately, today's media pushes me to look for alternative sources more then ever, but I would like mainstream media to improve and return my, and other people's trust. Because of flu-like diseases for the last 2 years, I've read dozens and dozens of peer reviewed medical studies, including the trial data from the pharmaceutical companies themselves. It's fucking shocking! Go find Pfizer data on the CDC website from February this year. It's amazing that state authorized injections after seeing that data - 9 pages of adverse reaction, in high numbers (and don't let me start about the 6 months old baby data). No wonder CDC officials have quit their jobs. I know for a fact that lots of narrative breaking stories have been suppressed, many high-profiling doctors censored or stories consciously lied about [misinformation] (Ivermectin - Horse Dewormer). Same is happening with Ukraine. They are not showing you the whole story. They want war, and you're giving it to them, as always. One million dead in Iraq, cities literally obliterated to dust, under the pretense of weapons of mass destruction? No weapons, but a lot of countries destroyed, people bombed and murdered, and of course - oil pillaged. And these same oil-ligarchs are peddling you the global warming anti-science fairy tales now. 😄I don't have anything against robots or digital currency. I like video games personally (got in trouble for that as well as a kid). But I would just like to have a choice, that's all. Conspiracy - a secret agreement between more people, an act of plotting. Have you seen where the money flows within the pharmaceutical industry or world medical organisations lately? You don't think that state owned media and social media companies (btw state + private interest = fascism) are working together against the conspiracy theorists? Think again. That's a definition of a conspiracy. We need to use our right brain hemisphere more. We are stuck in the left brain thinking. We always need certainty. But the world is not like that. There's always a "Yes, but...", a Yin and Yang synthesis. Every good has it's bad sides, every bad has its good sides. Let's create a nice flow here, and not deepen the divide.

at its very worst the SPanic didnt cause even a tiny fraction of the trouble, death, injury and ruination of lives as did the summer of 2020 but the left loves that summer.

@@joejones9520 apples peanut butter apes oranges

1980 baby here, nearly identical experiences. For me the first time was with Ghostbusters, with my father warning me that pretending to fight off demons with electric beams would be a one-way ticket to Hell. Wouldn't let me play with a gremlin toy I found in my backyard (tossed over the fence by some other kid apparently) because he thought it was a demon. One time he told me that dinosaurs were demon skeletons planted in the earth by Satan to deceive people. Later on it would be the computer game DOOM that would trigger him the same way. His unique brand of "faith" or whatever you want to call it would culminate in throwing a Bible at my head when I was suffering from severe depression and contemplating suicide at the age of 15. It was the last catalyst I needed to break off from that religion forever.