297: The Epstein Satanic Panic

Summary

Conspirituality Podcast — Episode 297: The Epstein Satanic Panic

Date: February 26, 2026
Hosts: Matthew Remski, Julian Walker

Episode Overview

This episode dives deeply into the recent resurgence of “Satanic Panic” narratives following the mass release of the Epstein files. The hosts explore how conspiracy theories, especially those intersecting spirituality (a.k.a. "conspirituality"), recycle old tropes to make sense out of the disturbing and opaque reality of high-profile abuse scandals. They debunk common patterns, highlight the blurring between real criminal acts and supernatural evil claims, and trace the lineage of this kind of panic to its roots in media, therapy culture, and cultish influencer spaces. The episode aims to clarify the difference between healthy suspicion of power and unhealthy, paranoia-driven conspiracism that derails meaningful accountability and justice.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Context of the Epstein Files Dump

• Opaque Release: The hosts discuss whether the mass, disorganized dump of 3 million documents is itself a form of “flooding the zone” (04:09), obfuscating truth under a veneer of transparency.
• "Depoliticized Catharsis": Rather than fueling actionable inquiry, the dump has led social media and influencers to repackage and recycle decades-old Satanic Panic tropes (05:46).
• Quote (Matthew):

  "The paradox of this dump is that it looks like an act of transparency...but through the sheer volume...it might be a pretty clever way of actually hiding data while professing not to hide data." (04:40)

2. Data Overload and the Social Media Labyrinth

• Chaos Amplifies Conspiracism: The nature of online platforms encourages “do your own research” logic, with creators slicing, dicing, and remixing unverified claims for dopamine-fueled virality.
  • “The details in conspiracy theory predictions morph to fit new facts, declaring victory over reality’s blanks and errors.” (08:04)
• Cognitive Hazards: Sincere feelings and intuitions of injustice get twisted by the viral logic of social platforms (12:01).

3. Distinguishing Real Conspiracy from Mythical Evil

• The Epstein case is real, horrific, and involves elite criminality, but the stories flooding in also channel anti-Semitic, supernatural, and feverish "spiritual warfare" explanations (10:32).
• Quote (Matthew):

  “I think there is a possible positive aspect this time, in that the panic is at least more directionally correct — targeting the actual titans. But the space between real conspiracy and wild theory is filling up with the miasma of supernatural evil.” (09:43)

• Warning: Pointing out these dynamics often brings accusations of denial or complicity (13:10). The hosts clarify their stance:

  “It’s not that I’m in denial of child sexual abuse… It’s because I’m not in denial that it’s really important to see this issue clearly.” (13:44, Matthew)

4. The Recycled Narratives: From Pizzagate to QAnon

• Brief explainer on Pizzagate and how it mutated into QAnon: false claims about elite cabals running child trafficking rings and using coded language (14:30).
• Reminders that the real bulk of child sexual abuse is perpetrated not by Satanic elites but by family, friends, and authority figures, and is a much broader, tragic reality (16:00).
• These fantastical stories function as “movie villain” simplifications that make the reality easier to process morally and conceptually (16:45).

5. Infotainment and Amateur Investigations

• Gamification of the Files: Influencers turn the document dump into a “treasure hunt,” selling AI tools to parse the data, focusing on stolen artworks and sensational tangents (25:27).
• “Disaster Spirituality”: Naomi Klein’s concept of “disaster capitalism” is applied to how influencers exploit calamities for personal or ideological gain (29:00).
• Quote (Matthew):

  "Charismatics of disaster spirituality...parasitize the attention economy, seizing the exhausted passions of their followers." (29:21)

6. The Anatomy of the Satanic Panic Narrative

• Recurring Elements: Stories from figures like Max Loewen and Anya mix claims of global cabals, ritual abuse, animal sacrifice, secret identities, and supernatural evil (32:00–41:26).
• Patterns:
  • Global citizenship and travel
  • Drugging and paralysis
  • Animal/human sacrifice
  • Unverifiable details (e.g., being someone’s secret twin)
• The “doctor” as both abuser and preserver is a recurring archetype (34:40).
• Hosts emphasize the difference between empathy for trauma survivors and journalistic rigor (37:17).

7. TikTok-ification of Conspiracism

• Expressive, High-Impact Reels: Gen Z creators remix old Illuminati, Babylon, Vatican, and bloodline tropes at dizzying speed (42:04, 44:30).
• Satirical, performance-heavy content blurs entertainment and sincere claim, leaving viewer both informed and confused (45:04).

8. The Emotional Economy of Trauma Influencers

• Trauma-Informed Performances: Some creators lead with empathetic advice and support for presumed survivors — before uncritically introducing sensational, uncorroborated stories (48:11).
• The blending of genuine empathy with poor epistemological standards is a central risk.

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History: Where Does This Panic Come From?

9. Michelle Remembers & The Birth of Modern Satanic Panic

• Book Background: 1980’s Michelle Remembers, a product of devout Catholic psychiatrist Dr. Lawrence Pazder and patient Michelle Smith, stages the explosive “recovered memory” of Satanic abuse (49:30).
• Themes:
  • Psychic hemorrhaging tied to miscarriage
  • Catholic symbolism and battle against modernity
  • Sensational, unverifiable details (amputated fingers, mass rituals, etc.)
• Cultural Impact:
  • Sparked massive media coverage (2020, ABC), "Catholicization of public morality," anti-abortion/anti-psychiatry zeal (55:01).
  • Influenced numerous (false) legal prosecutions, shattered families, and laid groundwork for future panics.

10. Courage to Heal & The Recovered Memory Craze

• Book and Influence: “The Courage to Heal” (1988) by creative writing instructors Ellen Bass and Laura Davis encouraged automatic writing and “somatic epistemology” as reliable paths to discovering childhood sexual abuse.
• Early editions mixed real abuse, speculation, and outright fantasy, further muddying public understanding (59:14 onward).
• Quote (Julian):

  “The plural of anecdote is not evidence. You can stack as many stories as you like...but that doesn’t end up creating evidence; that’s a different category.” (60:36)

• Consequences: False accusations, destroyed families, but also created a space for survivors whose stories were neglected by the healthcare system.

11. Personal Testimony: Communities Taken In

• Julian's Experience: Describes his time in an Anna Forrest-led yoga community, where repressed memory therapy induced false beliefs about family abuse; community validation sustained the delusion (66:53–70:23).
• Quote (Julian):

  “For about three years, I myself came to believe that I was such a person—that all of my suffering must be rippling out from buried abuse committed by my father...It ruined my relationship with my family.” (66:53–70:23)

• Parallels drawn to the “survivor-to-sage” archetype, wherein personal trauma transmutes into cultish authority (70:42).

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Conspirituality in Modern Times

12. The New Grifters

• Teal Swan:

  • Builds a brand on early, dramatic stories of ritual abuse, positions herself as a persecuted truth-teller vindicated by the Epstein files (71:52–73:00).
  • Quote (Teal Swan):

    “Those of us who were the first to come out about having been trapped...experienced a world that defended those who harmed us and that sacrificed us...” (72:12)

  • The transformation from victim to radiant sage provides social capital and cements her cult-leader status.
  • Her key therapist, Barbara Snow, was herself a key player in previous Satanic Panic false memory scandals.

• Yolande Norris Clark:

  • Claims obstetric birth is “occult humiliation ritual” for mass mind control (77:34).
  • Links all medicalized birth to satanic ritual abuse and MK Ultra. Advises followers to “heal their own hearts” as the ultimate solution, exemplifying the fusion of activism and spiritual bypass (80:41).
  • Quote (Julian):

    “For her, it’s the direction of obstetrics...people in her field...are targeted and shut down not because their practices are dangerous pseudoscience, but because they are exposing evil at the heart...” (80:36)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Flattened out...deputizes everyone to attempt the same kind of process [Julie K. Brown did], but they’re just going to be baking with half a cooking set.” — Matthew (04:40)
• “Every few years, someone discovers what a genius Andrew Wakefield is.... The defenses against this kind of recycling are withering.” — Matthew (06:41)
• “These fantastical stories make this grim reality easier to process morally and conceptually.” — Julian (16:45)
• “I just want to say...repeating it with more emotional conviction is corroboration. And if you don’t believe, well, that’s your bias.” — Julian, critiquing faulty logic of online “corroboration” (23:27)
• “Charismatics of disaster spirituality...parasitize the attention economy, seizing the exhausted passions of their followers.” — Matthew (29:21)
• “The most painful pathway is for people convinced their worst intuitions about what the filled in gaps must contain have now been definitively proven.” — Julian (20:33)
• “You can stack as many stories as you like...but that doesn’t end up creating evidence.” — Julian (60:36)

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Highlighted Segments and Timestamps

• The Conspirituality of the Epstein Files:
  • 03:27 — Nightmarish effect of the untamed document dump
  • 04:40 — The paradox of “flooding the zone”
• Recycled Conspiracies:
  • 06:41 — How old tropes are stored up and deployed in new crises
• The Realities and Fantasies Around Abuse:
  • 08:04 — The blending of criminal fact, religious prophecy, and supernatural evil
  • 13:10 — Anti-analytical backlash faced by skeptics
• Pizzagate and QAnon Explainer:
  • 14:30 — Clear summary for new listeners
• Infotainment Treasure Hunts:
  • 25:27–26:47 — AI tools and treasure-hunting the Epstein files
• Michelle Remembers & Courage to Heal:
  • 49:30 onward — Satanic panic’s real-world origins and consequences
• Personal Fallout Stories:
  • 66:53–70:23 — Julian’s community experience with repressed memory therapy
• Modern Grifters’ Responses:
  • 71:52–75:59 — Teal Swan’s self-mythology
  • 77:34–80:41 — Yolande Norris Clark’s take on birth as ritual abuse

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Tone & Language

Throughout, the hosts balance empathy for survivors of real abuse with skepticism toward sensational, uncorroborated claims. Their language is careful, sometimes academic, but also candid and occasionally wry: “kitchen sink” conspiracies, “disaster spirituality,” and “baking with half a cooking set” stand out as memorable turns of phrase.

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Conclusion

The episode provides a tour of the “new Satanic Panic,” showing how old patterns are revived and amplified by social media, and how real questions of accountability for elite abuse risk being lost among waves of recycled myths, charismatic grifters, and trauma-influenced influencers. The hosts stress the importance of critical thinking, evidence, material action, and historical memory to avoid repeating cycles of panic, scapegoating, and misplaced focus.

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For further listening and reading:

• Episodes on Michelle Remembers, The Courage to Heal, Catholic horror, and the Teal Swan phenomenon, available on the Conspirituality Patreon and archives.
• Documentary: Satan Wants You (on Michelle Remembers and the original Satanic Panic).

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This summary covers major themes, arguments, quotes, and memorable content from Conspirituality’s “Epstein Satanic Panic” episode, so listeners new and old can navigate the troubled waters of modern conspiracism with greater clarity.

Transcript

[Julian Walker]

Reggie, I just sold my car online. Let's go, Grandpa.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Wait, you did?

[Julian Walker]

Yep. On Carvana. Just put in the license plate, answered a few questions, got an offer in minutes. Easier than setting up that new digital picture frame.

[Matthew Rumsky]

You don't say.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, they're even picking it up tomorrow. Talk about fast. Wow.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Way to go. So, about that picture frame.

[Julian Walker]

Ah, forget about it. Until Carvana makes one, I'm not interested.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

Car selling made easy on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.

[Matthew Rumsky]

It's tax season, and at Lifelock, we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now, here's another big number. 100 million. That's how many data points Lifelock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it. Guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast for the threats you can't control terms apply. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism. I'm Matthew Rumsky. I'm.

[Julian Walker]

Hello, I'm Julian Walker. We are on Instagram and threads inspiritualitypod as well as individually on bluesky, and you can access all of our episodes ad free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions. As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Episode 297, the Epstein Satanic Panic it is hard for some people to accept that the normalized and unbridled accumulation of wealth and power is like a selection process for apex predators who wind up having overwhelming influence over the systems that enabled them. The metaphysical reflex can provide a lot of relief. Epstein was uniquely evil and so different from the rest of us that he engaged in supernatural acts that, you know, we would never think possible. He was a cosmic raider invading an otherwise balanced world. In the chaos of facts and illusions that swirl around the Epstein files, the nearest available and resonant metaphysics some people have found are in the recycling of Satanic panic themes from the 1980s. These stories have been surging since Pizzagate and QAnon erupted in 2017. But now they're reaching another peak in visibility and provocation, and their ability to reduce the problem of the Epstein class to the unsolvable problem of evil is on full display. So that's what we'll be looking at today. So, Julian, this is not an easy episode to put together and navigate. I think on a personal level, we've been discussing privately how demoralizing it is to watch a new tidal wave of conspiracism. And it epistemological, like chaos, form and begin to break over the. The rocks of the Epstein files.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, it's very Twilight Zone y. I feel like we've gone back to like the middle of 2020. It feels like a rip in the fabric of space time and the whole world has kind of fallen to this. Do your own research, alternate reality, at least for a couple weeks. Let's see how it goes. There are of course, very upsetting and solid details in the Epstein files. But the incompetent and as far as I can tell, cruel nature of this makes this indiscriminate dump of 3 million highly charged files with no context or investigative structure or categorization a real magnet for the darkest of nightmare conspiracy theories once again.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah, and I think we have to start off with like, is that itself a conspiracy or is it just incompetence?

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, I mean, I do see it as incompetence because I think career civil servants and law enforcement professionals would have the self respect and the experience to deliver. Deliver something more like a report. We've seen these kinds of documents in the past. But does saying fuck it and just releasing it this way look a lot like flooding the Zone and serving as a big distraction? Sure, yeah.

[Matthew Rumsky]

I mean, all governments will hide or politicize data to one degree or another. But the paradox of this dump is that it looks like an act of transparency. Despite the continued redactions, the disappearing files, but through the sheer volume of materials, it might be a pretty clever way of actually hiding data. While professing not to hide data and to underline this, I was just imagining how the alternative pathway would have worked out. Somebody like Julie K. Brown takes four years and all of her background with Miami Herald, and she does a thousand FOIA requests and she winds up doing the same quality of work that she's known for. And then it takes years, but she breaks the story and she shows her work. One of the things that this dump does is that it deputizes everyone to attempt the same kind of process. But really they're just going to be baking with half a cooking set and they'll come up with diverse interpretations. And in that landscape, whatever Julie Brown might come up with is just going to look like another opinion.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, it's flattened out.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah. Okay, so today we wanted to look at the themes, the pieces of content. We'll get to a bunch of examples in part two that copy and paste and remix QAnon, satanic panic, anti communist propaganda, and even the Protocols of the Elders of zion from like 5, 40, 100, 120 years ago, respectively. And I think it's a very sober lesson in how fragile good history and cultural memory can be and how we live on platforms that are really designed to constantly, like, electrocute the amygdala and to push a lot of people into reactionary and then right wing views, because that's where the traction and engagement is.

[Julian Walker]

And I just want to say for longtime listeners, yeah, we're covering this stuff again, but through this new lens of current events and for newer listeners, you may just be learning about this like a lot of people were seeing on social media, right?

[Matthew Rumsky]

So there's this recursive quality of bad information that's recycled and then it's stored up and then it's ready to be deployed in the midst of a crisis. I mean, it's something that we see in other areas like anti vaccine conspiracy theories, for example. You know, it's like every, every few years somebody discovers how what a genius Andrew Wakefield is or something like that. And then, you know, fascism continues to liquidate institutions of knowledge and persecute journalists. And so the defenses against this kind of recycling are, seem to be withering even more. But I think we have to say that with the Epstein files, things are different. There is absolutely a real conspiracy to be threaded together here. This guy's a smiling ghoul who just happens to be a Jewish supremacist. He's abusing a thousand girls and women while networking financial and cultural titans together and binding some of them into various layers of complicity while seeking to influence geopolitics and plotting a genetic conquest of the human race. So there are blurring lines and a shrinking amount of space between that emerging reality and the conspiratorial storylines churned out by a range of operators, from like earnest Gen Z new believers to Gen X opportunists and grifters.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, absolutely. And as you've been saying, because of this data deluge, all of the real criminal conspiracy is so easily then jumbled together with old reanimated zombie conspiracies, as well as videos and pictures that come from elsewhere but are reshared as if they're actually from the files, because someone told me they were. I think it's good to note here that as with religious prophecies, when the details of a conspiracy theory and what it predicts turns out to be untrue. It will morph to fill the gaps around whatever new facts have emerged while then turning around and saying I was right all along.

[Matthew Rumsky]

And then I just want to add to the sort of smorgasbord that there's also AI slop infiltrating the files and their presentation on social media as well. I think that there is a possible positive aspect of this particular round of satanic panic in that first of all, at least it's more directionally correct. The panic in the 80s and the QAnon surge that is now kind of in a brief remission, it really targeted elites, but it actually scapegoated working class and marginalized people. Like the original satanic panic specifically targeted teachers and childcare providers and school janitors, accusing them of satanic ritual abuse crimes. And that of course drew attention away from growing scrutiny of the reality of clerical and domestic child sexual abuse. QAnon viciously attacked Jews, queer people, trans people, those moral panics punched down. And a lot of the punching now is going straight up.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, it's interesting too, right, because the satanic panic in the 80s also has been analyzed as a reaction to women entering the workforce. And so what is the site of evil? It's the daycare center where women are dropping off their kids instead of staying home and being trad wives.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Right.

[Julian Walker]

I think this general analysis is right, but I can't help but get stuck a little bit on the fact that QAnon's central claim was that it was Democrat and Hollywood elites that were involved in the adrenochrome blood drinking pedophile cabal.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah, yeah, true. I don't think those liberal really felt it though. I don't think they were vulnerable to it. I think it was the queer world really downstream that paid most of the price for that.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, so maybe they were punching up but not actually landing and then they had to fight other scapegoats.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah, and I think we should add too that Epstein related conspiracism is so far showing a lot of anti Semitic and conspirituality feverishness. But as I'm saying, it really does target the actual and obvious titans of the world. But with what I mean, what I see so far in some of the examples we'll review today is not a realistic or actionable analysis of power and capitalist excess, but a meditation on supernatural evil. So while the space between conspiracy and theory is shrinking, that space is filling up with the equivalent of like the miasma theory of Disease. And I think that's my main concern, that information clarity could turn a moment like this into a revolutionary opportunity instead of an exhausting and disorganized catharsis.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. So target the elites for the right reasons. Right, Right. Yeah. I mean, I think we need to be careful not to give too much credibility, though, because this is always something that comes up to the idea that conspiracy theories are actually turning out to be true. Because it's in the nature of conspiracy logic to do this kind of cobbling together of truth and lies and healthy intuitions and paranoid fantasies, actual events and then outlandish spec speculation, and then, as I mentioned before, to kind of morph when they fail and then say, oh, look, Pizzagate, QAnon, the Illuminati, the blood libel from the 12th century. All of it actually has turned out to be true.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Well, about the healthy intuition part that you mentioned, I think the complication comes down to if Naomi Klein is right, that they get the feelings right but the facts wrong, what do we do with that? Because in my opinion, the feeling or the intuition of exploitative control is correct. It can be protective. It can generate solidarity. Solidarity within an underclass. So, yeah, it's difficult to sort. I mean, for me, it's difficult to sort my way through that. Right. Because there's a point at which the theorizing does gather information, it does gather data, it does get legs. People do pick it up and start to work on it with some kind of, like, notion of corroboration. So we're going to launch into some examples, and then we're going to track their historical antecedents to decades before Epstein. But before we do that, one last intro note from me before we do, there are going to be really angry responses to our analysis because simply flagging this issue on Instagram provoked a barrage of accusations that I am in denial about the reality of child sexual abuse or that I'm trying to protect the predator class. Maybe I'm in the files, people should check my hard drive, et cetera. What I want to say is that it's not that I'm in denial of child sexual abuse and structural abuse at all. In fact, it's because I'm not in denial that it's really important to see this issue clearly. And for people who earnestly believe that satanic ritual abuse is real, because you support all survivors or because that is part of your story, what I would say from a strategic perspective, because I really, you know, I really wouldn't want to try to litigate anybody's account is that when you're searching for an explanation of networked crimes and cruelty with incalculable personal costs, it's really important to consider the downstream effects of the narrative of spiritual warfare, because that never turns out well. Like the groups that most easily mobilize that are all on the right, the groups that the spiritual warfare narrative serves are generally all on the right. Like, can we think of any instance in which the explanation of Satanism for a material catastrophe has helped anybody? Like, I can't.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And I want to say here too, just because I've been having a couple conversations with friends who are newly tuning in on this and saying, what are you talking about now? I just want to very quickly say, oh, Pizzagate was the conspiracy theory that buried within a bunch of emails that were hacked from the DNC was proof of a cabal in which John Podesta and Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin were ordering children from this place called Comet Ping Pong, but referring to it as pizza and various other code words and that this all sort of was blowing up right before the election, going back to 2016 and 2017. And this was so widely propagated by people on the right and through message boards like 4chan that a guy named Edgar Welch ended up driving multiple hours across country with firearms and attacking this place called Comet Ping Pong and only to find out there was no basement for kids to be hidden in. And, you know, he got arrested, he ended up going to jail. So this is sort of of one aspect that we see sort of being resurrected. And now the guy who owns Comet Ping Pong is being harassed again and being accused of all kinds of terrible crimes. And out of that then grows QAnon, which is a further kind of development of this idea that Democrats and Hollywood elites are involved in a blood drinking, satanic cabal. So just to clarify that for anyone who's never heard of this stuff before, and we'll get into what the satanic panic was in a little bit, I want to point out here before we go any further that yes, child sexual abuse is a real thing. It happens mostly at the hands of family members or trusted friends and authority figures. And clearly the Epstein network is real, and it's estimated to have victimized at least a thousand women and girls, all of whom deserve dignity and justice. And at the same time, there's a broader reality of sex trafficking as a global organized crime phenomenon, which, according to the data, affects roughly 6.3 million people every year, with about 1.7 million being children and it's enacted overwhelmingly by common criminals, who are neither billionaire elites nor practitioners of satanic ritual, nor Hollywood movie stars. In some ways, I think the movie villain narrative of a small group of perverted elites exploiting money and power while chanting ancient spells and metabolizing the magical properties of adrenochrome in the blood of abused children can make this grim reality easier to process morally and conceptually.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah, I agree.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. So what we start to notice, what we have started to notice right away after the files dropped a few weeks ago, is that our feeds were very quickly filling up with things like clips from old Geraldo Rivera daytime talk show accounts of satanic ritual abuse, or people repeating some of that Pizzagate and QAnon stuff I just referenced as if they were hearing it for the first time. And then even some shell shocked liberals who had some familiarity with those right wing conspiracy theories, but now were getting Epstein pilled into saying that they owed their MAGA friends an apology because it turns out it was all true.

[Matthew Rumsky]

It's really exhausting to see Gen Z influencers, platform people like Rivera as if he's just another guy. As if there isn't like a firmly established consensus on him being a complete tool.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And so overlapp with all of this has been the DOJ dumpster diving into the files by using keywords and search terms like pizza or jerky or shrimp. And then I've had a lot of people show up on my Instagram feed interpreting emails and texts that use those words and saying that they're code for children or perhaps for cannibalism. And the one that I saw really spinning out of control was the theory that emails about Epstein supposedly surviving on a diet of jerky alone for some time and having a special jerky maker on staff, all of this pointed to him dining exclusively on the flesh of sacrifice babies.

[Matthew Rumsky]

And I just want to say that, like, I don't put it beyond anybody being able to do anything. This is all possible and we have to make sure that we can see evidence for it.

[Julian Walker]

Which is.

[Matthew Rumsky]

That's the crucial point. Right. Like I. It's not like, oh, that couldn't possibly happen. I mean, the Nazi, these did some incredible stuff with human skin. And so, yeah, it's not about disbelieving out of hand. It's about the process by which something becomes something that jolts your spine for the next week and whether or not that was necessary.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And this is the thing with conspiracy logic is that the gap between I have this hunch that this seems really Weird, Maybe it could mean X, Y or Z. That jumps very quickly to oh no, we know what that means. Right?

[Matthew Rumsky]

That means. And knowing what that means is like custom made for social media. I know what this means. Let me fill you in on this. Nobody's talking about this. Right. Let me drop a bomb for you.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. The mainstream media won't tell you, but I figured it out. So this is all of course understandable as you're saying. And there is this odd preoccupation with some of these words in the emails that are used in weird sentence fragments or in references that don't seem to make sense, especially out of context. And we see that this becomes a kind of site of one of the hazards of doing your own research. To me, the most painful pathway this phenomenon goes down is for the people who become convinced that their worst intuitions about what the filled in gaps must contain have now been definitively proven. Right. Yeah.

[Matthew Rumsky]

And so there's something too that happens. This is our first clip coming up when a kind of naivety, maybe research incompetence meets a lack of education. So we have a Gen Z creator here discussing allegations made by a guy named Sasha Riley who we don't know much about except through social media and interviews that he gave to a substack writer. So let's just roll what this guy has to say. This video is going to be for the people that don't believe Sasha Riley and for whatever reason need more to consider this victim's story credible. So this is something that Sasha posted themself, which Sasha uses they them pronouns. So I will be referring to them accordingly. But this is what Sasha posted on Facebook and not recently either, over four years ago. So for the people saying, you know, oh, why now? Why just now? It's not just now. We're only listening just now. So please remember that. Okay, so what listeners have to know about this video is that across the top is emblazoned the title corroborating Sasha Riley. And what this guy is doing is just reading Sasha Riley's statements, which is not corroborating Sasha Riley. Sasha Riley posting X on Facebook is not corroboration. So like that's the level of kind of difficulty I think we're encountering now. There's no reliable public record for Riley. Reportedly they are an Iraq war veteran, possibly with military honors. They've said that they were trafficked and abused as a child and that their adoptive father, father was the ringleader. They say that between 9 and 13 they were trafficked to and abused by the Epstein network. And in one incident with Trump, Reilly claims that they thrust a tent peg into Trump's anus, which is why he's been incontinent for decades. Now, as I said before, anything is possible with this crowd. And as with everything else in the files, it all has to be investigated. Of course, it won't be. And in the absence of that, we're going to get a ton of noise. And so the point that I just want to come back to with this creator is that he's flashing this title of corroborating Sasha Riley's testimony and sort of convincing himself ever more sort of, I don't know, like, intimately of the truth of a story because he is repeating it. And so I think that's a really difficult, difficult situation.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And, and giving the impression to everyone who is, who is seeing that piece of content that this counts as corroboration. Right. Just repeating it with more emotional conviction is actually corroboration. And if you don't believe, well, you know, that's, that's, that's got to be your bias or something. These types of stories, to me, like the actual Sasha Riley story, are the most tragic because. And of course I'm speculating, but it seems like someone who's endured immense trauma and suffering, maybe they have some kind of mental illness, maybe some unethical and deeply confusing therapy, as we've seen time and again, ends up with a kind of recovered memory situation where it's hard to tell what's real and what is imagined and what has gotten attached to very overwhelming emotions. And then, you know, what has been woven in from pop culture or suggested by the therapist while under hypnosis. It's impossible to know for sure, but the more sensational and outlandish the claims are, the more investigation and corroboration seems necessary.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Well, yeah, that's exactly it. Right. Like, this isn't. This is an extraordinary thing. We've got to see the. We. We have to, you know, and, and the, the counter argument is going to be, well, of course, these people are so powerful, they're going to cover everything up really, really tight. And, yeah, that, that is true. And yet the history of journalism shows that, you know, things that are locked down really tight by governments, by corporations, by, you know, the powers that be will often be ripped into the sunlight at some point. So it's not just, it's not a fait accompli that it's sealed. So I've got another example before we break, which is an influencer treating the Epstein files as a gamified treasure hunt. I think I just solved the biggest art heist in the world using the

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

Epstein files and there is a 10

[Matthew Rumsky]

million dollar reward if I did.

[Julian Walker]

This woman just found two of the most famous missing stolen pieces of artwork in the world in the Epstein file. She asked for help and oh boy, did we find some art crime, maybe some money laundering. Definitely a name that should be investigated.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

There's a lot of estate information in there and it's worth us all going through.

[Julian Walker]

So we're going to help her solve

[Matthew Rumsky]

the case and I'm going to show

[Julian Walker]

you how this new AI tool I built that can AI analyze the entire Epstein document dump. Crack this case in one question and I'm going to tell you about how you can get access to the same AI tool named Web for free.

[Matthew Rumsky]

This guy is selling. Well, it's for free, Julian. But he is selling his AI tool to help you analyze the Epstein files so you can go on a treasure hunt. And find what? And find stolen art so that you can claim rewards on it. Because, you know, I guess the stolen art is listed on some, you know, reward site or something like that. Incredible. So the first example about the Sasha Riley corroboration, non corroboration points to the epistemological issues. The second one is about how easy it is for the files to just become content. And in that process, I think the moral thrust of investigation is just lost to infotainment.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

Yeah.

[Julian Walker]

You know, Matthew, this reminds me a bit of your term disaster spirituality. Because some of the folks creating this more treasure hunt content, which by the way feels like an updated and more accessible version of how, you know, influencers did something similar with Q drops. Right. Like we're going to interpret for you what this means and come along with us on the ride and follow us and buy our merch. But these guys are building their own digital tools and then using Epstein mania as a way to gain prominence for their AI engines or whatever. And yeah, it starts to veer away from concern with justice for survivors and more towards an opportunistic gold rush on whatever clues might be in the trash pile about how to get rich.

[Matthew Rumsky]

So that guy, I'm not gonna name the first guy, but that guy is Ian Carroll. You might have seen him around, but he's got like, he's everywhere doing some weird stuff like that a lot of the time with a big shit eating grin like, oh, I found out something really juicy about how horrible the world is. And it's like you're supposed to just I don't know, I don't know. Man, what a waste. So yeah, disaster spirituality was Inspired by Naomi Klein's 2010 coinage of the term disaster capitalism, in which she's describing the agility with which multinational corporations like exploit natural disasters, civil unrest, terrorist threats to appropriate public assets and push hyper capitalist fixes. So Hurricane Katrina was like the opportunity that everybody was looking for to sort of destroy the New Orleans or reform the New Orleans public school system according to a more privatized model, things like that. And Klein quoted Milton Freeman and his candor as a way to underline her thesis. Friedman wrote, only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken on taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That I believe is our basic function, to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. And so while the captains of disaster capitalism, they work on the sort of brick and mortar level to seize distressed assets for privatization, the charismatics of disaster spirituality, they parasitize the attention economy, seizing the exhausted passions of their followers. And the ideas that they have lying around in this instance are, you know, the ideas from 120 years ago through to 1980.

[Julian Walker]

And today's social media is custom made for these dynamics.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

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[Julian Walker]

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[Matthew Rumsky]

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[Julian Walker]

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[Matthew Rumsky]

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[Julian Walker]

Gotta keep the lights on when the three alarm hits.

[Matthew Rumsky]

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[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

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[Matthew Rumsky]

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[Julian Walker]

when treated with ebglis.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Before starting ebglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

Ask your doctor about ebglis and visit eglis.lily.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Okay, so we're going to take a tour through some examples.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. We'll start with someone named Max Loewen, who's been making the rounds doing podcast interviews lately. This is her bio. Max Loewen is a global citizen, having grown up in various countries and is trilingual in Italian, Spanish and English. She is a survivor of satanic ritual abuse, torture and trafficking who went on to do her healing work and train in trauma and recovery to help other survivors and those trapped in the cycle of violence. So that's what you'll see as a bio anywhere where she's showing up on a podcast or YouTube channel doing an interview.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah, saying something like this in terms of the.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

The sexual abuse, the rape, the trafficking. He had done a bonfire ritual with me when I was 14 at night, and they brought in cages of animals and this huge fire and I was laid on a blanket and drugged with a drug where I was fully conscious, but I couldn't move a muscle. I couldn't even talk. And, you know, then he had me basically gang raped by a whole lot of men. And every rape would coincide with an animal being thrown into the fire. So I would hear the screaming and smell the burning flesh and out of this event and others. By the time I reached that age, I became impregnated a few times.

[Matthew Rumsky]

So, you know, I will just say that this is a kind of structure of narrative that I have heard in many, many, many, many different iterations. You know, some major characteristics that are shared between this account and those of many other people who rise into this kind of satanic ritual abuse, almost spokesperson position. Some of those points are quite sort of common. So the person is usually a global citizen, you know, and you, if you, and it makes sense because if you have the proof of a global cabal, you're going to have a story of non stop long haul travel and being a polyglot and you know, being able to sort of flow into any, almost, almost in a mirror of what Epstein does himself. Flow into any environment. Right. Like brought into against their will. But they can, they, they are, are generally, they can be anywhere, they have been everywhere. And often there's a very long recitation of how many different countries, how many different places, how many different, you know, governments they have been victimized by. Also, she mentions later in this account that she was drugged but also conscious of everything. That's also a kind of, of like a, like a waking, almost paralysis that is commonly described in these narratives. Animal sacrifice is a common thread. There's also. She mentions somebody called the doctor. And in Michelle Remembers, which we'll get to, especially in the third segment, there is someone also called the Doctor, there's also a nurse who both sort of play the role of keeping victims alive and functional so that they can be tortured indefinitely. And that's their job. They are evil, they are torturing, they are, you know, manipulating. They're probably doing medical experiments, but they're also there to make sure that the, the, you know, the victim doesn't die, that things don't go too far. And Julian, it occurred to me this week that this figure in these narratives of the doctor who's never named,

[Julian Walker]

I

[Matthew Rumsky]

think begins to become sort of secularized and muted a little bit and normalized in a lot of Maha wellness discourse. So it's a figure that exists prior to Christiane Northrup saying the vaccine pediatricians are demons. Right. So I think there's something there where the doctor is like this, this figure of horror, of abject modern horror. And so, and then there's incredibly like, you know, fantastic and morbid imagery that Loen brings up.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, it gets really mythic. I mean, the thing is, it's so for anyone hearing this for the first time, it may sound like we're just very quickly poo, pooing someone's story of some really horrific thing happening to them that they're courageously bringing forward. And I think that the Importance thing, and hopefully this will become clear as we continue, is that when these kinds of phenomena emerge culturally, it tends to snowball in a way where you start to get this picture that around every corner there is some secret satanic sect that in the basement of houses all over the world are doing these appalling things, or in remote places, they're building these bonfires. And. And it starts to become something that is just absolutely untenable in terms of reality with no evidence. And it's like, might there be instances where something like this has happened? Yes, sure. But you would need good evidence to prosecute a case like that, and it would be really extraordinary. The thing is that it starts to create an impression that this is just an ordinary part of the everyday world and that there's all these survivors running around who've endured things like this woman is describing, and we just don't have evidence for that.

[Matthew Rumsky]

I mean, another point to make about. Are we dismissing this out of hand? It becomes easier to see the patterns when you see the story almost copy and pasted from the past. And then that becomes sort of just a point of focus for me.

[Julian Walker]

Right.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Because, you know, the stickier a set of morbid details or a logic flow is, culturally, the easier it is for it to simply be echoed. Right. And I really want to say these things without implying that people are lying or that they are consciously grifting or things like that, because for all I know, they might absolutely believe what they're saying.

[Julian Walker]

Yep.

[Matthew Rumsky]

And that's. That's a. That's a real problem. Okay, so let's go to another type of narrative. This is a satanic panic narrative connected directly to allegedly Epstein's family, in which a woman named Anya admits or says that the Epstein family admits that they worship baal.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

My family masqueraded themselves as Jewish publicly, but behind closed doors, you know, at Passover dinners, when I was drugged, would admit we are Satanists. They told me that we belonged to the cult of BAAL B A apostrophe al. They told me this with consistency while I was being abused. Now, what you can look up about the cult of Ball information that is publicly available is that it is thousands of years old. It is a Phoenician satanic fertility cult. And publicly it's supposed to have been eradicated. But to my knowledge and my experience, it is not. This is what people perceive the Illuminati to be.

[Matthew Rumsky]

She seems to be speaking from a table in the corner of a restaurant, so it feels like it's public. This Appearance on the podcast is public and I don't know who the podcaster is, but there is a whole genre of sort of, of, you know, I don't know, like dudes who will scour the Internet for the most extreme content they can find in platform. And that's. That's their thing. Right. And, and I think that their job is, is might even feel therapeutic to the people who they interview. It might feel like it might feel supported, but they're not doing journalism, of course.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. So this one, if you keep watching, is kind of wild because she makes very specific claims about her family, namely that she is Shia LaBeouf's twin sister, separated at birth, and that her father is Jeffrey Epstein's brother. Both of which are completely unverified and according to fact checking sites, have been identified as a hoax. So, you know, these kinds of unnecessary false details are also a little bit of a telltale sign that this is someone whose ability to tell the difference between fact and fiction, memory and fantasy might be kind of compromised. And we'll see this later when you get into people like Teal Swan, because not only is there the background of satanic ritual abuse, but then there's talking to aliens as an adult, et cetera. There's another category that I think you've identified, Matthew, which is sort of new for us. I would describe it as the like hyperverbal detail, rich Gen Z breakdown for a new audience of elaborate and arcane conspiracism.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah. So this is a person who's going to be doing an Illuminati flesh out with a lot of kind of pseudo historical background. And I would say it's new for us in the sense that this is so fast, it is so high impact that, you know, when we were doing QAnon materials six years ago, we were mainly looking at pretty slow place, slow paced, you know, YouTube and then rumble videos where people were drawing out sort of their long narratives about things. And this is really tailor made for TikTok.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

You think Epstein was the scandal that was the bait. Real architects sit on thrones, wear robes and drink wine while feeding on children's souls and back in crips. Look, let's name what they won't. The 13 bloodlines that run the world aren't who you. You think Orsini, Aldo, Brandini, Palavincini, Medici, Breakspear, Farnese, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Warburg, Hanover, Lee, Bruce, Hasberg. These are not old money. They are balik parasitic bloodlines. Ritual sorcerers who hijacked empires and installed mind control Systems under the illusion of religion, politics and finance. Where's their origin point? Venice. The black Venetian nobility ran Babylonian blood cults under cast Catholic masks. They merged with the Vatican, embedded into the Jesuit priesthood, and exported global slavery through maritime law, trapping you in birth certificates, taxes and silent contracts with no consent. Venice wasn't a city of romance. It's a sacrificial basin. Why do you think the Pope wears a fish hat? That's not Christian. That's Dagon, a nephilim water demon. Look, Epstein wasn't a financier. He was a human trafficker for the priest class. He ran blackmail rituals for the elect. Elite orgies, time to celestial gates using children pre programmed through MK Ultra satellite nodes.

[Matthew Rumsky]

The one thing that I heard in there that I want to learn more about, at least from her perspective, I don't know that she would care too much, is that. Yeah. Venetian mercantilism was essential to certain developments in modern capitalism with regard to contract law and things like that. So there's something in. There's probably something. There's probably something in there about the weird shape of the bishop's hat. But like, my goodness, what incredible certainty. Yeah.

[Julian Walker]

And that's basically kitchen sink. Like just everything, everything, everything all together.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah. Right.

[Julian Walker]

Whether It's. It's from MKUltra to the Vatican assassins. So in a similar category, this is someone I actually came across a few weeks ago. Matthew, and sent to you. And the aesthetic is very. This woman is. Has really styled herself as a personality and a presenter. And the reels clearly take a lot of work. There's a lot of images. Yeah. A lot of words on the screen. Like it's. It's high production, lots of edits and B roll and. And then also lots of very clever language.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah. Let's. Let's have a listen.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

People are talking about the Epstein files

[Matthew Rumsky]

with George Bush and Bill Gates, but I'm still stuck on the jester. Now, jesters are one of the reasons

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

that Epstein and these people got away with everything.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Basically, we're looking at deep B and

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

C class celebrities for this video.

[Julian Walker]

We can use Rainnn Wilson and Chrissy Teigen as examples of this archetype. Allegedly, Rainn Wilson released disturbing tweets talking

[Matthew Rumsky]

about harming children in 2009 and 2011. Now you can look these disturbing tweets up.

[Julian Walker]

I don't want these tweets to hurt my honeybutter's eyes.

[Matthew Rumsky]

And I don't want that darkness overshadowing

[Julian Walker]

the beauty of my videos and my jacket.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Okay. It has a Dragon on it.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

Yeah.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Incredible.

[Julian Walker]

I think you'd know better, man. Matthew, maybe because of your kids ages and the fact that you've been posting on TikTok for a while. This just seems very generational and of that kind of form. Yeah, yeah.

[Matthew Rumsky]

I mean, she's a real artist and it's very. I mean, I think what is disorienting to me is that, you know, if you grew up with postmodern art in the 1990s, you had some signposts for whether or not the irony was flowing in a particular direction or what its point was. Right, right. There's no training wheels for this. She's really presenting Epstein related material in an infotainment style, and she's self conscious about it, and she's self conscious about the sort of parasocial hooks and the flirtations and all of that stuff. And so it's like the content itself fades into oblivion in a way before the presentation. Like, it's extremely, extremely performative.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. It's like this. This charismatic person is sort of injecting herself into your mind with infowars and almost like Adam Curtis style. Or is it in Curtis or Adam Curtis?

[Matthew Rumsky]

It's Adam Curtis. Yeah.

[Julian Walker]

The other one is the lead singer of Joy Division. It's that kind of agit prop, like. Like style compressed into, like a short reel. Incredible.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, well done. I hope it doesn't confuse a lot of people. I hope it entertains more than it confuses. So here's the last one that will lead us into section three. Gets a little bit more serious here because I think the plausibility and the empathy and the care goes up. You know, let's take a listen here and. And then. And then we'll break it down. Hey, I need to take a second before we go any further. If you are here, because this story feels like it's reaching into your chest, if it's pulling up memories, old pain or something you've carried for years, please listen to me. You're not alone. Not even close. What happened to you was never your fault. You were a child. You deserved safety. You deserved love. Love. You deserved arms that protected you instead of hurt you. And the fact that you didn't get that, that breaks something inside of me. But the fact that you're still here, still breathing, still feeling, still showing up in whatever small way that you can, that's everything. That's real courage. You are stronger than you know. And if right now this feels too much, too close, too raw, it's okay to stop. It's okay to breathe. It's okay to walk away and come back when you're ready or not at all. Your heart comes first. Today I'm sharing a small piece of the heart wrenching true story of Sasha Riley. So that was a full minute of preamble to I'm going to share some more details about Sasha Riley.

[Julian Walker]

Exactly. And that full minute feels thoughtful and trauma informed. The tone of voice is really good. But then it's like we're going into. I'm going to say all of that before I then and just introduce you to something so, so incredibly disturbing. Again with no journalistic kind of rigor.

[Matthew Rumsky]

When we come back, we'll look specifically at the source material for that particular trend because it loops straight back to a book called Courage to Heal, which this guy's channeling. And we'll also take a close sort of walk through memory lane on Michelle Remembers, which is ground zero for, for the satanic panic.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

I'm Nomi Frye.

[Julian Walker]

I'm Vincent Cunningham.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

I'm Alex Schwartz. And we are Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. Guys, what do we do on the show every week?

[Matthew Rumsky]

We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

That's right. We take something that's going on in the culture now. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a book, maybe it's just kind of a trend and we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template. Join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker. New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow wherever you get your podcasts.

[Julian Walker]

1980 saw the publication of Michelle Remembers, a book of session transcripts from years of psychiatric sessions in Victoria, British Columbia, between Dr. Lawrence Pazder, a devout Catholic, you should hear sirens blaring at that. And his patient, Michelle Smith. The book was partially funded by the local Catholic church and the diocese archbishop vouched for it in a foreword.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah, so Michelle Smith initially came to Pasder for help with persistent hemorrhaging and psychological distress following multiple miscarriages. Her GP referred her on because he was convinced the hemorrhage was psychosomatic. So right off the jump, there's a pretty bad misogynistic, maybe borderline malpractice take there. Maybe, maybe the GP is actually responsible for the satanic panic. Who knows? But if she had actually gotten treatment, different story. And the hemorrhage part is crucial because many of the most provocative images that come out of Michelle Remembers and the visions elicited by Pazder involve lots of blood, and then, unfortunately, the abuse and consumption of babies and fetuses at ceremonies with hundreds in attendance. And so this is part of what makes the continual refrain of saving the children decade upon decade, so sticky as history progresses. And it's almost as if, in this particular, you know, conjunction between the miscarriage and the visions is that it's psychologically impossible for pazder and Smith to simply accept the fact that miscarriages happen. And, you know, know, that leads us to. In the Catholic devotional mode, everything that happens really has to happen according to the will of God. So surely there must be a demonic reason for this tragedy, and that might be a precursor to some salvation story.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And so instead of exploring that material tragedy of her loss, Pazdur, as you're saying, influenced by his devout catholic heritage and missionary time in west Africa, during which he thought he was observing signs of animal sacrifice in their religion, reinterprets her symbols, reinterprets her symptoms, excuse me, as symbols of a cosmic battle. And Smith spoke under suggestion, hypnotic suggestion, which they don't actually disclose in the text itself, but which became clear decades later as the original reel to reel tapes emerged.

[Matthew Rumsky]

So there's a lot of ways to approach this in our archive on this material. What I settled on in terms of historical context was looking at and seeing just how central Pazder's Catholicism was to Smith's visions. And that begins to generate this analysis of the satanic panic as primarily a manifestation of reactionary Catholic anxieties in response to the modern world and specifically in response to the reforms of Vatican II. Because in modernizing the liturgy through the 1960s, Vatican II led traditionalists to fear a kind of secular melting away of metaphysical devotion. And so there's this drive to resurrect the sacred. And sometimes that's really efficient to do, if you, like, show people the devil first. If you. If they're not believing in God anymore, you. You tell them that Satan is real and see what happens. And I think that, you know, reactionaries like pastor wound up leaning into a satanic scare to, you know, prove the existence of the sacred, to sort of buttress this. This fading glory. And this is part of how we come to the Catholic horror film genre of the 1970s, which starts with the exorcist, in which we have this fetishized preternatural gore and, you know, satanic influences and conspiracies with Michelle remembers and all of the copycat texts and films that followed it. Some scholars have described this as the catholicization of public morality. So to the extent that these stories become really, really popular, we have a kind of like almost evangelical sort of cultural conversion. Like everybody is now thinking like a Catholic somehow. And that's signified by a real fixation on. On dead babies and a foregrounding of the political issue of abortion. And I think the other thing that was going on was a religious revolt against psychiatry. Now, there's many, many angles to the anti psychiatry movement. But in the case of both Dr. Pazder and Dr. Damien Karas, who's the star of the Exorcist, these guys are heroes to the extent that they realize that their psychiatric training cannot account for or deal with the reality of evil. And so they're to remove their disenchantment with the sacred world. Karas brings in the old exorcist and pastor reaches for all of these religious explanations. And actually in editing or preparing the Michelle remembers text, he's going to several different priests to say, well, what do you think about this? Have you seen any evidence for this? This is what Michelle is telling me. And he gets various forms of positive feedback.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, it turns out you really need God because it's not mental illness after all, it's demonstration. It's Satan.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Right?

[Julian Walker]

Yeah.

[Matthew Rumsky]

And you can imagine somebody in the 1970s maybe coming out of a medical training from the 60s that was very cold and clinical and probably kind of crude in a lot of ways, not being satisfied with the sort of regimen of pathologies that you're sort of supposed to hand out and diagnose. And somehow that feels, you know, I don't know, empty to you, or it feels too cold or it feels meaningless or something like that. Or it's hopeless because we don't have medications for these pathologies. Right.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah.

[Matthew Rumsky]

So, but maybe prayer would work.

[Julian Walker]

So Michelle Remembers was then ground zero for what is referred to as the satanic panic. It viralized the concept of satanic ritual abuse through sensationalist media, such as the 1985 ABC 2020 report that elevated Pazder to the world's foremost expert on the topic. And despite over 12,000 documented accusations of this kind of satanic ritual abuse in America alone, no forensic evidence such as bodies, tunnels, medical injuries was ever found to corroborate the claims. When historians in Victoria considered the claims made by Smith about a large church like structure hosting hundreds of people at a time for these rituals, there's no sign of where that could have been.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah. Like in Victoria's sort of town history architecture. Yeah.

[Julian Walker]

And there's no police reports of disturbances or injuries. After purported events in which dozens of people were apparently ritually sacrificed or killed.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah. And she said actually that membership in this group required the third finger to be amputated. So apparently there's hundreds of people walking around Victoria without their third fingers. None of these people have ever been found. Nobody's ever reported a missing finger. Like, it just doesn't. It doesn't track. So, you know, it. It really comes down to Smith and Pazder made the whole thing up for whatever reason. And in the end of the book, they actually tell you why they made it up, but they tell you in their way. Because the book ends with a transcendent vision of the Virgin Mary dissolving the entire ceremonial site in blazing light and telling Michelle that Michelle now knows what will happen if the glory of God is allowed to be overshadowed, really, in the times. And this is dating back to all of the Marian apparitions, you know, that really are trying to face down communism in Europe. This is code for communism defeating the mission of the Catholic Church. And Mary is there to tell Michelle that, you know, now you know how important it is to protect the faith.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And when we say that they made the whole thing up, it's impossible to know for sure. But my impression is that they show us in the book how they made it up. They take us on the journey. It is. They are. They're deeply immersed in a process together which has layer upon layer of emotional and erotic and mythic kind of. Kind of overtones and threads running through it. But ultimately does it correlate to something in the real world?

[Matthew Rumsky]

Let me just note, because you use the word erotic that you know, Lawrence Pazder, I didn't say this, but he leaves his wife and family for Michelle Smith. They wind up getting married, and then they are on tour together for many years after that.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, totally legit. Pastor's influence leads to the destruction of many families and the false imprisonment of many innocent people. Pazur's expert testimony and the book's recovery techniques influenced high profile legal disasters like the McMartin Preschool trial, the West Memphis Three, and the Oak Hill daycare trial. Within Smith's family, the book caused irreparable pain. Her father reportedly cried all the time over the gruesome, unproven allegations made against her deceased mother.

[Matthew Rumsky]

So that's Michelle remembers. Now we turn to courage to heal. And we Fast forward to 1988, and the satanic panic is not just a legal firestorm. It's starting to generate a kind of pseudo therapeutic arts industry. So a book called Courage to heal comes comes out. And this turns its authors, creative writing instructors Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, into central figures in what's known as the recovered memory therapy craze, which in itself is like a super complicated topic. But this book was their introduction and curation of stories that were generated by writers, a lot of them anonymous generation or solicited from writing workshops, and they also solicited stories through newspaper ads, and they published them all as though they were simply true. Again, you know, it's kind of like the guy introducing the Sasha Riley details. You know, I. For people who don't believe, let me tell you what this person said, right? This and sort of believing, conveying this impression that. That the stories are true or corroborated or they're not imagistic, they're not vague memories, they're not poetic in some way.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this. This goes back to sort of the. The famous saying that a lot of people will bring up around. Around scientific evidence, especially of things like vaccine injury claims that the. The plural of anecdote is not evidence. Like, you can. You can stack as many stories as you like that you think, prove the thing you're claiming, but that doesn't end up adding. It doesn't end up creating evidence. That's a different category. And so one of the authors, Ellen Bass, said that her awareness of child sexual abuse began in 1974 when a student in her workshop shared a tentative story of her father's assaults on bits of paper. And this experience led Bass to form specific writing workshops centered around the theme I never told anyone, and I just want to say here, especially given everything else I just said, that sounds like a very meaningful and important moment in the lives of both of those people, and I'm sure, and many of those workshop participants, because there are real things like this.

[Matthew Rumsky]

In fact, I have heard directly from somebody who is quite mad at me on Instagram that this book changed my life. I went to a workshop with Bass and Davis. They were incredibly kind and supportive. They. And. And I think what happened was they provided a needed service for people who did have memories and traumas to explore and to. And to investigate. And I think my understanding is psychotherapeutically those people were speaking into a kind of void, that there wasn't a good understanding of childhood issues and the excavation of traumatic memories and traumatic recovery and things like that. And so Bass and Davis, there they are. But they're creative writing instructors, and so they are incentivized to also be focusing on something else which is how sticky is the story? Story. Right. Like, you can't get away from the creative writing instructor who is going to have the impulse to say, well, how. How can this become more effective? And that's just a different question from can. Can we try to. Can we try to figure out what. What you really feel and what is possible to remember and see if somebody might be held accountable for the things that we. We can know? For sure. Like, those are different. Those are different processes. They're different categories. And so Bass and Davis, they promoted something called automatic writing as a reliable method for uncovering repressed memories. Now, automatic writing, if people aren't familiar with creative writing exercises and workshop spaces, really is just the encouragement to let anything come out of your fingertips on the keyboard or. Or the pen on the page without interrupting yourself and without any kind of doubt or judgment as well. The object is to continue to go until something is there. And this became kind of what they felt was a reliable method for uncovering repressed memories. Now, when memory psychologists looked at this book, they said, this really lacks experimental evidence. It relies on what's called somatic epistemology, which is a kind of dodgy belief that the body accurately stores hidden truths that can be accessed through relaxation or writing. But those truths are retrieved, kind of like files or like, you know, intact pieces of cassette tape. Right.

[Julian Walker]

And the footage from CC cameras.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Right, exactly right. You're in internal cctv. Right. So this warms up a whole demographic for the very popular ideas of Bessel van der Kolk. And the body keeps the score.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, which is a whole other can of worms.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Right.

[Julian Walker]

So the first edition of Courage to Heal included discredited stories of satanic ritual abuse and used wildly inflated statistics about child trafficking. When challenged, the author's initial initially doubled down, suggesting that those seeking evidence were potentially attempting to cover up the reality of satanic ritual abuse. But in subsequent editions, they toned down the worst bits. Like, in addition one, if you think you were abused, then you were.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah, a famous sentence. If you think you were abused, then you were. Which led to many any false accusations against family members and loved ones based on intuitions or symptoms rather than, you know, reliable recall and corroboration. And so there's a whole cleanup crew of psychotherapists with, I guess, more awareness, maybe higher levels of training who follow. And they report that these accusations just destroy reputations, you know, cause job loss, permanently destroyed families. In the third edition in 1994, they added a kind of long and meandering chapter that was ambiguously Titled Honoring the response to the Backlash, which a lot of critics argued that they really failed to address methodological or evidentiary concerns.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, and I want to say here too, what you were just saying about this cleanup crew of psychotherapists. And they're basically looking at this at the time. The more time we've gotten, the more distance in time we've gotten away from this kind of material, the more we've, you know, psychology has moved on, neuroscience has moved on, our understanding of memory has moved on in terms of saying that was an idea that people had at that time that turned out to be very, very flawed. And here's all of the fallout from that.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Well, speaking of fallout, Julian, I mean, you have direct experience with this one, right?

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, I really do. And I've told this story a couple times in our episodes, so I' keep it brief here. Essentially, the yoga community I was deeply involved in during my 20s was led by someone named Anna Forest, who at the time was very influenced by all of the ideas we've been discussing. Right, let me do that again as a discussing edit. Yeah, I actually do, and I've told the story a couple times in our episodes in the past, so I'll keep it brief. Essentially, the yoga community I was deeply involved in during my 20s was led by Anna Forest, who at the time was very influenced by by all of the ideas we've been discussing. She presented herself in those days as having survived horrific abuse in which she was apparently drugged and sold as a child prostitute, much of which seems to have been remembered via hypnotherapy. She touted her approach to yoga as a unique method she developed for healing abuse trauma via reinhabiting our bodies and processing repressed emotions. All very few familiar. The small circle of loyal students and eventually, like myself, yoga teachers mentored by her in that community, came to understand that the studio was a kind of energetic magnet for people who had repressed childhood sexual abuse memories but didn't yet know it. For about three years, I myself came to believe that I was such a person and that all of my own emotional suffering and dysfunctional pain patterns must be rippling out from buried abuse committed by my father. And if I could just remember that and process it fully, it would render me an empowered and integrated teacher walking in the footsteps of my mentor. And I should add here that a lot of this was implicit and co created within the community. Everyone's experience was a little bit different, but Anna's influence was very strong and it was complicated by her assertions that she could see energy and where it was stuck and that she had this very strong intuition for what students didn't yet know about their own lives.

[Matthew Rumsky]

And she might not have planted your story, but if you had brought it to her, she would have, I mean, appreciated it, perhaps told you that you had come to a clear vision of yourself. You would have been rewarded in some, some way.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, I don't know if I'd go so far as to say rewarded, but actually those kinds of conversations did happen and in the climate that we've been discussing of these kinds of ideas, I was validated and supported and like, ah, yes, okay, there, there it is. So once I had been dissociated with her and with that community, after working and practicing and socializing in it for like 11 years, I would gradually, over time, come to recognize it as being possessed by some quite cultish dynamics woven through these, these ideas of, of repressed memories and various kinds of abuse. And this period of my life really ruined my relationship with my family and it sent me into a very deep crisis. But thankfully I got into long term therapy with a really good reality based therapist and was able to, to sort it all out over time and come out of the other side. And I've since been able to mend my relationship with my parents, which I'm very grateful for.

[Matthew Rumsky]

I mean, it's, it's kind of staggering to think that something else, you know, the outcome could have been differently, could have been different. Right. Somebody could have died before, before any kind of resolution.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. And I mean, if it, if it had happened 20 years later, I could be one of these influencers. Right. Saying, let me tell you my story.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Story. Yeah. One thing that I want to pick out from your description of Anna is that this transformation from the survivor of horrific abuse to the sage who can see into other people's energetic body or into their past or they have a heightened perception. This is a very, very common trope amongst figures that emerge in this discour is that their capacity to have survived what they survived gives them a kind of messianic knowledge. Right. It's like they have been crucified and risen and now they can see reality clearly. And so that's part of the stickiness and attraction too.

[Julian Walker]

I think it's part of the archetype.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Well, thanks for sharing that, Julianne. I don't know whether this is a more lighthearted or a less lighthearted way to finish this, this episode, but I thought we would finish with a couple of grifters and the first, of course, is the undefeated Teal Swan. Let's take a listen. Not to the whole thing, but I'll. I'll just let it play for a bit.

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

Hello, there. In the very beginning of my career, when I first stepped out into the public eye, what everyone wanted to know is, what's your backstory? I didn't understand then how deeply dedicated people would be to their own. Own sense of safety in the world. I didn't understand how willing people would be to write you off as crazy to discredit you and blacklist you when the truths that you share conflict with their current reality. And so I simply told the truth, and it went horribly. And so the release of the Epstein files has caused a lot of mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, there is this deep, visceral relief that people are finally accepting the truth that you tried to share. On the other hand, the damage has already been done to you personally, damage that people are unlikely to undo. Those of us who were the first to come out about having been trapped when we were very young into this very large and sophisticated system of abuse and corruption that's happening, experienced a world that defended those who harmed us and that sacrificed us on the altar of their need to believe in good and most of all, in safety.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Okay, so this is Teal Swan who has to make a statement on the Epstein files because, of course, it's her wheelhouse. And as she goes on, she's reflecting on the backlash she faced for sharing her backstory. This line about, you know, people often discredit survivors to preserve their sense of safety. That, you know, people didn't want to believe that, you know, she had been sewn into a corpse at a midnight ritual because they wanted to preserve their own sense of what the world was actually like.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, they want to take the blue pill. Right? They don't want to wake up.

[Matthew Rumsky]

They don't want to wake up. And. Yeah, so everything is just the tip of the iceberg. I think there was. I could sort of hear her say a third point. Like, on one hand, I'm happy it's coming out. On the other hand. Hand I'm sad that the. That the damage has already been done. And I was waiting for the third point, which I think is just obvious from this, which is. And the third point is I hope this really doesn't distract from my brand, or I really hope that it. That it supports, you know, what I've been doing all of the. Like, I'm the og, sort of, you know, purveyor of this, you know, she also, as per usual, she views this event as an opportunity for systemic change. I never really hear any details on what that means. She identifies the root problem of the Epstein class as mankind's disconnection, where, you know, individuals act against each other for personal benefit. She advised. I mean, there are some positive messages. She advises people to choose empathy, compassion and connection. She says that if we manifest kindness through thoughts and actions that we can influence the creation of a new world. We can exercise a power plate.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, boilerplate stuff that. She could be commenting on anything, and then this would be where it ends up. Right. We should love one another.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah. Right. We should be good.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah. So we've done a lot of work looking at Teal Swan. She's a really fascinating character. We have a whole series in our Patreon bonus collections about Teal Swan. And this is based on all of that. This is sort of my speculation about her inner world, because here we find the way she starts off talking about herself as an early truth teller whose experience is finally being heard in light of the Epstein files, even though it's too little, too late. It reminds me that, you know, when we go back at look and look at those early interviews, when she's telling her backstory, she always actually came across to me as more of a charismatic grifter than as someone recovering from the most horrific experiences imaginable. Like, it always sounded like this sensationalist story being told by a very confident, eloquent, poised personality as a next career move.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Well, I think this is where this sort of transformation from the survivor of the abject to the radiant sage is really pertinent. Right. I think that's the actual hook I think you're picking up. How is this person so well put together and so eloquent? And I think that that's the signal that she has actually metabolized all of this evil in the world. And so you should listen to her because she can show you how to do the same thing. She's gonna give you advice.

[Julian Walker]

And the thing that we haven't mentioned yet is that her therapist, who she started seeing at a very young age, is Barbara Snow. And if you wanna learn more about Barbara Snow, go and check out our series because she's ground zero.

[Matthew Rumsky]

I don't think we set up enough about Teal Swan here, but that's really essential, is that, you know, by the time she 20, she's doing therapy sessions with the most. One of the most prolific satanic panic therapists in, you know, the Western United States. It's In Utah. But her name is Barbara Snow. All kinds of, you know, legal actions involving her.

[Julian Walker]

Yes.

[Matthew Rumsky]

You know, this was a pattern for her. And we don't know how long Teal Swan saw her for, but I think, you know, she got her story and she moved on, and then that became a rolling part of her own.

[Julian Walker]

And this is a therapist who ends up being censured, who ends up being just, you know, really, really discredited as part of the whole satanic panic phenomenon.

[Matthew Rumsky]

All right, so grifter number two, Yolande

[Various Guest Speakers / Advertisers]

Norris Clark, they want you to look at the files. Anyone who believes that these photos and documents and emails have not been carefully curated to elicit very specific responses is naive. I have spent my entire adult life speaking out against the sex and violations of industrial obstetric birth and exposing the many ways that institutional birth represents the most successful and universalized form of sacred ritual abuse and large scale empire for mind control programming that has ever existed. And it's right there in plain sight. Medicalized birth is an occult humiliation ritual, and it serves to initially initiate the vast majority of humans into the slave program.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Okay, yeah, so the. The blanked out. You can hear the. The muted. But she's saying that obstetric. Industrial obstetric birth is. It's her subject and it's the universalized form of satanic ritualized mind control and MK Ultra programming. And she goes on from there.

[Julian Walker]

Yeah, so this is. This is an earlier generation doing the same thing as one of our other instagram and. And TikTok influencer. Influencers. Right. Where you're connecting all these different dots. But for her, it's in the direction of obstetrics, it's in the direction of her particular wheelhouse of what she is so critical about. And she starts off by saying, they want you to look at the files, right?

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah, they want you to look at the file. Well, that becomes complicated because she also has a message around emotional management. But just back to her main theme. Clarke asserts that the normalization of what she calls obstetric violence, basically, this is anybody who wants to get birth in a hospital. Okay, so if you give birth in a hospital, according to Yolande Norris Clark, you are the victim of satanic ritualized mind control through obstetric violence that desensitizes society. It allows larger global horrors to go unnoticed. Because, of course, if this is the way her argument is, if this is the foundation of the beginning of your life, then how would you understand anything clearly after that if you've been completely, completely reprogrammed by going through the satanic ritual abuse of a hospital birth. And everything downstream of that is going to be completely distorted. You're basically incapable of thinking for yourself. You're going to see everything through the eyes of, you know, the demonic whatever. Now, regarding the Epstein files, Norris Clark warns that viewing them feeds the beast and fuels demonic energy rather than helping. I don't totally disagree with her unless one is directly involved in apprehending perpetrators. So that's a good point.

[Julian Walker]

She's not wrong. But she does the whole bait and switch early on around people in her field who of course are also never radical or pure enough for Yolandi, are targeted and shut down. Not because their practices are dangerous and even deadly pseudoscience.

[Matthew Rumsky]

Yeah.

[Julian Walker]

But because they are exposing the evil truth at the heart of the obstetric industrial complex.

[Matthew Rumsky]

So then she turns to. And this is part of her recent conversion to orthodox Christian Christianity, I believe. She turns to arguing that the evil found in these files exists on a continuum within everyone. And so her challenge to her followers is that individuals must address the evil in their own hearts and in plain sight. You know, institutions such as medicalized birth and pornography. Those are the same category, by the way, before focusing on external scandals. So ultimately, she suggests that the most powerful response is to attend to one's spiritual condition and to care for children with love rather than exposing oneself to curated corrupting documents. And I think in a way, that formulation almost defines conspirituality for me. Right. I mean, there's a nice bit in there with like, you know, don't get so overwhelmed by this that you can't pay close attention to your kids or you're completely fried. I think that's good advice. But there's also this notion that what will transform the world is really spiritual activity is really prayer. And I think that's an incredibly reactionary position because, no, it won't. And if you are really worried about the Epstein Predator class, then you have to do material actions to prevent them from continuing to have power. And prayer isn't going to cut it. Developing yourself spiritually is going to help, but it's not going to cut it. So, yeah, that's Clark, and that's the show, I guess, Julian. So we're going to link to our extensive archive on these materials in the show notes. And for the stuff that now lives on Patreon in these collections, we're going to be unlocking episodes on these full histories of Michelle Remembers and Courage to Heal. On Catholic horror films, we might actually repost our interview with the wonderful filmmakers I forget their names, who made Satan wants you, which goes right into the Smith Pasdor relationship. And we also have a lot of material on how all of these ideas transfer trickle down through figures like Teal swan into the QAnon age. Because, you know, more, more now than ever before. I think it's really important for this history to be kept alive. If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why, hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering with on time restocks. Your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.