“you’re wrong about” has a short series about the book written by an evangelical grifter in the 70s about his alleged time in a satanic cult. all the cultists talk like cartoon greasers, and he manages to make worshipping the dark prince in return for sorcerous powers sound like the most boring-ass middle management job in existence, and it’s great. it’s one of those things where somebody is so unable to imagine the world beyond their own narrow experience that they end up just projecting all the neurosis and flaws of their own ideology/organization onto an invented enemy, but somehow it’s also just weird and dumb.
anyway, the thought occurred to me that given the perennial willingness to attribute everything to satanists in the 80s and 90s and the way crying wolf all the time about secret cults has thoroughly exhausted the idea, you could actually probably get away with running an actual murderous satanic cult in the US for a while, because everybody who tried to expose you would just look ridiculous.
For a bit now I’ve been getting the sense that the next turn in American culture was going to revisit some of the themes of intergenerational sex-positivity from the 70s but I was like “but how would we even get there from here” but then like, the most uselessly irritating people in every field of society started rambling about “pedos” and problematic age gaps and “grooming” nonstop until that got coded as low-status nonsense to tune out, and I was like “oh”