In the 80’s and early 90’s people went batshit crazy about satanic cults. According to some they were everywhere. From time-to-time satanic cult hysteria still pops up in one way or another. The latest being QAnon and Pizzagate. This kind of crap has always been a part of human existence. Witches were burned at the stake or hung everywhere. Clashes of different cultures brought on beliefs that anyone that did not look like you was out to get you or your children.
Some cults did exist, such as Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, and even Nazism. These cults did not work in secret, drink blood, eat children or sacrifice people on altars. They mostly counted on lonely gullible people that listened to and followed charismatic con men that wanted their money or just wanted power. These are different from a satanic cult.
The brouhaha in the 80’s started with your basic conspiracy theories. Most of them are untrue but like a game of telephone, each rumor spawned another, even worse, rumor until people were trying to top each other in how gruesome and evil a story they could invent. There was no evidence to back any of these allegations, but it didn’t seem to matter. People wrote books and made money, and others fell into their own cult. The cult of believing every garbage theory that came along.
Some people used the cult craze phenomenon for their own financial gains. For example, a couple claimed that the Proctor and Gamble trademark symbol, that they had for over a hundred years, was a satanic symbol, and that Proctor and Gamble supported a satanic church. The couple wanted people to boycott the company. It turns out that the couple were Amway distributors and were trying to discredit P&G so as to garner some of the company’s clients and profits.
“Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults” was released in 1994 and was directed by Devin Dehaven. The film was written by Dehaven, Gordon L. Coulter, and Brian Everland. It starred Gordon Coulter, Joie Brinsfield and Kelly McGhee. The film pretends to be an official procedure that law enforcement uses to educate other law enforcement agencies on the ins and outs of satanic cults. I doubt if any agencies ever actually used the tape as a tool to educate their officers. It was created by a pastor and former cop and is a load of crap.
The film tries to associate homosexuality with Satanism. It also tries to tie child abuse to it and the Satanic calendar of events seems to be centered around sex with babies, children, women, men and animals as well as blood sacrifices of “all of the above”. It also says that over 2 million children go missing each year and suggests that they were kidnapped for these ceremonies. The film also tries to connect serial killers to being members of satanic cults instead of just individual homicidal maniacs with Satan fetishes. The movie does more to spread panic than it does to educate police officers. The belief that widespread satanic cults operate all over America has been debunked by the FBI. In essence, satanic cults in America do not exist. It is not a thing. They are the modern date witch hunt, the McCarthyism of the present.