It’s mildly interesting that this claim originated during a time (~ late 70s and 80s) when such claims also originated about rock and metal music. Both D&D and those were somewhat new (or at least newly popular) during that time.
In a way it was the analog equivalent of modern FUD and misinformation spreading on social media. Maybe even disinformation, but probably just misinformation and FUD.
I can’t find any corroboration of that, can you say more? The D&D thing specifically was started by someone whose son committed suicide and she attributed his death to D&D.
The right wing of america and the various christian cultural movements/monoliths have been allies since roughly the reagan campaign. The power of that alliance is a large part of the republican’s base/power. The politicians on the right have a great deal of push on them to parrot christian talking points, like the satanic panic of various flavors that was pushed about music and activities like D&D.
So while the d&d being evil may not have started as right wing propaganda, it quickly became so due to the way the cultural onus of christianity pushed politicians into acting. You can see the same thing with ‘christian’ values around political fighting with abortion, teenage pregnancy / sex education, israel (though that one is obviously much more complicated than just ‘church leaders fetishes -> politicians’ stances), ‘morality’ based laws around prostitution and gambling, etc.
Your view of whether it is disinformation depends on whether you believe church leaders and politicians had sincere beliefs about it, so, obviously, that’s going to be pretty personal to you. I have met several federal level politicians and ‘influential’ church leaders and gotten to know them well enough that I can say they push lies with intent, so I’d be confident in stating that the various flavors of satanic panic weren’t entirely organic and honest.
In addition to what the other poster responded, the “satanic panic” was fanned to divert attention away from very real pedophile rings. Just like pizzagate was started to deal with leaks of the epstein/trump ring.
We thought the Internet would be our salvation… wow were we wrong.
Funny side story: we also though that technology, particularly AI, would save us - again, swing and a miss (tbf, LLMs != AI, so we still don’t truly know, though we’ve lost hope for it anyway since even if they did exist they would be controlled by the elites not applied to the good of of all humanity).
It’s mildly interesting that this claim originated during a time (~ late 70s and 80s) when such claims also originated about rock and metal music. Both D&D and those were somewhat new (or at least newly popular) during that time.
In a way it was the analog equivalent of modern FUD and misinformation spreading on social media. Maybe even disinformation, but probably just misinformation and FUD.
It was very much disinformation. The whole satanic panic bullshit was based on far right propaganda.
I can’t find any corroboration of that, can you say more? The D&D thing specifically was started by someone whose son committed suicide and she attributed his death to D&D.
The right wing of america and the various christian cultural movements/monoliths have been allies since roughly the reagan campaign. The power of that alliance is a large part of the republican’s base/power. The politicians on the right have a great deal of push on them to parrot christian talking points, like the satanic panic of various flavors that was pushed about music and activities like D&D.
So while the d&d being evil may not have started as right wing propaganda, it quickly became so due to the way the cultural onus of christianity pushed politicians into acting. You can see the same thing with ‘christian’ values around political fighting with abortion, teenage pregnancy / sex education, israel (though that one is obviously much more complicated than just ‘church leaders fetishes -> politicians’ stances), ‘morality’ based laws around prostitution and gambling, etc.
That doesn’t sound like a disinformation campaign though.
Your view of whether it is disinformation depends on whether you believe church leaders and politicians had sincere beliefs about it, so, obviously, that’s going to be pretty personal to you. I have met several federal level politicians and ‘influential’ church leaders and gotten to know them well enough that I can say they push lies with intent, so I’d be confident in stating that the various flavors of satanic panic weren’t entirely organic and honest.
In addition to what the other poster responded, the “satanic panic” was fanned to divert attention away from very real pedophile rings. Just like pizzagate was started to deal with leaks of the epstein/trump ring.
To be fair, this was likely a reverse problem of today: not enough social media or freely flowing info via the internet.
People who did not know assumed much from manual covers.
We thought the Internet would be our salvation… wow were we wrong.
Funny side story: we also though that technology, particularly AI, would save us - again, swing and a miss (tbf, LLMs != AI, so we still don’t truly know, though we’ve lost hope for it anyway since even if they did exist they would be controlled by the elites not applied to the good of of all humanity).