Back in the late 1980s Stewart Brand had a great idea. He offered all his regular writers for the Whole Earth Review (circulation 30,000, nearly all hippies) the publication of an uncensored unedited column to say whatever we wanted. Great opportunity for me.
I chose to write about the two hysterias
that were raging around me at the time: recovered memory of childhood
abuse and child denunciation of satanic ritual abuse by adults. I knew
no one else would publish anything on the subject since the hysteria
had gained control over 99.99% of all Americans.
That made me the first human being to publicly write about these two hysterias. I knew about both of them because my friend Catherine C. was a lawyer who had a lawyer friend who defended plaintiffs in these types of cases...all of which were the modern day version of the Salem witch trials, maybe even worse.
The strangest thing was that I never met a person, not one person from any walk of life who was outside the hysteria. Everyone...no exceptions, believed in the recovered memory and ritual child abuse stories unless they were specifically the people falsely accused, their immediate family or their lawyers.