7. There Was A Conspiracy About Satanism And Child Abuse
One thing that makes conspiracy theories so believable is that they don’t need evidence. The lack of evidence is, in itself, evidence that the conspiracy was extremely well-organized and that the wool has been pulled over everyone’s eyes. Case in point: In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a string of horrifying child-abuse instances in which children accused adults of crimes as egregious as ritual rape and even child sacrifice. In 1988, an NBC reporter named Geraldo Rivera took it upon himself to blame many of these crimes on Satanism and even claimed that one million people in the country were Satanists.
The Satanists supposedly flay children alive and even eat them. The problem is that Rivera presented no verifiable evidence, but the lack of evidence in itself was proof. Researchers at the FBI and New York University called the story the greatest hoax of the twentieth century. So basically, the Satanism conspiracy was a twentieth-century version of QAnon today. It isn’t real. Yes, there are Satanists, just like there are pedophiles. Nevertheless, that does not mean that there are a million Satanists in the country who are ritually raping children, just like the presence of pedophiles today does not mean that President Trump is breaking up pedophilia rings in Hollywood.