I went to the McMartin Preschool as a child. Yes, THAT McMartin preschool. If you are not aware of it, there is a wiki page for it I'm sure. For proof, I offer this photo of me (I'm the little one).
It was apparently my birthday
What is alleged to have happened there is well after my time. When I went there is was super fun and I have nothing but happy memories. I was actually enrolled in a psychological observation program. I would go to McMartin in the am and then to an observation play group in the afternoon. I have REALLY fond memories of both the people at McMartin and Ms. Whitehead, the psychologist.
Later kids, especially the kids that attended during the period of time where abuse is alleged are traumatized. Whether they suffered abuse or whether their trauma was induced by well meaning psychologists interviewing them, I don't know.
What I do know is that most of the most egregious allegations simply aren't true.
Clearly - there were no tunnels under the place. You cannot tunnel into sand without building a cement structure to keep the sand out. You just can't. All they found was some disturbed dirt. If anyone wants to dispute this, understand that if archeologists can find tunnel walls that are thousands of years old in Egypt, then disturbed dirt with no tunnel walls found means there were no tunnels under the building. Even if you backfilled it - you would still find what are obviously tunnel walls. They didn't.
I also find it very hard to believe that Virginia McMartin did anything to harm any child. If kids were being abused and she found out, she would have stopped it. I don't have proof she wasn't involved, but I believe she wasn't. Ray? Possibly.
Finally, there was no evidence that there was a satanic cult involving prominent people in town. This sort of thing would have been an open secret if it was true, and nothing. There is no contemporary accounts from adults who witnessed or participated in such things. And no, that doesn't mean there is a conspiracy. Sometimes absence of proof means there is no proof. We have plenty of evidence of what happened with Epstein. None to say a Manhattan beach grocer was involved in a satanic cult. Houses were searched - nothing was found, not even in the dirt that was alleged to have been a tunnel. (Seriously - you could not build a 40 foot long tunnel without people noticing or finding concrete evidence of it).
Yet, despite this having happened decades ago, and despite the lack of evidence for tunnels and some sort of satanic conspiracy, people still believe that there were tunnels running ALL over town and that there was a massive satanic cult involving prominent people in the community who were allegedly using the tunnels to shuttle kids around town for sexual rituals. Again, let me remind you, there were no tunnels and no evidence of any satanic rituals found anywhere.
If the whole, tunnels and satanic cult holding satanic sex rituals sounds familiar, it's because most of the narratives for the current satanic child sex ring conspiracies that are apparently happing in tunnels underneath everything from pizza parlors to whatever odd business, are all based on this first one.
The investigations and trials into McMartin lasted years! They were among the longest in USA history and ended with no conviction and if you read the link below - you will see that many of the allegations made were too fantastical to be real. To this day people in Hermosa and Manhattan Beach CA who lived through the investigations and trial don’t want to bring it up because there are still people on both sides of this who are adamant about what did or didn't happen. This case tore my community apart and yes, I was living in the community when this all went down. I was in high school when the first allegations were made. I lived through a mass hysteria event.
The saddest part was how many lives were destroyed by this and how divided it made my community. Kids were traumatized, adults were too. Several companies with no ties to the McMartins went out of business because people became convinced that a local grocer was part of some non-existent satanic cult. It didn't matter that no tunnels were found to link the grocer to the school as was alleged. People still believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that has come out since then.
What happened was crazy. The community is still divided over this 40 years later. There has been no reconciliation between the people who accepted the results of the investigations and the people who still absolutely believe the kids. Further, the kids who were molested or have come to believe they were molested (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6818307/) were and still are traumatized by what happened.
It doesn't matter that almost all of the crazy allegations that were clearly untrue - were proven to be false. People still believe them anyway. And again, I don't know if kids were abused - it's possible they were. I'm speaking only about the alleged tunnels and the alleged satanic conspiracy).
How do I know people still believe this? Because my brother innocently posted photos of my family from 1970 of us at the pre-school and unleashed the controversy all over again.
Which brings me to my topic: Critical thinking, Common Wisdom and mass hysteria. Part of my practice as a Humanist is to use critical thinking to help me solve problems. My rules:
1) Don’t believe everything you read.
2) Common wisdom isn’t necessarily correct.
3) if you are getting worked up into a frenzy – you are
probably being manipulated.
First, critical thinking says, in a beach town where everything is built on sand, a massive tunnel system that stretched a couple of miles with lots of branches going to lots of different buildings would have a) required a massive public works project and b) would have been easily found since to create such a tunnel system would have required concrete. Backfilling in such a tunnel would have left the walls of the tunnel.
Common sense also says, there is no way a preschool could have created or maintained such a thing and given that no evidence of any tunnel was found anywhere, that this part of the allegations is obviously untrue.
Finally, if a conspiracy involves more than one person, then someone will find out and it won't be a conspiracy for very long. The truth will come out.
Again, this doesn't mean kids weren't molested at the school, it just means, the part of the story that involved tunnels and a satanic cult was clearly NOT true and couldn't be true.
This is where the mass hysteria comes in. Common wisdom isn't always true. Just because a LOT of people (say half a town) believe that there is a Satanic cult that has somehow built tunnels all over town to shuttle kids from a preschool to satanic rituals, doesn't mean it's true. It is ok to question common wisdom. How should you decided who to believe? Don't believe people - believe the evidence.
Finally, if you feel yourself getting really upset over allegations, you are probably being manipulated.
Why tell you this now? Because once people believe these things, evidence to the contrary doesn't change their minds. At no point have people who believe in this conspiracy, accepted the overwhelming evidence that there were no tunnels. Kids were harmed (either by a child molester, or by the investigators or both).
Today's conspiracy theorists, will most likely believe their conspiracies until they die. This means, the people who believe there are satanic sex cults today involving high ranking people, will not just magically go away or change their minds when presented with contrary evidence. The people who believe Trump won the election despite the overwhelming evidence and certification that he lost, are still going to believe that going forward.
We have to figure out how to get along despite a large portion of our communities believing things that aren't true. (And if you are a believer, you believe that the people who don't believe believe things that aren't true - this goes both ways). We need to figure out what the truth is and we need to figure out what to do about people who believe things that aren't true. This is especially important if elected officials believe things that turn out to not be true.
The other thing we need to realize is - prevention is better than the cure, because there is no cure for this. Delusion is a life long problem. We need to really figure out how to prevent delusions from taking root in the first place.
Finally, these beliefs morph and spread and they are never harmless. At this point, the belief that there are satanic child sex rings all over the world, is widespread. It's literally impacting national politics. Obviously, child sex abuse occurs and we need to deal with it, but the whole - child satanic sex rings in tunnels conspiracies - have been thoroughly debunked and it simply isn't part of how children are trafficked for sex in the real world. The focus on something that isn't happening, is taking away resources from dealing with the abuse that actually is.
People - we need to get our heads right and stop treating crazy beliefs as ok. They aren't. They do real harm to real people and really do tear communities apart.
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