Pump Up the Panic
Oh Halloween, never change
Police in Ontario, B.C. and Saskatchewan have been receiving reports of staples, needles and morphine in Halloween treats.
Global News
Sadly, and surprisingly, this is not a headline or a quote pulled from the heyday of 1980s or 90s hysteria. Nay, dear reader, the above was pulled from a Global News story on November 1, 2025.
A few days ago.
While I’d thought a lot of the old legends and surrounding bullshit around Halloween had been thoroughly debunked by now, a new podcast from Sarah Marshall reminded me, “…we are always in the middle of a moral panic.”
And hey, if you can also manage to attach an alleged terrorist plot to Halloween, that’s a twofer.
FBI director, Kash ‘Bug-Eyed-And-Surprised’ Patel was able to at least kind of half-assedly pull this off in Michigan. There’s no real punchline when you’re accused of terrorism by the US meat grinder at the best of governance times; let alone where things are at…*side eye*…currently.
I wonder if Kash got all wound up by the legend of Detroit’s Devil’s Night. A night where hundreds of fires and incidents of vandalism happened every year throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Until a citizen-patrol helped keep the peace, at least one night of the year. It was pretty short-lived. On October 30, 1994, hundreds of fires were lit again. Oddly enough, this was about 5 months after the blockbuster movie, The Crow, dropped into theatres.
The Crow is a movie set in Detroit on October 30th, with rape, violence and vengeance as its main course. Oh, and Brandon Lee, the son of Bruce Lee, died during the filming, too, further adding to its permanent spot on cursed-film compilations and podcast conspiracies.
Maybe Kash was watching The Crow and just really had a raging vengeance boner for Michigan? I dunno, man…
I think it would have been better if Perma-Shocked-Patel could have worked some O9A or 764-styled-group into it. Both of which are probably the closest things to a real-life murderous, child raping, death cult. Outside of the Catholic Church or the GOP, that is.
For reasons I am endlessly seeking to figure out, there is always a Satanic Panic going on.
One has to believe it might be because some horned-horny-demon assramming you during REM cycles is much more convenient, and entertaining, than facing the truth of how morally ugly our neighbours, both figuratively and literally, truly are.
Take a look around.
Rancid men and bog-wives protest our drag queens reading children’s books. They work themselves up to the point of violence over what room someone takes a piss in.
They breathlessly slobber and grind their crotches across gold-plated, payment-plan iPhones to pictures of accused, mentally disturbed murderer Luigi Mangione. All the while using their free hand to close every browser tab that might have a black man being gassed to death.
Can’t bust to that kinda justice, I guess.
They pat their kids on the head and spew lectures on morality, maybe capitalism; rarely consent. Then, on Halloween, these pearl-clutchers let their children paint their faces, dress up and emulate (or culturally misappropriate) some of the worst rapists, serial killers, and monsters from fiction and otherwise.
This is all just totally fine. Absolutely and completely.
If they’re Christian, they get to go play zombie-cannibal every Sunday with the eucharist.
Normal shit.
And listen, if we enjoy ignoring evidence to the obvious issues in safety for women and children, we might as well bait and switch alcoholism and domestic violence with demonic possession.
As a society, we’ve been doing it for decades.
In a paper published in 1911 by Dr. Edward Mayer titled “A Case Illustrating So-Called Demon Possession”, the errant doctor spends a great deal of ink describing the various maladies of his patient, allegedly associated to our Dark Lord, and yet it’s not until page 7 of a 14-page paper, that the doctor starts to really home in on it:
His wife whom I visited I found to be a quiet woman, who told me that her frequent desertions were due to fears as a result of blows.
Quite the “demonic possession” and a true disservice to name this piece of academia not for what it was, a small, drunk, violent, shitty man, but the excuse it was made out to be: the devil.
…a secondary self in which he would beat his wife and drink.
Amityville Horror, both the fictionalized version, the murders before it, and the Warren-Miney family themselves, is the perfect summation of all cautionary tales on how violent, substance-abusing men, often over-confident and way in over their heads, drag their families into the pit of violence and financial ruin all on their own.
Recharacterizing men’s intergenerational bullshit as the devil, I think somehow helps us to distance ourselves from how regular and gross the abuse of women and children truly is.
That’s the nice thing with a good panic (or bubble, really). We get to distract ourselves with things like Pizzagate, vaccines and LLM queries to false gods instead of focusing on the tangibles, like the bruises left behind on women like April Wilkens.
It makes it nice, convenient and easy to look away. To slobber and grind.
Battered and raped to the point of survivor self-defence, thrown in prison as her prize, and repeatedly denied her freedom. Routinely being told she just wasn’t domestically-violenced enough.
Within this social construct, it should come as no shock, then, that officers of the Court would find it acceptable to buy the victim’s former home.
The victim their office prosecuted.
The home April Wilkens was stalked and abused in.
Did I mention a Halloween wedding?
From Brenna Rose at KTUL:
Wilkens’ counsel argues district attorney Steve Kunzweiler’s office has conflicts of interest that “undermine the defendant’s due process”.
Her counsel claims a large number of staff members from the DA’s office recently attended a wedding at Wilkens’ former home.
It’s alleged that ADA Ashley Nix has bragged about buying Wilkens’ former home and held the wedding there for “creepy vibes”.
You know, I just can’t help but wonder what it is about Halloween…
I just hope it never changes while all the rest of us do.