This week, Lucien and Lenny pick up where recent headlines left off: Australian authorities claim they disrupted an “international satanic pedophilic network,” and the hosts unpack why that framing echoes the Satanic Panic era even as today’s internet-born extremist micro-scenes muddy the picture. They draw a hard line between sensational “occult crime” narratives and what evidence-based investigation can actually support—especially when institutions build task forces explicitly to hunt “ritual” crimes and then declare they’ve found them.

Lucien also explains his suspicion that modern “satanically branded” online networks (including 764 and O9A) are being amplified or exploited as propaganda vectors, potentially intersecting with Russian disinformation efforts. From there, the conversation turns to the professional ecosystem that keeps “ritual abuse” mythology alive: the ISSTD, “trauma-based mind control,” recovered-memory culture, and the way unfalsifiable frameworks can contaminate investigations and courtroom outcomes. The episode closes with a brief look at The Satanic Temple’s effort to help members evacuate Ukraine early in the war—and why Russia’s propaganda narrative latched onto it.

Watch this on TST TV: https://thesatanictemple.tv/

Subscribe to Failed State Update: http://lennyflatley.substack.com/

Theme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

Further Reading: The Satanic Cult Crime Conspiracy Is Still Nowhere To Be Found by Lucien Greaves

In this episode of Worldwide Panic, Lenny and Lucien talk about the realities of surviving as an independent journalist in 2025, including Lenny’s recent move into private investigative work as a way to stay financially afloat without abandoning long-form reporting. They discuss the pressures of audience-building, the exhaustion of social-media performance, and how influencer culture warps both journalism and public trust.

Support Lenny’s investigative journalism & PI career: Help cover essential surveillance and reporting equipment by donating via GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/4d367900a

The conversation then unspools into a deep dive on the strange and largely unnoticed BiChip scam—an earlier “Mark of the Beast” microchip grift that quietly helped seed the later COVID-era microchip conspiracy. Lucien recounts bizarre emails, fake conferences, invented cult leaders, fabricated police raids, and a shadow disinformation network that blurred the line between incompetence, belief, and deliberate fraud. Along the way, they trace how recycled Satanic Panic narratives keep resurfacing through pop culture, from award shows to country concerts—and why none of this ever actually goes away.

Lucien's original article on the event: https://luciengreaves.substack.com/p/revisiting-the-most-elaborate-display

Theme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

Further reading: 

Frederik Kulager's story featuring Lucien (in Danish) (Zetland)

“Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about Human Microchips” (CSIS)

Subscribe to Failed State Update: http://lennyflatley.substack.com/ 

In this week’s episode, we break down the New South Wales Police announcement that they had dismantled an international satanic child-sex ring. Within hours, major outlets—including CNN and Al Jazeera—ran with the headline unquestioningly. What didn’t show up in any of the early coverage? Evidence. Not even the basic details that would justify calling the case “satanic” in the first place.

Lucien walks through what he uncovered in his own reporting, including the origins of Strike Force Constantine, a special police unit formed in April 2025 specifically to investigate satanic ritual abuse. Within just eight months of its creation, the task force claimed success—yet the public record raises more questions than answers.

Next, the conversation shifts into the psychological machinery that makes these panics self-renewing. We look at Sarah Y. Krakauer’s 2019 ISSTD case study on Dissociative Identity Disorder therapy, which describes clients “recovering” memories of ritual abuse under highly suggestive visualization procedures. The paper is a window into how certain clinical subcultures—especially those aligned with the ISSTD—continue to reaffirm ritual-abuse mythology through “inner wisdom,” hypnotic techniques, and guided imagery that closely resemble recovered-memory practices of the 1980s.

Theme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

Subscribe to Failed State Update: ⁠http://lennyflatley.substack.com/⁠

TST TV: https://thesatanictemple.tv/⁠https://thesatanictemple.tv/⁠

Further reading: "Australian Police's Dubious Claim of 'International Satanic Child Sex Ring'" (Lucien Greaves)

⁠https://luciengreaves.substack.com/p/australian-police-dubious-claim-of⁠

“Four arrests over alleged ‘international satanic child sex abuse material ring.’” (CNN) ⁠https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/01/australia/sydney-satanic-child-sex-abuse-ring-intl-hnk⁠

Worldwide Panic is a weekly conversation about the stories, anxieties, myths, and cultural flashpoints that shape how we understand the world. Each week, journalist Joseph L. Flatley and The Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves examine how fear spreads, how belief takes hold, and why certain narratives return again and again—long after they’ve been debunked.

In this week’s episode, Lucien and Lenny dig into a shocking and almost entirely unreported case out of New Jersey: a 2025 civil lawsuit in which 23-year-old Courtney Tamagny accuses her father, neighbors, and a sprawling network of state agencies of participating in an international Satanic Ritual Abuse cult.

What begins as a bizarre news clipping quickly unfolds into a textbook Satanic Panic narrative—complete with recovered memories, dreams treated as evidence, conspiracy-therapist “experts,” and a therapist pipeline straight out of the 1980s ritual-abuse moral panic. Lucien and Lenny walk through the case, the complaint, the procedural posture, and the deeper cultural forces that allow these narratives to keep resurfacing, unchallenged, in courts and media.

The conversation also situates the Tamagny case in the long tail of modern conspiracy culture: the way JFK, MK-ULTRA, and the Epstein files have created a worldview where nothing is provable, everything is possible, and where therapeutic malpractice flourishes in the cracks.

This case is worth paying attention to; not because the allegations are credible, but because it showcases how an entire therapeutic subculture continues to manufacture SRA narratives, ruin families, and destabilize public understanding of trauma and memory.

Further reading: “Daughter of NJ police chief accuses him, others of ‘ritualistic’ abuse, years of sexual assault: court docs” (NY Post)

Theme music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

Watch the video version on The Satanic Temple’s streaming service: https://thesatanictemple.tv/

Worldwide Panic is a weekly conversation about the stories, anxieties, myths, and cultural flashpoints that shape how we understand the world. Each week, journalist Joseph L. Flatley and The Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves examine how fear spreads, how belief takes hold, and why certain narratives return again and again—long after they’ve been debunked.

In this week’s episode, Lucien and Lenny dig into the messy and largely unreported history of Bessel van der Kolk, the superstar trauma doctor behind The Body Keeps the Score. Before his bestselling fame, van der Kolk was deeply linked to the recovered-memory movement, ISSTD conspiracy therapists, and the experts who fueled the original Satanic Panic. We trace how these ideas migrated into today’s therapeutic culture and why they continue to distort public understanding of trauma, memory, and mental health.

This episode also looks at the modern ecosystem that keeps these beliefs alive: influencer therapists, social-media diagnoses, dissociative-identity subcultures, and the profit-driven therapeutic marketplace that blurs the line between treatment and mythology.

ALSO: The Satanic Temple flies its Flag over a City Hall in New Hampshire

How TST successfully flew its flag over Somersworth City Hall—directly above a Ten Commandments monument installed during the 1950s PR campaign for Cecil B. DeMille’s film. Lucien explains viewpoint-neutrality, legal backlash, media framing, and why pluralism still matters.

https://luciengreaves.substack.com/p/the-satanic-temple-flies-its-flag

AND: America is Hell: Anima Noira, 1987–2025

A reflection on the life and sudden death of a Czech occultist who believed she was called to the U.S. by Satan. A meditation on belief, ritual, and the divide between theistic and non-theistic Satanisms.

https://lennyflatley.substack.com/p/terminal-belief-america-is-hell

Theme Music: “Satanic Planet” by Satanic Planet

Watch the video version on The Satanic Temple TV: https://thesatanictemple.tv/

Worldwide Panic is a weekly conversation about the stories, anxieties, myths, and cultural flashpoints that shape how we understand the world. Each week, journalist Joseph L. Flatley and The Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves examine how fear spreads, how belief takes hold, and why certain narratives return again and again—long after they’ve been debunked.

In this debut episode, we dig into a wave of recent media stories that echo the classic Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s. From the revival of recovered memory therapy and “parts work,” to new legislative pushes against imaginary ritual abuse cults, it appears that the cultural machinery for moral panic is still very much intact.

Why are discredited conspiracy frameworks resurfacing in mainstream reporting, clinical therapy, and state legislation? What does this say about political polarization, memory, trauma culture, and the collapse of shared reality? And what happens when influencers, journalists, and policymakers all start telling a story that feels true—even when the evidence isn’t there?

This episode explores:

Stories discussed include:

• “The Therapy That Can Break You” by Rachel Corbett (New York Magazine / The Cut) https://www.thecut.com/article/truth-about-ifs-therapy-internal-family-systems-trauma-treatment.html

• “Utah advances bill to criminalize ‘ritual abuse of a child,’ in echo of 1980s satanic panic” by Brandy Zadrozny (NBC News) https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/utah-advances-bill-criminalize-ritual-child-abuse-rcna140025