![\"140315Campos\"](\"http:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/140315Campos.jpg\")
March 15, 2014<\/p>\nMarch 15, 2014<\/p>\n
\u201cIn an interview with Entertainment Weekly (True Detective<\/em>\u00a0creator Nic) Pizzolato responded to a question about the inspiration for the show: \u2018You can Google \u201cSatanism\u201d \u201cpreschool\u201d and \u201cLouisiana\u201d and you’ll be surprised at what you get.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cThis is clearly a reference to a 2005 child abuse prosecution in Ponchataoula, Louisiana, that generated lurid international headlines about ritualistic Satan worship inside a church, complete with black robes, animal blood, orgies, and pentagrams.<\/p>\n \u201cThis has since led various media sources to report breathlessly on the \u2018true story\u2019 behind\u00a0True Detective<\/em>. The problem is that this \u2018true story\u2019 turns out to be completely false, at least in regard to all the details regarding Satanic ritual abuse.<\/p>\n \u201cThese were apparently part of a classic atrocity story, invented by the defendants to garner sympathy from jurors \u2013 the idea being that the defendants were victims of an unspeakably evil church-based mind control cult, rather than merely being banally evil and not very interesting child molesters.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat sort of moral responsibility do artists have not to exploit, and thereby perhaps propagate, moral panics? The aesthetic power of\u00a0The Birth of a Nation<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Triumph of the Will<\/em>\u00a0has not absolved their creators for choosing to exploit racist and anti-Semitic beliefs.<\/p>\n \u201cOur shameful history of panics and persecutions over the imaginary satanic ritual abuse of children should have been treated by artists as talented as the makers of\u00a0True Detective<\/em>as a cautionary tale, rather than as an opportunity for further invidious myth-making.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 From \u201cTrue Detective’s dangerous lies about satanic ritual abuse<\/a>\u201d by Paul Campos at The Week (March 12)<\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019m surprised to find myself cutting the just-concluded HBO series a bit more slack than Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado. But True Detective\u2019s potential for doing harm in 2014 seems minimal compared with the hysterically alarmist\u00a0Do You Know the Muffin Man?<\/a>\u00a0which aired on Lifetime while arrests were still being made in the Little Rascals case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" March 15, 2014 \u201cIn an interview with Entertainment Weekly (True Detective\u00a0creator Nic) Pizzolato responded to a question about the inspiration for the show: \u2018You can Google \u201cSatanism\u201d \u201cpreschool\u201d and \u201cLouisiana\u201d and you’ll be surprised at what you get.\u2019 \u201cThis is clearly a reference to a 2005 child abuse prosecution in Ponchataoula, Louisiana, that generated lurid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1192"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2398,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions\/2398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}