De Young spent her career studying moral panics — specifically, what became known as the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s, when false accusations of the abuse of children in satanic rituals spread across the United States. Decades later, echoes of that same fear had emerged in QAnon. The seemingly novel conspiracy theory has grown in far-right political circles since November 2017. Adherents of QAnon believe that a shadowy cabal kidnaps children, tortures them and uses their blood in satanic rituals. The alleged perpetrators in the QAnon conspiracy theory are Democratic politicians — not preschool teachers, as had been the case in the 1980s — but the accusations are eerily similar. "Every moral panic has to have a folk devil," says de Young, the author of The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic. "It has to have a person — or more likely a group of people, whether real individuals or fantasized individuals — who are the devils in the middle of all of this."... "These are the same kind of tropes that crop up again and again and again," says Eleanor Janega, a historian at the London School of Economics who has studied moral and religious panics over satanism throughout history. "This idea that there's this kind of shadowy realm of the people who control the world secretly and they're all getting together to plot out and really delight in this kind of torture and sacrifice."