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Abstract A moral panic animated by conspiracy theories alleging ritual sex abuse swept through the United States in the 1980s. During that “Satanic Panic,” as it came to be known, people expressed fears of social change regarding gender and sexuality. Beginning in 2022, conservative politicians, pundits, and pastors in the United States levied similar accusations of child grooming, sex trafficking, and satanic sex abuse at the LGBTQ + community, teachers, liberals, and entertainment companies; these accusations were accompanied by repressive legislation and violence. Despite their political salience, little is known about the people who believe these accusations. Using a 2022 U.S. national survey (N = 2,001), we find that up to one-third of Americans believe accusations of satanic cult abuse, government sex trafficking, and an “agenda” to “groom” children into gay or trans lifestyles. These beliefs are correlated with a range of political attitudes (e.g., positive views of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and white nationalists) and policy preferences (e.g., overturning Roe v. Wade), as well as with normative (e.g., a desire to run for political office) and nonnormative (e.g., the acceptance of political violence) political intentions and behaviors. Regression analysis further reveals that these conspiracy theory beliefs are positively associated with dark psychological traits, antiestablishment orientations, and repressive views toward sex and gender. Our findings suggest that these accusations can spark dehumanization and deadly violence by mobilizing into politics people who possess strong feelings of political efficacy, but also antisocial traits, nonnormative tendencies, and a desire to undermine established political institutions. 

We often assume that annotation tasks, such as annotating for the presence of conspiracy theories, can be annotated with hard labels, without definitions or guidelines. Our annotation experiments, comparing students and experts, show that there is little agreement on basic annotations even among experts. For this reason, we conclude that we need to accept disagreement as an integral part of such annotations.