Live and Let Polyhedron

In 1985, Patricia Pulling joined forces with psychiatrist Thomas Radecki, director of the National Coalition on Television Violence, to create B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons). Pulling and B.A.D.D. saw role-playing games generally and Dungeons & Dragons specifically as Satanic cult recruitment tools, inducing youth to suicide, murder, and Satanic ritual abuse. Which was of course false. Other alleged recruitment tools included heavy metal music, educators, child care centers, and television. Patricia co-authored the book “The Devil’s Web: Who Is Stalking Your Children For Satan??” published in August 1989. One portion of the book urges police officers to open interrogations of suspected teenage occultists with the question “Have you read the Necronomicon, or are you familiar with it?”As the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games increased, Pulling’s views and statements were increasingly called into question. 

The Satanic Panic also led to the formation of another moral panic group in the same era, the PMRC. The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) was an American committee formed in 1985 with the stated goal of increasing parental control over the access of children to music deemed to have violent, drug-related or sexual themes via labeling albums with Parental Advisory stickers. The committee was founded by four women known as the “Washington Wives”—a reference to their husbands’ connections with the government in the Washington, D.C. area. Frank Zappa called them the “Mothers of Prevention,” the group of wives married to members of Congress who decided in the mid-80s to go to war against rock lyrics and whip up some good ol’ conservative hysteria.