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Sept. 20, 2022 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
59:53
Trump Taps Into Evangelical Fascism To Hypnotize His Followers

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss a rally Donald Trump hosted over the weekend, where he mixes the rapture of fervent religious followers with the QAnon conspiracy set to lure people with the sweet siren sounds of fascism.  Support The Muckrake Podcast at http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
In the phony steel dossier, it was all phony.
How'd you like to be me and go home and explain that one to my wife?
Darling, it wasn't true.
I swear it wasn't.
Remember that one with the hookers from Russia?
Darling, I'd like to explain this to you.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Muckery Podcast.
I'm Jared Yates Sexton.
I'm here, as always, with Nick Allisman.
Nick, how we doing, bud?
I'm doing good.
It's a Monday.
It is a Monday.
We're recording this on September 19th of 2022.
Nick, we got disturbing stuff we got to talk about today.
We got to talk about Christian nationalism.
We got to talk about Trumpism morphing around QAnonism and Christian nationalism.
But we're also going to get in depth on the idea of the satanic panic, which is something that we've sort of talked about a little bit on this podcast, but we haven't gotten in depth in Like, on this show.
Are you excited to go through one of the more embarrassing and disturbing moments in American history?
Well, you know, I'm older than you, so I remember the original one, just so you know.
Whoa, whoa, whoa!
What are we doing here?
You're telling me that I wasn't terrified by the satanic panic?
You know, we have to get into it because I don't remember it as severe as what people who are writing about it now are characterizing it as.
But maybe that's because I grew up in a sane part of the country, I don't know.
Well, I did not.
Well I have a sound bite I want to share because it reminds me whenever I hear this of probably one of the best laughs my dad ever had when I was a very young person going to see this particular movie and in this movie they mention it so it's this.
By the light of the night it'll all seem alright I'll get you a satanic mechanic My dad turned to me and laughed so hard at the notion of a satanic mechanic.
That would be Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was 7 or 8 years old going to the movie at midnight.
So, you know, I have good feelings.
I have good memories of the satanic, you know, word itself.
So, I'm not scared.
I do not.
It caused me many a night of lost sleep and we'll get into that later.
Nick, I don't know what your experience with this was on Saturday.
In the past, back when, I don't know, Donald Trump was running for the presidency and Donald Trump was president, I spent a lot of time watching, obviously sneaking into his rallies, reporting from his rallies, observing them and analyzing them.
I do not subject myself to that all that much anymore.
But of course, my social feeds lit up as everybody and their grandmother sent me a link to this footage from a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, where Donald Trump was was in town to support J.D. Vance, who, by the where Donald Trump was was in town to support J.D. Vance, who, by the way, Nick, one of the Just a sinking stone that does us all a favor by sort of disappearing.
But this clip that we're getting ready to listen to, see if you can figure out at home what's occurring here and where we might be going.
But now we are a nation in decline.
We are a failing nation.
We are a nation that has the highest inflation in 50 years and where the stock market finished the worst first half of the year since 1872.
Likewise, we are a nation that has the highest energy costs in its history.
We are no longer energy independent or energy dominant as we were just two short years ago.
We are a nation that is begging Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and many others for oil.
Please, please, please help us, Joe Biden says.
Yet we have more liquid gold right under our feet than any other country.
We are a nation that is consumed by the radical left's Green New Deal.
Yet everyone knows that the Green New Deal will lead to our destruction.
It will just lay waste to the entire country, Nick, if the Green Dune Deal, which isn't even on the legislative agenda, it would just absolutely destroy the country.
Buildings crumbling in front of us.
Just cats, dogs living together, mass hysteria.
Nick, I know my background and I want to go ahead and give people insight into what happened here and how bizarre this is.
What was your first reaction when you saw this?
Icky.
Ickiness.
Uncomfortable.
You know, I'm not a Catholic, I'm not Christian, but I did go to church once when I was, you know, six with my best friend who took me after I slept over at his house and, you know, in the beginning it's weird.
It's not quite like Damien going to the church in Omen 1, but it's just very, very strange and like, but the music was very effective and it's without question completely referencing your typical religious thing, right?
They have music now, right?
And they pump it in like that in these evangelical places.
Yeah.
So immediately I was taken back to many a church service, uh, in which I was emotionally manipulated, uh, by charismatic preachers.
Um, this is an old, old trick, uh, of evangelist and televangelist like to pipe in dramatic music.
The, This is in the very, and we'll talk about the origins of the song in a second.
But this is very specifically targeting the idea that Trump is somehow or another an evangelical divine agent, whether he's a preacher, a prophet, you name it.
Nick, we saw a bunch of people who still don't understand exactly what Christian nationalism is and what its roots are.
They didn't grow up in evangelical circles that I did.
They started talking about this being a fascist salute as the people put their hands up in the air.
No, this was worship.
This was this was literally worshiping and feeling the quote-unquote spirit of the divine entering them.
It hit every chord of the framework of that underlying programming that evangelicals have.
It was as obvious as the day is long.
Well, let's just, you know, for the people listening, make sure they understand exactly what this looked like, because not everybody, but a lot of the crowd in this rally, we'll have to talk about another rally later, but had their hands up at a 45 degree angle with a finger pointing straight up, and I'm assuming that is America first?
It's America First, but also appealing to the divine spirit, to the Holy Ghost, if you will.
You know, a real good finger point, just like you do to your buddy after he makes a basket, right?
You point it to God for him, give him credit.
But there is no mistaking even still.
And by the way, you'd ask anybody doing that symbol and they're not going to even entertain the notion that it has any kind of fascistic symbolism to it.
But it's without question.
It's frightening.
Yeah.
And to make this very, very obvious point that isn't so obvious to American audience sometimes, the fascistic underpinnings of those movements, whether it's fascism, whether it's Nazism, they were built on Christian worship.
In Italy, it was the Catholic Church.
In Germany, it was the Christian Church.
And what these authoritarian movements always do is they find a way to jack themselves into the religious movement in order to gain power and purchase among the masses.
This right here, and the reason it felt so icky, Nick, is because you saw this and you recognized there's a weird power happening here.
There's a weird community here.
There's something that is coagulating, is what I will say.
And you'll notice that this is a rapturous moment.
And it's not like Donald Trump is talking about God.
He's not talking about revival.
What he's talking about is a political agenda.
And you're watching that political agenda and Christianity, particularly Christian nationalism, start to merge on the public stage.
Right.
And that is the fascistic playbook as well, is to create a religious figure out of them who cannot be questioned.
You know, there's a famous quote that I think Groucho Marx originally said, which was, I don't want to be a member of any club that would have someone like me as a member.
And I just would feel, it just feels when everybody is that dedicated and that, you know, into what is basically turning into a cult.
It doesn't feel comfortable to me.
Now, perhaps hanging out long enough in it, and that maybe it's one or two or three rallies, all of a sudden my arm goes up and I'm pointing to this guy too.
I suppose that's how easy it can happen.
And we've seen films and documentaries about how people can fall into these things so easily.
And this is exactly what they're doing.
It's really good to see Stephen Miller has now graduated from overuse of alliteration.
because clearly Trump is reading the script that he wrote for him, and that's a problem.
If he's going to get better at the writing part, and then Trump's going to get a little bit better at the reading part of it, then this is a problem.
Well, real fast, that would mean that Donald Trump would have to practice and put effort into something, so I don't know if that's going to happen.
I will go ahead and say that power of suggestion, but also the power of like, Pressure from around you?
Like, as a person who grew up in these circles, Nick, one moment you're sitting there watching everybody put their hands up in the air and worshiping and witnessing, the next thing you know you might find yourself speaking in tongues, because that's what's expected of you.
You're supposed to feel the Holy Spirit into your body and change you.
Like, that's the type of stuff that I was privy to.
That's the type of stuff that other evangelicals who came from those circles were privy to.
And I have to tell you, that the services back in the 1980s and 1990s, which we're going to talk about with the satanic panic here in a second, they were always focused on political and cultural warfare, right?
The idea was you may not have very much.
You may not have much going on in your life.
In fact, God is probably testing you, right, like job.
But the one thing you can do, Nick, is you can take that suffering.
You can go ahead and live through that suffering.
And the best thing that you could possibly ever do is be a warrior in God's war.
And you'll notice this is, again, you brought up the idea of the cult.
This Christian mindset, this evangelical right mindset, many people have come along and used it.
And I'm not just talking about televangelists and Christian leaders.
Charlatans, left and right.
Conmen, left and right.
It was waiting on someone like Donald Trump to come along and focus it.
And I gotta tell you, man, Donald Trump, as his illegal troubles get worse and as the Republican Party sort of pushes him out, he's finding himself in a narrowing circle.
And I don't know how many documentaries you've seen about your Jim Joneses or anybody like that.
When the fuzz starts calling, and when the pressures start growing, and the cult starts to shrink, it actually grows more radical.
It does.
I mean, I've seen with like David Koresh and those kind of documentaries, it is the same thing that's happened to the Republican Party itself.
Right?
And an interesting, you know, parallel here where you have, you know, the Republican Party has gotten more and more radical as it's desperate to find any other loose crumbs of a vote from here or there.
They didn't realize, you know, what would have been there for them.
You know this has got to be what the founding fathers wanted to have separation of church and state because even back then this was a thing and probably worse because without knowledge of science that we have now it was you know people really did believe some of these things.
I have a feeling this was what they were really concerned about when they tried to separate the church and state.
It wasn't necessarily like okay great there's a judeo-christian basis to a lot of the laws we have okay whatever but like The notion that these kind of people would get involved and try and take over the government, I'm sure, had to be on the top of their minds.
The founders were descended from people who left England because they didn't want to be in a state run by a state religion.
They saw the wars.
They saw the genocides.
They saw the Catholic-Protestant split, which, by the way, killed millions.
You know, like they looked at it and they said, this isn't right.
These are the same people who were parts of groups like the Freemasons, who were parts of these societies where they could talk about logic and reason.
They would talk about science as you were talking about.
And they looked at all of it and they said, you know what?
Religion is useful in terms of creating movements.
I mean, the Great Awakening in the United States of America is part of the way that the fabric of the country was brought together.
One of the ways that people started saying, I'm an American, and it began to mean something.
They wanted to keep this as far away from government as they possibly could.
They saw this as a real, real problem.
And this is why, and by the way, as Donald Trump's circle and influence shrinks, you'll notice, Nick, like in the past, we documented him playing footsie with QAnon.
You know what I mean?
Like he would retweet a thing every now and then, every now and then a speech would have a little bit of something.
Nick, do you want to tell the people what the name of this song is that was playing?
I'm hoping that you know what it means, because, you know, it's WWG1WGA, right?
That stands for something.
I was going to look it up, but I figured you know what that means.
Where we go one, we go all.
And the Trump crowd is all saying, oh, this isn't a QAnon song.
Are you kidding me?
It's just the fake media.
Nick, would you do the favor and give the people a taste of WWG1WGA?
It's catchy.
You know, it reminds me, do you remember back in the day when they asked Vanilla Ice if he ripped off Queen and David Bowie's Under Pressure?
He said, no, I didn't rip it off.
There's like a symbol here that's a little different.
Right, well, I think he added one note.
He had, I think, one note.
And somebody right now is veering off the road screaming, it was two notes!
It was two notes!
Right.
Let's just throw the last clip we had on before with Trump talking, just so we can hear.
Should we?
Because I think it's a good comparison.
We are a nation whose leaders are demanding all electric cars, even though they can't go far, cost too much, and whose batteries are produced in China.
Yeah, it's that song.
It is that song.
It's that song.
It's WWG1WGA.
And listen.
If somebody wants to say this is a coincidence, that they just happened to pick a QAnon song, do you understand how unbelievably huge of a coincidence that would be?
Meanwhile, what is happening over on Truth Social, Gab, whatever in the hell it is that they've rigged together as an anti-Twitter, He's sharing QAnon memes left and right.
Last week he shared a meme of himself wearing a Q pin with Q sayings.
He has always flirted with these people because this is an ideology.
This is a Christian cult that has gone ahead and laundered everything that he's ever done.
He's not playing footsie with them anymore.
He's not blowing them kisses across the way.
He's not sending them messages and speeches.
Nick, he's merged with them.
Period.
And he's had to.
It's the only thing that he has left.
It's the only play that he has left.
And it also explains why somebody, DOJ, released audio during January 6th on some private audio communications where the key takeaway is how much they'll take the words and parse them into what they want them to mean.
And we know that Trump understands this, right?
So he can say, stand back and stand by.
He can drop things like that to good people on both sides.
And he knows how that's going to be pulled apart by these, you know, cult members to his own ends.
That is why it's really, really troubling.
I mean, can't this guy just have one too many burgers or, you know?
But I gotta tell you, here's the thing about all of this, Nick, is this Christian nationalist thing, it's not going back in the barn.
It's not.
It's too useful.
I mean, Donald Trump might not end up being sort of the vanguard of this.
He might not be the one who brings it out on the national stage, even though it already is.
It's sort of like, you know, bubbling underneath the surface.
The Republican Party recognizes that this is incredibly useful.
They're already flocking to it.
Of course, we start, as we've talked about and as our analysis shows constantly, It starts with the fringes, right?
It starts with your Alex Jones, it starts with your Marjorie Taylor Greene, it starts with Donald Trump, whatever.
And eventually, the mainstream Republican Party takes it, digests it, and regurgitates it in ways that hides the worst parts of it, right?
That hides the most undigestible parts of it.
This is why QAnon and QAnonism has turned into the Big Lie.
and turned into basically the principles of the Republican Party.
This thing, whether or not Trump sticks around or not, is still going to be mainstreamed by the Republican Party.
Let's play this out a little bit because what I kind of feel like is in four years, eight years, ten years, are these candidates going to heal people on stage in the middle of a political rally?
I'm sorry, but you and I were hosting a live stream for the Muckrake podcast for the Republican National Convention where Madison Cawthorn was so moved by the spirit of patriotism in the Republican Party that he stood up during his speech.
I'm telling you, this stuff is only going to intensify.
And you say that.
Jokingly, I think you're saying that.
You're not wrong.
Well, it has to.
It has to include signs and wonders.
Oh, well, you know, the whole speaking in tongues thing, that just seems like a, whatever, they're acting.
But with the healing part, now that's amazing.
When he heals cancer, and it just goes away, now that, to me, really stands out as something that would be useful.
Well, and again, one of the things about all this is I love the idea that he would actually do it, as opposed to saying, I've cured many cancers.
Many cancers have been cured, and that's what's going to happen here.
When this thing really takes off, if it does and if we don't defeat it, and knock on wood, I hope that we defeat it before it really reaches its final form, Nick, the shit that these people are going to try and sell the public, it's going to be ... We're going to laugh at it, but it's going to include that icky feeling that we're talking about.
I mean, it's going to be a joke until it's not a joke.
Exactly.
I mean, you know, we saw this, there's actually this great play, The Irresistible Rise of Arturo Uy by Brecht, perhaps?
I don't know, I saw this in London, and it's basically Hitler's rise, but the guy, it's a complete buffoon, it's a comedy.
Remember the movie Life is Beautiful?
Is that what it is with Benini?
You know, there's a moment in the middle where it goes from kind of a comedy in a Yeah, and that's the thing about this.
then the atrocities, whatever.
Same idea.
It flips in a second and then it becomes as scary as it was ridiculous and buffoon-ish beforehand.
Yeah, and that's the thing about this.
I feel like our stories of how authoritarianism grows, they basically portray it as it's an irresistible sinister force that can't, you know, that people just find themselves under the spell up.
They're hypnotized, Nick.
Hitler, the oration is too good.
Too good of a speaker.
People just fell under his sway.
And what actually is hidden in all of this is the buffoonery.
Like, fascism, authoritarianism is actually really absurd.
I mean, you know, we broke this down on an earlier episode, like Tucker Carlson talking about dudes reclaiming their masculinity by, you know, inflicting themselves with UV rays on their genitals.
Like, we can laugh about that, but meanwhile, what is it deep down?
It's creating this different reality that these people can live within, and you look up one moment, and all of a sudden, and we're going to have to talk about this satanic panic in a second, The satanic panic is ridiculous, Nick.
I mean, it really, truly is.
The things that we're going to talk about in just a second are absolutely absurd.
But I have to tell you, it wasn't limited to just this small fraction of the country.
It was part of a larger material condition upswell as the culture changed, economics changed, politics changed.
And you look up one day and absurdity isn't absurdity anymore.
It's just a thing.
And Christian nationalism, the idea that like the Holy Ghost or God's energy could go into you and create patriotism like that's that's not far off.
Right.
I think what's also disarming is that they're turning it around on the people on the left and saying that they're the fascists.
And it's hard to respond to that because it's like it's so preposterous and it's and for the same reasons we're trying to point out why these things are so troubling.
They're trying to say it's the left that are doing all these things.
I mean listen how do we know like how do we know you're not a fascist Jared?
You know, you have two S's.
You have SS in your name if you look at it when you're writing it all out.
Wow.
So, come on.
Isn't that a sign?
Wow, I think you just threw some real coal into the QAnon farm.
Like, they haven't created a new narrative about me in a hot minute.
I feel like you just, like... Oh no, I'm sorry, but it caught my eye.
I'm looking at your substack name and it has, you know, Jared Dixit and then, like, SS in there.
I'm like, look, there it is, right there.
Fascist.
You.
See, and by the way, like, what you just did there, that creation, like, of that conspiracy theory, some of this doesn't go much further than that.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, it really truly doesn't.
It doesn't take much more than that.
I have three sixes in a row on my social security number.
Well, don't give that out.
My God.
That's playing with fire, Nick.
I know, but like, that was always a sign I knew when I was in high school.
Like, just like Damien, I'm telling you.
I'm looking for that in my skill.
And by the way, speaking of the satanic panic, I have to tell you, back when I was a kid, Nick, the idea of looking for the sixes and everything, Like, that was absolutely terrifying.
And I'm here to tell you, and I assume some of our listeners are from similar backgrounds, like, I assume from where you experienced it, I have to imagine it was almost like a cultural curiosity.
Like, what in the hell are these Christians doing?
What are people talking about?
This was my childhood, man.
And, like, it wasn't a laughing matter.
It was the type of stuff that, like, gave me stomach aches.
There were moments that, like, I was told that, like, stuff that was going on was part of a sinister spiritual battle.
I mean, it literally is so absurd now, removed from it, and some of the stuff we're going to talk about today is just head-shakingly stupid, but it was the horrific nature of my experience then.
Oh, well, listen, it was as scary to me as it was to you.
I mean, you're talking about all those movies like The Omen.
I mean, listen, it actually starts with even something like Rosemary's Baby, which again, we didn't, I don't think you saw, I didn't see because that came out like in 68, but like The Exorcist tormented me and traumatized me to no end.
But, you know, at some point you realize, well, A, it's a movie.
And B, you get to a certain age, right?
And you realize when you learn science and you learn things that like, I mean, listen, maybe you can believe that people can be levitated off of their bed by the devil.
I don't know.
I haven't seen it.
I'm not, I'm not, I'm not there.
I'm not willing to believe that.
But that's the other problem we have with like popular culture is that that's what sort of doubles down on what you were learning in the fire and brimstone speeches if you go to church when you're young.
Nick, I'm not kidding here.
Like, I knew other people who went to my churches who believed that they had either been possessed.
I had other people in my churches who believed that they had been visited by Satan.
You know, these things... I once watched a person cry their eyes out because they had done something that they considered unchristian.
And in the midst of crying their eyes out and confessing their sins to a group, as people are laying their hands on them and trying to heal them, talking about how Satan himself had made them do it.
I mean, like, this wasn't screen stuff.
Like, this was day in and day out.
The 1980s to the 1990s, as part of a side effect of the cultural and political goings-ons, And we'll talk more about that in depth here in a second.
Like, that created a perception that literally moved reality around and shifted the experience of individuals on the ground.
You know, I'm actually a little scared now remembering some of these things.
It's a, you know, there must be something wired into the human's brains to sort of, like, have that fear.
And obviously there is a, the reasoning behind it, right?
I think they came up, we have to come up with something that will make people behave, right?
And then maybe if we scare them to death, then they'll behave, right?
They'll actually, you know, so we'll give them somebody like the devil to be afraid of.
Now, this is a very uniquely Christian thing, as far as I can tell, right?
Like, you know, Judaism doesn't really have a hell.
It doesn't have like a really have a devil, you know.
I grew up kind of religious.
I would never learn anything about that, and I don't know about any of the other major religions, but this is a thing that seems to be uniquely related to, A, Christianity, and B, the United States.
Well, and you know what's weird?
I was writing The Midnight Kingdom to go ahead and bring a couple of these threads together, I was writing it and I started to realize that the nature of the devil is like a very, very interesting concept, to just put it a certain way.
The Christian concept of the devil, particularly the way it moves away from Judaism, Judaism looks at evil as something that we all struggle with.
It's something inside of us that we have to sort of mess around with, right?
We have to fight through and try and become our best selves.
Which means that the origin of quote-unquote evil is internal struggle.
It's in you, right?
Christians, particularly of the evangelical variety that we're going to be talking about that formed the foundation of this, Nick, they believe that not only is humanity fallen, but humanity, because it is fallen, is uniquely susceptible to the manipulations of an evil outside entity.
And because there's an outside entity, it's lurking around every corner.
It's not, you know, it's not a coincidence that as we're, you know, engaging in colonialism, and as we're, like, taking over the American continent, we're afraid the devil's in the woods, you know, where the Native Americans are.
They're probably in league with Satan.
Eventually, it comes in, and I gotta tell you, we can talk about satanic panic, and we're talking specifically about the 1980s, 1990s, There's not a moment where this stuff isn't around.
It's where circumstances bring it to the forefront, and it's this idea that humans can be vessels for external evil, and that external evil can come in when they're not aware or when they're vulnerable.
I, for one, to go ahead and use another personal anecdote, I think I was, I once asked my grandmother, I want to say I was seven, I said to my grandma, I said, I've heard that Satan can possess you.
When does he do it?
How does he do it?
And she said, oh, he gets you when you're asleep.
I stopped sleeping.
Oh, wow.
You know what I mean?
For like a couple of weeks at a time.
And like, because I was absolutely terrified.
I believed that I was in the midst of a supernatural battle that could take me at any given moment.
And when you believe that, and millions of Americans believe that, stuff like QAnon, It's the same thing.
QAnon is a new Christian digital cult.
It just so happens to be wired with this Christian nationalism.
But it's taking advantage of all that programming that's been there forever.
Well, yeah, but it's not like we, you know, had these like this notion that you could fall asleep and then wake up a communist at any time of our country, right?
That never happened.
And, you know, have you ever watched?
Oh, speaking of invasion of the body snatchers, don't go to sleep.
You'll become one of them.
And this is exactly what the Red Scare was.
Yes.
People believe that.
That's what's so frustrating about, I guess, having a free and open society.
People are allowed to believe what they want to believe, and this is the problem, because now we have, you know, this is growing.
This is the problem.
It used to be this really weird, fringe, lunatic part of our country, and it's growing.
But we don't have to go.
We can go way back.
You go to, like, the Salem Witch Trials are the same thing here, and we could go way back.
I'm sure, you know, the Pope and, you know, the Vatican was doing this shit since it started.
Ken, would it surprise you, Nick, and I'm glad you brought up something like the Salem Witch Trials or even what happened within the church.
Would it surprise you to hear that a lot of accusations of demonic possession and or witchcraft They were often used as weapons by an individual because they wanted a political position that somebody else had, or they wanted their property, or they were standing in the way of their own profit and power.
Would that surprise you to hear?
No, that would not surprise me.
Yeah, would it surprise you to hear that one of the oldest things within the Christian religion is to say that anyone who disagrees with you is obviously in league with Satan, and as a result, no more argument!
You don't have to talk about the specifics.
You don't have to compare notes.
You don't have to look at facts and figures.
Suddenly they are the personification of evil.
End of story.
That's it.
I get back to my argument from before, you fascist, when what they say is you can't argue with them.
The right is always railing against this notion that you can't argue with them if they don't agree with you.
They silence you.
It's disarming because they're the ones Who are trying to silence you by using Satan as this end-all be-all.
That's what that is.
It's so frustrating.
And by the way, I feel like Donald Sutherland and JFK in the park bench.
It's like, okay, who benefits?
And I'm glad that you got right to the political side.
This is simply used by politicians to benefit and another tool to beat their opponents politically.
That's what's so frightening about it.
What the internet has done now is allowed what would have been a whisper or two, and never would have bubbled up anywhere, to become a metastasized headline that will brand you forever.
Yeah, and it's this thing where, I mean, if the internet was around in the 80s or early 90s, the satanic panic would have been 20 times worse.
I struggled to sort of wrap my head around what that would be because What was taking place, and it's not, and again, the way history books, conventional history tells us, Nick, it's like everybody woke up one day and they're like, I'm really concerned about witchcraft and Satanism.
Like, it just happened, right?
Like, out of nowhere.
That's not what happened.
What happened was following, and by the way, we covered this on our audio documentary a little bit, A Certain Route to Failure, how at the end of Jimmy Carter's tenure as president, he lost control of the evangelical vote.
He was a himself.
He was a adamant Christian.
He lost control of that.
Plus, he also was presiding over an economy that was starting to fall apart with stagflation and all these energy problems.
Ronald Reagan comes around and basically creates a, how do I put this, an American revival, right?
We need to rediscover who we are and faith in ourselves.
Meanwhile, Nick, why did we lose faith in ourselves?
The 1960s and the 1970s, right?
The clashes about Vietnam, about civil rights, feminism, gay liberation, you name it.
The conservative movement believed that those developments, which had started to affect culture, that not only were they wrong turns, right?
And because on one hand, how can you say they're wrong turns?
It's about people having freedom.
It's about people being treated better, not wanting to be oppressed.
So how do you explain how oppression, And how mistreatment of individuals and the taking away of liberties, how do you explain why you want to do that?
Do you come out and say people don't deserve rights and they should be exploited?
Or do you maybe find a cover story?
Right.
You know, this notion of nuclear family and this is the proper way to raise kids and otherwise, you know, you're going to become, you're going to have pedophiles who are scooping them up and stealing them and killing them and whatever else they're doing.
I'm a little bit offended you didn't mention disco in your list of things that, you know, Well, and you look at the pieces of popular culture, and by the way, as I'm listing these off, I need you and the listeners to know that programming that I've been talking about, every time I talk about these subjects, that programming, it's disconnected, but I feel it's sparking.
Do you know what I mean?
Okay.
Hard rock.
Satanic hard rock.
D&D.
Which, by the way, I would have been the type of person who would have loved to have played Dungeons & Dragons.
Do you think for a second, Nick, that I thought it was okay to play Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s?
No, I did not.
Wow.
Okay, because I did a little bit and there was never in my mind a connection to Satanism.
But wait, I'm glad you brought that up because we have a symbiosis in our brains.
Rosemary's Baby, Exorcist, The Matrix is even dealing with this notion of what version are we in?
Is it hell or not?
Stranger Things, which we talked about in the Oh, absolutely!
last time, two weeks ago.
Stranger Things is basically an allegory not only for hell, but also it's rooted in Dungeons & Dragons and how they're playing it.
There's no question they were playing upon that and praying upon it.
Is it safe to say that I'm sure a lot of these households and, you know, that are religious probably ban their kids from ever even watching the show?
Oh, absolutely!
And you got told when you went to church, you got told that around every corner there was the possibility of being perverted and falling victim to Satan.
If you listened to the wrong song, you watched the wrong movie, you went to the wrong place, you trusted the wrong people.
Everybody that you talked to, Nick, your friends at school, your friends on the team, even family members, If somebody said something that was wrong or that questioned America, then that meant that they could possibly be, either willingly or unwittingly, agents of Satan.
And this entire thing is about rolling back the progress of the 1960s and the 1970s.
And you'll notice a couple of things in all of this.
The crime wave, right?
There are a bunch of satanic super predators out there, right?
You also have this absolutely absurd wave of child abuse witch hunts in preschools.
Which, by the way, if you look at this now and you look at the coverage of it, Nick, They're talking about kids who are saying that they were flown by levitating, that they were murdered, their friends were murdered, magic was being cast.
This was on TV.
This was on the news.
Serious people believed this.
And where did that come from?
It came from concern over the fact that during neoliberalism, all of a sudden, everybody had to work.
You couldn't stay at home with your kids any longer.
You had to have probably a dual income or the nuclear families falling apart.
So all of a sudden you're giving your kids to strangers?
Oh my god, that goes against this conservative idea.
Meanwhile, why is it about predators?
Why is it about pedophiles?
Because of this conservative, Christian, Republican belief that gay people are all out after your children.
They're all wicked and sinful and satanic way down at the heart of this thing.
This wasn't about actual, like, a situation occurring.
These are the consequences of neoliberalism and the conservative reactionary push in the 1980s.
I mean, at least it kind of explains the root of why the gay population has to be vilified like this.
It's because they believe that the Bible says it's an abomination.
It is the devil.
And then it's not a stretch to be like, okay, what would a devil do?
And then, okay, that's what they are that this is what they're doing.
You know, there was a series of books that came out that were like autobiographies about, you know, the whole entire childhood devoted to Satanism.
And it turns out there's no corroboration for any of these things.
But, you're right.
Why do we watch true crime?
Why do we watch the Omen?
What's the Ouija board?
It's funny, my daughter freaked out so hard when she found out my dad flew on a plane with a Ouija board to bring to her because he found it in his basement, right?
And she wouldn't go near it and wouldn't touch it.
I'm like, what is going on?
It's powerful today!
Well, and I want to point out in all of this, like, you just brought up, like, a lot of these sort of, like, situations where people are having these memories, right, of abuse.
This wasn't just something that was being peddled by your Jerry Falwells or your Pat Robertsons, who we'll talk about in just a second.
Nick, there are entire, like, serious things that popped up.
Like, in terms of psychology, there was, like, this whole movement of diagnosing these memories that never actually existed.
Psychology had to, like, sit down after this whole thing and look at themselves in the mirror.
And you'll notice it also found purchase in the larger culture.
Like, this was something I remember specifically watching an exorcism on, like, NBC.
And here, I want people to listen to the opening, and it's Geraldo Rivera.
I understand that we have our assumptions about Geraldo Rivera now in 2022 AD.
You need to understand that some people looked at Geraldo Rivera as like an actual journalist for a hot minute.
Check this out.
And beyond the mayhem and monsters, it's said that a nationwide network of satanic criminals exists.
Start with the warped and wicked Charles Manson.
It's everything that human beings don't understand.
It's all their fears.
It's what they're not sure of.
You dig what I'm saying?
Satan to me would be God.
Or the demented son of Sam killer David Berkowitz.
These and others purportedly linked to the devil worships underground.
It's all over the United States and probably all over the world because it's just something that people are experimenting with now.
Impossible to measure.
Easy to doubt.
The very mention of it invites ridicule.
Come out!
I won't let her go!
No.
Often the choice is to avoid confronting it.
Ignore it.
Find other explanations.
Or laugh it off.
That is not the choice we have made tonight.
Now, you'll notice something in this, Nick.
First of all, tell me if that sounds familiar.
A national, international network of satanic criminals.
It is exactly what we hear now when it comes to not just QAnonism, But Republican conspiracy theories in the deep state.
Second of all, why were the networks airing this stuff?
Yes, there was a cultural movement towards it.
Absolutely there was, as conservatism started to gain purchase and push back against the 60s and 70s, which, by the way, were seen as part of the reason why the economy started falling apart and why neoliberalism was brought in.
But here's the thing.
You'll notice, and think about what you're seeing right now in our culture.
It was profitable!
They looked at it.
They didn't have their journalistic sort of integrity.
They said, this is what people want to see.
We need to show it to them.
They show it to culture.
Culture reverts back to them, and it goes in a cycle, and it grows, and it grows.
People want to see the movies.
They want to see the news coverage.
Suddenly, it's not this wild-eyed conspiracy theory.
Suddenly, it's the reality that you live within.
And that's how conservativism and how these sort of regressive movements take hold over culture and kind of what we're watching right now.
As an aside, they mentioned Davey Berkowitz, the son of Sam.
There's a great documentary you might want to see called Sons of Sam, where they actually posit that perhaps it was a satanic cult, and they do find there was Some sort of evidence of some rituals going on somewhere at some, you know, cemetery.
It's eerie.
It's conflict.
Well, hold on one second.
I will say, and I agree, that is a good documentary actually.
I enjoy that.
Here's the thing that you have to ask an American culture.
Like, did they find ritualistic things because people were out there as part of a satanic network?
Or were people reflecting the culture that was being reflected to them?
Oh, there's a bunch of satanists out.
I bet satanism's cool.
I'm listening to all this heavy metal stuff.
It's not like there was a growth of sinister energy that had taken over the country and needed to be battled back, which is what is always positive in these.
Well, wait, so I'm now picturing the notion of, like, the real Satanists who have been practicing for centuries, right?
And they stumble across a bunch of posers, right?
And so that's going to be a big fight they must have.
Listen, I did not expect this conversation to happen on this podcast.
Have you ever looked into what the Church of Satan is?
I think it's just a pushback on the indoctrination of kids or whatever, right?
No, it's the idea that, like, Like it's an atheistic push against – and in a lot of places, it is actually a pushback to what we've been talking about, which is the separation of church and state.
A lot of it is just individualism or hedonism.
It's not actually black magic and ritual sacrifice.
It's this – it's actually a completely separate thing.
So yeah, the idea that they're like these satanic killers that are like stalking around, there's never been any proof of that.
It's actually more likely, and I would say more factual, to say that all the people we're talking about, whether it's Son of Sam or Charlie Manson, There are socio-economic reasons for these things happening.
America's culture of violence, the shredding of the social safety net, all, and cults, going back to how we started this program to begin with.
It isn't this, like I said, it's not an outpouring of satanic energy that somehow or another has been unleashed because Like in The Exorcist, they found an artifact in a rack, you know, and suddenly the evil has been loosed.
And they're saying it's women suddenly wanting to be on the pill and wanting to be feminist, it's civil rights, it's something evil was loosed in the 60s or 70s and now we're dealing with it in the 1980s.
The artifact in the rack, isn't that the Omen 2?
I'm not sure if that's The Exorcist.
No, that's The Exorcist.
Okay, alright.
Um yeah the other thing that does though it takes away any accountability because you can just sort of say up Satan made me do it what do you want me to do uh now here's the thing we see people who are panicking and they're crying and they're shaking and all the and they're speaking and all these different things I mean It's hard to wrap your head around that being fake, right?
Like how can somebody be faking that?
But we have a lot of explanations with the study of science and brain chemistry for why people might behave in ways that look like that.
That is not Satan and that can be treated.
With vaccines, even, or drugs that could really help people that, you know, we can hear in the vaccine deniers, the same kind of thing.
That there's also some sort of devil in the background here that's trying to get into your body.
It's troubling that the accountability thing is so prevalent in my mind is that you can simply just, you know, and politicians can do the same thing.
It's just like they don't have to have any accountability because they can just pretend that someone else like made them do it or they wasn't them controlling themselves.
And that's the problem.
Isn't there a better way to inspire people to behave properly?
Well, I mean, I think some people would make the argument it's through, like, law enforcement.
You know, it's through indoctrination and law enforcement.
But I think the larger thing that's happening here is that all of these systems we're talking about are systems of control, right?
Why should women have to stay in the household?
And why should women, like, not be able to, like, and control their reproductive rights.
Well, God wants it.
You don't have to argue, well, I think that women are lesser.
Why can't people of color enjoy their civil rights?
Well, it's an affront, and actually we're dealing with a satanic situation, which, by the way, is what happened during the first and the second Red Scare.
They used communism and the idea of the satanic sort of nature of communism and that quote-unquote conspiracy.
They used that to make sure that people of color weren't able to organize or gain their civil rights, women weren't able to gain independence, and gays were continually and utterly oppressed.
It keeps you from being able to have to iterate and articulate some type of a reason why you deserve more power and more resources than other people.
You simply look up at the sky God and you say, that's why.
I wish that these people would be on the side of like progressives.
Like, because what I mind as much if it was a cult like that, but we're trying to get, you know, people to have a free, you know, choice and they can marry who they want and they don't have choice with their bodies.
But it never happens that way, right?
This kind of thing can't ever be a progressive situation.
No, not really.
I mean, it can.
That doesn't mean that there isn't progressive Christianity or progressive religions.
There are absolutely facets of that.
What's important here, and this is again what I found writing The Midnight Kingdom, is when power merges with religion, it's because of its authoritarian elements, right?
It's to be able to say, this is the reason we're doing this and we're facing this sinister threat.
Which, by the way, is why we're seeing a resurgence now.
It didn't go away.
We didn't wake up one day and suddenly sort of wake up and say all this is false.
This has constantly been under the hood.
These messages have continually been disseminated and communicated.
We're now reaching a point, though, where in order to make our economy work, and in order to make our political system work, particularly the way it's been working, Nick, we have to have authoritarianism.
And you can't just simply say, I'm sorry, some people are going to have to die.
We've already seen like some Republicans say that, right?
Some people are going to have to suffer.
I'm sorry.
That's not popular.
It's not going to turn itself into a movement.
There now has to be a threat, which is pedophiles, groomers, the deep state, the satanic conspiracy.
You know, they're drinking adrenochrome, you name it.
All of that stuff is a useful ideology or story that allows you to go ahead and undermine elections, disenfranchise people, and if necessary, Nick, and I mean this, kill people.
We've already seen it happen and it's going to grow and grow simply because these stories are the ways that you get to there without having to explain it.
But don't you think that we're like kind of way out in front of this at this point and we're just sort of still just predicting how this is going to be used as a political cudgel to hurt people's, you know, primary chances?
We're way ahead of this, aren't we?
Like this hasn't happened and this will be in the future.
Well, we're in the midst of it.
We're in the gathering of this situation.
Unfortunately, all of this stuff is telegraphed.
The writing is on the wall.
This Christian nationalist idea is starting to take off.
And we're seeing right now, it's again with Trumpism.
You'll remember when Trump showed up and started doing his stuff, everybody said, ah, this is ridiculous, this is never going to take hold.
Then it took hold, and then it got mainstreamed and it got reiterated and moved around, right?
It became sort of the mainstream policy of the Republican Party.
We're in that period right now.
It's like Alex Jones screaming about water making the frogs gay, and everyone would be like, what the hell is he talking about?
Next thing you know you're talking about groomers in the classroom.
You're talking about people going after your children.
We're at that stage.
We're in the out here in the distance.
What in the hell are these people talking about?
If this gets carried out, if this authoritarian movement gains power and we have a regressive movement that pushes back progress, it's going to be under the auspices of this.
We're going to have another satanic panic that's going to become cultural-wide.
Well, you know, we don't have to look that far.
I mean, I just have to go a couple states over to Utah because I thought we have a sound bite we can share about what just happened.
A guy running, an incumbent running for office in Utah literally loses because Yeah, so just to get people up to date on this, David Levitt, who is the Utah County prosecutor, or was, I guess I should say, is a Republican.
And this guy basically got into a feud with a sheriff and a couple of other people because he wanted to reform the system.
Now, he wasn't a radical, he wasn't one of these people that everyone claims was in with Soros or whatever.
But more or less because of this feud and because of his political agenda, rumors began that he was part of this giant conspiracy that, tell me if you've heard this before, QAnon, pedophile accusations, all of this.
Let's hear Levitt deny this.
They're so outlandish and so crazy that they're just not true.
Utter baloney.
Pack of lies.
100% false.
100% false.
There is no organized ring of abuse.
And just so we're clear, like, you know, people started attacking him by finding like weird, you know, court cases from a decade, a decade ago or longer where to some sort of notion that they made it seem like his wife was a sexual abuser of children or something like that.
And that he was also part of this whole thing.
And that could never work, right Nick?
That would never possibly ever work.
What would never work?
These attacks.
Well, it worked.
He lost.
He lost by a lot.
How much did he lose by?
At one point in the June GOP primary, David Levitt, who is part of a respected political tradition in the state of Utah, at one point he lost to his challenger by over 50 points.
Yeah.
50 points for the county attorney.
And I want to point out, it is so much easier to say you shouldn't vote for this person because they're evil and they're part of a gigantic conspiracy than to sit down and go through the particulars of criminal justice reform.
And the question is this.
Are you voting on the question of should we reform criminal justice, which is a really complicated question that has a bunch of different facets?
Or are you voting because that person is evil and I have to get rid of them otherwise Satan will win?
It is such an easier way to do it and people are susceptible and more and more susceptible every passing year.
To those types of conspiracy theories that go ahead and bypass everything else and get to the reptilian brain, as you like to say.
Exactly.
And it's frustrating because there isn't much of a solution.
You know, democracy is so fragile because it relies on the fact that no one is going to do this.
And for a couple hundred years, nobody really did.
Right.
I don't I can't think of any other period of our history until this point.
Right.
Like, I mean, that anybody certainly won like a presidency doing it like that.
I mean, I mean, do you want to argue that Reagan did it under our noses before we even realize it?
I Reagan did it by prosecuting the culture at large.
What he basically said is he basically said that there is an evil in the world.
And to question the United States and not believe that it is a capital G good is you are you are playing a role on the wrong side of history.
Right.
On the wrong side of this war.
There's been other, I mean, McCarthyism was another expression of this, and that had large electoral implications.
Yeah, we've seen this happen, but at this level, honestly, Nick, We haven't seen it at this level since probably the Civil War, which we don't like to talk about the religious aspects of that and the conspiracies of that.
The Know Nothings, the election of 1800 in which Thomas Jefferson was basically called a satanic Illuminati.
I mean, these echoes run through American history, but you know when things are about to get bad and when the shit's about to hit the fan, when the volume on these go up.
Do you know what I mean?
Like they're always there and they're always sort of percolating in the culture and the political environment.
When they get real loud like they are now, and they are definitely loud now, you know that things are about to get really, really tough.
For sure.
And it is frustrating because popular culture is going to double down on these and really reinforce a lot of this stuff.
So it's almost like, remember there was a time when people were like writing books or even doing movies where they would tell the point of view from the bad guy.
I mean, wouldn't Lucifer on TV just a couple years ago?
Grendel was the one where they did it from the monstrous point of view.
And it was really fascinating.
Maybe even The Unforgiven was sort of like that a little bit.
Somebody needs to do a movie or book or something from Satan's point of view.
He's misunderstood.
People have done that.
I know I've seen these things before.
I mean, wouldn't Lucifer on TV just a couple of years ago?
I could be wrong.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And probably condemned by the religious right.
Oh, you have no idea!
I mean, that's the thing, is they literally look at this, and again, we've talked about this at ad nauseum, like, it's an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that everybody in charge of media is pushing these ideas and corrupting culture.
They absolutely condemned it, and it's the same thing with wokeism.
They truly think that anything that is representative or anything that is inclusive is a plot.
It's part of this larger sinister thing and eventually down the line if this takes hold and if this authoritarianism like actually finds purchase in terms of like overall overarching power, you're going to see culture and entertainment change.
You're going to go back to those types of movies that we talked about.
You're going to see shows that are going to talk about the nuclear family or gender roles.
They'll start to push back.
Because culture has to reflect itself back and forth in order for this power to find purchase.
Well, the other thing that's interesting is, and I bring this up all the time, or several times, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote this short story, Young Goodman Brown.
And it's about a guy who was, you know, in the Puritan times.
Interestingly, a quick fact, Hawthorne's, like, great-great-grandfather was part of the Salem Witch Trial here.
He was a judge, and they were so mortified by that they changed the spelling of the last name.
But it takes place during the Salem Witch Trials, and a guy wanders through the forest at night and realizes that the whole town are satanic worshipers, and he dies as an upset person, right?
His whole life has been shattered.
I have a feeling that really religious people would have would have taken that and made it into a moral fable for them versus what he was, I think, trying to say was that all these religious people are really just, you know, completely, they're not really true to what they're saying.
And I think that's, it gets bastardized really quickly to the opposite meaning.
And then now you can't control that narrative either.
Nick, that's the deep state.
That's what that is.
It's the idea that everybody seems like they're, you know, on the up and up and they're just doing their jobs and they're playing a part of culture and meanwhile they have these deep, deep sinister secrets.
It's the deep state.
That's all it is.
Yeah.
And as a result becomes a cautionary tale again you know not to be that way versus trying to open your eyes to see like no this is this is clearly just a lot of you know bluster and a lot of you know cosplay basically for what they're trying to be you know be righteous when they're really not and I think that's the difference there we you know it's hard to continue it's a very powerful Is it a drug or whatever you can call it to convince people of this?
And I suppose if you start off in churches from a very young age, it gets wired into you.
And that's why it's like, are you ever going to be able to get through to enough people to try and quash this before it becomes a movement?
Well, I mean, as we're starting to see people move away from Christianity because of this extremism and because of this oppression and because of these conspiracy theories, that actually is sort of doubling down on the situation because people are saying, look at Christianity under attack.
Look at this problem.
This is obviously this secular conspiracy that's coming for us.
I'm hoping we can turn this thing back, but you're absolutely right.
That framework stays with you.
There's really no way to get rid of it permanently, but it does make you able to see this stuff, like out in the open.
Yeah.
I mean, the solution could very well be that somehow you have laws that you are not allowed to do this kind of thing, but how would you ever enforce that?
I guess we can't enforce the laws we already have.
Well, the answer is to address the material conditions that are underlying this.
You can't make people think something different.
We don't need to indoctrinate people.
We don't need re-education camps.
You deal with the underlying material conditions that create this situation, that allow this conservative authoritarian backlash, and all of a sudden, I gotta tell you, people don't worry about this stuff as much.
They don't, you know, they're not sitting around.
Like, there's a reason why in the 1980s and 1990s this found purchase.
It's because neoliberalism started making, you know, your day-to-day life worse.
And you started to realize that the American Dream was more and more of a sham, and you start looking for responsibilities.
You can't make people think differently, but you can take care of the conditions that affect how they think.
All right, everybody, that's going to do it for this deep dive on the satanic panic.
I got all mixed up by the talking of evil.
It was Satan.
Satan's controlled your time.
Oh, God, don't say that.
Yeah, but that'll do it for this.
We will be back for our regular weekender edition on Friday.
A reminder, if you're not already signed up on patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast, go there, become a patron.
It's what supports the show.
It keeps us ad-free, editorially independent, and you get to join the community over on the Discord with some of the best people around, so you should do that.
Go to patreon.com slash SchmuckRigPodcast.
And it'll keep the devil away.
If that's what does it for you, that's what does it for you.
If you need us before then, everybody, you can find Nick at CanYouHearMeSMH.
You can find me at J.Y.
Sexton.
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