Satanic panic is making a comeback, fueled by QAnon believers and GOP influencers

PROVO, Utah — On June 1, David Leavitt, the prosecuting attorney for Utah County, stood behind a lectern in his windowless Provo office before a gaggle of reporters. Wearing a gray suit and an exasperated look, he wanted to make something categorically clear: Neither he nor his wife were guilty of murdering or cannibalizing young children.

It was, by all accounts, a strange declaration from the progressive Republican prosecutor, a Mormon and younger brother of a former Utah governor, Mike Leavitt, who had earned a name for himself by prosecuting a well-known polygamist in 2001. But David Leavitt was up for re-election, Utah County voters would start casting ballots the next week, and the allegations, ridiculous as they may have sounded, had started to spread online and throughout the community. 

Some of Leavitt’s most high-profile political opponents were willing to at least wink at the allegations against him: Utahns for Safer Communities, a political action committee opposing Leavitt’s re-election, posted his news conference to YouTube with the caption, “Wethinks He Doth Protest Too Much,” and on their website, the group wrote that Leavitt “seems to know more than he says.” 

Leavitt lost the election, most likely not just because of the allegations against him but because of his liberal style of prosecution in a deeply conservative county where opponents labeled him as “soft on crime.” But the allegations’ impact on Leavitt was clear. After decades of serving as a city and county attorney with grander plans for public office, Leavitt now doesn’t think he’ll run again. 

“The cost is too high,” he said recently in an interview from his home.

Leavitt’s experience is one of a spate of recent examples in which individuals have been targeted with accusations of Satanism or so-called ritualistic abuse, marking what some see as a modern day version of the moral panic of the 1980s, when hysteria and hypervigilance over protecting children led to false allegations, wrongful imprisonments, decimated communities and wasted resources to the neglect of actual cases of abuse.

While the current obsession with Satan was boosted in part by the QAnon community, partisan media and conservative politicians have been instrumental in spreading newfound fears over the so-called ritualistic abuse of children that the devil supposedly inspires, sometimes weaving the allegations together with other culture war issues such as LGBTQ rights. Those fears are powering fresh accusations of ritual abuse online, which are amplified on social media and by partisan media, and can mobilize mobs to seek vigilante justice. 

The daily invocations of Satan by the biggest players in conservative politics and media are too numerous to catalog in full. 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., credited the devil with whispering to women who choose to have abortions and controlling churches who aid undocumented immigrants. In June, she tweeted a video of a man dressed as the devil, stating that the mythical creature would be the next witness called by the House Jan. 6 committee. “They all know him, they all love him, and some even worship him,” she wrote.

Charlie Kirk, the president of one of the largest conservative groups in the country, Turning Point USA, recently opined that Republicans should “use the law to shut down Satanism.” Last year, Fox News host Tucker Carlson expressed his opinion on trans people, telling his viewers, “When you say you can change your own gender by wishing it, you’re saying you’re God, and that is satanic.” The Republican nominee for Missouri’s St. Louis County executive, the top job in the local government, is currently suing her former employer over its mask mandates, citing their use in “satanic ritual abuse.”

And after President Joe Biden’s recent speech on the threat that “MAGA Republicans” pose to democracy, the very subjects of his warnings framed the president’s address as “satanic,” because of the red lights illuminating the backdrop of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.  (As an aside, that red background was definitely bad optics, just sayin')

In the U.S., a Republican candidate for governor in Georgia, Kandiss Taylor, campaigned on demolishing the Georgia Guidestones, a tourist attraction known by some as American Stonehenge. When the mysterious monument — made up of massive granite slabs etched with innocuous rules for living — was blown up in July, Taylor seemed to celebrate, calling them “satanic.” 

Much more on this story:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/satanic-panic-making-comeback-fueled-qanon-believers-gop-influencers-rcna38795

A video that makes the Republican Party threat to democracy crystal clear

This ~26 minute video makes it about as clear as the MSM can make the Republican Party threat to democracy and civil liberties can be made. People who cannot see it now, essentially the entire GOP leadership, almost all T**** supporters, and nearly all anti-democracy forces (e.g., the pro-pollution sector led by Exxon-Mobile), very likely will not be able to see the threat before it is too late, or see it now but do not care enough to change their behaviors because so much profit is at stake.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for looking for when the New York Times posted this on YouTube.

Channel note to authors

For authors here, this is the current invite list I use. It has been trimmed some to account for most of the people who no longer comment here or who do not comment on Disqus at all any more. To send invites, copy this and paste it into three separate comments. Disqus automatically converts the names into the correct format. The :disqus part signals the conversion.

Is there anyone I should add?

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@disqus_GCHC27FxPX:disqus

@SvdH:disqus

@ellabulldog:disqus

@e_monster:disqus

@jbmoorpark:disqus

@ronsons:disqus

@roam85:disqus

@newestbeginning:disqus

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@epicureanpariah:disqus

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@larrymotuz:disqus

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@TheOriginalSnowflake:disqus

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@vinnygtheoriginalkb723:disqus

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@Angry_Grasshopper:disqus

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@vinnygtheoriginalkb:disqus

@JustSayYes:disqus

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@Thundersrealm:disqus

Authoritarian Senate Republicans deal a massive blow to defense of democracy

The Washington Post writes:

Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked legislation that would have required super PACs and other groups to disclose donors who give $10,000 or more during an election cycle, a blow to Democrats’ efforts to reform campaign financing laws.

In a procedural vote Thursday morning, the Senate failed to advance the Disclose Act on a 49-49 vote along party lines. No Republicans voted for it. At least 60 votes would have been required for the Senate to end debate on the bill and advance it.

Spending in election cycles by corporations and the ultrawealthy through so-called dark money groups has skyrocketed since the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. FEC, which allowed incorporated entities and labor unions to spend unlimited amounts of money to promote or attack candidates. Democrats have railed unsuccessfully against the ruling for more than a decade, saying the ability for corporations and billionaires to advocate for or against candidates anonymously through such groups has given them outsize influence in American politics. Republicans have defended the right of corporations to make political donations, even as some of them have called for greater transparency in campaign financing.

Before the vote Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) noted that, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Citizens United, the dissenting justices had warned that the ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation.”

“Sadly, they turned out to be right,” Schumer said. “By giving massive corporations the same rights as individual citizens, multibillionaires being able to have their voice … drowning out the views of citizens, and by casting aside decades of campaign finance law and by paving the way for powerful elites to pump nearly endless cash, Citizens United has disfigured our democracy almost beyond recognition.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) criticized the bill as “an insult to the First Amendment” and encouraged Republicans to vote against it Thursday.

“Today’s liberal pet priority is a piece of legislation designed to give unelected federal bureaucrats vastly more power over private citizens’ First Amendment rights and political activism, and to strip privacy away from Americans who speak out about politics in their private lives,” McConnell said before the vote.

The only insult here is McConnell’s and the Republican Party’s cynical lie that the defense of democracy bill is liberal, a bureaucratic power grab or a serious assault on free speech or privacy rights. Republicans lies are so blatant and shameless now. That there is little or no public moral outrage is evidence that the Republican Party, driven by well-funded but anonymous forces of autocracy, Christian Taliban theocracy, kleptocracy and brass knuckles capitalism, are on the verge of winning it all.

When they win power and wealth, we will lose our power, wealth, protection by the rule of law, our civil liberties and all hope of protecting the environment. Those are the stakes. That is not an exaggeration.