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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@larrymotuz:disqus

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@TheOriginalSnowflake:disqus

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@Angry_Grasshopper: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.

Some history on the radicalization of the Republican Party

Peter Smith, a Republican who represented Vermont in the House of Representatives from 1989 to 1991 writes in a New York Times opinion piece:

Over the last 30 years, the Republican Party has effectively eliminated its moderate and liberal voices — as well as the conservative voices that put country over party. The consequences of this takeover by an increasingly right-wing faction include the threats to democracy that have become increasingly prominent since the Jan. 6 riots.

When I lost my seat in Congress in 1990, I knew it was because I had co-sponsored a bill to ban assault weapons. The National Rifle Association and conservative Republicans in Vermont and elsewhere united to defeat me, calling the independent challenger, Bernie Sanders, the “lesser of two evils.” First, a right-wing candidate challenged me in the Republican primary, then many of his supporters aided the Sanders campaign in the general election.

Their plan: Elect Bernie Sanders for one term, then defeat him the next time around. The only problem: They couldn’t weaken him in a primary the same way and consistently failed to beat him in a general election. And the rest is history.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my defeat was an early step in the elimination of the moderate and liberal wing of the Republican Party. That process, aimed at members of Congress and state-level officials, began with the ascent of Newt Gingrich’s style of full-throated partisanship and has continued to this day. When moderates like Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine retired, the party typically nominated more right-wing candidates to succeed them. Over the years, the party’s capture by hard-line activists — and now, as seen in New Hampshire’s primaries last week, election deniers — has resulted in ever more extreme nominees.

When Mr. Gingrich was elected Republican minority whip by a single vote in 1989, he and his supporters seemingly had one goal: not to govern, but to control, stifle and stymie Congress. They got less actual governing done as they frustrated Congress’s work, and in many ways their strategy worked.

The long-term consequences of their scheme led to the election of Donald Trump and the rise of today’s hard-right extremism. It has also weakened and undermined the Republican Party and multiparty government in states where more liberal general election voters reject hard-liners who become Republican nominees.  

About three weeks after his election as whip, Mr. Gingrich called me into his office. He asked whether I was having dinner with Democrats. I was, I said: A colleague from Tennessee and I were hosting fellow freshman members for dinner regularly to share experiences. Mr. Gingrich demanded that I stop; he didn’t want Republicans consorting with Democrats.

I responded — not overly politely — that I was from Vermont and nobody told me what people I could eat with. But his demand was a harbinger of the decline of moderate and liberal Republicans. (Mr. Gingrich told The Times he did not recall the meeting, but noted that he was working to unify the Republican caucus at the time.)  

What followed over the next few years was the deliberate quarantining of Republicans from Democrats: separate orientations for new members, a sharp curtailing of bipartisan activities and an increasing insistence that members toe the party line. The very idea of “voting your district” — which was alive and well when I was elected — became anathema within the Republican caucus. Simultaneously, the weaponization of the evangelical religious right and the organization of wealthy conservative donors was going on, largely behind the scenes, with money and organizing often used against moderate Republicans as well as Democrats. 

I believe that the current attempts to overthrow our democratic traditions will fail, but we must understand the successes produced by the right wing’s focus on control at all costs over governing.

Beyond Mr. Trump’s election, those successes include the numerous right-wing ideologues confirmed to federal judgeships, a major effort to restrict voting rights, the increasing presence of dark money in politics, the elimination of abortion rights and a lack of critical progress in combating the global climate crisis.  

There is little room left in the G.O.P. for any disagreement — indeed, of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump, only one appears very likely to be in Congress next January.

It may be too late for the Republican Party to again welcome moderate and liberal voices into its ranks. But the focus of moderate and liberal Republicans — both elected officials and the voters who supported us — was historically on governing to solve America’s critical problems, not on accruing control for its own sake. If the Republican Party cannot be an instrument of democracy, independent-minded moderates will do what we’ve always done: Vote our conscience, and vote for someone else.

This is more evidence of Republican Party radicalization and its shift from a pro-democracy party to the anti-democracy party it is today. 

11th Circuit Appeals court blocks T**** judge’s corrupt ruling

In a bit of good news on the legal front, the 11th Circuit appeals court granted the government’s petition to block parts of the Loose Cannon’s (judge Aileen Cannon) obviously improper pro-T**** ruling about the stolen documents the FBI found at Mar-a Lago. Law & Crime reports:

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals is allowing federal prosecutors to resume their review of documents seized from former President Donald Trump‘s Mar-a-Lago residence that were marked classified, issuing an opinion Wednesday that also blocks them from having to release the documents to the newly appointed special master and Trump’s lawyers.

The ruling grants a motion for a partial stay filed Friday by the U.S. Department of Justice, with a three-judge panel concluding that “the public interest favors a stay” and agreeing with prosecutors that U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon “likely erred” when she blocked them from using classified records in its criminal investigation and required them to submit them to a special master.

The panel also said Cannon’s decision to permit national intelligence officers to continue their risk review regarding the seized material while enjoining the DOJ from further reviewing anything is based on a distinction that “is untenable.”  

The panel also dismissed Trump’s argument that he would be “substantially” harmed by a stay, writing that because he “does not have a possessory interest in the documents at issue, so he does not suffer a cognizable harm if the United States reviews documents he neither owns nor has a personal interest in.” The judges also said his argument that he would be harmed by a criminal investigation is “unpersuasive,” quoting a 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Cobbledick v. United States, “Bearing the discomfiture and cost of a prosecution for crime even by an innocent person is one of the painful obligations of citizenship.”  

The panel dismissed Trump’s suggestion that he may have declassified the documents when he was president, saying there’s no evidence of that, and also called the argument a “red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal.”

Two interesting paragraphs from the court’s ruling:

Plaintiff suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was President. But the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified. And before the special master, Plaintiff resisted providing any evidence that he had declassified any of these documents. In any event, at least for these purposes, the declassification argument is a red herring because declassifying an official document would not change its content or render it personal. So even if we assumed that Plaintiff did declassify some or all of the documents, that would not explain why he has a personal interest in them.

For our part, we cannot discern why Plaintiff would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings. Classified documents are marked to show they are classified, for instance, with their classification level. They are “owned by, produced by or for, or . . . under the control of the United States Government.” And they include information the “unauthorized disclosure [of which] could reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to the national security.” For this reason, a person may have access to classified information only if, among other requirements, he “has a need-to-know the information.” This requirement pertains equally to former Presidents, unless the current administration, in its discretion, chooses to waive that requirement. (emphasis added)

At least that panel of the 11th circuit has not yet been corrupted and subverted by T**** and the Republican Party.

The 11th Circuit covers federal cases from 

Florida, Alabama and Georgia

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For law wonks, the analysis of Loose Cannon’s improperly biased (political partisan) legal reasoning is based on court jurisdiction under the four Richie factors for equitable jurisdiction. All four factors need to be found to apply for Richey jurisdiction to be proper. The 11th Circuit appeals court wrote:

For the first Richey factor—callous disregard for Plaintiff’s constitutional rights—the district court found no evidence that the United States had engaged in that type of behavior. As to the second factor—Plaintiff’s interest in and need for the seized property—the district court determined that Plaintiff had an interest in at least some of the documents, like his medical documents, tax correspondence, and accounting information. But it made no finding that Plaintiff had a need for the classified documents.

The appeals court went on at length to analyze the 3rd (“whether the plaintiff would be irreparably injured by denial of the return of the property”) and 4th (“whether the plaintiff has an adequate remedy at law for the redress of his grievance”) factors, and found neither of them applied. To be clear, not one of the four required factors were present for Loose Cannon to assert that she had jurisdiction. 

One thing to note is that right from the get-go, the first factor, callous disregard for T****’s constitutional rights, did not apply. In getting and executing the search warrant, the DoJ followed the law and did not disregard any of T****’s constitutional rights. Loose Cannon just made that crap up because she supports T****. There is nothing more to it.

If one takes the time to read the Appeals Court reasoning, it becomes obvious and undeniable just how blatantly corrupt Loose Cannon was in her Republican Party attempt to protect T****.