It's not just Qanon

Satanic Panic is alive and well in the American left, too

This bothered me a lot more than it should have. I was a fan of this conspiracy podcast, you see; contemporary conspiracy thought, that is. Not that Last Podcast on the Left tourist stuff. Though, don’t get me wrong. I love them. Hail yourself!

I was a fan. They hooked into weird lines of thought and explored connections that led down dark alleyways of American history. But every episode of the podcast tended to grate on me after a while. There is a blanket suspicion among them of anything occult. Anything. Doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t even have to be occult, it just has to be occult flavored. If the subject of examination use a word like will, it sets off alarms and turns the hosts into living 🤔 emojis. Their understanding of the occult is woefully lacking but their fear of it weaves its way through everything they discuss. To them, it’s all Sheitan. Wicca, ceremonial magic, chaos magic, Vodun, they’re just the different masks that Satan wears and everyone that studies or practices these currents is either in on the conspiracy, or is woefully ignorant of the occult’s true nature. Yet, they present themselves as knowledgeable about the subject despite their knowledge being nothing more than strange fantasies fostered from watching horror movies. So and so at the mosque told them it was all djinn, so that’s that, amigo.

They had this discord server for Patreon subscribers. I was a subscriber. So, I joined, found that they had an occult channel and started chatting with a couple dudes showing off their ritual gear. But it turns out that we misunderstood the purpose of the channel, which really ought to have a pinned message informing users of its purpose: “This channel exists purely for the discussion of things we think are satanic. Details be damned! We don’t wanna know what we don’t wanna know.”

I found myself, like a fool, arguing with people there about the innocence of the West Memphis 3, insisting that Ricky Kasso wasn’t part of some satanic network and that the murder wasn’t some ritual human sacrifice. It was just some psychopath into heavy metal and satan, killing a dude that stole his drugs. I was finally chased out of the entire affair because I would budge in my argument that Aleister Crowley didn’t murder children in occult rituals because that’s not how god damn magic works, you fucking dunce.

But it doesn’t matter. Their minds were made up long ago. I am “sus” and my magical practice was “cringe”, to quote one user. Not that I can respect anyone over the age of thirteen that uses either of those words in earnest. You might ask yourself why I would associate myself with these Qanon weirdos but I didn’t think I had. The contributors to this podcast and some of their guests were outspoken socialists and Marxists, a political set that I can understand and sympathize with. It was a slap in the face to realize that the same opposing forces of Capitalism and Communism occupy the same reactionary space on the pillar of severity. This podcast and its base of leftward listeners are every bit Qanon, right down to the Hillary and Podesta suspicion, just without all the Trump shit.

I left and canceled my subscription. My five bucks a month won’t likely be missed and it’s tainted with satanism, anyway. It bothered me, though. A lot. That treatment, that is. Suddenly I was 13 again, taken on as a project by the weird youth group guy at St. Theresa’s because I wore Guns N Roses shirts. Treated like a burnout hesher loser in seventh grade because my hair was long and I wore a denim jacket with heavy metal patches on it. I thought that I had found a tribe of weirdos to commune with, and they’re weirdos, alright, but none of them has ever known what it’s like to be the weird kid in the community, violently judged for your most superficial qualities. To them, the folks that deliberately stare into the abyss are doing so because they want in on the sinister shit. Whatever.

I consoled myself with a hefty dose of adrenochrome. Hail Satan.

I honestly couldn’t believe that in 2021 I was arguing with someone of the political persuasion most closely associated with broad tolerance for the people most commonly vilified by the American right that no, Damien Echols wasn’t some master of the diabolical back in 1993. He was a poor 18 year old with a bad attitude, put to the question by a community of people that violently rejected him based on his appearance, alone. My argument was a deep understanding of the case, its facts, and the people involved. His argument was that Echols told some jocks that he did it. The three pled guilty on the Alford Plea, and that some of his books taken in as evidence had passages underlined about human sacrifice. And yet, the people watching us talk it out sided with the other guy because some Hollywood people helped them out with legal fees and shit. You see how the leap in logic works there?

Hollywood is decadent and depraved

The tentacles of power, the ancient forces of greed and fear, The West’s dusty Dracularity and the means that its most powerful people use to consolidate money and authority at the top of the pyramid, it touches a certain morbid fascination in me. Behind the swarming opulence of the world’s most wealthy people is a horror movie of predatory behavior and exploitation that affects the public on a broader social scale: growing poverty, crumbling infrastructure, collapsing environment, as well as a personal scale: human trafficking, sex abuse, drug addiction. To be rich means clawing every penny you can from every hand. Your luxury depends on someone else’s suffering and when you come to realize that you can’t ever be held responsible for that predation, the lust to have all the money pairs itself to a powerful dopamine boost that comes from actively harming others.

We all know that it’s out there and that it’s happening but we’ve been intimidated by a connected media machine into carrying on the narrative that the Satanic Panic was just one of those moments in human history when we dipped down into medieval anxiety. The McMartin Preschool case was so big and so destructive to so many people that it became the totem for enlightened people to present as all the evidence you need to disprove satanic ritual abuse as nothing more than the hysterical Christian right being hysterical. Ritual abuse fell into the ca-razy Christian bucket and liberals went back to congratulating themselves for being so rational. The next time someone came forward about being raped in a systemized, ritual setting, a unified monolith of skeptics, Christian and secular, alike, would come out the woodwork asking if the Ninja Turtles were there or if Chuck Norris was the head satanic priest like all those weird claims the McMartin kids made.

But we know it’s there. We know it’s happening. Cosby, Epstein, Sheen, Spacey, Weinstein, they’re presented as individual but unfortunate cases of people who allowed themselves to be overcome by their worst impulses. But people in Hollywood have been trying to tell us this for years. That it’s not just a handful of people holding the keys to the Hollywood dream abusing their authority, that it’s a whole system with its own moving parts and power players at the middle management level that organize the hedonism for the bosses on a massive scale. Corey Feldman has been making noise about this since the 90’s. He and Corey Haim were among the biggest teen sensations of the late 1980’s and in only a couple short years they fell from grace and landed face down on the concrete. Haim sank into a mire of alcoholism and drug addiction and Feldman embarrassed himself in a post-career bid to continue on as a Michael Jackson-styled rock star on Howard Stern.

Feldman shit where he ate and lost it all. Now whenever he tries to chime in on the #MeToo thing that he had brought to life literally decades before, everyone says, “Yeah, but Corey is on drugs.” Which is exactly how that machine is supposed to work. Credibility is stripped from the victims. It’s a familiar tactic in most cases of sexual abuse. Law & Order SVU would have you believe that the police and the courts take sex crimes very seriously but think about any real-life sex abuse case that you can that doesn’t involve a thorough teardown of the victim’s character or how the consequences of a serious crime will affect the rapist’s future chances at a good life. Think about whenever the cops empty their magazines into some black dude’s back. Do we hear about the killer’s violent history or shitty performance record on the police force? No. We hear about how the victim had a couple possession arrests and once stole a carton of cigarettes from a convenience store. When I worked in a psychiatric hospital, 99% of the teenage girls admitted to the adolescent unit were victims of incest or were raped by friends of the family and when the secret was exposed to the light, rather than protect their children, they circled the wagons around the perpetrator.

There is no question, in my mind, that Hollywood is a pitch-black den of abuse of depravity and that much of it is tied to a larger behemoth with claws in military and the civilian government.

But that doesn’t mean that it’s satanism all the way down.

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Human behavior is a strange and complex thing and the questions most-often asked by people looking over conspiracy sources is, “Why would someone do that if they aren’t guilty?”

Why would they confess to a crime they didn’t commit if they were innocent? There’s an entire Netflix series about this. People do it all the fucking time.

Why would they go around telling people that they worship the devil and sacrifice cats? You’re a teenage outcast, constantly fucked with by normies. This is not a confession. It’s called fucking with people you hate.

Why would they dress in black and change their name to Damien if they weren’t evil? Echols adopted the name Damien. I was almost actually named Damien and it bums me out that my parents passed on that one. Some of us are just fascinated by horror movie shit. I own a physical copy of The Turner Diaries. Does this make me a neo-nazi? Fuck no!

Why are they interested in Crowley? Because Ozzy Osbourne wrote a song about him! Because the occult is fascinating! Because if you’re a poor kid in Arkansas, looking at a future of poverty, it’s empowering to think that something greater is out there for you to take.

No one asking these questions considers how someone else might think? They simply apply their subjective point of view to the questions asked and this is a pretty big problem. Some rando’s opinion of Damien Echols ultimately amounts to nothing but it opens the door a crack to see the real person inside: frightened and prejudicial, not nearly as enlightened as they think they are.

The West Memphis Three as an example

Most of the people I’m referring to here have read a book called Abomination by an author named Bill Ramsey. Ramsey is a producer on Ed Opperman’s podcast and that’s kind of a bummer because The Opperman Report is often interesting and Ramsey’s involvement and extremely bad judgement casts a long shadow over it. He also has a couple of books under his belt about Aleister Crowley. Yes, his cup floweth over with Crowley misinformation and naive interpretations of the written document. He begins from a point of suspicion and grabs the parts which can be twisted to fit his story while accusing the official documents as having been twisted to fit their story. You can read some of Abomination on Google Books. I recommend looking at it but for the love of fuck, don’t buy it.

Ramsey’s thesis in Abomination is informed by a few things:

1. The police built a case strong enough to support the prosecution.

2. The prosecution had a case strong enough to convict the accused twice.

3. The defense attorneys fought like hell.

4. The lack of physical evidence doesn’t exonerate the accused.

5. Jesse Misskelley confessed many times.

6. Damien Echols continues to practice the occult.

The first three points are extremely naive. I don’t care for cops but I get it. The community around West Memphis was so shaken by this murder that the town was like New York City during Son of Sam. There was tremendous pressure to put a face on the killer and the actual murderer had likely slipped through their fingers forever. They found a scapegoat and made it stick. Ramsey leans entirely on the supposition that all parties in the investigation and trial were operating from a place of good faith and that’s troubling because anyone who has ever done the reading knows that the prosecution’s case was nothing but character assassination and appealing to stupid people’s reactionary Christianity. The police just straight up lied to Misskelley, informing him that if he just told the truth, he’d be a free man. None of his confessions match the collected evidence. Of the three, they leaned on him the hardest because he has the intellect of a five year old. Abomination also starts with a passage from Proverbs and has a whiff of old time religion to the introduction. So, keep that in mind. Ramsey also uses articles in the local papers from the late 80’s as evidence of growing occult activity in the area but what’s described in these articles is more like party places for the local teens in remote spots like the ones near me when I was a kid. Where inverted crosses and pentagrams were spray painted on the walls next to the Blue Oyster Cult logo and the words JUDAS PRIEST. Ramsey clearly didn’t grow up in the sticks like Damien and I did where there’s nothing much more to do than drink stolen beer in an abandoned building in the woods. He also supposes that the writers of these articles know what an occult symbol looks like and aren’t just describing the things that I just described.

The lack of physical evidence is the part that I have the hardest time with, though, because that’s a really fucked up way to judge someone guilty and like those weird leaps in logic I noted above, the ones that reveal the true ugliness of someone’s character, this, too, indicates a fundamental frailty of character in Bill Ramsey and the people that point to this document as conclusive proof of that the well-meaning liberal public was, like always, deceived by wicked satanists. By the way, the lack of physical evidence also doesn’t connect them to the crime, genius. That’s how criminal investigations usually work, you fucking dog-brained loser. The popular suspect among people still looking at the case is Mr. Bojangles, by the way. The unnamed guy in the ladies’ room at the Bojangles restaurant near the crime scene, witnessed with muddy shoes and blood all of him near the three boys’ time of death. Also, Ramsey, nothing about the crime was ritualistic. It was just brutal animalistic murderer shit but then again, it’s not like you care. You probably also read Programmed To Kill and think that Dahmer was an MK-ULTRA subject.

Echols practicing the occult is just outright meaningless. He spent literally half his life in solitary confinement trying to find peace with a death sentence and turned to the sources that he was most familiar with. I wrote to the dude in jail back in the 90’s and received back a letter from him that was grateful for the correspondence but profoundly sad in his resignation to lethal injection. Can these people honestly not consider what it’s like to be twenty years old and know, for a fact, the day and time that your life will end? When Damien got out he had zero skills he could put to use to make a living but a head full of occult philosophy and a reputation for being the guy put in jail for witchcraft. Capitalizing on that reputation was the smartest move he ever made.

Fuck it

At the end of the day, my fascination with conspiracy theory is just tourism on the dark side and I think that’s what sets me apart from those guys. They sense my otherness and it scares them. I actively participate in the things they have identified as evil, based on incomplete information. Their thoughts on Stalin or a fifteen dollar minimum wage have no bearing on their thoughts about satanic ritual abuse or Project Monarch. They make fun of Alex Jones because their politics lie on the other side of the tracks but their approach is every bit histrionic as his. I thought I had found my tribe but what I found, instead, was a group of /x shitposters that are just as close to replacing “The Hollywood Elite” with “The Jews” and “Adrenochrome” with “Christian Blood” as the Qanon people.