From Satanic Panic to Satanic Persecution

The cyanide Kool-Aid cult of Jim Jones—infamous for establishing an isolated commune in “Jonestown,” Guyana where Jones and nearly all his followers committed mass suicide in 1978—is seldom referred to as a Christian cult. In fact, Jones was a Pentecostal preacher, and the name of his “Peoples Temple” was shortened from the tedious “Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel.” Still, the self-professed Christianity of the Jim Jones cult seems trivial, or merely pretextual, in considering Jones's bizarre, paranoid messianic delusions, and countless Christians since have proven that mass suicide is hardly an inevitable outcome of studying Christian gospel teachings.

Varieties of Christianity abound, and even as Bible-thumping barbarians storm the Capitol and demand a theocratic overthrow of Constitutional law, most non-Christians, and even non-Christian Nationalist Christians view this as the result of political polarization, rather than the natural outcome of a Biblical worldview.

Imagine, however, if Jim Jones had instead identified Satan as his source of inspiration, or if insurrectionist rioters had come waving flags adorned in inverted crosses and pentagrams. Charles Manson identified himself as Jesus, but hack authors peddling Satanic Panic prefer to focus on the fact that he also identified himself as Satan, thereby ensuring that his homicidal hippie “family” would often be characterized simply as a “Satanic cult.” Contrast this to a case in Oklahoma in 2014 wherein one Isaiah Marin cut an acquaintance’s head off, presumably because the victim had been “practicing witchcraft,” which offended Marin’s “strong Christian beliefs.” Another acquaintance (the victim’s brother) described Marin as a “religious zealot.” The facts of this case related above were reported in a local news report that somehow determined “the motive for the murder is still unclear.” More incredibly, Capt. Randy Dickerson of the local Police Department stated (again in the same report) that “the case is not related to recent beheadings by Islamic extremists” and that “the case had no religious implications.” Odds that the same inability to determine “religious implications” would have persisted if Marin identified as anything other than a Christian stand at about zero. And had Marin identified as a Satanist, he would almost certainly be upheld in widespread infamy as an irrefutable demonstration of the threat posed by Satanism.

Shitty British tabloids, like the Daily Mail, Mirror, Daily Mail, and Daily Star regularly conflate any irresponsible mention of Satan or Satanism into a click-bait headline, regardless of how superfluous or tenuous the connection. Thus, some hick Sheriff’s Deputy has but to refer to a murder scene as satanic-in-appearance in order for those tabloids to make an allegation of Satanic ritual murder their entire focus.

In the 1970s, a confused simpleton by the name of David William Myatt, a Muslim, created a Wiccan group called the Order of Nine Angles (perhaps because he failed to correctly spell ‘angels’), which eventually claimed to seek to “usher in a new imperial aeon (age) ruled by a race of Satanic supermen who would colonize the solar system.”

As I previously have written regarding the Order of Nine Angles, or O9A: “Knowing that the name of the Order of Nine Angles has been in existence since the 70s leads people to assume an unbroken lineage in a centralized, tightly managed organization. The truth appears to be that the name is co-opted online, at convenience, by whichever basement-dweller feels like expressing their pathetic misanthropic outrage against the world at the time. The rules are simple: Be evil. O9A appears mostly to be relegated to online chats for troubled losers who build fantastical world domination plans to avenge the injustice of their involuntary celibacy. This certainly is not to say that it is harmless. But it does seem certain that O9A is something deeply troubled people gravitate to express their pre-existing failings, rather than a comprehensible philosophy that holds any chance of converting and radicalizing any semi-intelligent, secure and capable individuals.”

The tabloids love O9A, which surely helps sustain its online existence, attracting ever more desperate and deranged individuals who occasionally act out their aggressively idiotic and destructive fantasies, which in turn attracts more tabloid headlines, which recruits more O9A imbeciles, in a symbiotic cycle of stupid.

In 2020, a U.S. soldier was caught discussing plans to murder military personnel during overseas movements on O9A message boards, much to the enthusiasm of tabloid hacks.

Last week, court documents revealed that a Wisconsin teenager, Nikita Casap, who was arrested for killing his parents in February had been online discussing unlikely plans to assassinate Donald Trump and overthrow the U.S. government.

Allegedly, Casap had been communicating in Russian with somebody in Ukraine about his plot, and Casap identified himself as a follower of O9A in recovered private chats he had with other online users.

The timing of this all is rather remarkable. This past December, Russia added The Satanic Temple to its list of “undesirable” organizations alleging, in part, that we are colluding with the Ukrainian military. Previous to this, Russian propaganda had been already long peddling cheap conspiracist claims of Ukraine’s Satanism and Nazi-ism. Casap, aside from identifying as a follower of O9A, is alleged to have also been an online participant in a Russian-based group not-so-creatively named “National Socialism/White Power” (NS/WP). Since the addition of The Satanic Temple to the Undesirables list, Russia has obsessed further about Satanism, claiming it “threaten[s] Russian statehood” in a recent lower-house State Duma roundtable.

According to The Moscow Times:

Lawmakers at the meeting identified Satanism as a “misanthropic ideology based on the justification of evil,” saying that its goal was to destroy Russia’s religious denominations as part of Western hybrid warfare. They compared it with Nazism and LGBTQ+, according to the newspaper Vedomosti. [...]

The group and the Duma Committee on Issues of Public Associations and Religious Organizations are expected to start drafting amendments to Russia’s laws on freedom of conscience, information and commerce to fight the spread of “satanism and other destructive cults and ideologies.” It was not immediately clear when lawmakers would vote on the bills.

And now, we suddenly have a teenager from a “Satanic cult” with ties to Ukraine plotting to kill an American president. It sounds a lot like the kind of provably false story that Russia has been creating for years now.

Efforts to promote the story regarding Casap and his ties (such as they were) to Satanism and Ukraine seemed confined to far-right, Russia-sympathizing outlets. The Daily Caller, founded by Tucker Carlson, who has made a post-Fox News career of publicly fellating Russia’s sitting dictator, has not lost any of its pro-Russia zeal since his departure in 2020, and took up the Casap story primarily focusing on the alleged Satanic/Ukrainian connection.

I hate to speculate too often, or too far, but I feel my suspicion is reasonable and it should be stated: I think we will see more half-witted online basement dwellers provoked into extremist activities at the behest of unknown online Ukrainians and/or Satanists…because I suspect Russia is engaging with antisocial fools like Casap online as “Satanists” and/or Ukrainians for exactly that purpose. It is well-known that Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) hosts an army of trolls whose purpose is to sow confusion, misinformation, disinformation, and other Russian propaganda. Trying to create some apparent basis for the conspiracy theories that Russia is already attempting to spread does not seem like an unlikely activity from the Kremlin by any means. After all, Putin is the same dictator who rose to power after bombing Russian apartment buildings and blaming Chechens. Putin seems very eager to persecute Satanists, and to reserve the right to use “Satanist” as a blanket term with which they can persecute LGBTQ people and whomever else they wish to, for whatever reason.

The most effective disinformation utilizes what it can of the truth, something that professional Russian propagators-of-lies are well aware of. Shitty English-language click-bait rags desperately stretch any “Satanic” connection, often beyond breaking point, to create an impression of an active subterranean Satanic criminal network. This creates a ubiquitous pre-existing folklore upon which Russia can build its manufactured conspiracy against its homeland and, more recently, the president of the United States.

I do not expect, in the current U.S. administration, that Russia would receive any real official American push-back if they began a wholesale persecution of “Satanists” predicated on these self-created concerns.