“We need an investigation,” a woman named Angel told me patiently. A casino worker in her mid forties, she’d driven all the way to DC to hold a neat hand-lettered sign featuring a picture of a Comet staff member’s toddler daughter, her hands taped to a table with heavy white masking tape. “We can’t call people innocent without an investigation.”
Given that she believes the federal government is involved in the sex-ring cover-up, who should do the investigating? I asked her.
“We need an unbiased investigator,” she said, just as patiently.
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“WIKI WICCAN: PODESTA PRACTICES OCCULT MAGIC,” yelled the far-right aggregation site Drudge Report when the telling emails came to light. Alex Jones dubbed spirit cooking “black magic,” and Mike Cernovich weighed in with “sick stuff” and “sex cult.” Abramović’s repeated rebuttals that “Spirit Cooking”—the title of an art installation—was just that, art, and that nobody ate semen, blood, or anything else unsavory, had no impact. Those who bought into spirit cooking as a real demonic activity are certain that Abramović and the Podestas and everyone else involved in this Satanic sex-and-death cult will face their judgment, sooner or later.
These outbreaks of religious hysteria recur so persistently in American life for a reason: they are, like so many conspiracy theories, a response to moments of social change and perceived societal fracture. Satanic Panic allegations first arose during a moment in the 1980s of intense concern over the number of women in the workforce and a subsequent rise in “latchkey kids” and paid caregivers.
Pizzagate emerged during the 2016 elections, a time when Americans were re-litigating, to an exhausting degree, our beliefs, our vision of America, and our sexual ethics. The paranoid idea of sexual predators hiding in the highest echelons of power was not so paranoid; Pizzagate, though, spun it through a nexus of faux black magic, imagined ritual, and nonsensical accusations that were somehow both unbelievable and yet, for a lot of people, unbelievably powerful.
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