Christian Preacher Knows Why Oprah And Tom Hanks Won't Sue Him For Saying They're Child Molesters

Wish they would.

Last week, noted Trump prophet Greg Locke went on quite the rant, re: his belief that Joe Biden is a "demon-possessed pedophile" like Oprah, Tom Hanks and the pope. He said the aforementioned were involved in child sex trafficking, via the use of tunnels underneath the White House. And as kooky as that sounds, clearly all the members of his congregation were on board.

The rest of the world, however, not so much. The sermon went viral due to the sheer number of people mocking it across the internet, and Locke took notice.

Right-wing pastor Greg Locke confidently predicts that Oprah Winfrey and Tom Hanks will never sue him for calling t… https: //t.co/S8FouRxwb7

— Right Wing Watch (@Right Wing Watch) 1625147545.0 

Locke said:

What a week this has been! Man it's not every week you trend on Twitter with Tom Hanks. They're like "You do realize, Pastor Locke, Tom Hanks and Joe Biden and Oprah Winfrey are going to sue you."

No they won't. No they won't. You know what happens when people sue you? You get a discovery process. You can subpoena witnesses! You can subpoena books! You can subpoena videos! You can subpoena articles!

Two of them that I named can't sue me, they're probably sitting in Gitmo right now with ankle bracelets on, praise God.

Why would people locked up in Gitmo have ankle bracelets on? Also, if Oprah is in Gitmo, then how did she send a "5-Year-Old Girl and Her Real-Life Fairy Friend to Disneyland Following Viral Story"? Hmm? That seems pretty tough to pull off from an island prison.

Also, it seems like all those things Pastor Locke wants to subpoena are things one can easily get without a subpoena, other than the witnesses. From what I can tell, the only "witness" is that one lady who started all this, who says her parents were part of an evil cult that controls the world and they forced her to be Tom Hanks's brainwashed sex slave.

The unfortunate fact is he's not wrong about one thing — Oprah and Tom Hanks probably will not sue him, though not for the reasons he thinks. Part of this is because the bar for public figures is extremely high, and they would have to prove Locke either knew what he was saying was untrue or acted with reckless disregard for whether or not it was true. The latter seems possible, but again, the bar is really high.

The real reason is more likely that they know that practically anything they do here is a trap. If they do nothing, people will see it as an admission of guilt. If they sue, those same people will go "They're silencing their critics! That means they're guilty!" If I have learned anything by watching hours and hours of true crime shows, it is that there is literally no possible response to something like that that will not read as "guilty" to people. And no matter the outcome, they're Streisand-effecting themselves.

That being said, I actually wish they would take on these motherfuckers. I would even argue that Oprah, due to her complicity in the original Satanic panic and the fact that she used her show to promote and legitimize hoaxers like Laurel Rose Wilson (who pretended to be a Satanic ritual abuse survivor named Lauren Stratford, as well as a Holocaust survivor named Laura Grabowski), should feel something of an obligation here.

What Locke knows and takes advantage of is that people throw their brains out the window when it comes to things like this, both because they want to "protect the children" and because they don't want to be seen as defending child molesters. He even said it straight out in his last sermon on this topic, saying anyone who didn't believe him about the US military finding tunnels full of children underneath the White House was "complicit."

[I]f you disagree with that, and if you try to discount that, and if you try to cover that, and if you try to keep that on the DL, you're just as complicit as Hunter Biden and the rest of them bunch of crack-smoking perverts.

It's not a bad instinct people have, it doesn't always come from a bad place, and that's exactly why it's so dangerous.

It's why it was so easy for all of the Wayfair nonsense to spread last year, and why it was easy for QAnon to spread. There is almost no chance it would have become the phenomenon it did if it weren't centered around "saving the children" from evil Satanic politicians molesting them in order to get high off of "adrenochrome." People know children get abused and feel helpless to do anything about it, and this kind of bullshit at least makes them feel like they are (while having the added effect of justifying their hatred of various people). And people like Greg Locke are more than happy to take advantage of that for their own ends.

OPEN THREAD! And if you're looking for Wonkette's post on the Trump Org./Allen Weisselberg indictments, Evan here to say I'M STILL READING THEM and you'll have a post in the morning to read, when I'm not at work.

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