I, Shub-Niggurath, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, have known darkness. I have known the eldritch horrors of cosmic lunacy. Just the sound of my name whispered into the howling westerly wind has driven men mad. I am the chill at the base of the spine. I am the abyss. Thousands of humans have been sacrificed to me across centuries, their beating hearts ripped from their chests by blood-drenched priests, their limbs torn asunder, their eyes pried from their skulls as they begged their tormentors for mercy.
And I have been pleased by their suffering.
So when I say that I, Shub-Niggurath, destroyer of the sanity of all who lay eyes upon me, was impressed — and perhaps even made a bit fearful — by the darkness in whatever souls made that political ad for Vivek Ramaswamy in which Amy Acton’s mother accused her of lying about being raped as a 12-year-old, you can be sure it was pretty darn evil.
I, Shub-Niggurath, am well-aware that families can be problematic. I have not always done right by my own children. My offspring Zhar and Lloigor, the Twin Obscenities, have been imprisoned for centuries in the lightless caverns under the Lake of Dread after being defeated in battle by the Elder Gods. I had higher hopes for Ithaqua the Wind-Walker, but for all his monstrous forms, he has never risen above the status of minor deity. His following is small, mostly confined to the tribes of the Far North where he is feared as the walker who brings death wherever he wanders.
Which is an achievement! But is it a “live among the stars as the eternal tormentor of all lesser fleshlings” levels of achievement? Hmph.
You give them everything — eternal life, all the stars in the universe, power beyond anything comprehensible in the realm of man, their own cults of worshippers who live entire lives cowering in fear of their wraths — and still sometimes your children will disappoint you.
Still it is gobsmacking, or would be, if I had one single gob, to get my vast mind around this one. A politician seeking out the estranged mother of his opponent, a mother who has been estranged from her daughter for 48 years because she took the side of the stepfather who raped her child from the age of 9 to 12 and helped him flee authorities, and put her on camera accusing the daughter she has not spoken to in half a century of being a liar? Making the daughter relive all the trauma of her youth?
Yes, half a century is as nothing to beings such as myself. I have not been able to see my Star-Spawn, Zhar and Lloigor, for millennia as they lie in their underground prison. But for humans, 50 years is nearly an entire pathetic lifespan, even as it is the blink of an eye — well, in my case many, many eyes thanks to the mortal beings I have consumed into my womb and made part of me over the centuries — to one such as myself.
But if I thought my ex the Nameless Mist had ever raped any of my vile offspring from my mating with Hastur the Unspeakable, you can bet there would have been consequences. For the Mist. I would have torn him down into nothing and scattered his atoms into the most chaotic of alternate dimensions, where each one would suffer an eternity of torture.
Quit your mewling, mortals. I, Shub-Niggurath, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, care not if my appearance terrorizes you into a bowel-voiding state of insentience. I haven’t seen my kids in centuries, you can sit in your own human filth for another minute.
What sort of evil must infest Amy Acton’s mother? The woman was once convicted of animal neglect after kittens she left in her car with the windows rolled up on a blazing hot day died. Kittens. She murdered kittens! The laziest hack human writer would not have made her a kitten murderer because that would be too obvious!
Yet this is the woman who is Vivek Ramaswamy’s closing argument in his campaign? And he’s proud to make it?
What’s more, so many on the Right are fine with it. Donald Trump has been complimenting it and telling Ramaswamy to keep going.
Much of right-wing media has sneered at liberal pearl-clutching over the ad, as if it is equivalent to Robert F. Kennedy Jr’.s relatives publicly begging Congress to not make him Secretary of Health and Human Services. But for one thing, they were accusing him of being an unqualified crank, not a child rapist. And his relatives had at least seen and spoken to him in recent decades before they publicly denounced him!
I, Shub-Niggurath, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, thought I had seen the basest depths of the human soul. Even an eternal deity can still occasionally learn a lesson.
So, Vivek? Respect. I would thump my chest with one of my many tentacles, but who can even tell where my chest is. It wouldn’t look any different than my usual flailing, and when one has hundreds of tentacles, a little flailing is inevitable.
Silence, worms! Shub-Niggurath might be allowed moments of insight into its own monstrous appearance, but you are not to nod your heads and mutter “Amen” in agreement! Do you know how many of you I can swallow into my womb and rebirth as hideous satyrs doomed to worship me for eons, satyrs who will be cursed to remember and mourn your dead human forms every minute, suffering the worst sort of pain in every atom of your physical form and metaphysical consciousness as you weep and drink the unholy ichor dripping from my many mouths, which will be your only sustenance?
That’s what I thought.
Donating to help Wonkette stay alive forever is not the only way to protect yourself from eternal torment by vengeful, black-hearted deities. But it can’t hurt!
Whoops, my bad, comments reopened!
I always love hearing from Shub Niggurath. He’s a thought leader you can trust. He is what he is, and makes no bones about it, other than the countless bones of his victims rotting in an unspeakably large mound beneath him. But no one’s perfect.