If there is one thing QAnon has taught Republicans, it is that a great way to mobilize their base is to randomly accuse people of being “Satanists.”
Recently, Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville stood in a warehouse in Bluffdale, Utah, at a campaign stop for Republican Senate candidate Trent Staggs, and told over 100 Republican state delegates that he believes the whole Democratic party is a Satanic cult.
“I’ve traveled all over the country — all 50 states — I’ve been in good places and bad places. The one thing I saw, we are losing our kids to a satanic cult,” Tuberville warned, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.
Yes, and we are draining them of their delicious adrenochrome in order to get high and keep ourselves young and beautiful.
The thing I really enjoy here is that the gist of his speech was that the Democratic Party is a “cult” and yet, when he describes the actions of the two parties, they’re not the ones who sound like a cult.
Brandishing an upside-down pocket Constitution, Tuberville said the 2024 election wasn’t Republican vs. Democrat but “anti-American vs. American.”
“We’ve lost our moral values across the country. We’ve got to get back to the Constitution, and we have got to get back to the Bible. We’ve got to get God back in our country,” Tuberville said. “There’s not one Democrat that can tell you they stand up for God.”
You see, in this scenario, the group trying to recruit other people to believe in and support their religious texts would be the cult, not the people who are (supposedly) not pushing any religion on anyone.
Also, there is a reason it’s called a “religion” and not “reality,” and that is because it is one’s own personal faith and beliefs. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with believing in stuff, but it’s still personal. You don’t get to get mad when other people don’t believe things you can’t even prove.
Republican delegates ate it up as he careened from anti-transgender statements to discussion of immigration and chaos at the border to a prediction left-wing mobs are set to wreak chaos across the country this summer to help Joe Biden win reelection.
I’d simply love to know where he got his intel on that last one. Did he see some secret Discord chats that no one else has been privy to, or did he use his own psychic powers?
“We’ve lost our Department of Justice. In most of the country, we don’t have a criminal justice system anymore. Nobody goes to jail, unless you’re an innocent person that really loves this country, then they’ll put you in jail,” Tuberville said. “We have never overcome a cult like we’re dealing with right now.”
There are over 1.9 million people currently incarcerated in the United States right now, which is more prisoners than any other country in the world — though to be fair, China does not divulge these statistics so all we have are estimates for them — and no, the vast majority of them are not January 6-ers.
While you wouldn’t have known it from all of the New York Post headlines, 2023 actually had one of the lowest violent crime rates in the last 50 years, so that may be what he was sensing.
However! I will say that if there were a cult that was out there dismantling the US criminal justice system and keeping people out of prisons (with magic powers), I would certainly be up for joining. That sounds great.
During a brief interview with The Salt Lake Tribune following his speech, Tuberville doubled down when asked if his references to a satanic cult were borne from political zeal.
“They’ve basically taken God out of everything that we’re doing. I don’t know any other way to express it other than it’s some kind of cult that they’re trying to push on our kids and all Americans,” Tuberville said. “We have got to get back to our moral values. If we can’t get back to that and let the Democrats continue to push this cult on us and take God away from our country, we’re going to have huge problems.”
Again, taking God out of things and imposing a “morality” based on supernatural beliefs would be the literal opposite of what a cult would do.
Is anyone taking God away from Tommy Tuberville? Has anyone prevented him from going to church or believing what he believes? Or is he just mad because other people have different beliefs from his own?
Utah is undergoing something of a Satanic panic renaissance these days, complete with accusations of ritual abuse and attempts to pass a law banning ritual abuse, despite the fact that it is not a real thing (at least not the Satanic kind with robes and what have you). So it’s quite likely this nonsense went over very well with the crowd there. And it’s likely it will continue to go over well with Republicans elsewhere, because of how they are stupid.
What’s unlikely, however, is that anyone who thinks Democrats are actually out here trying to pass child tax credits as part of a ritual sacrifice to the dark lord is still on the fence — and this kind of weirdness might end up burning him and the rest of GOP at the end. Though, again, not in a ritual sacrifice.
PREVIOUSLY:
OT: Trump can’t pay. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/03/18/politics/trump-464-million-dollar-bond
When guys like Tommy Tuberville talk about getting back to God and values and faith as a country, we liberals who don’t understand Christianity are like “Oh, so you mean help the poor and the sick and the needy and the infirmed and the elderly and welcome the stranger from a strange land, and beat swords into plowshares and show kindness and compassion to our fellow citizens?”
And Tommy, the real Christian, is like “no uh, none of that.”