If you ever are trying to track down evidence for my assertion that success in America is almost entirely attributable to luck, you need look no further than my fellow Minnesotan Mike Lindell. Lindell is the wealthy founder of the MyPillow company, a prominent media conservative and Trump supporter, and a complete idiot.
To be clear, I'm not calling Lindell an idiot because he's a conservative. Lindell promotes every bizarre conspiracy theory that supports his political beliefs, and is now working with a former occult expert who knows nothing about occultism to root out voter fraud in Arizona. I suppose if you're an occult expert who knows nothing about occultism, being a voter fraud expert who knows nothing about voter fraud is just par for the course.
The Daily Beast's Will Sommer reports that Lindell is now working with Dr. Lyle Rapacki, who pitched himself to law enforcement agencies as an expert on devil worship during the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s, and who is now apparently pivoting toward being an expert in election fraud.
In particular, Rapacki has been working with the Arizona Republican Party in its effort to obtain ballots and voting machines from Maricopa County, which is the most populous county in the state and which delivered the state to President Joe Biden last November.
"It's been unfair, it's been unreal, it's been demonic," Rapacki said in an interview earlier this month. Rapacki has also adapted his purported expertise on Satanism to the QAnon era, as he's endorsed conspiracy theories claiming that the Democratic Party runs a Satanic pedophile ring.
Rapacki is one of those guys I talked about in this recent post, who presented themselves as "occult experts" back in the 1980's and early 1990's. As far as I can tell none of them knew anything about real occultism and were in fact experts on the various lurid and mostly made-up versions of occultism and "Devil Worship" promoted by evangelical Christians. A lot of that information came from frauds like Mike Warnke and Bill Schnoebelen who seem to have been caught up in making lots of money by telling Christians that what occultists do is exactly what they see in horror movies.