Demonic Voter Fraud

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.

Meanwhile, would-be "experts" like Rapacki repackaged that made-up nonsense and pitched it to law enforcement in the form of ridiculous "training videos" like this one. It's no wonder that police trained with videos like this one misidentified random brush as "Satanic crosses" and so forth in the DePalma case that I linked to above. The whole thing would be laughable if it wasn't for the several hundred people sent to prison for "Satanic crimes" during that period because police and prosecutors had no idea of how real magick or real occultism worked.

For Lindell to not know this is flat-out stupid of him. These "experts" have been exposed over and over again as frauds, and statistically there are hardly any occultists out there, let alone "devil worshippers." The Satanic Temple doesn't literally worship the devil and neither does the Church of Satan. Remove the membership of those two groups from your list, and how many people do you realistically have left? There are nowhere near enough of them to perpetrate all the QAnon allegations, and there weren't enough of them to perpetrate the number of crimes alleged during the "Satanic Panic" either.

I remain convinced that educating the public about real magick and real occultism is the way to go. "Occult" may mean "hidden," but the technologies that facilitate direct experience of the spiritual no longer need to be kept secret. In fact, as I see it, the more people who understand them, the better. Everyone should realize that a lot of people draw graffiti including "rebellious" symbols like pentagrams and inverse crosses who have nothing to do with occultism. The same is true of drug references - WAY more people are into illicit drugs than are into practicing all styles of magick put together.

We probably can't educate the Mike Lindells of the world, but at least we can try to educate the folks who might be tempted to listen to him. I understand being a political partisan and always rooting for "your team," but Christians who try to pull the supernatural into it really are something else. It can be just as Christian to focus on social justice as it can be to work towards prohibiting specific sins - though I will say that modern Christian conservatives focus on a pretty narrow list. What's not at all Christian is to extract special privileges under the law for Christians that discriminate against those who follow different religious and/or spiritual paths, and in that way modern Christian conservatives are failing completely.