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Nevilledog

(50,687 posts)
Tue Jan 25, 2022, 07:36 PM Jan 2022

The demonology of the antivaxx march on DC.



Tweet text:

Talia Lavin
@swordsjew
I wrote about how a very literal belief in Satan influences the American right, and the demonology of the antivaxx march on DC.

theswordandthesandwich.substack.com
The Devil in D.C.
All over America, believers cast Satan as literal, potent, and omnipresent, with his dark minions influencing every action in public and private life.
10:37 AM · Jan 25, 2022


https://theswordandthesandwich.substack.com/p/the-devil-in-dc

When you close your eyes, what do you imagine lives in the darkness beside you? There are so many things too small to see—microbes and molecules, protons and quarks, and faraway nebulae burning off beyond the horizon. But for millions of Americans—some two-thirds of the country, by one poll—the darkness is populated by bigger and more frightening things: demons and their consorts, feeding on hapless human beings, as one early Pentecostalist minister put it, “like ticks on cattle.” These parasitic forces exist to draw humanity into a long and terrifying war, where prayer has the power of any great weapon; and there are many Americans who believe, every day, that they don the armor of God to wage an endless battle in the spirit realm.

One contingent of would-be spirit warriors gathered at a large anti-vaccine rally in Washington, D.C. this week. Thousands of protestors took to the capital to challenge the purported tyranny of the U.S.’s shambolic, piecemeal Covid-19 response, a refrain echoed across the frozen water of the Reflecting Pool, under the long marble gaze of Abraham Lincoln.

“This is a war on religion, this is a war on the children,” rapped the MAGA-hiphop duo Hi-Rez & Jimmy Levi. “The devil he hides in ego and pride… Fuck your medication, I’ll just keep on praying for your salvation.”

Throughout the day, Christian-nationalist imagery—from crosses to entreaties to get “vaccinated in the blood of Jesus”—was a notable presence among rally-goers. Injunctions to buck worldly authorities in favor of God’s, along with a flood of profit-motivated pseudoscience, lent the event an unmistakably fundamentalist overtone; a quarter-million dollars had been raised for the proceedings on the fanatical fundraising site GiveSendGo. Amanda Moore, a freelance journalist covering far-right movements who attended the rally, described seeing signs depicting Dr. Anthony Fauci as a demon, and others that encouraged all present to “Obey Christ, Reject Tyranny.” The Trump-hatted thousands appeared to believe, like many of their compatriots, that their physical presence at the rally was a corollary to the supernal war being fought, invisibly, all around us, all the time.

*snip*

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