I’ve spent decades here researching and thinking and writing about the corrosive, fantasy-role-playing delusion of pretending that one is a heroic champion battling against superlatively evil Satanic baby-killers and now, after all of that hard work and thought … they’re just tweeting it out.
Republicans’ fantasy of Evil Satanic Commie Kamala Harris doesn’t really look much like Kamala Harris — their fantasy versions of their opponents rarely do. But it also seems like “pretending we’re the heroic champions of virtue instead of the neighbor-hating suck-ups to wealth we know ourselves to be” isn’t the only fantasy these guys are entertaining. If you know what I mean.
And speaking of how abortion-is-murder Satanic baby-killerism recycles ancient antisemitic tropes … have you heard about the new best-seller from Daily Wire hack Megan Basham?
Shepherds for Sale is a MAGA diatribe purporting to expose “how evangelical leaders traded the truth for a leftist agenda.” The “leftists” it goes after are people like Russell Moore, David French, Marvin Olasky, and Os Guinness. In other words, “leftist” here refers to extremely conservative people who oppose Donald Trump. Basham attacks them in true Daily Wire fashion — as puppets of George Soros and a cabal of globalist financial string-pullers determined to destroy America with their cultural Marxism and their stealing the blood of white Christian children to make their Passover matzoh.
Oh, and Basham also goes out of her way to dox the victim of sexual abuse preyed upon by a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Because opposing clergy sexual abuse is also, apparently, part of what Basham considers a “leftist agenda.”
(Rick Pidcock has some fish-in-a-barrel fun turning the tables on Basham’s failed attempt to “follow the money”: “Who are the billionaires and celebrity pastors supporting Megan Basham?“)
The online “prophets” of CharisMAGA Christianity are not nearly as subtle about their melding of abortion-is-murderism with explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theories: “FlashPoint ‘Prophet’ Joseph Z Says Antichrist Spirit Chose Tim Walz to Fit In With ‘Overlord Lizard Mafia’ and its ‘Goblin Masters.’”
Lest anyone missed the Hutu Radio levels of eliminationist bigotry in Joseph Z’s fever-dream, here’s a follow-up: “Antisemitic Roots and Deadly Consequences of ‘Lizard’ Rhetoric Promoted on FlashPoint.”
Contrast the way these self-proclaimed prophets’ literally dehumanizing — “lizards,” “goblins” — anyone opposed to their partisan political agenda with the more polite, “civil,” and urbane way this moderate white evangelical site casually accuses Tim Walz of infanticide: “More about Tim Walz’s extreme views on abortion.”
That piece is very tangentially premised on a Minnesota law requiring palliative care for dying newborns. How does that provide any basis for an accusation of “infanticide”? Well, the post linked there quotes from a piece by a Catholic anti-abortion activist in First Things (which, like Newsweek, retains the name and form of a once-respected journal). It’s possible that Charles Camosy’s misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the law in question was not intentional, but it’s also possible he’s just following the lead of Donald Trump by falsely claiming that those evil Satanic baby-killing, Soros-funded leftists want to make abortion legal even after birth.
This is one of the weirdest, sickest lies told by our moral superiors in the “pro-life movement.” It’s a lie that’s never explained, let alone defended. What is the alleged scenario here? What is the supposed motive?
They never say or even bother minimally imagining one. It’s a lie entirely based on the presumption that most women, doctors, and nurses, are cackling fiends who would condone, participate in, and celebrate the killing of a newborn infant, just because.
It is, in other words, a lie based on the desire to believe that most women, doctors, and nurses are like this.
It does not speak well at all of anyone that they would desire to believe such a demonstrably false, absurdly vicious, fantasy about their neighbors.
And I’m not sure desiring to believe such a lie without bothering to examine it or to notice it’s many obvious impossibilities actually makes you a better or more serious person than someone like “Jason Z” who just cuts to the shared conclusion by ranting about goblins and lizard-people.
The willful false witness of this “infanticide” nonsense builds on decades of the vicious incuriosity and gleeful presumption of wickedness that underlaid the anti-abortion movement’s attacks on “late-term” abortion. These were all assumed to be and implied to be procedures chosen by procrastinating women motivated only by shallow convenience and selfishness.
Unless, of course, it was someone from your church — in which case it was allowed to be understood as a tragic, late-developing complication in a wanted pregnancy. That was presumed to be exceptional and completely unlike the late-term abortions that all those other people — those reckless, lazy sluts — were volunteering for. Those people are bad, we are good, so they have “late-term abortions” and we have a thousand euphemisms for the same procedure.
That pernicious lie is, at last, starting to falter now that Dobbs has outlawed access to such life-saving, necessary surgery regardless of whether it’s demonized or euphemized. Stories like this one make that lie harder to swallow and harder to pass around.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In