How Fake News Is Baked. An Example of Putin “The Chief Exorcist”.
On 26.10.2022 a certain Isabel van Brugen, who writes about the Russia-Ukraine war for Newsweek, posted an item named “Putin Appointed ‘Chief Exorcist’ as Kremlin Whips up Satanic Panic”
In it she claimed that “Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, called Putin “a fighter against the Antichrist” or “chief exorcist,” according to local news outlets.”
She did not provide any links to such local outlets and did not bother to factcheck the claim. Her article is a good case study in how the broken phone (Chinese whispers) game coupled with credulity and a lack of factchecking results in creation of fake news.
Step 1: the corrupt and hateful Patriarch Kirill rants against “globalism”, which he calls a project of a world unification without taking the Creator’s goals for humans into account. He puts it into an eschatological context, hinting that the Antichrist is the end goal here. As examples he of course mentions same-sex marriage, euthanasia and unspecified genetic experiments. He claims that it is “our” common task to resist this and says that Russia is an example of a modern, technologically advanced state headed by a president openly confessing his faith (those in the West allegedly ask, why can’t they have something like this). In the West it is allegedly improper to show religiosity. The fight of various minorities denying the traditional values is a tool of globalism. This allegedly contradicts democracy, which means that the majority has the power, whereas various institutions pushing the minority stuff allegedly work against the majority.
So this is the typical braindead pablum by a vile religious fundamentalist, but it’s also exactly nothing new. All of this has been said before in one way or another. Teh Ghey etc. being the signs of the Last Days is the usual staple of the fundies.
Step 2: a Telegram channel posts a video of Kirill’s speech, adding its own spin, namely, that he allegedly called Putin a fighter against the Antichrist. No, he didn’t directly. And implicitly he did, but only as a part of calling all true Orthodox Christians fighters against the Antichrist. There is nothing about Putin’s fight specifically in this speech. So no, Kirill did not single him out as a fighter against the Antichrist. His point is that “we” all should resist the “globalism” which leads to the Antichrist.
Step 3: various websites don’t bother to watch the video and present its skewed interpretation as Kirill’s direct speech.
Step 4: yet other sites post an item tacking the “exorcist” label on top of what the Telegram channel claimed, even though the word is also never mentioned in the video and its use would be extremely weird in this context simply culturally (despite exorcists existing in the Orthodox church). (Though I guess you have to be a part of the culture to get it immediately.)
Which means it is merely their own description of what they perceive as Kirill’s message (or, rather, of its misintetpretation by the Telegram channel). Indeed, in the posted item the “exorcist” label only appears in the subheading and without the quote signs.
(Notably, the term does not even fit, since an exorcist is supposed to be someone driving the demons out of specific human bodies, it’s not a term for generic fighters against the Antichrist.)
Step 5: a seemingly clueless Western reporter at a once respected magazine not only uncritically repeats various misinterpretations by the aforementioned websites without any attempt at factchecking (like simply watching the video), but also misinterprets some of these sources’ mention of “chief exorcist” as Kirill’s own words.
Step 6: social networks, tabloids and some in the mainstream media do their thing: lap up Newsweek’s misinformation, spread it with snarky comments and make it conventional wisdom/fact.
In the end, no, the warmongering Russian neo-fascist dictator and former KGB officer Putin was not “given bizarre new title in Russia” by the doddering hate-filled fundamentalist patriarch and former KGB agent Kirill. There is no need to invent such stories given how weird and wacky these persons are in reality, yet there you have it.
(Now to the featured image. Putin: “What if He really is there?”. Kirill: “God forbid”.)