re: #40 goddamnedfrank

I swear, conservatives must be the most deliberately ignorant motherfuckers imaginable. Everybody knows what Dempsey was actually saying, and that it’s true, but it’s a lot more fun to pretend he was legitimizing ISIS somehow.

Fred Clark, “The need to believe in awful things,” talking about the Satan Panic:

None of any of that was true, but Warnke’s audience believed it. They enjoyed believing it. For whatever reason, they wanted and needed to believe it.

Let’s put this more bluntly: Hundreds of thousands of good Christian people believed these stories because they preferred a world that included Satanic ritual abuse and human sacrifice to a world without such monstrosities. Given a choice between a world full of monsters and the real world, they chose the monsters.

I’m not as nice as Fred, so what I’d add is that they want monsters because anything can be excused when fighting monsters. They’re setting up their alibi.