As if this election weren’t already strange enough, Hillary Clinton may be spending the last days before the election refuting claims that she is involved in a satanic cult.
On Thursday, Wikileaks highlighted an email to John Podesta from his brother, Tony Podesta, in which John Podesta is asked if he is planning to attend a dinner hosted by prolific and highly-regarded performance artist Marina Abramovic. In the email, the dinner is referred to as a “Spirit Cooking” dinner, a reference to one of the artist’s pieces, “Spirit Cooking,” a provocative “cookbook” which has been displayed at the MOMA.
What the alt-right would like you to believe is that they have uncovered an underground human-sacrificing sex-cult that counts the entire Clinton campaign as its members.
What it is, in reality, is a guy who works for the Clinton campaign being emailed by his brother to see if he would like to attend a dinner at the house of Abramovic, one of the most well-known and highly regarded performance artists in the world. A woman with with a 30,000 square foot cultural center in her name in Hudson, NY. A woman who has garnered numerous prestigious awards and honorary degrees from all over the world, and who is friends with the likes of James Franco and Jay-Z.What we have here is a series of cynical and hysterical assumptions, correlations, and misrepresentations put forth by the alt-right in an attempt to horrify the voting public.
This kind of logic is astounding. Let’s review:
- John Podesta receives email from brother asking if he is attending a dinner put on by an artist.
- The dinner references the title of a work by said artist that, yes, out of its artistic context, might seem bizarre or offensive to sensitive folks who don’t care for provocative works.
- Wikileaks and alt-right sites begin to manufacture a fictional hellscape by drawing from Googled out-of-context imagery, concocting unfair and inflammatory claims about the Clinton Campaign’s involvement with “the occult.”
- Twitter-trolls pile on with even more outlandish and bizarre conspiracy theories until suddenly, Hillary Clinton is the grand Poobah of Satan’s blood-drinking army.
By the same logic, we could conclude that because Donald Trump hung out with OJ Simpson, that Trump is a great football player and/or a murderer. Or that, because Trump knew Michael Jackson, he must have slept with children at Neverland.
If Donald Trump had eaten dinner with filmmaker George Romero, we could post grainy pictures of flesh-eating zombies from his early horror movies and conclude that Trump is obviously a cannibal. See? Weird-looking and horrifying, right? Can you believe he eats people?
So here, in the last few days before America votes, Hillary Clinton may actually have to deflect the most far-fetched fictional conspiracy in the history of presidential campaigns, while a man who has 75 actual lawsuits pending (including an actual child rape case, a very real fraud case, and 20 cases involving his treatment of women) skates by — possibly all the way to the White House.
This is nothing more than a last-ditch effort to further paint the Clintons as evil members of a nefarious cabal. It’s the same thing they’ve been getting for 30 years straight.
If you didn’t think it could get any weirder, we still have four days to go.