In a surprising bit of breaking devil worship news, the widow of former Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes has opinions about “industrialized devil worship” that might be taking place at her late husband’s television network.
The woman who stood by her serial sexual harasser husband as he built a network of conservative disinformation took a complaint about the alleged “industrialized devil worship” at Fox News to the network’s budding competitor, Newsmax. I bet you didn’t see that one coming.
It was the sedition-backing hoax site Newsmax that brought this important news to the world’s attention, because of course it was. Former Fox host Eric Bolling scored the interview. Bolling was himself jettisoned from the Fox News desk after he was accused of “sending unsolicited photos of male genitalia to current and former female colleagues.” It is unknown whether Bolling slept soundly after his interview with Ailes that night or sat staring at a wall, wondering where in his career things had gone so badly wrong, but we’re not going to pretend to care. He signed with Newsmax; he knew what he was getting into.
As for this latest satanic panic, one worthy of digging Ailes’ widow out of obscurity, you’ll probably be disappointed to learn that Fox News is supporting devil worship in a very slipshod manner indeed. The scandal comes from Glenn Beck’s own far-right hoax site The Blaze (no link because ick) in a story that “in a shocking turn of events” exposes Fox as “supporting far-left charities, including the Satanic Temple, the Trevor Project, Planned Parenthood, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.” Beck, of course, is another pundit who was ejected from the Fox News lineup in 2011.
What that actually means is that Fox News has an internal charity matching program called Fox Giving that allows employees to select a charity to donate to, after which Fox News promises to match the donation with one of their own. It turns out that in the long list of charities, those four are among the many included in the program. While we don’t know for sure how that happened, it’s most likely to be the result of a list of pre-vetted, known-legitimate charities provided by some outside source, one nobody in the Fox offices so much as even looked at before plopping it into the system. That’s the sort of thing corporate HR departments tend to outsource.
On the other hand, we’ve already had many examples of what the internal Fox News office culture is like, and it’s just as possible people inside Fox are really, really into satanism. Donating to the Satanic Temple is the sort of thing Tucker Carlson would have done as a laugh.
None of this, however, should mask the real outrage here, and that is that Ailes’ widow, Beth, is misrepresenting devil worship. One would think that if “Christianity is under attack,” it would be in the interest of Christianity’s defenders to learn their facts, but no. No, that never seems to happen.
Matching charity donations to the Satanic Temple is, and I cannot stress this enough, not “industrialized devil worship.” It just isn’t.
There are multiple levels and types of organized devil worship.
Pastoral devil worship is the one we are all the most familiar with. Devil worshippers go out into a field, or a forest clearing, or to the top of a small round hill during a moonless night. (Bring flashlights if you’re going to do that one. Wandering into a thicket of brambles on a moonless night while wearing your most expensive ceremonial devil worship robes will ruin your whole evening.) They do their agrarian whatevers: Sing songs in German, sacrifice goats, check Pokemon Go—you know, rural stuff. This is considered the highest form of devil worship because it requires participants to do actual work, and yes I’m looking at you here, Brittany. You will note that there are barely any rituals in Christianity that involve a lot of walking because screw walking, but pastoral devil worshippers always get their steps in.
Industrialized devil worship seems, at first glance, like it’d be bigger and more lavish. Industry is being brought to bear; there are gears and cogs and large iron chains that do mysterious things when you pull on them. Put a time clock on the wall and a pot of molten iron in the middle of a room and you’re halfway to simulating hell already.
But the industrialized version is, at best, a knock-off. It is impersonal. Devil worship by assembly line lacks the artistic touch of an old-timey hilltop ritual, and pastoral devil worshippers dismiss the whole industrial devil worship scene as a place for edgelords and tryhards. Yes, yes, devil worship has gone all steampunk now—but what has it accomplished?
What Ailes and Bolling are discussing, however, is not industrialized. There ain’t no giant cogs; nobody’s getting their expensive devil robes caught and being yanked into the machinery. What Beck and Newsmax have uncovered is online devil worship, which is the lamest and most lackluster of all possible devil worship. Online devil worship is just embarrassing. It’s just a bunch of memes.
Are we really supposed to believe that Fox News matching a charity donation to the Satanic Temple is devil stuff? What the hell kind of devil worship involves cutting someone a check for $20 or so? This is not f–king Amazon, there’s no Devil Worship Prime, and there is no form of devil worship more pathetic than one that has its own online shopping cart.
This is the PayPal or GoFundMe of devil worship. It’s embarrassing. And that’s before we even get to the real outrage, which is that donations will go to the Satanic Temple of all things, and the Satanic Temple is a bunch of pathetic sellouts! They’ve gone commercial!
This is like accusing someone of liking Norwegian death metal only for it to turn out that they like Nickelback. I cannot even begin to explain to you how embarrassing this should be for Beck, for Bolling, and for everyone else.
Look, Beth Ailes owes Fox News and Newsmax viewers an apology. You can’t claim that all of Christianity is under attack, then cite a Fox News charity page referring people to the Satanic Temple, the freakin’ Teletubbies of devil worship, as your only evidence. I realize Newsmax is 90% hoaxes on any given day, but if you’re going to claim something is industrialized devil worship, then it needs to at a bare minimum involve factories, vats of chemicals, and Henry Ford’s stuffed corpse twirling from a ceiling fan.
There is nothing, and I mean nothing, that will make actual devil worshipers laugh at you more than a phrase like “online charity donation page with matching corporate funds.” It is the mark of an utter poseur, and they’ll laugh you and your Starbucks latte and your V-neck sweater and your stupid custom-hacked Furby right out of the ominous meadow and back to Des Moines if you pipe up with that shit.
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