Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 929: The Demon Next Door

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

The Demon Next Door - The Atlantic

This episode of Cognitive Dissinence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is Cognitive Dissence. Every episode to be blessed anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news,

makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at. Today is Thursday, July the, let's call it sixth or so. But you're listening to this. No. No. Can't even be close to that. It'll be the 17th. 17th. I was way off. Maybe 16th. Today's 10th? Friday 16th. All right. Hey, you know what day it is? Check your calendar. Check your phone. I don't know what day it is. This is long form day. Today we're going to be covering a story from the Atlantic. And Cecil, you picked out. It's called The Demon Next Door, and it is insane.

Yeah. It's what's interesting about this story, and let me just give you the broad strokes of this, of this narrative. There's a couple, and this couple are, one of them, I guess, is porn addicted and, I think, addicted to maybe substances. And they go to church, and they have a revival moment where, you know, they see God and God basically is like, you're going to be a middle manager for God. And they believe it. They believe their visions.

They believe their feelings. They think that a feeling that makes them feel like they're cleansed is a real thing that they were actually cleansed. And so they become essentially missionaries for Jesus. And really what I think is I would call a pretty dangerous form of Jesus which is this new apostolic ministry stuff. And we've been talking about this for decades, right? You and I.

This is Paula White stuff. This is, you know, there's tons of people. Yeah, tons of these people who are all in the same thing, which is dominionism, which is there is a spiritual battle happening in the world right now, and you are part of it, whether you know it or not. And you can join with the light side and, you know, go fight against demons and pray against demons. and these are the prayer walkers. These are the people who chase down

anything that they think is impure. So in this case, they're going after somebody in a small town that happens to have drag shows, right? But these are people who they dedicate their life to Jesus. They go on a couple of these ministry trips, which I think we'll talk about

as we work our way through because some of them are pretty amazing. And then they come back to this small town in Tennessee and they get into a fight with essentially an LGBTQ bookstore. Right? And they're fighting against this bookstore. They're down the street from this bookstore.

And then there's a back and forth and back and forth. But really what it shows is that there's not just this small group of people. And I think other people are starting to notice it. People who aren't in the atheist movement, right, who are on the periphery, maybe didn't understand it or didn't know about it. They're starting to realize this new apostolic ministry is a fucking problem. These are people who their whole plan is to dehumanize, the other side and call them demonic.

And if somebody's demonic and evil, you can do anything you want to them. And so that's the big takeaway from this story. And that's the narrative structure, that there's a back and forth fight between these pastors who are down the street from this LGBT bookstore that is like a coffee house and a bar in the basement.

And they're just fighting about because they think that this person who runs it and the things they do are demonic. And to be very clear, too, the fight is entirely like attack and defend, right? So like the LGBT bookstore owner, she's just some lesbian lady owns a bookstore. That's all it is.

Yeah. And she's not seeking out conflict of any kind, right? She's just a person owning a bookstore. And they literally say in this article that some of these people involved in this movement, they drive around looking for Masonic lodges and other things that make them feel uncomfortable. Sure.

And those things become their, targets. And they literally target these businesses, these organizations, the people that go and attend them. And they are convinced that there is like an actual battle and that there are real actual demons, like actual demons in the world with names and they're having fights. And there's this big like supernatural set of forces that you have to like choose how you align yourself with. And the world is full of these secret undercurrents and shadow realms and all of this mysticism nonsense. And it would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerous. Because what they do is they create hullabaloo around some poor beleaguered bookstore owner.

And then their followers, their legions of idiots that believe that there's really something that is called the supernatural world. and that existentially they have to align themselves with the light in order to fight the darkness. And Odin is involved at some point. And like the fucking Darth Vader shows up and whatever all their bullshit they want to make up. Because they're just making it all up in their own heads, right? There's none of this as anything except for shit they invent themselves in their own heads to convince themselves of their greater sense of moral and other superiority to the people around them. They invent all this.

And now the bookstore owner has got guns and she's trying to defend it. offend herself. She sleeps with like fucking bug spray and shit next to her, like guns and baths in her bookstore because she's afraid because people are showing up. And then they back off at the last minute and say, hey, we're just pointing things out. That's all we're doing. And if other people show up and pizza gate you, you know, and break in and have a gun, like, hey, I didn't do that part. We're advocating nonviolence. We are, however, calling attention to the fact that you're an actual demon and then we're absolving ourselves of any of the violence or harassment or potential violence that very naturally would follow from being like, hey, everybody, you believe in

demons? Why don't you pretend you're in the fucking bad TV show supernatural? Yeah. What the fuck? Like, this is like, these people believe Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a goddamn documentary. I think it's more insidious than that. I really do. I really do.

And here's why. all the things that they mention in here, they're all other cultures, right? So Odin and all that stuff, yeah, sure, whatever. Nobody worships that. But there's other, like, Hindu gods and goddesses and things like that that they're mentioning that they're saying are demonic.

They're traveling to different parts of the world to cast those things out because Christianity is being suppressed there. Right. So at one point, some of these people climbed Mount Everest. So they could pray on the side of Mount Everest to try to get Christianity to spread more thoroughly through that area. These are people who genuinely think other cultures are demonic. And they're also reinforced.

You said that there's just random people who show up. But then there's also genuinely a group of racist and white supremacists who find this stuff and latch onto it. because the connecting glue is the anti-multiculturalism stuff, right? So these people that are out there, these fucking, these crazy, you know, people who we're going to look at and say, gosh, you got to be insane if you think this is a real, like God called on you to be like, hey, just so you know everything else is that isn't you as a demon and you need to go out there and fight it against demons. But they are doing it in such a way that attracts the attention of other people who happen to be racist in those spaces. and those people then latch on to this and then go harass this. They literally march up in this part of this story.

A white supremacist group finds out that this church is prayer walking around there. They come over with signs and placards and stand in front of their bookshop and have to get pushed away by the police. The police have to show up and separate this group from the... They're being harassed by white,

supremacists because this stuff rhymes with white supremacy. Yeah. And I guess I want to point, I agree with that 100%. I want to add to it too that like they try to disavow responsibility. But and they expressly say, hey, we're not affiliated with any neo-Nazi shit or white supremacist shit. It's just that what we do is we say those people that we know you hate, we hate them to for different spiritual reasons. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll tell you who they are and we'll identify the targets. and we'll point them out, we'll put them on our website. But if anyone shows up about it, that's not on me. Yeah, I didn't do anything.

That's not on me. I just lit this views. Exactly. I can't be held responsible for the explosion that happens afterwards. That's perfect. And the other thing, too, is that when they talk, they also just happen to believe in other things which you're just like, wait a minute, why are you espousing free markets? Free markets have nothing to do.

First of all, most of this is not biblically literate, right? Like most of this is not theologically grounded. It's not biblically literate. I mean, the Bible's nonsense, but this doesn't even follow that. It doesn't even, yeah. It's not even following any of that, like, tradition

in any real sense. So they're just reading into it what they want to read into it in order to enact their grandiose vision of a supernatural world in part. But I also think that all of this is built in such a way that it just coincidentally

happens to reframe America in a way that the right needs. to frame America economically and otherwise in order to push their agenda. Otherwise, why are they talking about free markets? Yeah. Free markets have not. I mean, that's not, what are you talking about? Free markets.

That's built in. There's also that really strong sense of this sort of new religion of American Christo-fascism that is built into this. So what they've done is they've created a supernatural underpinning that allows them to then build this kind of like new colloquial. colonial revolution that they bill as a spiritual revolution, but in point of fact, has always had economic underpinnings and has always been about making sure that the wrong people don't make any money, that their classes continue to be separate, that whites continue to have access,

and people of color continue to have less access. This is all, like, there's so much economic warfare that just, oh, just so happens, oopsie daisy to jive with the shit they're literally making up and that like one of them even calls themselves in this article something like a narrative warrior or they're doing like the narrative work of this and I'm like you're saying you're making up stories man making it up as you go along yeah yeah the uh the the the racist thing really does play itself out in here and in a couple of places not only do racist show up but there's a part later on when they're talking to this like uber driver who got saved and that person's telling them all the different things that they did in their life before.

They were like porn addicted. This is a woman who's like porn addicted, a gambler or something at a certain point, maybe substance abuse, et cetera, et cetera, but then got saved. And the things that they believe are literally just the right wing talking points. Yes. Right? All the right wing talking points they all believe. And very specifically, they say, she says out loud, I believe immigrants are coming to replace us.

She says that, I mean, I'm not quoting, I'm quoting, but very loosely, but that is exactly what she says is that immigrants are coming to replace this. This is the great replacement theory. And it's woven in throughout this story multiple times. And it's funny because if you don't really pay a lot of attention to it, sometimes you miss it. And I think I've been missing it for a long time, but I really have started to notice it pop up more and more and more and more in a lot of different right-wing places. And it's, it's, such a, it's such an interesting, I don't want to say a good way to control people, because I think it's a terrible way to control people, but I think it's a, it's a masterful way to control people because it, it works on your selfishness. And it controls your selfishness and makes you feel selfish. And it, it, it sort of turbocharges it in a way that makes it so that when you're confronted with, with, and it's, and it really does focus on race, they, try to say it's culture, but it's about race. I mean, look at who they're making fun of. They're all brown people, right? Look at who they're talking about in this, that they're saying they're,

those are the demons, right? They're saying those people worship things that are not what we worship, and so therefore, they're demons. So look at how they're demonizing other cultures in this. I mean, that's literally the story of this. So you see how insidious this great replacement theory can be. And what it does is it focuses on that selfishness quite a bit. So it makes them think that somehow something is being taken away from me. And in this case, this lady's talking about birth rates and how other people are coming in to take the country away from them. And what it does is it basically makes it so we don't recognize that there is real economic issues in our country. It makes it so that stuff gets pushed under the rug.

Because if they blame the problems of immigrants taking a job, which isn't true, and they actually contribute to our economy in a good way, and multiple think tanks have gone through this multiple times to talk about how much they contribute and why it's necessary for us to have immigration and why immigrants don't take jobs from people who were born here. but even still, it makes us not focus on, hey, they're moving all those jobs in a different place. Hey, they're closing these things down. Hey, these CEOs keep getting richer and richer and richer and nobody's gaining anything. And wages stay stagnant, but prices go up. And they make you think about something other than that.

And then they can just keep taking and taking and taking. And they make you forget that there's economic war going on the entire time. And they make you blame the wrong person. And it's perfect for them because they can keep. keep reaping it, and all they have to do is keep saying, look at how bad it is. Right. And they point to the wrong thing. And then you say, well, there is the reason.

It's because of an immigrant. And so these people are just as easily led. And they're not just as easily led. They're as easily convinced. And they will dedicate their whole life to it. They will call these people evil. They will inflict damage if they can. I think what is so important about this particular style

of sort of like intellectual colonialism, which is the only thing I can think of it is, is that the stories are infinitely flexible and incredibly urgent. So they, because they're making all of this up, right? None of this is theologically grounded. They're inventing all of this from whole cloth for the most part, which allows them the ability to change on a dime

and adjust on a dime and make sure that the story they're telling and the villains that they're casting, are flexible. They can change it. The story can change. This guy's a demon for this reason. These demons are more important. We've got to smite and smote and smot and smot and smot and all of these different groups. And these are the enemies of God. And these are the enemies of the light and all of this nonsense. The story doesn't have anything that underpins it fundamentally, which makes it infinitely flexible. So who do we need to, who do we need to attack? What's the problem du jour that gives us the most sort of like political bang or economic bang for our

our book. And then it's cast at the same time with this incredible narrative urgency, right? If you believe in demons, holy shit, you're living in a different world than I'm living in. I wake up. I never have to think about a demon. Yeah. I never have to think the demons could are real and influence the world and could hurt me or damage my family. I don't ever have to, you know what I don't have to do, Cecil. I don't have to think about how I have to manage my life and my afterlife. I never have to do that. I just manage my day. I just try to get through today because I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in supernatural shit.

I'm not worried about demons. And as a weird result, literally no demons ever show up and fuck with me, right? It's a very interesting coincidence, by the way, that as long as you don't, I don't know, ever think about demons at all, strangely no demon shit happens, right? But because their stories have infinite flexibility and incredible urgency, it gives them the ability to do with those stories whatever they need to do. And they can change on a dime, they can fit whatever slot needs to be fit in.

And so when the right wants to focus on immigration, which is what we're focusing on now, awesome. The story absolutely fits that mold. Oh, what's that? The story now needs to shift its focus and demonize the gay community. No problem.

All we have to do is write our story a little bit. Oh, there's the spirit of Jehovah Baba is definitely on the rise now because some bullshit. And then we can focus all of our attention on smiting, smiting, and smittening that. It is so clever because it's so flexible. It's this plastic knife that they're constantly playing with

that is always sharp and never stays in the same shape at any one time. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's crazy. And what I think is also insidious about it is that they can make up whatever they want, whenever they want, right? And that allows them to, like you say, be so flexible to attack anything that they dislike at the moment.

at a moment's notice, whatever their whim is, they can change. One of the things that they mention in this is that they talk about the sort of how they use

this idea of demonic presence to go after and attack things and people. And we recently covered on the other show I do The No Rogan Experience. It was a patron show

that we did where we covered Tucker Carlson, or it wasn't patron show. It was a show we did where we covered Tucker Carlson talking to Nick Fuentes. So Nick, he interviewed Nick Fuentes. We covered

them both on the show. We specifically wanted to cover Nick Fuentes before he possibly gets invited to by Joe. There's a suspicion that both Marsh and I have that he's going to get invited on the Joe Rogan show. We think so. Joe has talked him up enough in the past to make us think

it's possible that he could invite him on the show. Well, one of the things that happens in this Nick Fuentes as interview as Tucker says something to Nick like, well, you have to love everybody. You have to love everybody. Even if you, you know, you totally disagree with them. You have to love them.

And Nick says the same thing. Like, yeah, it's part of my religion. I have to love everybody. And what they're not letting out of the bag is, is that they both also probably believe in demons. Well, certainly we'll use demons as a way to go after people and still remain consistent religiously. Smart.

That's the key, right? Tucker Carlson's mentioned in this particular article multiple times as a guy who says he was attacked by demons. Physically. Physically attacked. Yeah, physically attacked. God, I wish they'd have roughed him up a little more. Jesus Christ.

I mean, it seems to be got off so easy. Just grab him by his lapels and shake the shit. Grab him by his little bow tie. Just snap it. Like pull it back and just snap it, spin it like a movie. But no, like Tucker Carlson is saying, I got attacked by demons and like they came into my wood,

or whatever. I don't know. It's like the evil dead where he lives. But he got a beat up and attacked by him. That's what he said. But I think Tucker

would easily call somebody demonic. I don't know if you knew, but you, and you listen to the same thing I did. So you know what he said he called Trump the Antichrist. Yeah. You know he called Trump.

I mean, he did. Absolutely. They played it in this New York Times interview they did with him. I wasn't going to listen to that interview. And then I did. And it's an absolute mic drop moment

when they say, well, you called Trump the Antichrist. He's like, absolutely. I never did. No, I would never call them. I know. I didn't call it.

I never said it. No, I never said that. No, I would never say that. And then they play the tape of him being like, well, he's absolutely the Antichrist. What's the deal with the Antichrist? His schick is so his, I would just as a brief aside, Tucker Carlson's like,

schick when he had his show, his show on Fox or whatever it was, very much played like a, what's the deal with airline food, but with immigrants. Yeah, exactly. You know, yeah, it was the same thing.

What the fuck. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But he's got, he, he, he, he, is somebody who I think will use this to his best advantage and use it when he needs it. So are you saying, because I think I hear what you're saying, and let me phrase it back to you, make sure I understand it, because if it's true, God damn, that if you're Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson or any of these guys, you believe that it is your moral responsibility and your

religious duty to love all people. However, those are not people. Those are demon-infested whatever's. So I don't have to love them. because they're actually not truly people. They're either possessed, influenced, or actual demons. Yes, I think so. And I think, and I think, and I think, I think it, it definitely spreads itself to large swaths of the population. Yeah.

I don't think it's just like, I can individually dislike that person because they're infected with a demon. I think all those people are affected by demons. And so there's a, there's definitely something there. I think you have to be right. It's a super, it's a super racist area once you start to notice, once you start to really pay attention to the racism that's so deeply embedded in the far right wing.

It's really unbelievably racist. Like that show that we covered with Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes was unbelievably racist. But Joe has also been unbelievably racist too as well. Listen, I've been shocked by how, insanely racist he sounds. At one point, Elon Musk is talking specifically about a thing that happened in Germany. It didn't actually happen. He's lying about it. He's really distorting what happened in Germany. But he makes this statement about someone who raped somebody and he says he's an immigrant. And then Joe

says, well, he's an immigrant. And then Musk says yes. And he goes back. He's like, well, it was his culture. I mean, like, genuinely, that's what, that's how Joe responds, is that that is the culture of other people and other places that they, and he, he thought it was funny. He kind of laughed. He had a moment where he was like, but it's their culture. It's their culture. It's a RELIN. It's their culture. And so very specifically, these people are, it's, it's gritting. It's, it's more and more open. I think there's probably always been a lot of racism there. But I think like it's been a lot of racism there. But I think like it's been a lot. lot less, at least to me, I think it feels like it's been a lot less out in the open as it is now. And these people genuinely have very negative feelings when it comes to all of this stuff. And it spreads. The thing is that since it rhymes, these people spread these ideas. So what will happen is, is if you happen to believe the thing I believe with demons, then I'm susceptible to other things that you have to suggest to me. This happens with Joe Rogan. So one of the things that I

think happens with Joe Rogan is Joe Rogan will hear someone say something that matches his ideas of how the world works. And specifically when it comes to like COVID or Ivermectin or the media, how they distort things, or if they say something about how they're trying to take away our free speech, if people mention those things on Joe's show, Joe will immediately, give them the benefit of the doubt on anything else that they have, any other claims that they have. So this is great for these people because the right wing can come in. And as you, they talk about multiple pundits in this, the right wing can come in and they can believe the same one thing. I believe in demons too. I think these things are demonic. I actually know where the demons are.

Think of how insidious that is. Right. And then I can also bring you over to all the other things I want you to believe. I can make you believe in free markets or whatever it is. Right. Yeah. Right. Because I believe in one thing, we share a commonality. A couple of things that occur to me too. I guess the first is that, and we've said this before, but I think it's interesting to note again, how important the idea of faith as a value is and how dangerous that value is to truth. because if you are getting to, if you begin, if you begin the most important part of your moral and values driven life on a bedrock that faith,

that understanding is more important than where the understanding comes from, that belief is more important than the factual basis that underlies that belief. If the factual basis for something is less important than the authority of the person who said it, all of those things, the faith relies on, if faith is that important, then there's really nothing that also cannot be undermined, right? Like you're not living in a fact-driven world anymore. Because facts are in the passenger seat at best. Facts are the things you use to prove what you already think is true.

Because the most important question of your life has already been decided using a different toolbox. So they've already got that going for them. If they're trying to manipulate people, and I think that there are forces here, like institutional, political and economic forces, that look at this and see the utility and help to drive this. And they're saying, great, what's the best wedge we can have? Well, the best wedge is not a series of really good arguments. That's a stupid wedge. The best wedge is faith. If I start and I try to get everybody on board with faith and we get everybody on that, then I have this infinitely flexible, highly urgent narrative. And I can adjust that to whatever I need.

And it doesn't matter now what the fact pattern allows for or requires. So all of that is now kind of out the door because I've already said, that's not how we start. That's not actually terribly important. We don't need to do any of that work. That's the fucking crazy thing to think about. I also think that what this also does is it positions believers in a really grandiose and powerful and I think in a lot of ways satisfying role as a main character. Yeah, for sure. So if I think that, that there's a world of light and dark and good versus evil in these like big battles of the spiritual world and there's the you know the spirits of heaven and the spirits of hell in the terrestrial sphere where we all battle it out and I'm a warrior in that space man how fulfilling how much

does that sound like so many adventure novels adventure books romance stories everything else we want to believe that about ourselves we want to think that we're doing something that really has meaning. I think part of the problem that all of us have, I think of a need that humans often feel is we want to feel like the things that we do have meaning, have value, have importance, are deeper and more substantive than just, I woke up today and I went to work, and I earned a little bit of money, and I got tired, and I came home, and I ate dinner, and I fell asleep. And that's the drudgery of day-to-day life. And I also think that we are increasingly a less and less communal society. And I think those things kind of combine in such a way that these stories, man, wouldn't I rather be a spiritual warrior fighting demonic forces to preserve like my God and then righteousness and morality and right and wrong?

Boy, I'd rather be Harry Potter where somebody knocks on my door and says, you're special, kid, than be anybody else. Because like part of what's satisfying about those stories is that nobody ever knocks on your door and says, hey, man, you're right. You are special. Instead, we wake up, we go to work, we feed our families, we take care of the people that we love, and a lot of times it looks like banality. And this doesn't look like that. This looks like, wow, main character energy. I'm a big, important force.

I'm not a cog in some great economic machine that's going to chew me up and spit my guts out the other side, unloved and unwanted. I think as we become less communal, we start to tell ourselves or we want to tell ourselves different stories that say, you're important because we don't have a community of people saying, hey, man, you're important. We're glad you're here. Instead, a lot of us live much more solitary lives. And I think it makes us really vulnerable to the appeal of these stories. I totally agree with the, when it comes to the way in which this would be exciting to look at the world, right? I'll think about, you mentioned all the books, but geez, a lot of our films, video games,

they're all based on this idea of the hero and you're playing the hero and you get to do these heroic things and you get to watch the hero do the hero stuff. This is just saying to everybody, you have the power to be a hero. And every week, you can show up. This is like their Dungeons and Dragons group.

Yes. You know? And some people go out and they play, you know, dungeon dragons with their friends on, you know, a night of the week or a day during the week. Other people go to church and they do the same thing.

They do exactly. They're making up. a demon and they're fighting a demon in their brain and they're going limp and wiggling on the ground and all that stuff because to them that's them fighting this supernatural force. The thing that it does too is it gets them allies, right? Because like we talked about earlier, some people believe the same stuff that you believe. And now you guys are allies together. I want to read a part of this because this is the part when the people, this white supremacist, show up. I want to read it. It says the white, so the support.

go to the bookstore, dozens of supporters stood in front of the bookstore, watching as a group of nine men, some with faces covered in bandanas, marched down the side street, and up the sidewalk in front of the front entrance, where the police stopped them from going any further. According to local press reports, men held signs that read, groomers are pedophiles, and it's okay to be white. So what do either of those things have to do with a bookstore? Nothing. Nothing, nothing whatsoever. They're saying groomers are paddifiles. Well, what are you saying?

Who's the groomer? Of course, they're going after an LGBT establishment, because that's who they want to go after. Same thing when it comes to, it's okay to be white. Those are your bedfellows now. These are the people who are part of your group now. And that's, I think, the most alarming thing is that this is a collection of people

where they don't care who's, standing next to them. That's the scary thing, right? That's the thing that's the worst. We talked about on our main show this last week about that group of people who marched in downtown Washington, D.C. They had masks on their faces and they marched up and down the street with their Confederate flags, right? And you and I both agreed that what should happen is there should be a denunciation by both parties to say this is disgusting, right? And I'm sure you get one on the left. I'm sure the Democrats denounced it, but who cares, right? But look at the other people who are silent and willing to stand next to that person.

If you're willing to stand next to them, you share the same values. Yeah. Right? Share the same values. These people who are orchestrating this attack on this LGBT institution, they share the same values as these people. They're just not as courageous enough to walk down the street with a sign. Right. Yeah.

That's the only difference, right? They're happy those people are next to them. Right. Because they share the same values. And that's what should scare you about this group of people that's a fast-growing apostolic ministry. That's what should scare you is that these people, to them,

it's the end justifies the means. So I don't care who stands next to me. As long as, because the most important thing in the universe is stopping demons. So I don't care how or who stands next to me. Because open the prisons and they could stand next to them. Right. Yeah, I, I'm, it's 2026.

Cecil. I know I read this story and I feel and I'm not exactly, I feel crazy. I feel like like a couple of years ago we shot a rocket to Mars and then we used a

fucking parachute to put a rover on Mars and it drove around and sent fucking HD pictures of Mars back to Earth. And then you've got people in charge of of the world. These are not uninfluential people. These aren't like just some rando dipshits. A lot of

these people are really influential who believe in fucking demons, man. And your point is like exactly taken. I think there are no disqualifying features for your bedfellows or for your fellow soldiers if you think that the fight is against supernatural forces that are trying to destroy and rip asunder the fabric of the earth and the spiritual blah, blah, blah. And you're You're just like, yeah, all right. I mean, your shit rhymes with my shit. Great. Like, maybe I'm not, I'm not as racist against Mexicans, but I don't like the blacks and

you don't like the blacks. And I, you know, but it's all the same shit. They don't, like, none of them really care because at, like, at the heart of it all is this insanity. Yeah. And, like, we shouldn't think of it as anything other than just pure insanity. Demons? Yeah.

I'm sorry. Demons. Again, we're shooting rockets to Mars. And we've got people in charge of shit. Like in this article, they're talking about the guy who was like in charge of FEMA who's like,

yeah, I got fucking beamed up to a waffle house. And I don't know if they were good guys or bad guys that beamed me to the waffle house. Is the waffle house purgatory? Do you think? Do you think Waffle House is?

Because I was like, is it heaven hell? No, it's definitely purgatory. I went to one Waffle house and I was certain I was in the bad place. I know that. I want to read, you know, echoing what you said.

this is a piece from that article. By 2014, roughly 61% of American Christians agreed with this statement, there are modern day apostles and prophets. And roughly half agreed there are demonic principalities, powers, who control physical territory. By December 2025, roughly 59% of evangelical Christians and 22% of non-evangelicals agreed that the church should organize campaigns of spiritual warfare and prayer

to displace high-level demons. The same survey indicated that more people are encountering these concepts on social media than in church, which speaks to how people are following these apostles and prophets through online ministries and prayer networks and how influencers across broader Christian right are leveraging these ideas to gain and possibly radicalize their followers. So, I mean, those numbers are insane. Now, I know that those numbers are large. they're saying the number of evangelical Christians, but I mean, the number of evangelical Christians

dwarfs the number of atheists by an intense amount. And it could be one of the largest, if not the largest group of religious people in the United States. And I think if I heard you right, I think one of the numbers you gave me was something like half of Christians, not even just evangelical Christians. Yeah, America, 61% of American Christians. That's not evangelicals. The evangelicals believe that about spiritual warfare and displace high-level demons. But it also said 22% of non-evangelicals

agreed with that. And the 61% is like, yeah, there's demon principalities. Yeah, they're saying physical space. Yeah, exactly. That's like, that's walk around the street

and that's, there are people at every, at every restaurant you're in, somebody believes that a demon is in charge of some room in the world. Yeah. Not like a nebulous spiritual space. But like, yeah,

there's someplace in Ohio where there's like an actual demon. I believe that, though. I just, I just, I know, I should have picked up to any different state. I just, I just,

I hear that and I'm, like I'm flabbergasted and I'm not. And I think, you know, in the 90s, there was a lot of 90s and early 2000s. There was a lot of worry on the Christian right side about the fundamentalist Islam.

and this was an ideology that was dangerous. We were told all of this, right? So I'm not saying this is what I believe. I'm saying this is what we're told. Oh, it's a very dangerous ideology. It's a dangerous belief system. It's a violent, problematic belief system. And look, all of those things have some truth to them, right?

Like, because belief systems always are a problem. Belief systems that rely on faith are necessarily a problem. And the more adherent you are, the worse off often they are. So I'm not discounted that. but now we're building a world we're coming back to, I guess I should say. I thought for a while we were secularizing. And what it feels like instead we're doing

is we're super naturalizing. Huh, interesting. And I am afraid of growing up or continuing to live or having my kids grow up in a world that continues to supernaturalize itself. Because, and I hate to say this, but like, we are the most powerful economic,

military and otherwise force in the world. And to be led by supernaturalized people is to be led by assholes and dipshits. Yeah. It's not possible to have another thing, right? You cannot be a serious, honest interrogator of the real world around you if you are a supernaturalist. And to echo that this is another piece from the article that talks specifically about the Charlie Kirk Memorial.

It says, this was obvious at the memorial for Charlie Kirk, following his assassination last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hedgeset described the moment at hand as a spiritual war. The right-wing influencer Benny Johnson urged members of the Trump cabinet to wield the sword for the, wield the sword for the terror of evil men in our nation. And the far-right activist Jack Posobic told people to put on the full armor of God and face the evil in high places. and the spiritual warfare before us, rhetoric that has only continued to escalate as the midterm elections approach. And there's another part of this that I don't have highlighted that, where they specifically talk about the Trump administration is attacking Iran and some religious

people think this is righteous because there's like a prince of Persia thing that's a demon and they're going after the Prince of Persia, and that's a demonic callback from one of their books or prophets. So it's a very difficult video game. It is. It's so hard because that fucking wind is just so stupid. And then you've got to go back in time, and then he stopped time.

It's a whole thing. But no, genuinely, these people think this is a real thing, right? So they're like, oh, this is his foreign policy, which is destabilizing markets and changing so much of how the everyday American has to pay for things. that is perfectly fine as long as he's doing the things that are biblically okay.

And so Trump can continue to enrich himself or in some ways aggrandize himself, right? Because that's one of the things he's been trying to do for a long time. He can do those things without any fear from the side that is promoting him because they can say, well, he's doing it righteously.

Yeah. This is a thing he's doing. So he gets a get out of jail free card. He could start a nuclear war and it wouldn't matter to them. You'd be like, no, that's, that's exactly what was supposed to happen. If you can, if you can justify the reality, if you believe in the reality of a spiritual war, you can justify a physical war. Yeah, for sure.

Or an economic war or any other kind of war. And you can make people who have no, nothing to do with that, go out and die and fight and suffer in order to achieve what? To achieve, we can't even, we can't even get into a war to achieve military aims at this point. We're going to get into a war to achieve what, like the aims of somebody, like some shit that exists only in someone's mind? A spiritual war? It's not real. How do you declare victory? Mission accomplished.

I'm on a spiritual aircraft carrier. What is that? What is that? It's a way for them to accomplish the real political and economic and social agenda that they've always had. This is a way for them to manipulate you and everybody else into supporting that because you believe that there's, is a supernatural element to the world that the stakes are really this high, and you're willing to eat a little economic ship because you'll get yours in the aftermath. Yeah, yeah.

Right? There's so many people throughout history, and I thought we were done with this. I thought like the Western world was done with this. So many people have fought and died, and the rationale was you'll get your reward in the afterlife. It's okay if you suffer and die, and you're economically underprivileged, and you're hacked apart by swords or shot up with bullets or whatever it is in this world because this is a temporary world that doesn't count. You'll get your reward in the afterlife. And we are just moving back to it. That's all we're doing. We're just rebuilding that in order to build different shit-eating

soldiers of whatever type, economic or other buys. For, you know, when we first started this show, we've talked about this multiple times that you and I both had the idea that this show wouldn't to exist because the world is becoming more rational. When we started it, there was a trend. It felt like there was a trend that the world was coming more rational. We get to now, and you're looking at numbers of people that are, believe demons exist, that think demons control areas of our government or areas of physical control. I don't, when I think about this, it feels intractable to me.

It feels like there's, I don't know that there's anything we can do. Because we've tried rationality, right? There's plenty of people out in the world that have been trying to fight this rationally for a long time. I don't understand how we can move forward because I think that what's happening is there's a feedback loop.

And the feedback loop is there's a bunch of people who believe this and want to believe this and are motivated to believe this. And then there's a group of people who keep feeding those people the same thing over and over and over again so that and then getting their way out of it. it. So this feedback loop keeps on reinforcing itself because the people at the top are getting what they want,

but also the people at the bottom are getting what they want, right? So if I'm one of these people who's never gaining physically in this world, just like you just mentioned, well, I'll get it in the next one. Right. So for me, it's perfect. And on the top part, it's a group of people who are constantly gaining, who can't stop gaining, right? They're manipulating all these people to believe this stuff so that they can they can meet the ends they want to meet. Whatever those ends are, they can meet those ends. So now we just have this feedback loop of people who constantly empower that group because they think that it's great for them and it is great for the people on the top. So we're stuck in this massive feedback loop. And the only thing I think that gets you out of it is massive destabilization.

I think that's the only way that gets you out of it is something massive. And I think history has shown that these things, and here's what I, here's what I, here's, is an argument I don't like. I don't like the argument that, well, you know, history moves in cycles and we're just in this part of the cycle. And over time, you know, there will be a destabilization and a writing of the ship and a reaction against supernaturalism and more toward, you know, realism and reality. Maybe. Maybe. But I don't think it's reasonable to say that everything that happens comes back around, right? I don't believe that that's true. I think that it's reasonable to also say that sometimes things slip and stay slipped for a really, really long time.

When you look at history, some things took hundreds of years. So that's small comfort to me, right? And we are also living in a time where we affect the world more than we ever were able to affect the world. So if we slipped into chaos and darkness or whatever during the Middle Ages for a while, I mean, really, we couldn't do all that much harm, right? People thought they died, but like the harm people caused was literally hand to hand, right? Now we have nuclear weapons. We can annihilate every single living thing on the world.

The stakes are higher because our ability to impact the world is higher. So if we fuck it up before, it's like, well, you fuck it up. Basically, progress grinds to a halt for 400 years and then it picks back up again. And that sucks for every person that lived during those, you know, 16 generations of suffering and dying of that time period. But over the long course of history, things turn out and there's progress, right? I think

things could slip in a way that it's like, oh, now there's no people. That was never possible before. Yeah, man. So saying it's like historical stuff is sort of like it negates the stakes. And like, and just look at the environmental stakes. Right? If we slip away from

a world that roots itself in reality, pragmatism, science, the greater good of all people, the recognition that there is no such thing as demons. All people are deserving of the same rights and dignity as everybody else. And there's no brown people got the demons in them. If we move away from that, we will continue to do environmental damage that can literally never be undone. It just will never be able to be undone or slowed or stopped. and we'll eat shit that never gets uneaten at that point.

So there's like, we have an ability to impact the world that is so much bigger than it ever used to be. It makes the stakes higher. We can't afford this sort of like cyclical history sort of narrative. Yeah. It's too dangerous. It's not catapults and longsords anymore. Yeah.

That's really interesting because I think there's always potential at any moment for humanity to disappear naturally, right? in a natural way, some big crazy disease, some big asteroid, you know, some crazy geological event or weather event or something, maybe some solar type activity that could wipe everybody out, right? That's a possibility. Sure. But now we've got that ability.

And that's what makes it scary because during irrational times, you don't want someone who happens to be a human to have that kind of power. That's a real scary thing. Yeah. And if you have supernaturalists, in charge of these weapons of existential destruction. And they believe that is their responsibility to wage a spiritual war and they're going to be fine because there's an afterlife and so it doesn't really matter if we all die.

Holy shit, man. Yeah. There's an amount of slipping down that rabbit hole that if we go down too far into, what is the discouragement? And I don't know that there's an answer for if you really believe in your fucking heart of hearts, if you really believe that you are engaged in a spiritual war against demons and nothing that matters on the terrestrial plane is anything, as long as you've done the right thing by your God and your reward is in heaven, then why not start a nuclear war if the other

side is demons and not people? Don't you even have a responsibility to do it? I mean, it's frightening to let the supernaturalists have the keys to the kingdom. Sure is. Unlike. it. Bad article. Zero out of time. Yeah, man, this one's rough. All right, that's going to wrap it up for our long form this week. We'll be back on Monday with the full show. We're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-babelon bullshit. Couched in Scientician double bubble toil and trouble, pseudo-quazi alternative acupunctuating pressurized stereogram pyramidal free energy healing

water downward spiral brain dead pan sales pitch late night infotucatinement Leo Pisces cancer cures detox reflex reflex foot massage death and towers Psychic healing crystal balls Bigfoot Yeti aliens churches mosques and synagogues temples dragons giant worms Atlantis dolphins truthers birthers

witches, wizards, vaccine nuts. Shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your signs. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonance pod.

help us spread the word by sharing our content. Find us on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Preds, all under the handle at DissinancePod. This show is Can Credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm on their hotline at 617-249-4255, or on their website at creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org.