https://nitter.net/smashbaals/status/1666562294719950849#m
Damn near every tweet this bozo makes could be a dunk tank post, but what I like about this is that it’s a reminder that tens of millions of Americans believe there are actually these little demons who go around doing everything from flying spaceships to tempting Rachel in Jacksonville to go ahead and eat another Oreo.
As someone who grew up in the evangelical community in the US, the belief that “aliens are demons actually” was shockingly common.
When I was much, much younger, I went through a bit of a woo shit phase. This woo shit phase included picking up a book on reiki healing, in which the author asserts that the Hindu gods were in fact aliens and made contact with early humans, in addition to imparting their innate psychic abilities to said hominids. Shortly after thumbing through this book, I discussed it with someone in a Wicca/Neopaganism chat room (on Yahoo Chat, no less) who was extremely offended that I used the word "aliens."
Edit: The same person tried to perform a long-distance reiki healing on me via the internet (literally by holding our hands up against our monitors to establish a "connection"). To be fair, I had strep, was a broke college student, and I live in Burgerland, so it was worth a shot.
i grew up in a high populated part of the country with abysmal mental health services and no social safety net. i also had a woo phase for a while in early adulthood... there's something alluring and almost prestigious about so-called traditional knowledge when the institutions of modernity are wretchedly failing. at my most disbelief-suspending times, it felt like i couldn't go a week without running into someone who was peddling some wildly off the rails conspiratorial cosmology. i had long hair and was polite/chill. I liked hanging out in low traffic bookstores and reading weird shit for free, which I guess is something I have in common with people on the fringe. so i guess i seemed approachable to someone with orders from the mothership. better me than someone who is going to prey on them, i guess?
i've been around woo and tolerant towards it for so long, but in the last decade or so as i settled into leftism, it's started to bother me. the grifting of desperate people generally, but also way focusing on individualized treatment serves to distract people from collective action to restore, improve, reform institutions to serve us. not to mention, some of the woo people i knew 10-20 years ago turned into massive reactionaries and anti-vax Q brains. it's upsetting if i think about it too much, so i tend to just make jokes about the brain worms.