Part of the problem with Republicanism’s new insistence on elevating far-right cranks with their own far-right radio shows or podcasts is that there are tapes. These things are recorded. God help us, there are tapes, and every damn time the Republican base props up one of these crackpots journalists go back, review those tapes, and find out that wowza the person who now wants to be in charge of some critical infrastructure thing sure spent a lot of time, say, ranting about frog sexuality or the like. There are always tapes.
Republican Kristina Karamo is her party’s nominee for Michigan secretary of state. She’s backed by Donald Trump because of course she is. She wants to run the state’s elections. She has her own podcast. She thinks demon possession is a sexually transmitted disease. I’m not kidding.
The CNN investigation of her podcast history delivers that precious moment of history: “If a person has demonic possession—I know it’s gonna sound really crazy to me saying that for some people, thinking like what?! But having intimate relationships with people who are demonically possessed or oppressed—I strongly believe that a person opens themselves up to possession. Demonic possession is real,” Karamo said in 2020.
She also called abortion “child sacrifice,” a “very satanic practice,” and that’s of particular note because Karamo is an anti-abortion zealot who served on the board of a local crisis pregnancy center, one of the fake clinics that prey on Americans seeking an end to their pregnancy by instead feeding them disinformation and stuffing them into databases of pregnant Americans kept by anti-abortion groups for their own purposes.
Enough. I am so done. Why must we do this? Why must every recent election quickly decay into a list of ways the Republican candidate has proven themselves to be a conspiracy-addled crank?
You know what? If some American honestly believes that having sexytimes with someone who is demon-possessed may cause the demon to, uh, shoot into you instead, that’s fine! It’s a little confusing, to be sure: Does that mean the person you had sex with is now free of the demon? Does the demon split itself into two demons? Does the demon phone up another demon to possess you at the height of the intimate act? So if you have intercourse in some sort of holy Faraday cage, will that block the first demon’s call, thus sparing you? What are the parameters here?
The theological implications of possible demon mitosis aside, however, it does us no particular harm if some American believes in supernatural possession so long as they are kept far away from levers of authority. Very far. As far as possible. Believing that intimacy spreads demons is one thing, but at this point in America we are coming precariously close to having a Supreme Court cite dead Englishmen who believed in demon sex as reason why marriage laws must be rewritten to disallow sex between any two Americans not personally cleansed by an exorcist in advance.
Americans on the demon sex beat should stay in their lane: warning about demon sex. The last thing we need right now, however, is a Trump-promoting Trump-endorsed election conspiracy theorist as a Michigan secretary of state, and it is doubly bad to have to worry that a new pro-Trump state official might seriously be entertaining the idea that elections could have been stolen in part by new invisible swarms of sexually transmitted demons.
We are all very tired right now, and this is usually around the point where people start complaining that my commentary about the weird lady and her STDs is not being inclusive enough of people who Believe things, and that’s well and good but no. No, we do not have to respect people who believe their own little conspiracies and use them as reason to restrict the rights of others. You can believe that abortion is “satanic” if you want; until Justice Samuel Alito came along it was generally understood that you believing something was “satanic” was not sufficient grounds for demanding veto power over your neighbor’s medical decisions. I do not have to be nice to the Sexually Transmitted Demons lady; the First Amendment still says, for now, I am allowed to judge her based on the conspiracies she keeps.
Karamo has been an avid promoter of election conspiracy hoaxes, which is the sole reason Donald Trump gives a damn about her. This is disqualifying on its own, because it makes her a liar and a propagandist. That she believes she is allowed to lie and promote sedition-backing hoaxes because she believes Americans who do not agree with her specific religious zealotry are acting on behalf of demons does not make it better. It makes it much, much worse.
We don’t have to pretend that the Republican Party elevating conspiracy cranks is anything less than what it is. The party is lost. Whatever it once was, now it is just Republicanism, a conspiracy movement that elevates conspiracy over all else. The people who believe that unauthorized sex leads to demon possession are the same as the people looking to witch hunters to limit the rights of women, and both of them are the same as the people sneering with contempt at those horrified by gun violence, declaring that maybe the problem is that we don’t have good enough doors. Enough already. A single day of sanity would be a start; an entire week of it would feel like heaven.