Newmsax’s Hirsen Falls For The Satanic-Panic Trigger

The folks at the Satanic Temple love trolling right-wingers into a satanic panic, and James Hirsen proved to be its latest victim in his May 3 Newsmax column:

SatanCon, an event billed as “the largest satanic gathering in history,” recently took place in Boston, Massachusetts, courtesy of a Salem-based group called The Satanic Temple.

The mainstream media largely labeled it as satirical and harmless. NBC News even seemed to give it a sort of veiled plug with the headline: “SatanCon, poking at religion and government, opens this weekend in Boston.”

The news outlet described the convention as “mostly lighthearted” and characterized The Satanic Temple as “a progressive church that doesn’t worship the devil but instead uses the word to get attention.”

Other media outlets were similarly generous in their descriptions of the event as well as its organizers.

[…]

Notwithstanding mainstream media claims to the contrary, the SatanCon event was created as a promotion tool to disseminate information on one of the darkest of ideologies and to sing the praises of evil personified.

Hirsen went on to complain:

In his book “The Road Less Traveled,” psychiatrist M. Scott Peck wrote of values that lead people to live meaningful lives. Some of the virtues the author cited were truth, integrity, fair-mindedness, gratitude, kindness, and humility.

Dr. Peck discovered that in order to understand spiritual growth, one has to also understand its opposite. This notion inspired him to write another book, “People of the Lie,” in which he explored the concept of evil.

He found that evil people share some key behavioral traits.

— They lie.

— They are intellectually devious.

— They scapegoat.

— They turn their backs on facts.

—They self-deceive to escape their own consciences.

They are also narcissistic to an extent that enables them to “ignore the humanity of their victims” and incite hatred against their enemies.

Actually, that description most clearly applies to Donald Trump. It may also arguably apply to Hirsen himself — remember that he spread lies about election fraud after the 2020 election that he has yet to retract or take responsibility for, and he engages in scapegoating and self-deception by pretending to be holier than thou in attacking mainstream entertainment he doesn’t like and spreading bogus conspiracy theories.

Hirsen, along with Trump, has indisputably shown himself to be a person of the lie. If he wants to prove he’s not an evil person, he needs to fully and publicly apologize for the lies he spread — that would do much more good than the partisan pontificating he’s been doing lately.