Wednesday, February 09, 2022

Far-right conspiracy theorists are warning the Super Bowl halftime show is 'Satanic': report
Matthew Chapman
February 09, 2022

Wendy Rogers during a 2016 interview. (Screenshot/YouTube)

On Wednesday, in a Daily Beast podcast with Asawin Suebsaeng, reporter Kelly Weill explored how far-right conspiracy theorists are warning about the "Satanic" threat from the Super Bowl halftime show.

"With Stop-the-Steal fanatics like Arizona wingnut Wendy Rogers hyperventilating that the Super Bowl show exposes children to 'evil, wicked, Satanic' things (her words), there’s a very real 'performance-related Satanic Panic that’s been brewing for a little while now in the U.S.,' Weill says, adding that the same fears bubbled up after the deadly Travis Scott concert at Astroworld in December," said the report. "Of course it’s not hard to map the influence of QAnon onto the latest anti-Super Bowl crusade, nor the longstanding backlash from the right when Black artists perform at the halftime show (like when Beyonce’s backup dancers were criticized as supposed Trojan horses for Communism)."

"In fact, this backlash 'happens every time there’s a major Black artist performing at the Super Bowl,' Weill points out," said the report. "'They’re not explicitly linked but somehow whenever a Black artist takes the field… it’s evil, it’s Satanic, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that the people pushing the Travis Scott Satanic Panic conspiracy theories were also not reacting one of the most popular Black artists of the current moment.'"

Rogers, who has previously called for the arrest of Democrats for an imagined plot to rig the election, has also suggested that the Canadian truckers behind the anti-vaccine siege of Ottawa could storm the Super Bowl as a punishment for Colin Kaepernick kneeling to protest police brutality.

You can listen to the podcast here.





No comments: