You can’t make this stuff up! So, apparently far-right media outlets, Fox News’s Hannity and the Drudge Report, believe that a leaked email from Wikileaks proves that occultist Marina Abramović was invited to a dinner by Tony Podesta, a lobbyist who is also Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Chairman John Podesta’s brother, for some “spirit cooking,” which has since become a trending Twitter hashtag. Given that Abramović has recently headlined some unfortunate art world news, and the hilarious New York Times takedown of her racist memoir has made the rounds, the #spiritcooking revelations come as an uncanny mashup of all the weird late-stage US presidential election news and Abramović witchery rolled into one big surreal post-Halloween joke. (Is this really happening?) Read the Daily Beast report by Tim Mak and Ben Collins in partial below, in full here.
The Drudge Report, the right’s internet firehose, featured as its lead story a headline suggesting that Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta had been involved with occult activities linked to Satanism, complete with a photo of Hillary Clinton raging, arms outstretched, to the skies. Fox News’s Sean Hannity tweeted a story from his own website, along with its headline: “LEAKED EMAIL appears to link Clinton Campaign Chairman to bizarre occult ritual”
The hashtag #SpiritCooking was the No. 2 trend in the United States on Twitter at press time.
It’s a dizzying signal of just how distorted the alt-right’s echo chamber has become: suggesting that their opponent is Satan—or at least a deeply pious Satanist adherent.
Actual Satanists, however, aren’t buying it.
“Obviously, what’s really going on here is that the real would-be magicians are attempting desperately to conjure scandal from lackluster and mundane emails which were previously hoped to contain some political career-ruining revelations,” said Lucien Greaves, a spokesperson for The Satanic Temple.
“The absurdity of the accusations regarding the disgust-inducing ingredients harken back to witch-hunter inquisitorial panic fantasies that one would hope we’d have grown beyond today.”
The conspiracy theory hinges on a WikiLeaks email hacked and stolen from Podesta’s account, in which his brother, high-powered lobbyist Tony Podesta, asks if he was free to attend a “spirit cooking dinner” hosted by performance artist Marina Abramović.
“I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place. Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother is joining? All my love, Marina,” writes the artist, in June 2015. Tony forwards the email to his brother to ask—the entirety of the evidence to suggest that the Clinton campaign’s senior operative is involved with the occult.
Podesta’s ties to Satanism might make sense if you already believed that Hillary Clinton was a committed member of a coven. A story citing a “Clinton insider” published at InfoWars on Friday stated that “Hillary ‘regularly’ attended witch’s church.”
*Image of Marina Abramović via vigilantcitizen.com