They Have A Fetish

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I’m rather genteel here, but I don’t feel like being genteel about the issue of idiots banning abortion. Abortion is necessary to let people who get pregnant to control their bodies. As far as I’m concerned a lot of the people who want to ban it or limit it extremely are acting out a sexual fetish by creating and enforcing these laws.

Harsh? Cruel? Well if you read this we probably think alike, so you may agree, but look, I’m on a roll here.

So first of all, let’s note that most of the “for the children” claims come from people who don’t give a damn about actual kids. There’s no concern about immigrant children (quite the opposite). No one’s talking about expanding medical care or heavens forbid universal health care. Schooling is treated as just a chance for indoctrination by the forced-birth crowd. Also if kids are LGBTQIA+ then, well, this crew of womb-controllers seem to be happy to let them die.

Since all the reasons for banning abortion as “protecting kids” are obviously not what the control-freaks say, we can focus on the anti-choice crowd’s obsession with controlling people’s bodies. Yes, it’s an obsession, because it’s everywhere in the usual right-wing control-o-sphere. If you’re familiar at all with these right-wing mindspaces, the overwhelming, constant anti-choice repetition is unmistakable. It is embraced, it is, in short, a fetish.

Now the anti-choice swarm ignores people’s right to control their bodies, ignores their choice of medical treatment, and ignores abortion is a lifesaver in many ways. The need of the pregnant people is tuned out. Again, the utter obsession is beyond anything, into the realm of sexual obsession – of a fetish.

Sounds harsh? Not really. You’ll also notice as much as womb-controllers say they’re “for the kids” they are also obsessed with suffering. Most of the anti-choice people also seem to want to “save the children” from assorted imagined Satanists, evil cabals, etc. They’ll talk endlessly about human suffering, and it’s clear they take pleasure recounting how kids are tortured in their imagination. Again, these people have a weird sexual fetish about control and suffering.

And they go on, and on, and on . . .

But all of these people who want to tell people who can get pregnant what to do with their bodies want to do it with force. With the law, with the police, with threats, and in a few too many cases when you really listen with execution. There’s a sick, bloody, need for control and to punish.

So, yes, the anti-choice crowd as far as I’m concerned are sexual fetishists who want to nonconsensually draw others into their obsession. They’re ready to use the state to act out their twisted desires.

Sure, there’s also issues of control and politics, but this stuff goes all the way into weird, sexual fetishism. These people are obsessed, unhealthily so, and to the detriment of everyone.

And, yeah, this isn’t my usual deep discussion. Or maybe it is in a more angry way. But having a bunch of people who can’t confront their own fetishes and who want the police and government to rope us into them? We should be angry.

– Xenofact

Grifts, Spiritual Grifts, and Widespread BS

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Recently I discovered the delightful videocaster Tom Nicholas. A charming man who covers economics, politics, and culture, he has a witty but laid-back style that helps him cover some pretty serious subjects. My introduction to his work was a YouTube episode on why everything is so grifty these days, which I recommend seeing. Well, after you finish reading this.

It’s hard to sum up, but the short form is work and the economy aren’t so hot, business gurus sold advice on how to make money (while their business was guruhood), and eventually you end up with grifts everywhere. I’m not doing it justice, but, you get the idea – looking to have grifts is sort of normalized now.

While rewatching this episode because I’m some kind of masochist, I began wondering what this meant for the spiritual grifts that I often analyze. Which is where this column comes from, so here’s my thoughts.

Spiritual grifts have always been with humanity as long as there have been humans. It doesn’t take much historical reading to find such things, from failed cults to faked miracles. But there’s something about today’s spiritual grifts where they seem to be varied, ominpresent, and a lot of people are in on them.

Which seems sort of weird. Are there this many chosen ones, like can someone choose among the chosen ones to narrow it down? Why can’t all the messages from the Space Brothers, you know, line up? How come the Ascended Masters only now care about vaccination? I mean, how did we get here?

When I stepped back thanks to Mr. Nicholas, the answer seemed depressingly obvious.

First, grifts always take advantage of existing technology. The printing press changed every country that created it or adopted it – and also meant people could more easily print and spread bullshit. History is replete with opportunity pamphleteers and scam artists and people who lied fast and wrote just as fast on spiritual “issues.” The internet just makes it faster than we were used to a few decades ago – and easier to start a spiritual grift.

Secondly, many of us exist in a culture that contains what I might call “Capitalist Idolatry.” We are told to make money all the time, to turn everything to a profit, to look for the next thing. We’ve had years of business gurus pitching side hustles and passive income. We’ve internalized this, and for many people this seems to be instinctual.

Third, the economy hasn’t gone great for a lot of people. How many layoffs, restructurings, firings, our recessions have you been through? How many people lost their economic progress, or never even got a chance to start any progress? People have been let down by the economy, and they’re looking to make money, and that culture of hustle is there waiting to tell us we can do it – and beat the system!

Fourth, American culture has normalized the spiritual grift. We have the so-called mainstream Christian grift, a historical lineage of tent revivalists, pass-the-plate evangelists, megachurches, and of course the televangelists and their empires. If people aren’t interested in that – or are rebelling against it – you can provide “alternative” spirituality and get your own grift going by doing something different while keeping the same old moneymaking routines.

Fifth, spiritual grift doesn’t require you to make anything unusual. Sure you can sell crystals and whatever, but it’s really easy to sell content which you can just make up and spew into the format of your choice. If you do want to sell merch you can get things manufactured or slap your brand name on some pre-made herbal medication or whatever. But for the most part, spiritual grift is no different than the various life coach and business guru scams.

Toss all that together and of course we’re awash in Spiritual grifts. They’be been around for awhile, we exist in a grifty culture, and the internet turned it up to eleven. When someone is flooded with TikTok, YouTube, and Podcast gurus, they might get ideas. They might even have some authentic spiritual insights, but that’s a seed for something neither spiritual or insightful.

What we face today in the world of spiritual grift is something more widespread and faster-moving than grifts of say a century ago. But nothing is actually unusual – we’ve all seen it before, throughout history and throughout our lives.

–Xenofact