Tag: Hillary Clinton

Cannibalism and ‘Satanic Panic’ in Utah

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Utah lawmakers are attempting to pass a bill to criminalise the ‘ritual abuse of a child,’ bringing back memories of the satanic panic of the 1980s, when other states passed similar laws.

Critics of the bill, however, say it is unnecessary and potentially harmful.

Republican state Rep. Ken Ivory is sponsoring the bill, House Bill 196. It defines ritual abuse as abuse that occurs as “part of an event or act designed to commemorate, celebrate, or solemnize a particular occasion or significance in a religious, cultural, social, institutional, or other context.” The bill lists specific actions that fall under the proposed definition: abuse against children that includes rape and sodomy, involving them in animal torture, bestiality or cannibalism, or forcing a child to ingest urine or faeces, enter a coffin or grave containing a corpse, or take drugs as part of a ritual.

A hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on February 21 heard from several adults who described themselves as survivors of ritualistic child sexual abuse. They described devil worship, animal torture, forced bondage, rape, cannibalism, child prostitution and mind control, saying that the abuse was so physically and emotionally traumatic that they had repressed memories of it.

Kimberli Raya Koen, President and Founder of The Healing Center for Complex Trauma in Salt Lake City, told the Committee that she was trafficked into a family that ritually abused her for more than two decades.

She told them:

“I see the light and I have fought to be in this chair, to be in this moment, to have a chance to say this is real and this is happening.”

Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith spoke in favour of the bill, telling the committee that he began investigating a high-profile “ritual sex abuse” case two years ago.

The investigation (covered by this blog at the time) became embroiled in politics after then-Utah County Attorney David Leavitt accused him of dredging up an old, unverified witness statement that accused Leavitt and 14 others of “cannibalizing young children” and participating in a “ritualistic” sex ring. Leavitt subsequently lost his re-election bid.

Several states passed similar laws in the 1980s and 1990s, during the height of furore over satanic ritual abuse, but few, if any, prosecutions came from them. Since then, federal law enforcement agencies, scholars and historians have pointed to the scarcity of evidence for the claims of widespread ritual abuse and warned that such legislation risks generating false allegations, wrongful imprisonments and wasting law enforcement resources.

Mary deYoung, professor emeritus of sociology at Grand Valley State University, has documented the harms of the satanic panic.

“This bill is a very good example of panic legislation, hastily cobbled together, on the basis of testimony from a couple of women recollecting childhood histories of satanic ritual abuse. It’s a bill that responds with the kind of approach where we get really angry and say, ‘There ought to be a law.’ And we don’t think about whether it can be enforced in such a way that adds any benefit to society or that ensures that justice is done.”

County Sheriff Smith acted on the reports, but his prosecutions have lagged in court for years, plagued by accusations that investigators mishandled witness statements and that the investigation was politically motivated from the start. He says:

“I was attacked, I was ridiculed, I’ve had memes made about me because of it. Without a doubt, these things do happen in Utah. I believe they’re happening, I believe they have happened.”

Utah’s proposed bill and the county sheriff’s investigation have attracted national interest from conservative media and online conspiracy theorists who believe this case will prove that the allegations in the satanic panic of the 1980s were true, and that cabals of satanists are still sexually abusing, murdering and cannibalising children. Several self-described internet investigators have, in blogs, videos and podcasts, accused hundreds of Utahns of participating in satanic ritual abuse rings.

Many of the claims in the 1980s were made in Utah, amid claims that local therapists used hypnosis and manipulative interview techniques to recover memories from alleged child victims. These were some of the earliest claims of widespread satanic ritual abuse.

Utah’s governor formed a task force in 1990 which spent $250,000 to address pervasive ritual abuse. Investigators interviewed hundreds of victims in more than 125 alleged cases, only one of which ended in prosecution. A final report from the state’s Attorney General in 1995 suggested that there was evidence of isolated instances of abuse involving rituals, but not a widespread plot to abuse children in this way.

National studies from the Department of Justice and the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect found no evidence to support claims of widespread ritual abuse. Child sexual abuse, however, is staggeringly common; about 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 20 boys in the United States are victims, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Utah, the Judiciary Committee voted 10 to 1 to advance the ritual abuse bill to the full House; if passed there, it will advance to the Senate. No one testified in opposition to the bill. Rep. Brian King, one of the two Democrats on the committee, cast a dissenting vote and questioned its necessity, noting that state law already criminalises physical and sexual child abuse. Ivory, the sponsor, conceded the offenses were already criminal, but said a specific law was necessary because the crimes are “so heinous.”

​​Rep. Kera Birkeland, a Republican, cried as she addressed the people who spoke during the hearing.

“I had no idea that this was happening in our state. We believe you.”

Do we? Are children in Utah or elsewhere being forced to eat human flesh (the focus of this blog) or other matter usually considered inedible in polite society? One of the most famous allegations is the conspiracy theory #Frazzledrip which maintains that a video is circulating showing Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, a former aide, ripping off a child’s face and wearing it as a mask before drinking the child’s blood in a satanic ritual sacrifice. No claims were made about making the child eat flesh though. So I guess that’s not covered by the bill.

Utah has a bit of a record here, with the ill-fated team eaten by Alferd (or Alfred) Packer leaving from the Bingham Canyon mines near Salt Lake City in November 1873 for the gold fields of Breckenridge in the Colorado Territory. They met Packer some 25 miles from their starting point, near Provo. Unrelated (I guess) is the story of a Utah man who was charged in September 2021 over the Capitol riots and later threatened to “eat the flesh” of a probation officer.

We might also wonder if these laws might be used against churches that practise the Eucharist, the eating and drinking of the wafer and wine in church, which is seen by some (particularly the Catholics) as a literal transubstantiation of wafer and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ. Children are usually expected to take communion, that is, eat the flesh and blood of Christ (in the form of wafer and wine), from the age of about seven. This does sound a lot like what the bill describes as “ingestion… of human bones, blood, or flesh”. I wonder what the churches might say about that?

Idaho is the only state to have a law against cannibalism, but it has never been used. Seems a terrible oversight, really, and perhaps the good folk of Utah can set it right.

Is cannibalism a term of racist abuse?

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Short answer: yes, and regularly used that way, throughout recorded history.

If you don’t recognise the person in the Tweet, her name is Candace Owens, and she is an American Conservative political commentator, author, activist, and television presenter who has both criticised and supported Donald Trump, attacked Black Lives Matter and been widely condemned for disseminating conspiracy theories, including accusing Israel of genocide. She seems to choose her conspiracies from both extremes of the political crazies – right and left. She has declared Kanye West to be a “dear friend and fellow superhero”.

In the clip above, she is asked by a young woman about Native American “Two Spirit” people – those who might today be called LGBTQIA+, particularly the “T” for “Trans”. The existence of the term and the concept itself would therefore, the questioner argues, go back hundreds or indeed thousands of years, and make nonsense of Owens’ claim that there were no transgender people when she graduated (although it seems she never did), so therefore the population must have has exploded since then. She summarises Owens’ argument: “Trans people are only here because the media is telling people these things”.

Owens does not know the term “Two Spirit” or that there are multiple words referring to the concept in many Native American languages. She answers instead:

“With Two Spirit people, is this like a Native American Tribe? Like high, smoking and talking about your spirit? I’m asking you seriously ’cause I think of Native American tribes talking about their spirits – I know they used to smoke a lot, they used to do drugs, they also were cannibals who used to eat people, so I don’t know if we should be taking our cues from cannibals…”

Owens used the same argument against Colin Kaepernick at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2020, who had spoken of the 1.5 billion acres of land stolen from Indigenous people in the United States, asking “Did cannibalism get lost in Colin’s flowery depiction of Indigenous people?” She referred to Aztec cannibalism, which is generally thought to have taken place in Mesoamerican areas of what is now central Mexico, from 1300 until their society was decimated by the Spanish conquistadors. There is little academic consensus about this – theories range from Marvin Harris who said the flesh of the human sacrifices to the gods was fed to the ruling class due to the shortage of protein in the area, to William Arens who insisted that “there is no firm, substantiable evidence for the socially accepted practice of cannibalism anywhere in the world, at any time in history.” Nonetheless, cannibalism is still depicted as epitomising the uncivilised or, worse, those who have degenerated to savagery. Think of the “troglodytes” in the movie Bone Tomahawk.

the term “cannibalism” itself comes from Christopher Columbus, who named the practice after the Carib tribe of the Caribbean (also named after the Caribs). He claimed the Caribs ate their neighbors, but there is little evidence for this beyond the accusations of rival tribes who, despite never before meeting Europeans, understood that cannibalism was a powerful way to defame enemies. Frank Lestringant examines, in his book Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (1997), the contrasting reports from that period of the “savage” cannibals of the New World and the way they were compared, sometimes favourably, with the horrendous cruelty of European politics of the time, particularly in the writings of Montaigne.

Cannibalism is, therefore, an enduring and popular way to denigrate and vilify another group, to declare them less-than-human and therefore not worthy of respect or consideration. Cannibalism, definitionally, requires both sides of the repast to be human—the eater and eaten. But paradoxically, cannibals deny the anthropocentric particularity of their victims, and are in turn symbolically stripped of humanity due to what is seen as a horrendous contravention of shared ethics, deserving redefinition of the eaters as “inhuman” monsters. This was very useful to Columbus, who was not allowed to take slaves unless they were found to be cannibals, and has been used extensively by colonists to slander other Indigenous people including the people of the Pacific, Africans, and the Aboriginal people of Australia.

Cannibalism is a particularly popular trope for political, racist or queerphobic demonisation. The cannibal is most often depicted as male, but homosexuality, still considered repulsive by some despite its legalisation in most of the world, is often emphasised in the reporting of cases such as Jeffrey Dahmer, Ottis Toole, and Armin Meiwes, as if to impugn their masculinity and erroneously imply that straight men are not potential cannibals.

Accusations that a conspiracy known as “Deep State” was trying to subvert Trump crystallised in groups, accounts and pages linked to QAnon during the 2020 election campaign. The accusations included allegations of devil-worship, child-sex trafficking, torture and cannibalism. The fact-checking website Snopes rebuffed allegations about the existence of a “deep web” video showing Hillary Clinton and her campaign vice-chair raping, torturing and mutilating a little girl to cause the child to release adrenochrome into her bloodstream, before drinking her blood during a Satanic ritual sacrifice. Like characters in the films Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) and Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991), and the real-life murderer Ed Gein on whom they were based, they also supposedly excoriated the face to use as a mask. The bestselling QAnon-linked novel The Turner Diaries depicts a race war where white women and girls are constantly threatened and raped by “untamed, cannibalistic” black men, presented as symbolic of nature, and resisted by heroic white men, representing civilisation. Infanticide for cannibalistic feasts is not an original accusation, going back to the blood libels targeting European Jews and the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), the Inquisition’s guide to witch-hunting, which stated that witches would steal the host or wine from the Eucharist ritual to manifest a Christ-child, who would then be tortured, killed and consumed during diabolical feasts.

But back to Owens and her dismissal of “two-spirit” people as being the drug-fueled fantasies of cannibals. The term “Two-spirit” refers to persons who identify as having both masculine and feminine spirits, and is used by some Indigenous people to describe their sexual, gender and/or spiritual identity. The wider use of the term is attributed to Elder Myra Laramee, who proposed its use during the Third Annual Inter-tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference, held in Winnipeg in 1990. The term is a translation of the Anishinaabemowin term niizh manidoowag, meaning two spirits. It seems obvious that we all have some masculine and feminine features within our complex personalities, and it is useful, if poetic, to call these “spirits”. It explains motives, desires, emotions that may roil and confuse and sometimes contradict each other. It has little to do with gustatory preferences, except that some who feel they need to buttress their masculinity may insist on eating other animals to prove some dubious suppositions of human superiority, often including over other people they may consider less than human. “Real men”, they earnestly insist, don’t eat quiche; they eat lumps of meat, rare or even raw.

As do cannibals, very often. And with the flesh may come the spirit, allowing two spirits to co-exist, mingle, join within the cannibal’s body. Armin Meiwes told an interviewer that

“It’s not about killing or butchering. It is about entering into a relationship… My desire has always been to find a “brother” whom I could assimilate into myself.”

The nature or existence of ‘spirit’ is an eternal debate that will not be finalised in a Q&A session, particularly by a speaker who seems to know nothing about it. But it can only be obscured further by unfounded accusations about cannibalism, particularly by those who still happily chow down on their fellow mammals.

Cannibalism as eating disorder: FEED ME (2022)

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So, the buzz for this movie is ‘Ted Lasso goes cannibal’. By that, they don’t imply we will need to sit through any football matches, but that there is going to be a lot of American “can-do” ardour, conflicting with British reticence and melancholy. Also some dark humour, and a whole lot of gore, which some may find objectionable. Consider yourselves warned.

Feed Me is directed by Adam Leader and Richard Oakes (Hosts). XYZ Films released the horror-comedy on October 27 2022 on digital and on demand platforms. Feed Me follows Jed (Christopher Mulvin) whose life is shattered when his wife Olivia (Samantha Loxley) suddenly dies, leaving him feeling guilty. The blurb says:

“Spiralling into an abyss of depression, he finds himself in a bar with a deranged cannibal, Lionel Flack (Neal Ward) who convinces him he can redeem himself through the glorious act of allowing himself to be slowly eaten to death.”

Suicide, usually unassisted, is sadly common in modern society, and besides making the relatives wretched, it is also an enormous inconvenience to the police, medics and trauma-cleaners who have to deal with it. So why not benefit someone – the local cannibal who promises a painless death that will not require housekeeping, because he will eat the resulting mess? Jed moves in with Lionel, whose tiny house is filthy and full of body parts. But Jed is ready, eager to die, and Lionel is tremblingly eager to eat him.

Cannibalism, particularly vorarephilia (the erotic desire to consume or be consumed by another) can be seen as a type of eating disorder, particularly in cases where there are other foods readily available, but if that is the case, so can any form of carnivory. The film starts and finishes with such reflections – Jed’s wife is a beautiful young woman who is convinced she is fat and ugly, and eventually dies from the effects of bulimia – she starves herself and vomits out whatever nourishment she does eat, until her body closes down.

As Jed explains it, her mental illness meant that she “was eaten from the inside out.” Lionel’s solution is that, if Jed is determined to kill himself, he should do it from the outside in.

Lionel quotes some fake anthropology – a tribe called the Yiurkun who, he says, live in perpetual happiness,

His offer (and there is a written contract involved) is to eat Jed, quickly and painlessly, so he can join his beloved. Why not, Jed thinks, since Olivia has effectively (in his dreams) eaten his heart?

Lionel starts small – local anaesthetic, one finger chopped off with secateurs and carefully cooked, the wound cauterised with a hot clothes iron. “How do you feel?” Lionel asks.

But of course you can’t eat a whole person one finger at a time, and it’s not long before Lionel is removing limbs, but now without anaesthetic, because he gets mad at Jed.

Lionel says he has heard that

“some cultures believe that torturing the animal alive improves the taste and quality of the meat.”

This is not an invention of the director – it’s well known that dogs and cats and other animals are often beaten or burnt or at least made to watch the death of other animals, to make the terror and agony generate adrenalin, which is supposed to add flavour. Astonishingly, Hillary Clinton was accused of doing the same to small children. Other politicians have had the same accusations hurled at them. While these are almost certainly nonsense, it is true that almost every one of the seventy billion land animals humans eat each year will go through extremely painful ordeals, and all of the trillions of sea creatures. Jed is just one more animal in agony.

When the neighbour calls police about all the screaming going on, Lionel invites them in and feeds them some of his “mild veal”.

The enjoyment of food depends largely on what we believe about it. The actor playing the cop is probably in fact eating a piece of veal. His character, the cop, believes he is indeed eating veal. The audience, us, suspends disbelief so we can imagine that he is actually eating part of Jed’s leg. This turns the meal from gourmet to horror – a simple change of species, entirely within our imagination. The title, FEED ME, challenges the assumption that food will be prepared and served with our preconceptions catered for – it will be tasty and uncontroversial. In this society, eating a baby cow who wanted to live is praiseworthy; eating a man who wants to die is horrific.

The title reminded me of a foodie show called “Somebody Feed Phil” which sees writer and producer Phil Rosenthal (Everybody Loves Raymond) travelling around the world eating huge dishes of food while adding no weight to his irritatingly slim frame. In a recent episode, Phil lands in Madrid and apologises to a suckling (newborn) pig –

“you’re very cute, but I’m going to eat you.”

Most cannibals, like carnivores everywhere, do not usually have their victim’s permission, and usually do not apologise either, although they may feel some cognitive dissonance, knowing that their meal required the suffering and slaughter of the animal whose flesh is involved. Phil didn’t kill the new-born baby pig, but did apologise for eating him. Jeffrey Dahmer killed seventeen men and boys and also didn’t apologise (until it was far too late). The closest parallel to the plot of this film (the trailer above states it was “inspired by true events”) is the true case of Armin Meiwes, who advertised for a man who wished to be killed and eaten, had dinner and sex with the only genuine respondent, and then killed and ate him. He felt there was no apology needed, since Jorgen Brandes had wanted, indeed demanded, to be eaten. So it is with Lionel, who offers to kill and eat Jed, and then slowly and gradually makes good on his promise.

Neal Ward plays Lionel as an over the top, twitchy, verbose American con-man, the kind of man we like to think serial killers and cannibals look like, because that would make them easy to spot. Yet the essence of the real modern cannibal is his (or sometimes her) completely normal and unremarkable appearance – they walk among their peers, unknown and unidentified until their arrest (if they are ever found). Neighbours, for example, praised Meiwes as a nice young man who would mow the lawn for them. Issei Sagawa was so small and apparently innocuous that the young woman he killed and ate had been happy to come to his apartment to read poetry together.

The tagline for this movie is

“You are who you eat…”

The concept is interesting – if you are who/what you eat, do you want to eat pigs or chickens or sheep, all of whom are used, quite unjustly, as common insults (for gluttons, cowards or mindless followers). If you are what you eat, Lionel tells us, you should eat humans.

The anthropologist Marvin Harris wrote in his book Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture that, while humans are clearly not obligate carnivores, “our species-given physiology and digestive processes predispose us to learn to prefer animal foods”. This presents a problem for him, since “strictly speaking, human flesh itself contains the highest-quality protein that one can eat”. Lionel’s pathology stems from his calculating, impeccable logic.

The film is a fascinating study of love, loss, despair, friendship, loneliness and appetite. The gore is perhaps a bit over the top, but no longer unusual in modern films. The acting, despite what other reviewers have said, is great and the story compelling. Neal Ward plays Lionel as both a monster and a clown, a hard role to portray, but he is, in the end, seeking the same as all of us – self-acceptance, love, a validation of his humanity, and a good meal.

THE UTAH CANNIBALS – Satanic Panic in Utah County

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While we’re talking cannibalism investigations (it’s what we do on this blog), we’ve now got the Utah County Attorney going public to deny accusations that he and his wife are cannibals.

Here’s how it went down.

On June 1, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office (UCSO) sent a media release stating that:

Special Victims Unit Detectives and investigators from multiple county and federal agencies are investigating reports of ritualistic child sexual abuse from as far back as 1990.

The statement specified investigations into child sexual abuse and child sex trafficking that occurred in Utah County, Juab County, and Sanpete County between 1990 and 2010.

Sgt. Spencer Cannon with the UCSO stated that:

“We have gotten to the point where we believe we have been able to verify some of the information that we’ve been told.”

The Utah County Attorney, David Leavitt, held a press conference that day, calling for the resignation of Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith and for an investigation into his activities for misuse of taxpayer and county resources. He said that he had been wrongly accused of cannibalism, as well as the murder of small children.

Leavitt said that he had been provided a copy of an alleged witness statement from a person he called a “tragically mentally ill woman.”

“And for the first time in the reportedly 15 or 20 years since the report was given, I learned that my wife and I were part of those allegations, alleging that we were guilty of cannibalizing young children.”

Leavitt says the woman in question made sex abuse claims against 15 to 20 people before he was ever in office in Utah County. That case was dismissed, he said, because the allegations were deemed not credible by the special victims unit. He called the allegations “ludicrous” and “outlandish” and a “pack of lies.”

When asked whether Leavitt is a subject of that investigation, the sheriff responded: “We don’t talk about who is under investigation.”

But Leavitt insisted that the report names him. He believed the timing of the announcement from the sheriff’s office was suspicious, since Leavitt is running for re-election — and ballots are expected to go out next week.

“I am calling upon Sheriff Mike Smith to open his office to an outside investigation,” Leavitt said, “where outside, independent investigators are able to investigate and confirm or deny that documents from a debunked investigation from more than a decade ago were or were not used for political purposes in a Utah County Attorney’s race.”

Sheriff Smith said he won’t resign, and he doesn’t apologize for using county resources on the investigation. He stressed that this “was not a politically motivated investigation,” and that a year ago his office was contacted by people reporting crimes that were similar in nature to those brought up by Leavitt.

“Leavitt,” said Sheriff Smith, “is using his authority and his pulpit to bully, distract, and mischaracterize the facts of an ongoing investigation.”

The sheriff emphasized that while Leavitt focused on accusations of “cannibalism”, the primary investigation involves sexual abuse.

The only forum where Leavitt is publicly alleged to have been involved with the sex ring is purportedly published online by a man who Leavitt’s office is prosecuting for a 2008 rape case. Prosecutors allege that the man faked his death in the United States, and is now living in Scotland under a different name. He has denied, through his attorney, that he is the person prosecutors allege he is.

That website claims that County Sheriff Sgt. Spencer Cannon confirmed that Leavitt was the head of a “widespread ritual sex abuse ring in Utah.” Cannon said Wednesday that he spoke to the man, but never confirmed to him that Leavitt or any other specific persons were suspected.

Conspiracy theories are not a new phenomenon, and they have often involved cannibalism, often in the form of drinking blood, such as the blood libel accusations levelled at Jews during the Middle Ages, and resurfacing in the development of antisemitic movements from the nineteenth century until the Nazis, and even present day.

Since the 1980s, accusations of “ritual sex abuse” have been rife in the United States, and in Utah in particular. The US has seen over 12,000 alleged cases of satanic ritual abuse, leading to the coining of a new term: SATANIC PANIC. Satanic cults were said to have engaged in bizarre sexual acts such as necrophilia, forced ingestion of semen, blood and faeces, cannibalism, orgies, liturgical parody such as pseudo-sacramental use of faeces and urine; infanticide, sacrificial abortions to eat fetuses, and human sacrifice. Accusations of Satanic groups engaging in torture and cannibalism of children were extensively made during recent US elections. The event called “#Pizzagate” arose from QAnon claims that Democrats were torturing and killing children in the basement of a (basementless) pizza shop in Washington DC, following which a dude with a rifle entered the shop to save the supposed victims.

Proponents of the conspiracy theory #Frazzledrip believe that a video is circulating showing Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, a former aide, ripping off a child’s face and wearing it as a mask before drinking the child’s blood in a satanic ritual sacrifice. Supposedly, the video was later found on the hard drive of Abedin’s former husband, Anthony Weiner, under the code name ‘Frazzledrip’. Snopes found the whole thing to be a giant fake.

Looking forward to hearing new and, hopefully, more original cannibalism stories in the mid-terms!