Category Archives: Unspeakable Cults

The George Weber Murder and the Sad and Spiteful World of Peter LaBarbera

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For most people on the right Peter LaBarbera is simply a fringe element tolerated yet ridiculed the way “Paulnuts” or NAU truthers are. As long as they aren’t too much of a bother, no one pays much attention to what they get up to until they do something that reflects badly on the right as a whole, but otherwise their myopic vehemence about some ultimately inconsequential cause is little more than the source of some amusement, or more correctly bemusement, by most of us on the right who don’t spend our waking days consumed with conspiracies, petty bigotry or the overwhelming fear that somewhere two men may be kissing.

Until recently the only thing I knew about LaBarbera is that Pam Spaulding, the auntie tom who sat back and laughed while White liberals on Pandagon called me a race traitor for being Bi-racial and not tongue bathing them every day, allowed a death threat against him and his family credible enough for the F.B.I. to become involved to sit in her comments section. That was a little over a year ago and I never covered it because this was frankly a case of two rank bigots with too much time on their hands and not enough compassion in their hearts running afoul of each other in that poetic way that seems to prove there is a divine hand at work that is both just and and a dry wit.

But yesterday my fellow blogger Trench Reynolds sent me a link to this Killian Melloy article about the coverage of the George Weber murder where I am mentioned. Pleased with myself in the way only smug people can be, I opened the link and was immediately appalled by the quotes in the article by LaBarbera who ghoulishly began using the Weber murder to push the agenda of his web scam, I mean Internet based activist organization, Americans for the Truth about Homosexuality, which is running lurid and ham-handed editorials about how gays are more likely to perpetuate violence against other gays than heterosexuals (unlikely given the small percentage of the population they are) and how gays have a hook-up culture on Craigslist that is somehow different from the hook-up culture on Craigslist among straight people.

Of course, none of this would be relevant to the Weber murder even if it were true. Weber, as I said before, is not responsible for his death. He didn’t take responsibility for his safety, which people need to, but that isn’t to say he deserved or caused his murder. Weber’s death was caused by three things:

  1. New York’s anti-self defense culture
  2. The naivety of big city liberalism when it comes to crime
  3. The acceptance of sexual violence which exists in the general culture and isn’t specific to gays

In other words any cultural criticism that comes from the Weber murder applies to society as a whole, not a sub-group of it. New York has a legal environment where proactively tending to your safety is impossible and criminality is explained away in college freshman level sociological terms. This creates victims who do not understand how criminals think and cannot defend themselves when they are targeted. There has been a shift in adult entertainment where sexual violence is becoming mainstream and because of the reach of the Internet “rough sex” (which is really sadomasochism) is becoming an accepted “kink” that many people believe is safe and harmless to indulge in. All these things apply to heterosexuals as much if not more so than they do to gays, but LaBarbera dishonestly claims the problems are the province of gays alone.

It is as wicked as it is dangerous because he has convinced his followers and anyone who takes him seriously that they themselves would be safe on Craigslist as long as they aren’t looking for gay sex, which is a false assumption that creates hundreds of victims, as sites like CraigsCrimeList detail. Seeking strangers as sex partners is dangerous enough (perhaps its allure) but seeking strangers who are looking to abuse people compounds that danger, especially if you aren’t willing or capable of defending yourself if things go wrong. This applies equally to gays and straights. LaBarbera is just smart enough to know that, but has spent his time using his bully pulpit to paint this tragedy as something it isn’t, which is a crime that is specific to gays.

But for LaBarbera, all roads lead to the gays, and I suspect that if I spend enough time on his site I may discover that 9/11 was actually perpetrated by gays, a secret gay lobby controls our foreign policy and Al-Qaeda wants to restore a world-wide caliphate because they want to make LaBarbera their gay concubine. I suspect that would you attempt talk to LaBarbera about anything besides homosexuality, the conversation would be short to say the least.

Like a jilted lover, LaBarbera and his fellow crusaders seem incapable of simply not caring about what gays, who are adults who can make their own decisions, do with their lives. I understand that Christians have theological arguments against the practice of homosexuality, and I certainly can agree that it is offensive at best when gays interrupt memorials to Martin Luther King to prove a point, which I assume is that there are gays so tone deaf and self involved that they think spitting on the memory of King will get Black people to support gay marriage. But I have no interest, and neither should you, in the personal life of any consenting adults.

American gays have the same right you and I have to be left alone and live their lives as they, not some Communist like LaBarbera, sees fit. It is telling that almost all of LaBarbera’s arguments against homosexuality are Christianized versions of Marxist anti-gay propaganda. Not being a Christian myself, I can’t speak for them, but I was under the impression that Christ tells Christians to hate the sin but love the sinner. LaBarbera isn’t acting very Christian in this respect since he isn’t lovingly inviting gays to join him in fellowship, instead he sounds like a street corner Marxist reading out accusations of capitalist decadence from his badly xeroxed copy of Worker’s World Daily, pining away for the day when Comrade Jesus sends gays to re-education camps the way Saint Castro did.

LaBarbera is a spiteful, sad shadow of the “patriot” that he tries to pass himself off to be. In reality, he’s a parasite clinging to the right while slowly eroding the essential values of conservatism. I’m an old-school Reaganite, I believe in limited government, maximum personal freedom, low taxes and a strong military. Other than that, I’m not interested in weighing in on other Americans’ lives. LaBarbera is, and that is antithetical the Founding Fathers’ dream of a country where every citizen has their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness protected by a Republican government which stands between minorities and the tyranny of the majority. I thought he might have learned that when he was threatened with death last year by zealots as driven as he seems to be.

Blood Fetishism and the Travis White Murder

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The Pagan Temple has a post up rightfully pointing out that the reporting on the Travis White Murder includes the assuredly erroneous assumption that because a couple of the six people charged in the crime and its cover up “claim to be Vampires” that Witchcraft (and in some people’s minds Wicca though the two are actually separate and distinct practices as any honest Wiccan will tell you) is somehow involved. I’ve found little evidence that any sort of Witchcraft was involved but there are references that the murderers, ranging in age from 14-years-old to a 27-year-old man, met playing a Vampire Role-Playing Game game which they discussed online at MySpace.

Reports like this seem to conflate Witchcraft and “Vampirism” as alike and both playing a part in the crime:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-TDKKmtnKk[/youtube]

The problem of course is that aside from their morbid interests there is little enough to go on to claim that Witchcraft was involved at all. I frankly doubt the murderers were affiliated with gangs either. But I think I might disagree with The Pagan Temple in the assessment that “vampirism” or more correctly blood fetishism, isn’t part of the crime.

I first came across the idea of blood fetishism in books like Olga Hoyt’s Lust for Blood and Something in the Blood by Jeff Guin and Andy Grieser which were little more than ethnographies of people who fetishized blood letting and blood consumption, often using Gothic punk style vampire mythology to create a sub-culture where their paraphilia can be indulged. Blood fetishism is often sexual, or the product of sexual dysfunction, and is not the purview of goths only.

This profile fits in with what we know of the story. The initiator of the murder was a 14-year-old girl who was being shared as a lover by two of the accused. This is clearly an unusual arraignment, given that it was apparently known and accepted by both her paramours. She claimed she had been raped by the victim, a charge she later recanted, and lured Travis White to her home where her two friends, 27-year-old Brian Golsby and 21-year-old Kasey Dodson spent hours beating, stabbing and cutting the victim. Friends of the group stopped by during the attack, reporting that the heard the victims piteous screams but claim they did nothing. They later helped dispose of White’s body.

The blood fetishist is a sadist, attracted to the vampire image because of the inherent sado-masochism of the vampire/victim relationship where the victim wants to be hurt by the vampire. As Hoyt and Guinn illustrate, the blood fetishist is not often a stereotypical “goth” though they are of course attracted to the same themes and entertainment.  Blood fetishists seek others who share their interest, either “donors” who are predated by the fetishist or other fetishists themselves, and in this case the core actors of the group have seemingly organized themselves into a group using the role-playing game they played (most likely White Wolf’s Vampire games) as a template.

The murder itself involved sadism most people aren’t used to hearing about, and which again supports the idea of this crime being committed by blood fetishists. The brutality is hard to speak of, suffice to say they victim was attacked with a bat, crescent wrench and a knife. He was struck at least 31 times by the blunt objects, stabbed 27 times (until the knife broke) and had “gang symbols carved in his stomach. It would have been a blood soaked affair indeed. I should clarify that I am not claiming the assailants drank the blood of the victim, but there is an element of “blood play” here, a reveling in the bloodletting few of us could stomach.

As more information is released I would not be surprised however to hear of blood drinking. The police are coy about why they place so much emphasis on the supposed vampirism of those on trial, but simply wearing similar necklaces doesn’t usually make the news. One news report claims the two murderers were “acting as vampires” during the killing, which sans literal vampirizing the victim would be a strange phrase to insert into a murder story the mourning family might read.

In the same vein, while the group are certainly not Wiccans, ritual blood letting, ala Alfonso de Jesus Constanzo isn’t something I’d rule out with this group. Whether it’s fair if that happened to call it Witchcraft would depend on your definition and understanding of both practices.

Charles Johnson and the Truth about Atheism

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Governor Bobby Jindal voiced what is a perfectly patriotic position for many, that he hoped the policies and Ponzi schemes being peddled by Barack Obama fail. Predictably, Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs has a case of the vapors at the GOP’s “alienating and losing the support of the vast middle” etc.

At some point during this post, Bobby Jindal was referred to as “Creationist Bobby Jindal” and you could almost hear the disdain dripping from their inner voices as Charles Johnson’s cult of anti-Religionists curled their lips disgustedly at the idea of a person having beliefs they disagree with.

That Bobby Jindal’s opinion of how reality is structured is irrelevant to the point of the post is obvious to all but the most bigoted “lizards” for whom religiosity is akin to incest or necrophilia in both its unseemliness and undesirability in modern society. That being assured that there is an invisible hand at work in the creation of the uncountable multitudes of stars and planets in our universe has no bearing on the question presented by LGF, whether saying you want Obama to fail is a good political strategy. So why is it in there?

Because for the Charles Johnsons of the world simple belief, devotion, or faith in an idea or doctrine is enough to dismiss you as a person, enough in fact to deny your humanity at all. Atheism is not, as many will tell you, the absence of religion. Atheism is itself a quasi-religion that has a set dogma, a theology and most important its own demonology. For the Atheist the believer, of any faith, is like a character from the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum. We who believe are all similar beings that need be controlled and feared by rational people lest we spread our corruption throughout their pristine and random creation. The Atheist does not simply disbelieve in some form of divinity in the world, he or she seeks the total annihilation of religion and the religious.

I’ve often thought his anti-religious bigotry was at the root of his most hostile attacks on Pamela Geller from Atlas Shrugs and Robert Spencer form Jihad Watch. Despite the fact that clearly Pamela Geller isn’t a neo-Nazi Charles Johnson branded her one based on the same biased and unreliable, and atheist, source he used to brand English blogger Lionheart a neo-Nazi. Lionheart is a born again Christian, Robert Spencer is Catholic I believe and Pamela is Jewish. It is clear to any observer that Charles Johnson and his Internet cult wanted to believe the worst of these people, and I would put forward it is because they are religious he was pathologically driven to attempt to destroy their reputations.

This lashing out at the faithful is at the core of Atheism, which is so bereft of legitimate criticism of religion in general that these days they spend most of their time ripping off LaVeyian Satanism. Richard Dawkins’ much lauded book The God Delusion is essentially a plagiarization of Celsus’ Discourse Against the Christians with a smattering of Satan Speaks thrown in to spice up what would otherwise be a book as mind-numbingly dull and childishly nihilistic as atheism itself. Likewise LGF in its anti-theism incarnation has little to offer adherents besides a false sense of intellectual superiority based on mocking the misunderstood beliefs of others.

Creationists are often the targets of their ire even though the average big bang theorist has no more understanding of astrophysics than they do of the metaphysics they mock. Like the devoutly Christian Jindal, the “Lizard” from LGF accepts the creation of the universe ex nihilo and could no more explain to us how the big bang happened and what matter was in existence before the big bang than a Christian can explain where his God lived prior to creating the universe. Both views require a certain amount of faith, but whereas the Christian is consoled by faith in his or her God, the only consolation for the Atheist’s anti-faith is that their existence is essentially meaningless.

Which is both the allure of Atheism for many, and the driving force behind the evangelical fervor atheists have in trying to discredit religious ideas of objective truth and morality. I know many atheists and most happen to be bad people. That’s not to say that they are criminals or child rapists, but they simply aren’t particularly good in the philosophical sense.They are not honest, hard working or charitable. Except that I wouldn’t know if Johnson works particularly hard, I’d say that description fits him and his “Lizard” army.Their dealings with Spencer and Geller certainly prove they are neither honest nor charitable.

Atheists believe in a subjective morality. For example they believe that the reason it’s wrong for a 40-year-old to be sexually active with a child is because it’s illegal and society has ruled that it shouldn’t happen. Some may believe that it can be psychologically damaging for the child, or that it’s exploitative and deviant. But none believe that it is evil. They can’t because they don’t believe that anything can be, objectively, evil.

None of the atheists I know believe that people who rape children are choosing to do evil to satisfy themselves. They explain the abuse of children as a “sickness” which implies that it can be cured and is something that the perpetrator cannot control or truly be responsible for. These same people also happen in dozens of minor venal ways to exploit others. Just as they pass no moral judgment on the most evil amongst us they expect, and will accept, no moral judgment by others on them or how they choose to live. The heart of an atheist is a hopeful one, hopeful that there is no divine power that will weigh them and find them wanting.

I am not a Christian, though having my academic background in Comparative Religion I have a basic understanding of Christian theology. There are legitimate criticisms of general Christian dogma and specific denominations’ creeds that make decent dinner table conversation.The idea that being a Christian makes one less deserving of civility and respect isn’t one of them. It is uncivil at best to mock a man’s faith, but in reality it is the mark of a small minded bigot who has cut him or herself off from the basic search for knowledge all people must pursue.

I believe in a vast and unknowable universe, alive with beings that to us are gods and perhaps even these gods have gods. I believe that the divine can be seen within the natural world and I have experienced it in the warm winds that whisper through trees that danced in time with the coming thunder storm. There is a music that you can hear when you are alone in the woods that I believe is the Call of the gods themselves. But more importantly I believe in good and evil, something I share with most Christians, and I don’t believe in subjective morality. I believe that you will pay for the evil you do and atheists cannot allow themselves to believe this is true.

So they lash out at the religious because we remind them of what they fear the most, the divine and their separation from it. That’s the truth about atheism, it holds no comfort for people, only fear and loathing and a lifetime of trying to convince others that we’re wrong if only to convince one another that they are right. And underneath the pettiness and bile there is the longing for the comfort and faith that they deny themselves.

Organize for America Leader Admits to Building Brownshirt Brigades!

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Remember this story when people tell you you’re a paranoid weirdo for being freaked out by Obama’s attempts to form a “civilian security force” filled with his wild-eyed personality cultists:

From The Birmingham News:

Volunteers fanned out across the Birmingham area and Alabama Saturday to pump up enthusiasm for President Barack Obama’s budget proposal in much the same way they did to win over voters during the presidential campaign.

About 30 volunteers in Birmingham canvassed shopping areas and other high-traffic locations to talk about the need for health care reform, an education overhaul and environmentally friendly energy development.

“If we don’t change these three things in the next 10 to 15 years, America is over as we know it,” Chris DeHaven, told the group of volunteers before they went their separate ways.

Obama’s plan faces criticism from Republicans and others who say it’s too expensive. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a report Friday saying Obama’s agenda would cause huge budget deficits, forcing the country to borrow $9.3 trillion in the next decade.

Those who gathered at Kelly Ingram Park in downtown Birmingham were urged to enlist others who share Obama’s vision and to stay away from trying to convert naysayers.

“We’re looking for supporters,” said DeHaven of Hoover, one of the event’s organizers. “We’re not looking for a fight. That will come later, when we have an army.”

The volunteers are part of Organizing for America, the same grassroots, national network credited in large part with Obama’s quick rise from obscurity to president. Birmingham and 11 other sites statewide were part of a national push this weekend by Organizing for America to trumpet Obama’s spending proposal.

Say what now? When they have an army they are going to go out looking for a fight? Is this guy basically saying once they have more volunteers they’ll be going to go door to door “looking for a fight” with people who disagree with them? Does Obama know his creepy personality cult expects him to lead a violent revolution?

Atlas has more.

My advice? Arm yourselves.

“There’s Nothing Funny About a Clown in the Moonlight”

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The above quote from Lon Chaney was used in the preface of the essay Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns by Mark Dery which can be found in his book The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. It’s an interesting (if pretentious) read which makes some debatable points, but nicely illustrates the shift in American consciousness regarding our perceptions of clowns. Dery destroys his own thesis of clown phobia as both a “hysterical reaction” to pedophilia and a millennial exercise in scapegoating by pointing out that The Joker from the Batman comics is the quintessential psycho-killer clown. The Joker of course made his first appearance in 1940 in Batman number one, and was based on the character Conrad Veidt played in the 1920s silent gothic horror film The Man Who Laughs.

That movie was based on the Victor Hugo novel of the same name, which I believe was written in the 1860s.  So the scary clown image is one that has been part of the Western psyche for over a hundred years and is not, as Dery argues, a post-modern construct of American society.

However, his essay does hint at the madness of those who would become clowns, and more importantly the history of The Fool who was often seen as intertwined with Death, as a source of both fear and loathing. The dark history of clowns makes those who would become them seem mad indeed, which brings us to our modern cult of clowns, Juggalos.

As I’ve said before, I don’t happen to believe Juggalos are any more prone to violence than any other sub-culture in which drug use is not only acceptable but encouraged. However I along with other bloggers who cover crime see that Juggalos tend to be involved in crimes which are unusually depraved and fit nicely within the modern mythology of clowns being degenerates in the literal sense.

Most recently a young Juggalo by the name of Orion Kent Mitchell Stoltman made the news when he was found to be responsible for the torturing and killing of the pet goats of the Linell family of Utah. On the night of October 31st, he and two juveniles stole the 12 inch high pygmy goats and took them to a nearby elementary school parking lot where they slowly and gleefully hacked and sawed away at the animals necks to decapitate them. The goats were clearly in agony for some time because a man who lived nearby thought he heard children crying 2:00am, went to investigate and saw the trio in the midst of the attack. Unless the man lived within a few feet of the scene this would indicate the attackers were taking their time with the goats rather than killing them swiftly, at least long enough for a man to get out of bed, get dressed and leave his house.

Dreamin’ Demon has the long version of the story and it is disturbing.

Orion Stoltman is just one more Juggalo who has made the crime blogs, but the Juggalo culture itself is full of Orions. Juggalos proudly flaunt their disdain of social norms as all sub-cultures do, but there is in their iconography a sort of beacon for degeneracy, a metaphysical call through the collective unconscious that targets the most inhuman of us. There is no convention or norm we hold dear that Juggalos will accept, whether it is sober living or humane treatment of animals, for the Juggalo believes he or she transcends the laws of America just as the Fool transcended the laws of nature in medieval passion plays. If there is a term to sum up the philosophy of the Juggalos it is this: Secular Antinomianism.

I often use the picture of a woman dressed as a clown holding a gun on posts about Juggalos and I credit the site Underground Juggalo. The woman is a winner of one of their many contests where readers send in their photos. Some of these contests are R-rated and include nudity. They also seemingly include underage girls. Since the author never bothers to post the age viewers are left uncertain as to what they are seeing, but I would be surprised if there were not several pictures on the site that are illegal in this country. Yet there they remain, defiant in the face of the law and morality, a tribute to the debasement of American culture. The Juggalo is the foot soldier of the cultural apocalypse, the modern day Vandal that is already sacking our cities and making sport with our daughters.

When considering the Juggalos I’m inclined to believe Lon Chaney was right. In the light of the moon the corruption of the soul of the clown is revealed. The greasepaint hides not a fondness for laughter or even a secret sadness, but a bitter hatred, an atrophied soul and resolute desire to make the rest of us suffer as those whose madness drives them to the take up the killer clown image suffer. When you are alone or with your loved ones there is nothing funny about a clown in moonlight.

Especially if that clown is a Juggalo.