General Butt Naked, MAGA Exorcisms, and the Politics of Witchcraft
Belief in magic, demons, and witchcraft is a major force in politics—all around the world, but, increasingly, in the United States. We should be paying far more attention.
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Happy Halloween!
It’s a holiday with deep roots in our culture, stretching across millennia to its current incarnation.1
Today, it’s celebrated in Western cultures by embracing symbols of witchcraft and magic—spooky season, as it’s sometimes called. But beneath the costumes and dry ice and pumpkin spice, there’s a much more important lesson lurking: much of our world runs on uncanny belief, including the supposedly rational realm of politics. This is more easily apparent in the global south, where belief in witchcraft, superstition, and evil spirits is both widespread and uncontroversial. But belief in demons and other dark magical forces are increasingly playing a potent role in American politics, too.
In this edition, we’ll explore how belief in witchcraft, magic, superstition, vampires, and exorcism is swaying warfare, political decision-making, and election campaigns—from Africa to Southeast Asia and the White House.
I: The Invisible Armor of General Butt Naked
In the autumn of 1971, a young boy named Joseph Blahyi was born in Liberia, to parents who saw his potential for magical powers. Much of his ethnic group, the Krahn people, believed in the potent force of black magic, and Blahyi’s parents handed him over to village elders who trained him as a high priest when he was just eleven years old.
According to Blahyi’s memoir, thus began a ritual in which visions would appear before him, telling him which child was to be selected for human sacrifice. “As high priest,” Marco Margaritoff writes, Blahyi “would give the victim’s last name to its village elders. They would then lead a procession to the victim’s ‘House of Honor,’ abducting and sacrificing the child atop an altar.”
These powers apparently caught the attention of Samuel Doe, Liberia’s murderous president, who had come to power in a 1980 coup d’état. When the 1985 election rolled around, Doe allegedly brought Blahyi into his political orbit, tasking him with ensuring his victory by cursing the opposition. (But just in case that wouldn’t work, Doe also crushed his opponents and rigged the election).
This show of confidence in Blahyi’s powers created a bond of loyalty between the young high priest and the government that believed in him. So, when, in 1989, Doe’s regime faced the prospect of being overthrown from a rebel group, Blahyi decided to fight to defend the regime, joining ULIMO, a pro-government militia.
Soon, Blahyi was a warlord, overseeing a large fighting force that was laced, alas, with child soldiers. But it was no ordinary militia. Blahyi insisted that his ability to conjure magical forces on behalf of his rag-tag group of fighters would protect them, rendering clothing unnecessary. Soon, the group became known as the Naked Base Commandos, and their leader, Blahyi, rebranded as General Butt Naked.
During combat, the commandos would emerge from the jungle, completely nude other than their shoes, apparently protected from bullets by amulets and other magical charms. And because the belief in black magic was shared among both sides in the conflict, this display of magical confidence often terrified rival soldiers, sometimes causing them to flee in terror.
Whether General Butt Naked’s troops could harness magical forces or not was beside the point; belief that they could was sufficient to create a decisive battlefield edge. And with that edge, they committed horrible atrocities, with Blahyi later confessing that his forces killed up to 20,000 people, many of them civilians, murdered for sport or sacrifice. Blahyi also confessed to cannibalism, driven by his belief that he had received a prophetic vision from the Devil.
The crucial point, which Blahyi illustrates at the extremes, is this: no matter how much we pretend otherwise with our supply and demand curves, our game theory models, or our sophisticated regressions, human behavior is driven by subjective beliefs about our world. And for much of the eight billion people who make up our shared humanity, the sterile modern realm of cold-hearted rationality is a foreign one, subservient to a more mysterious and elusive reality where demons play, witches curse, and superstitions reign.
It is absurdly naive to imagine that politics, as a human system, is somehow immune from those widespread beliefs.
II: Diabolical Objects and the Quest for Certainty
In 2012, I arrived for my first stint of field research during my PhD, in Madagascar. Shortly after I landed on the island and settled in my barebones lodgings, I heard the sound of triumphant celebrations in the streets. Perplexed, I went outside, and was greeted by an impromptu procession.
Good news had spread like wildfire: the government had captured a top sorcerer, a pivotal figure in a militia that had been terrorizing villagers in the southern part of the island. The president, much to the delight of the public, announced that the sorcerer’s “diabolical objects” had been destroyed. With that announcement, his political popularity received a welcome boost, an early indication that rational choice politics—as imagined by hefty textbooks—is itself a fantasy world.
According to an enormous academic survey published in 2022, an estimated 43 percent of the global population beliefs in witchcraft, as defined as “an ability of certain people to intentionally cause harm via supernatural means.” There is a tendency among educated Western liberals to both drastically underestimate this proportion and to ridicule it. But that’s misguided for at least two reasons.
First, belief in superstition, witchcraft, and as we’ll soon see, vampires, are not byproducts of stupidity, but rather the nearly universal offshoots of precarious uncertainty. When life is a relentless minefield, where poverty crushes prosperity and survival hinges on rainfall or the fickle protective aura of a corrupt, murderous government, mystical belief provides a structured logic for making sense of chaos.
This doesn’t require an understanding of how these forces might work, so long as there’s a mechanism of possible recourse, in which humanity has levers to assert control over a dangerous, unruly world. As Theodore Zeldin astutely wrote in a 1989 essay: superstition functions the same “as the modern car-driver, who does not know how his car works, but trusts it all the same, interested only in knowing which button to press.”
Second, as we’ll turn to momentarily, the holier-than-thou mentality of educated Westerners who imagine such beliefs to be the relic of a distant past or the exotic foolishness of other cultures are, perhaps, a touch ignorant of how much these beliefs continue to sway politics in the most powerful country on the planet: the United States.
III: Power, Superstition, Vampires, and Astrology
When I was an undergraduate, I read a book by Luise White, a professor at the University of Florida. It was a history tome with an improbable title: Speaking with Vampires. But this was not a book about Dracula and delusions; instead, it used widespread tales of bloodsucking vampires throughout eastern and central Africa as a window into how ordinary people made sense of colonial subjugation.
The book opens with a story told by a colonial administrator in 1948, of an angry mob attacking a fire station in Kenya. Rumors had circulated that the fire brigade were, in fact, vampires concealing their true nature beneath their black overalls, an outfit widely believed to be indicative of the mumiani, the bloodsucking vampires. It was said that the victims were kept in pits beneath the police station, the fire brigade’s water buckets just a clever ruse, a way to transport their blood.
After centuries of oppression and slavery, in which strange, white-skinned intruders would arrive and make people disappear—only to return and rule over a system designed to suck resources out of a colony for the benefit of an invisible host far away—it requires little imagination to see how vampire beliefs fit neatly into the lived experience of African victimhood. As Luise White told VICE:
“In colonial Zambia in the 1930, Africans claimed their blood was taken and their bodies left for dead to make cough drops for Europeans. Can you think of a better description of the exploitation for luxuries for white people? In post-colonial East and Central Africa, there were many stories that blood was sold to this or that country in exchange for weapons. Farfetched, but a good way to talk about how far a repressive regime would go to control its own population.”
These beliefs, with roots in a disturbing colonial past, persist to the present day, perhaps most notably in Malawi. The president recently announced that he would visit part of the country where vigilantes killed several people suspected of being vampires, an unfortunately frequent event. (Three BBC journalists were nearly killed in 2017 when they were mistaken for vampires).
But beyond vampire belief, superstition also sways politics, determining the fates of national economies and provoking bloody uprisings that have shaped our modern world.
Take, for example, the case of Myanmar. The former dictator, Ne Win, believed the number nine was auspicious—a belief rooted in a widespread role for numbers in Myanmar’s culture.
In 1987, he took this belief to an unfortunate extreme: he unilaterally ordered that all denominations of currency that weren’t divisible by nine would immediately stop being considered as legal tender. Life savings were wiped out in an instant, as the country began anew with denominations of forty-five and ninety kyat. The economy crashed.
But Ne Win didn’t just let his beliefs affect the economy. He repeatedly sought the guidance of a soothsayer. Other times, he would stomp barefoot on bloody raw meat and then shoot his own reflection in a mirror, which he believed would stave off the risk of an assassination attempt.
A year after his disastrous currency devaluation, disgruntled students launched an uprising, on August 8, 1988. They chose this date because of a similar numerical superstition: the belief that the power of the number eight was said to be stronger than the power of the number nine. It’s known to history as the 8888 uprising. Thousands were killed in a bloodbath during the government crackdown, an event that continues to reverberate today in Myanmar’s ongoing violence.
However, lest we imagine that “other” cultures are more prone to violating bounded rational choice models than our own, the former chief of staff to US President Ronald Reagan released his memoirs in the same year as the 8888 uprising. In them, he revealed that First Lady Nancy Reagan had, for seven years, employed an astrologer to advise her, even on policymaking. “Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise,” he wrote. Reagan’s journey from Hollywood through the White House was guided, more literally than we realized, by the stars.
And it wasn’t that long ago that a former senior official at HSBC, a bank that now manages roughly $15 trillion in assets, was quoted as saying “most astrology stuff doesn’t check out, but some of it does.”
Today, belief in astrology has gone bananas, with a total economic value of the industry estimated around $13 billion. Beyond astrology, there is a resurgence in beliefs in omens—symbols of dark forces coalescing in the United States. Just before the total solar eclipse in April, for example, an astrology influencer—one Los Angeles-based “Ayoka,” who had amassed hundreds of thousands of social media followers—warned her disciples that the eclipse was merely the beginning of the apocalypse.
On April 7, 2024, she tweeted this QAnon account’s warning, seen by an estimated 4.5 million people.
Around the same time, shortly after retweeting vile conspiracy theorist and Trump acolyte Alex Jones, Ayoka posted this warning to her followers, which has since been viewed a reported 18 million times.
What Ayoka did next, according to police and media reports, was to prepare for the eclipse apocalypse by fatally stabbing her boyfriend. She then bundled her kids into her SUV, roared onto the LA freeway, and proceeded to toss her 8 month-old infant and her 9 year-old daughter out the window while driving at speed. (The 9 year-old survived; the infant died). Ayoka, real name Danielle Cherakiyah Johnson, 34, then accelerated to over 100 miles per hour and drove straight into a tree, killing herself.2
She was, as best one can surmise, avoiding the apocalypse, taking matters into her own hands before the eclipse. This was a person that hundreds of thousands of Americans had followed on social media, as a guiding light for how to live their lives. And her reach—along with her place in the conspiratorial universe around American right-wing politics—shows that the belief in such dark omens and apocalyptic forces are not just political influences far away, but at home, too.
IV: The United States of Demons
On Sunday night, at the Trump rally in Madison Square Garden, a sanitation worker “who was billed as the former president’s ‘lifelong friend,’ but apparently first met him just two weeks ago,” called Kamala Harris “the antichrist” and “the Devil” while waving a crucifix in the air. (The speaker, who is reportedly the same David Rem who was arrested in 1992 for spectacularly failing to transport 18 kilos of cocaine on an Amtrak train, apparently had no qualms with the cognitive dissonance produced by appearing onstage alongside hate-filled bigots who painted Latinos as dangerous drug smugglers).
On Monday, the televangelist Paula White, led prayers in which faith leaders touched Trump with their blessings. Yes, this is the same Paula White who presided over prayers both at Trump’s inauguration and before the January 6th rally that led to the attack on the US Capitol in 2021. She also presided over the launch of Trump’s re-election bid in 2019: “Let every demonic network that is aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken,” she prayed.
In previous remarks, White warned that “a demon prince in the form of a many-headed dragon” would soon appear, and insisted that the embattled, defeated soon-to-be former president would nonetheless prevail. She insisted that soon, her flock would see the handiwork of the “angels of Africa” overcoming the “demonic confederacies” hoping to remove Trump from power.
White is part of an authoritarian evangelical movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, and they are central players in MAGA politics.
Worse, as I’ve previously written:
More and more people are attending formal exorcisms, which often have overt political messages in support of Trump. The popular ReAwaken America tour was founded by a man who claims that COVID-19 vaccines are associated with the “mark of the beast.” A speaker at one such event warned that several diseases afflicting women are caused by “demon sperm.” The tour doesn’t just feature fringe characters with little influence; its speakers have included Michael Flynn, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Eric Trump, and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona.
So, before we indulge in haughty disdain for those who spend this Halloween worrying about real vampires and witches rather than the Hallmark variety, we must remember a crucial fact: politics is a human endeavor, and an overwhelming majority of humans incorporates some form of magical thinking into their worldview. The United States is certainly not immune from that fact, and, unfortunately, malicious grifters are summoning very real forces that play on our worst human impulses in pursuit of an increasingly dark political agenda. In a few days, they could get a new omen: that they may soon be in the White House.
And that—far more than ghouls and ghosts—is what should scare us this Halloween.
Thanks for reading! If you value my work, please consider supporting it and making this outlet sustainable for less than $1/week, or, buy FLUKE. You can unlock full access to all 160+ essays I’ve written. I hope you have a wonderful Halloween! (I’ll admit that I have procured a sheep costume to wear with my Border Collie, Zorro, and no, no matter what, photographic evidence will not be placed on the interwebs).
To learn about the history of Halloween, I recommend the work of Ronald Hutton, fellow victim of Philomena Cunk, and an all-around wonderful academic delight.
Beyond such avoidable, depressing tragedies, don’t get me started on healing crystals and manifesting, which, as I’ve previously explained, are far less rational mechanisms of enacting change than consulting your neighborhood medieval service magician.
I’ve never succumbed to superstitions…….touch wood 😉
Well done, Brian! This is why I support your work. People NEED to Believe more than they need to know. People love certainty when there is so little we can know for certain. People are more inclined rationalize-tell stories and consume stories rather than questioning assumptions. Stopping to question assumptions to do research requires effort and opportunity. We are creatures of comfort ease and convenience no matter how objective and sophisticated we think we are-how we attend to the world is always subjective. We can edge towards objectivity with enormous humility, but we never come close to fully arriving there.