Ted Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene Raise Hell Over Sam Smith’s Grammys Performance
The Grammys was its usual lavish spectacle featuring scores of styled-out celebrities on Sunday night. The buttoned-up, right-wing political commentariat was not pleased, particularly about Sam Smith and Kim Petras‘ performance of “Unholy” — which featured fire, red lighting, and Smith sporting a pair of horns.
“Don’t fight the culture wars, they say,” griped right-wing commentator Liz Wheeler. “Meanwhile demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan. I could throw up.”
“This…is…evil,” Ted Cruz, a United States senator, responded.
“The Grammy’s featured Sam Smith’s demonic performance and was sponsored by Pfizer,” wrote Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). “And the Satanic Church now has an abortion clinic in NM that requires its patients to perform a satanic ritual before services. American Christians need to get to work.”
Greene wasn’t the only conspiracy theorist to point out that the Grammys were sponsored by Pfizer, the ostensible idea being that the Covid-19 vaccine and the Grammys are part of a larger confluence of evil forces working together to brainwash your children and destroy America.
“The Devil. Brought to you by Pfizer…,” wrote Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
“The satanic worshipping Grammys – brought to you by – Pfizer. Perfect,” added right-wing Twitter troll @catturd2.
“That entire demonic presentation at the Grammy’s? Brought to you by Pfizer,” tweeted Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing commentator who, like @catturd2, regularly interacts with Twitter owner Elon Musk.
There was a time when conservatives would point to harmless allusions to the devil in popular culture, throw up their hands, lament the youth, and that would be the end of it. The culture war is now so insidious and so stupid — and so infused with the spirit of QAnon, which holds that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles — that such allusions are very sincerely being called out as part of a vast, governmental conspiracy to turn the United States into a wasteland of fire, brimstone, and drag queens. It would be laughable if so many people didn’t believe in it, and those who do, do so so rabidly that they’ll use absolutely anything they can, even President Biden talking in front of red light, to push it.
“The elite in our society are fully in line with the ideology of Satanic fealty expressed by Smith and Petras,” Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro wrote absurdly of the red-tinged performance on Sunday. “So what’s the story with Satan and the transgressive ideology? For most of religious history, Satan was the great villain, an emblem of rebellion against the Good and the True, a symbol of resistance to the Holy.”
…or it was just two artists having fun at the Grammys.