THE Super Bowl Halftime Show has been wildly slammed as “satanic” as the star-studded display is set to feature performances by Snoop Dogg, Dr Dre and Eminem.
The biggest NFL game of the season will take place this Sunday as the Cinncinati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams face off at Sofi Stadium for the biggest prize in football.
California love will be in the air when the Super Bowl rolls into Los Angeles this weekend, with a dose of ’90s nostalgia with performances by the city’s own Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar, along with Eminem and Mary J Blige.
As the rap heavyweights get set to grace the stage during the NFL’s traditional halftime show, the latest Fever Dreams podcast on The Daily Beast explores how far-right conspiracy theorists are warning about the “satanic” threat from the display.
Daily Beast reporter Kelly Weill says Stop-the-Steal fanatics like Arizona’s Republican lawmaker Wendy Rogers have been insanely claiming the Super Bowl show “exposes children to ‘evil, wicked, Satanic’ things.”
“With Stop-the-Steal fanatics like Arizona wingnut Wendy Rogers hyperventilating that the Super Bowl show exposes children to ‘evil, wicked, Satanic’ things (her words), there’s a very real ‘performance-related Satanic Panic that’s been brewing for a little while now in the US,’ Weill said.
Rogers, who previously called for the arrest of Democrats for an imagined plot to rig the 2020 presidential election, also suggested that the Canadian truckers behind the anti-vaccine siege of Ottawa could “storm the Super Bowl as a punishment for Colin Kaepernick kneeling to protest police brutality.”
Weill adds that the “Satanic” fears have been boiling after Travis Scott’s deadly Astroworld concert in Houston last December that left 10 dead.
“Of course, it’s not hard to map the influence of QAnon onto the latest anti-Super Bowl crusade, nor the longstanding backlash from the right when Black artists perform at the halftime show (like when Beyonce’s backup dancers were criticized as supposed Trojan horses for Communism).
“In fact, this backlash happens every time there’s a major Black artist performing at the Super Bowl,” Weill points out in the podcast.
“They’re not explicitly linked but somehow whenever a Black artist takes the field… it’s evil, it’s Satanic, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that the people pushing the Travis Scott Satanic Panic conspiracy theories were also not reacting one of the most popular Black artists of the current moment.”
QAnon is a disproven and discredited far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic pedophiles are running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotted against former US President Donald Trump while he was in office.
However, this isn’t the first time far-right extremists have spread misinformation about the Super Bowl.
One of the most wildly debunked claims about the Super Bowl is that the annual NFL championship game is linked to a spike in human trafficking.
The claim is that thousands of men travel to the host city, and while waiting for or recovering from the big game, they go looking for sex, which is provided by women and girls who have been forced into sexual slavery by traffickers.
There has been no connection or truth between trafficking and the game and no uptick in trafficking activity as game day approaches.
The wild claims have been debunked many times by law enforcement officials, political leaders, organizations that fight human trafficking, academic studies and news outlet.
Supporters of the discredited far-right movement have also wildly claimed that Hurricane Ida was a “man-made” storm and believed that JFK Jr would return from the dead – decades after he was killed.
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