Witch hunt à la française

This tweet comes from a troll whose identity is masked by Twitter because it had fewer than 5,000 followers, but researchers from Clemson University identified the account as MaximGaron1.

One reason Maxim maxed out at 530 followers could be that he claimed to be French but obviously wasn’t. In his profile description he claimed to be born in Paris but went on to say the French equivalent of, “I am interested of foreign affairs.”

The tweet Maxim posted says, “Régionales Nord: Marine Le Pen assure qu' ‘il n’y aura pas de chasse aux sorcières’ si elle est élue [plus a link].” That’s pretty good French, because he got it from a newspaper headline. The article is about the head of the fascist National Front party, Marine Le Pen, and her candidacy in the French regional elections at the end of 2015. The headline quotes her as saying that there won’t be any “witch hunts” if she is elected. Since she lost in the second round of voting, we will never know if she would have kept that promise.

Wait, there were witch hunts way back in 2015?

If you use the modern definition of a witch hunt – an attempt to hold a politician or political network accountable for unethical/illegal behavior – then yes, the term was around back then. Le Pen’s political party was under investigation for fraud at the time of her statement (and the tweet), and it was convicted years later, both in that case and an unrelated fraud case brought by the European Union.

Who was Maxim talking to?

This message was aimed at conservative French people. The Clemson researchers would have categorized this account as “Right Troll” if it had been an English language account. Maxim’s target audience isn’t difficult to figure out from reading his other tweets, but the tweet was also quoting a headline from Le Point, a right leaning publication.

What was being attacked?

It appears that Maxim was trying to nudge voters away from the conservative (but not fascist) Republican party candidate who ultimately won. The trolls are all about pushing people toward the extremes, so this makes sense.

How is this manipulative?

In saying that she won’t engage in witch hunts if elected, Le Pen is implying that the fraud investigations against her party are witch hunts, which in turn implies that those investigations have no basis in reality. Not surprisingly, the Russian propaganda outlet RT (formerly Russia Today) ran  a piece on the EU case against the National Front in which it only quoted people from the National Front and managed to say almost nothing about what the allegations even were, other than “bogus,” “a political game,” “political manipulation,” and “false.”

Nonetheless, the case was straight forward. The ruling was based on Le Pen’s inability to show that her EU Parliamentary assistant had performed any work despite being paid 300,000 euros by the EU for said work. It is difficult to imagine any legitimate work that a parliamentary assistant could do without leaving any evidence behind.

Did the tweet work?

Apparently not, at least not in the short term. Le Pen lost the election and both court cases, and Maxim got no traction at all on Twitter.

On the other hand, a lack of reaction on Twitter doesn’t always indicate failure on other platforms. More importantly, with Russian backing in the form of financing, troll messaging and hacking, Le Pen later made it to the runoff in the 2017 French presidential election and made a decent showing in the second round, especially for a fascist.

The Malleus Maleficarum

It would be a shame to discuss witch hunts and not bring in the wisdom of the masters on that topic, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, authors of the 1486 witch hunting manual, The Malleus Maleficarum. In the 15th century when witch hunting was more common, these two were considered serious scholars and authorities in the field. Keep that in mind when interpreting what they had to say.

According to them, if you want to go on a witch hunt, you’ve got to look for women. As they put it, “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable.” An interesting take. They explained: “There was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives.”

Getting back to the actual hunt, I’m not going to be the one to tell Mueller that he did it all wrong, but it does seem like he missed some obvious avenues of investigation. Like, why didn’t he look into who has been buying more oats and corn than she could reasonably need? Kramer and Sprenger point out that there are those witches who “sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, sometimes twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report.” The oats and corn have to come from somewhere, right?

Obviously, the question shouldn’t be, “Who stole John Podesta’s emails?” but “Which men are missing their penises and who are the witches in those men’s villages?”

I bet you think these ideas went away a long time ago …

But you would be wrong. Some of them are alive and well.

For instance, in January 2020, People For the American Way pointed out that President Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula White, prayed for “all satanic pregnancies to miscarry.” (See: https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/right-wing-bonus-tracks-signs-signs-everywhere-a-sign/ ) The concept of satanic pregnancies is all over The Malleus Maleficarum and is the foundation of European witch beliefs. Although White and Kramer/Sprenger both got these ideas by taking the Bible literally, the Malleus Maleficarum authors at least have the excuse that there wasn’t much else to go by in fifteenth century Europe. Ironically, White responded to critics of her “satanic pregnancies” comment with the dubious claim that she hadn’t meant it literally. I’ll buy the argument that the Bible shouldn’t be taken literally because it was written to be comprehensible to people who lived many centuries ago, but White is speaking to people living in 2020, so she can try to piggyback off of that reasoning but won’t be in for a very long ride.