The thing about the satanic ritial claim is that it makes sense if you view it as a method of discrediting the victim / story. If someone is molested and the perpetrators also conduct a whacky satanic ritual during the act, the victim is going to have a hell of a hard time being believed if they come forth. Hell, we see it in this thread with people dismissing the whole thing based on that alone.

Don't get me wrong, I think the evidence for it is a stretch, but there is some objectively weird stuff in the emails that do not make sense if taken literally.

Perfectly reasonable view of things if you ask me. I remember watching this thing spawn in real time during the release of Podesta's emails. There were 4 things IMHO that made this into a big deal for the_donald: 1) #SpiritCooking, 2) the "Pizza Related Map", 3) Bill Clinton's alleged trips to "pedo island without the secret service", and 4) Some have interpreted Joe Biden's interaction with children as creepy. Then, people started looking at old emails in a whole new light and realized there appeared to be coded messages involving children in them. That's kind of where I stopped tracking personally because the signal to noise ratio is pretty low.

Jesus Christ, this is gets at exactly the Pizzagate fake news phenomena. Right here. This very thread and the other thread. The reason why people dismiss this as crazy talk, is because there's literally no evidence for this ever happening, and every time these types of allegations has been brought up before, they've been completely discredited.

Your proposition hinges on replacing the the axiom that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, with extraordinary claims are more plausible to mundane ones.

Satanic child abuse is an old moral panic from the 1980s, of which nothing ever existed. Seriously, they're all discredited. Some even involved people claiming preschool teachers were fucking literal demons while riding on brooms.[0]

I toss out a joke about the completely discredited claim that Podesta is a warlock because of a mention of world famous artist Marina Abramović.[1] But of course, the fault is on me, because this is HN, and of course it's going to be treated as gospel.

But hell, what do I know. I'm contemplating ascending to the Aetheral plane because I've been listening to backmaksed Judas Priest[2] and playing Dungeons and Dragons[3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satanic_ritual_abuse_a...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking#Subliminal_persuas...

[3] https://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.asp

Part of the reason we're getting conspiracy theories like this is probably that John Podesta conducting satanic ceremonies is kind of plausible. He (or his brother, I forget) is friends with an artist who likes to carry out elaborate ceremonies involving blood and bodily fluids, and helps fund her work (possibly stuff that's less intentionally controversial, though). While that's technically not satanic, the need to qualify the kind of blood magic he's linked to makes it hard to have a sense of what's realistic anymore.