Everyone Is Satan in Hell

We've got trouble, right here in River City, with a capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for "pool!" —Harold Hill, on why a pool table is serious trouble.

Some Moral Guardians are so paranoid that they'll attack the most ridiculous things, or will attack them in the most ridiculous ways possible. Essentially, they use Insane Troll Logic to prove that something is The New Rock and Roll. There are a few favorite methods used:

• Excluded Middle Ground

This type of thinking runs thus:

• Alice wears a shirt with a picture of X on it.
• X is used as a symbol of Y by Z.
• Therefore, the X on Alice's shirt symbolizes Y.

A common example is when they claim that pentacles must represent Lucifer, because Luciferians use a pentacle as a symbol. Following this logic, one could assert that the Darigold cow symbolizes Hinduism, or the Nazis stood for Buddhism.

Or similarly:

• Bob's middle name is Hikaru.
• "Hikaru" means "to light."
• "Lucifer" means "light-bringer."
• Therefore, "Hikaru" refers to Lucifer and Bob is Satan.

Never mind the distinct possibility that "Hikaru" was chosen because it's a relatively common name that reflects Bob's Japanese heritage; it must have been chosen to represent Lucifer! This is also funny because Light bringer has been used to describe Jesus, which brings a whole other set of implications further.

All those pretty colors and shapes? Those aren't just eye candy to captivate the show's hyperactive target audience - those are eeeeeeevil occult symbols!

• Quote Mine

Another trick is to take something nasty that a villain said or did out of context, then insinuate that the source material actually encourages that type of thing. This was done with the Harry Potter books, with paranoid fundamentalists citing Voldemort's actions and words as "values" the book supposedly endorses.

• Devil Of The Gaps

Sometimes used against superhero and fantasy stories. The argument runs that if a source of what appears to be magical power is not explicitly explained or understood, then the power must come from Satan, and therefore the story is part of the Satanic agenda. A more likely explanation is that the writers intended the character to use a type of energy or Phlebotinum that is as of yet unknown in our world, or that the power was intended to be a metaphor.

How absurd is this argument? Picture a medieval peasant coming forward in time to your home and declaring that you must be in league with the devil because you use an ungodly power to light your home, cook your food, wash your clothes, etc. This power is electricity, but to the medieval peasant's eyes, such power could have only come from the devil.

• Make Stuff Up

And finally, some of them just make crap up, because their claims that such-and-such is an evil symbol of so-and-so has no historical basis whatsoever.

Expect a lot of Did Not Do the Research (especially You Fail Logic Forever), Dan Browned, Insane Troll Logic, Cowboy Bebop at His Computer, and Critical Research Failure among these people (many of whom believe that Hollywood Satanism is Truth in Television).

Some of these may be born via parody, which the sufficiently naive will believe and spread as gospel truth.

See also Everything Is Racist and Paedo Hunt. Compare The Moral Substitute, Heteronormative Crusader, Windmill Crusader and Informed Obscenity.

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Non-Fictional Examples

Anime and Manga

• Blade of the Immortal: The main character, Manji, takes the "crux gammata" as both his name and his personal symbol. As a symbol of prosperity and good fortune, the swastika was widely used throughout the ancient world. The anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi meaning did not exist until 1910.
  • The swastika is still widely used in Hinduism (and Buddhism, to a lesser extent) as it was for thousands of years all over Eurasia before the Nazis appropriated it to their own use.
    • While certainly played straight often, the anti-Swastika sentiment is actually a subversion in many cases. A lot of people who do recognize when a Swastika is used regardless of the Nazi connotations of it will still want to limit its public perception, at least in their own communities, as Holocaust survivors may be traumatized by just seeing the image too much whether it was intended in its use or not. Even striped pajamas have caused issues occasionally, without anyone thinking they were anti-Semitic.

Comic Books

• This trope is basically the reason why the Comics Code was created. In 1954, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published a book called Seduction of the Innocent which argued that comics were a danger to children. It didn't help that there was a US Congressional hearing being held about comics at the same time. Before the Moral Guardians could crack down, the industry created the Comics Code itself.
• Hitler considered Superman to be an honorary Jew. (Superman's creator was Jewish, to be fair.) However, since the Nazis referred to non-Aryans as Untermenschen, or "under-men", you'll encounter people who think Superman is Nazi-related. (One of those people was Frederic Wertham, who was very disturbed by the image of a "superman" wearing an "S" just like the Nazi SS!)

Literature

• Harry Potter contains "witches". Centuries ago, "witch" strictly meant someone who made a Deal with the Devil; therefore, even though the modern connotation of "witch" is simply "one who can do magic" and has nothing to do with Satanic origins, the magic must be Satanic and encouraging kids to pursue the same! The sad thing is that even a half-close reading of the series shows many parallels with Christian doctrine and the Gospels, especially by Deathly Hallows, but the Moral Guardians just don't know when to stop! One criticized Voldemort's drinking of unicorn blood, claiming that the book was teaching children that they could gain immortality by drinking the blood of something that wasn't Jesus. Of course, they didn't mention the parts where it's explained that drinking unicorn blood is an atrocious thing to do and that while it will stop you from dying, you will live a cursed half-life.
  • Not to mention that Quirrellmort (Voldemort in the movie) says "There is no good or evil; there is only power, and those too weak to seek it." Horrible philosophy? Yes. But this is Voldemort.
  • It's probably worth noting that some of the accusations that Harry Potter was turning kids on to witchcraft came from an Onion article that someone along the line didn't realize was a joke, forwarded to all their friends, and it blew up from there. Did Not Do the Research indeed.
• The Chronicles of Narnia has actually been banned in some Christian school libraries because it's supposedly Satanic. Never mind its obvious Christian allegories, and never mind that Aslan is literally Jesus.
  • It ought be noted that, as with Mr. Potter above, fundies also hated Narnia because it mentioned magic. Making it quite obvious to everyone that apparently every fundie ever skipped the day that symbolism was taught in Language Arts class.
  • In the original edition of his anti-Dungeons and Dragons (see below) tract "Dark Dungeons", Jack Chick claimed that the works of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, which D&D was based on, were... you guessed it. This is hilarious because Mr. Lewis was a professional Christian writer and apologist; one of his more famous works was The Screwtape Letters, in which he details the methods for combating Satan's influence, and The Chronicles of Narnia is today treated as a Christian substitute for Harry Potter by some parents. Tolkien was also a devout Christian, and was supposedly responsible for Lewis' conversion.
• Jack Chick is hardly the only one to denounce Tolkien as "Satanic". Perhaps the most baffling "argument" is presented in this essay: you know how in Lord of the Rings, the good guys win in the end? Well, you know who else teaches that good always triumphs over evil? WITCHES! Evidently, a good Christian should look forward to the eventual triumph of Satan.
• Twilight gets this treatment here. Yep, Edward Cullen was obviously named after the kid who escaped a Satanic cult that one time, and the chessboard on Breaking Dawn's cover is obviously supposed to look like the floor of a Masonic lodge. Incidentally, Bill Schnoebelen is the guy who claims that Dungeons and Dragons contains "authentic" spells and rituals. Given the bizarre, sensational, and contradictory stories he's told over the years, it's conjectured that he simply makes a large portion of his stuff up.
• Some Internet conspiracy theorists have decided that The Hunger Games is actually designed to brainwash people into accepting the dystopian society it depicts.

Live-Action TV

• The Teletubbies: The purple one with the triangle and handbag is obviously proof that the evil gay liberals are forcing their godless agenda on our innocent children.
  • He also wore a skirt at times that the other male refused to wear (strangely, it seems this was never brought up by either side).
• Parody sites like Christ Wire play with this a lot. For example, in their analysis of Glee, they accuse the straight Glee club teacher of turning kids into homosexuals because he dances and sings a lot, and they also criticize it for encouraging kids to "have fun in the arts" instead of pursuing "real" careers. They skip over all the show's much more obvious attacks on the Christian Right -- like the fact that the celibacy club president becomes pregnant, or the way her ultra-conservative, Glenn Beck-loving parents throw her out of the house when they find out. Even better is their article where they accuse The Golden Girls of turning "a generation of American boys into homosexuals."
  • We know that's not true.
• Legendary Firefly hater "Allecto" picked apart just about every action and line of dialogue in the series in an effort to expose what she saw as Joss Whedon's hatred of women. As far as she was concerned, the show was Whedon's manifesto of how he thought women should be abused by men.
  • What was even worse was her criticism of the episode Our Mrs. Reynolds, whose first half is largely taken up by Mal loudly protesting that the girl who has apparently been sold to him for getting rid of the bandits plaguing the town is not anyone's property and is free to do as she likes. Not only does she condemn the wife-selling as if Whedon had been openly endorsing it, but she dismisses the viewpoint character's obvious disapproval with "but he can't really mean it, he's a man".

Music

• Parodied with the Worm Quartet's song (link hilarious but NSFW) "What Your Parents Think All Your Music Sounds Like", allegedly "the most evil song ever recorded", which consists entirely of commands exhorting the listener to perform all sorts of misdeeds from raping their mothers to drinking milk straight from the jug, accompanied by a crowd chant of: "SEX! DRUGS! SATAN!"
• According to some conspiracy theorists, trying to grow out of your innocent child star image is proof that the Satanic media is using you to lure innocent children away from their own purity and innocence. For example, Britney Spears' entire life was a plot -- start her out on the Mickey Mouse show so parents think she's sweet and innocent, then when she gets older put her in skanky clothes and have her kiss Madonna to lure (former) children into depravity.
• The Tritone. Because it's dissonant, it must be the devil!

Other/Multiple

• According to this parody website, everything from candles to paisley prints contains demons waiting to pounce on you. Paisleys, you see, are evil because 1: the design was invented by those heathen Indians, 2: it looks like that heathen Pythagorean comma, and 3: it was printed on fabrics made from goat hair, and anything to do with goats is evil because goats represent Satan.
  • The design originally ("originally" in this context meaning "right after they stole it from the Indians who'd been using it for several millenia") came from the Scottish town of Paisley, which anyone who has spent five minutes in will compare unfavorably to Hell, so that site might be onto something after all.
  • From the website: "For those of you who demand to see a Scripture before you can believe something, there are NO Scriptures that say YOU do NOT have demons. That should settle it!"
    • If you need any more evidence of trolling, it also says: BOYCE and BOICE are two demons that interfere with any electronic equipment, i.e., phone, computer, printer, automobile. If something malfunctions, command these two demons to leave your equipment, in the name of Jesus. We get many emails saying this worked.
• Apparently, every round or semi-round shape in a logo is supposed to represent the Satanic all-seeing eye. Also, they point to logos containing eyes in which the eye makes perfect sense even without the conspiracy angle, such as eyes incorporated into the logos of home-security products. This makes even less sense if you know the symbol is meant to represent God (because he is omni-cognisant.)
• Anything and everything that is taller than it is wide is a phallic symbol. No exceptions.
• There is a site explaining, in all seriousness, why Santa Claus is an evil Satanic character. One reason was that "Old Nick" is a nickname for Satan. "Old Saint Nick" in fact just derives from "Saint Nicholas," a historical person upon whom Santa Claus was based.
  • There's an even sillier claim that Santa is just a Significant Anagram for Satan, which fortunately, most people just take as a joke. (In reality, "santa" simply means "saint.")
    • Ironically, this almost works for the Finnish name for Santa Claus, which is "Joulupukki" and means, seemingly nonsensically, "Christmas (Male) Goat". This comes from a goat St. Nicholas was said to walk around on a leash, which really represented the devil, specifically his having bound it and made it harmless. This is not so much satanic as people having forgotten what the symbolism originally meant.
  • Wait, if Santa is really Satan and "santa" simply means "saint"...then that means every saint ever is really just Satan in disguise! It all makes sense now...
  • One common theory is that the myth of Santa Claus was fabricated by the devil to dispel faith in God, IE, when children discover that Santa Claus is not real, they will become more likely to apply this same logic to God as well, thus falling within the devil's evil grasp.
  • For this reason, even metals aren't immune. Nickel comes from the German Kupfernickel, "Old Nick's copper".
• There is one video by Muslim extremists that claim that Pepsi is pro-Israel. Why? Because Pepsi is an obvious acronym for Pay Every Penny to Save Israel.
  • Ironically, Pepsi is less involved in Israel than Coca-Cola is, and neither one can be accused of conspiracy, just of doing business there or not.
• According to some fundamentalist Muslims, Coca Cola's logo can be read as Arabic if it's inverted, and it says "No God, no Mecca." Although you have to squint a lot and do some seriously creative interpretation of the patterns, it resembles more closely the words: "For God, for Mecca."
  • Which means that some fundamentalist Christian out there believes that.
    • Fortunately, few of them can read Arabic.
• Vigilant Citizen. A website devoted to finding all of the Illuminati/Masonic symbolism and brainwashing in the pop culture world, from Sherlock Holmes and Disney to Lady Gaga and Beyonce. There is a swelling undercurrent of believers who have congregated to YouTube to warn of the evils of music videos, children's programming and everything else in popular culture. The amount of reaching (and "research") is scarily staggering. See: the 5 part series on the possession of Beyonce, the 11 part series on Jay-Z's "Satanic Connections", and the 21(!) part series on Rihanna's "Umbrella" video. This site, and others like it, hasn't gone unnoticed among the celebrities targeted; Lady Gaga is to the point where she is milking it for all it's worth, and Jay-Z's response was the brilliant and darkly artistic video "On to the Next One."
• The Beltway Sniper caused fear and panic through out Washington. Before he was caught, an investigation of one of his nests turned up a tarot card which had the words "I am God" written on it in marker. Despite the many theological or philosophical, or cultural possibilities given from the choice of card and words, the media declared that it was clearly a crazed video gamer. Why? Because "I am God" is clearly a reference to "God mode" a term in video games for a cheat that makes you invincible. This leads to the obvious question -- if he thought he was in "god mode", why was he hiding?
• Conservapedia, although it's more like Everyone Is Liberal In Washington, DC.
• Metapedia is this for white supremacists. "Anti-Racism" redirects to "Anti-White Movement."
• You can find plenty of this at Fundies Say The Darndest Things. A few particularly rich examples include...
  • The Legend of Zelda and Resident Evil will give you real demons!
  • Avatar is conditioning people to accept reptilians and half-human hybrids.
  • Klingons are also part of the reptilian agenda - and the "Klingon" language is really the reptilian language!
• The YouTube user gorilla1999 can connect anything to Freemasons, Satanists, and reptilians. There's also a video where he claims that most businesses in the world are controlled by reptilians or Freemasons. One wonders if that applies to Mom & Pop grocery stores as well.
• Christopher Lord, AKA Truthiracy. The contents of his YouTube channel must be seen to be believed - he aims to prove that everything is Satanic. His over-dramatic delivery of everything and his insane troll etymology suggests that it is a Stealth Parody. Of course, you can never really be sure.
• For a while, the Procter & Gamble company suffered from rumors of having links to Satanism, mostly thanks to this company logo. It was claimed that the logo was a mockery of Revelations 12:1 ("And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of 12 stars."), since it has 13 stars instead of 12. It didn't help that rival company Amway also helped in propagating the rumors.
• Some Protestants are convinced that the Catholic Church is secretly a Satanic cult and that the Pope is the Anti-Christ. Their "proofs" often include the "horned hand" or mano cornuto (an old Italian charm to ward off the evil eye; not Satanic), the upside-down cross (actually based on the tradition that Saint Peter, who is said to have been the first Pope, was crucified upside-down), and the hexagram (appropriated from Judaism; called the "star of creation" by some Christians and used to represent the six days of creation). You can find one of Jack Chick's highly flawed attacks on Catholicism here.
• Glenn Beck once claimed that the artwork outside Rockefeller Center (NBC's corporate headquarters and site of many of their TV studios) in New York was intended to glorify communism and/or fascism, as documented here. In reality, the only artwork that was ever on display at Rockefeller Center that can be considered communist-themed, the mural Man at the Crossroads, was destroyed after an outraged Nelson Rockefeller saw the mural's depiction of Vladimir Lenin and ordered it painted over with one of Abraham Lincoln.
  • On a (slightly) less insane note, he has also said that the fasces is an ancient symbol for fascism. It is indeed a Roman symbol for authority, and it was indeed borrowed by Mussolini, but that's not quite the same...
• Since the colorless energy image on the Pokémon trading card game looks like a hexagram, it's obviously a Zionist conspiracy, hence the game being banned in Saudi Arabia.
  • There was also quite an uproar about a Nazi swastika in the background of a Zubat card illustraton... turns out, the card image was flipped when brought into America, and it's the symbol of peace they intended to put on the card. Not that most people in America would be able to tell the difference anyway.
• BSD (all types) has this problem since their logo/mascot is a little devil. It also doesn't help that background processes in *nix systems are called daemons.
• There is an urban legend that the word "picnic" derives from "pick a n*****" and was originally used to refer to a lynching with food and music for white spectators. Snopes dealt with this one...

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons and Dragons -- Certain people have claimed that the game contains "authentic" occult rituals and spells. The immortal Jack Chick did a whole tract, the infamous "Dark Dungeons", about fantasy gaming being a gateway to Satan. This is in spite of the fact that Gary Gygax was himself a Christian -- you'd think portraying demons and devils as bad guys, and angels as good guys, would be an obvious enough clue of his actual stance.
• This has caused other game companies (like Rifts publisher Palladium Books) to place a disclaimer in all their books stating that their books are works of fiction and they don't condone the supernatural or occultism.
• Worth mentioning is the Magic: The Gathering Hate Dumb. It has been associated with everything from pagan rituals to tarot cards.
  • Technically speaking, you can make a Tarot deck out of Magic cards. Or a normal 52 card playing deck. Or any other deck of any other kind you might ever want.
  • For that matter, Tarot cards were originally storytelling cards, with no ties to anything remotely magical. Then some people start using them as tools of divination, and suddenly the cards are evil by association and any actual storytelling deck is suspect. Go figure.

Video Games

• Pokémon -- accused of being Satanic for various reasons. Two ridiculous examples that stand out is the accusation that the -mon suffix stands for "demon" or that the card game is a "stepping stone" to Magic: The Gathering (see above). That the Pope approves of Pokémon does not necessarily help, as many fundamentalist Protestant sects consider him to be the Anti-Christ.
  • Arabic countries banned the game due to it containing a six-pointed star -- because a six-pointed star was obviously stealth Jewish/Israeli propaganda. More ridiculously, it's been claimed that "Pikachu" means "be a Jew," or worse, "stronger than God" in Latin America. (The truth is much more benign and cutesy. The name is based on a Japanese onomatopoeia, coming out to roughly "Sparklesqueak" in English. Alternatively, it's named after the small fuzzy animal known as a pika. Or it could be both; they do love their puns in Japan, after all.)
  • Don't forget the flap over Koga's Ninja Trick, which shows a manji. What's so bad about a manji? Well, it looks an awful lot like a swastika. Some people who Did Not Do the Research thought it meant Pokemon was encouraging Nazism, because after all, Japan and Germany are joined at the hip.
  • A few distinct Pokemon have been subject to criticism from paranoid watchers. The Pokemon Houndoom has been accused of representing Satanism, since it is characterized as a demon dog with horns and a barbed tail.
  • Some people criticized a Pokemon card showing a Registeel raising its arm. Apparently, it resembled a Nazi salute. To the less paranoid, it just looks like it's raising its arm.
  • Either the most psychotic Moral Guardian ever, or the world's greatest satirical blogger.
    • Even worse, she mixes up the terms Anime and Hentai.
      • Even wore than that, her description of the games (and the "Poke-men" themselves) may make you wonder whether you and her are talking about the same game. For starters, she terribly mistranslated Pikachu's name. She goes on to say that Metapod is "one of the rarest and most powerful Pokemons." Not only is it of course a Com Mon, the only move a wild Metapod knows is Harden. Uri Geller, she says, paid for Alakazam to be added, and Jigglypuff advocates drugs, gay sex, and Liberalism.
      • Worst of all, she blames the mass epilepsy on Pikachu evolving, not blowing up some particularly nasty missiles.
    • And she also promotes the Chick Tracts.
    • Really, how could this not be a parody? There's a mistake is just about every paragraph. She calls Winnie the Pooh "all-American" when he is a British character, misspells the name Superman, refers to Pikachu as a "bear" when he is not, and seems to think anything Japanese is evil. More than anything else, however, it's mind-boggling that anyone who burned comic books and tried to control what people enjoyed would use the word freedom with a straight face.
  • And then there's also creationists who accuse Pokemon of being anti-Christian because the Pokemon "evolve". Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the franchise will immediately recognize that the "evolution" portrayed in the series has absolutely nothing to do with the actual theory of evolution.
• You could call Poe's Law on this one, but check out these two videos for the hidden meanings someone has claimed to find in Legacy of Kain.
• There's no question that the original Doom eventually takes the player to Hell. Enemies are explicitly referred to as demons. Satanic imagery is rampant. However... the player is tasked with destroying these images and agents of evil with a combination of More Dakka and the Trope Namer BFG, yet the game has been accused of supporting the forces of Hell instead of opposing them.

Western Animation

• Care Bears. One particularly ridiculous example is when the movie was accused of promoting the occult because a character used magic from a talking spellbook. You'd think the fact that the spellbook was the villain would have given them a clue, but apparently not.
• Rainbow Brite -- Accused of being Satanic by Texe Marrs. Why? Because it contained stars and rainbows! According to Marrs's logic, if someone who isn't God is throwing around rainbows, that person is definitely promoting Satanism. Surprisingly he didn't seize upon two (actually, three) connections that would have halfway made sense. The star is an ancient symbol of Islam (or, alternately, could be mistaken for the pentagram), while the rainbow is, of course, one of the most famous symbols of gay pride. So, you could say that Rainbow Brite is a satanic Islamist-homosexual!
  • Texe Marrs really lives and dies by this trope. In Circle of Intrigue, Texe quotes Hermes Trismegistus as saying "God is a circle." He then reasons that, since, of course, Hermes was obviously a Satanist, Hermes's god is Satan. Therefore, by his logic, anything that uses a circle as a symbol is Satanic. He then goes on to list examples of things that have circles in their logos, coats of arms, or general shape.
• The Year Without a Santa Claus -- pulled from TV in some places because Heat Miser was deemed "Satanic." Especially absurd because he looked much more like a clown than like a devil.
• Some broadcasters worry about showing the 1942 Academy Award-winning Disney cartoon Der Fuehrers Face because it is rife with swastikas and other Nazi imagery. NOTE: The cartoon is anti-Nazi, and has to show such things precisely so it can condemn them. But, you know...
• Parodic (if eerily realistic-looking) complaints about My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic can be found; the usual themes are that the show is anti-Christian because it includes magic, shows animals as sapient when only humans are made in the image of God, and the fact that the name of the show's producer is Lauren Faust, so she obviously must have a Satanic agenda. A good example is here.
  • Not to mention one blogger that accused the show of being racist (due to the two dark-colored pony guards at the foot of Celestia's throne), Rainbow Dash being a lesbian (simply because of her mane and her love of athletics) and saying that books won't get you anywhere in life and you need authority figures to tell you how to be happy (completely ignoring the fact that Twilight Sparkle's book knowledge more often than not gives vital information to the characters, not to mention that in the beginning of the show she was a bibliophilic shut-in that didn't like to interact with other ponies). Fortunately, Lauren found out about the blog post and fired back with one that addressed every concern and even criticized the original poster.

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Fictional Examples

Comic Books

• Human Gotara-worshippers in Elf Quest are quick to blame just about anything unpleasant on "evil elf spirits", even if the elves have been suffering the same misfortunes all along (e.g. Madcoil's attacks) and even acted to stop them.
  • To be fair, since the elves are deliberately hiding from those humans (and largely seem content to just ignore them as much as they can otherwise instead of putting any effort into improving relations themselves), the humans in turn don't ever get to actually see anything that might dispel their superstitions.

Film

• The Cloud Ten film Deceived seems to have been made by the type of people who made this trope. A 6.66-second long sound byte that the military claimed came from space makes people's... um, sinful natures more prominent, and eventually gives them funky Psychic Powers. The signal's true origin turns out not to be space, but the depths of Hell itself.
• The Mother of The Waterboy, who clams everything is "The Debil". Though it is later revealed she does this to prevent her son from leaving her like her husband did. But after she sees how much the town loves him, is able to get past this.
• Rock: It's Your Decision, a Christian-made film about The New Rock and Roll (reviewed brilliantly by Brad Jones) becomes all about this. A formerly rock-loving teen starts to discover all the "horrible and evil" elements to rock music, eventually turning against it completely by the end of the movie. However, as pointed out in Jones' review, the "hero" of the film clearly Did Not Do the Research in many instances, and by the end has become so paranoid, self-righteous and horrible to everyone around him that one kind of has to wonder if the audience was really meant to side with him.

Literature

• In A Swiftly Tilting Planet, a Magical Native American is depicted as giving birth in complete silence, but the white townspeople expect women to scream during labor. Said townspeople happen to be Puritans at the height of the American witchcraft scare, so it's treated by the townspeople as a sign of devilry.
  • Considering the last time someone killed a "witch" in the Navajo Nation was 1993 (at least the last time the killer went to trial, anyway), many Native Americans would probably agree about the witchcraft.
    • But the signs are different.
• Harry of the Dresden Files has to deal with this on a fairly regular basis. He does this, of course, with his usual blend of sarcasm, dry wit, and setting things on fire.
• The Imperial Order in the Sword of Truth claims this about wizards and sorceresses in particular, but also in general about anyone who is better than anyone else at anything. They are not nice people. It also doesn't stop them from employing these wizards and sorceresses, either.
  • A mob tries this on Zedd. He stokes their fears of him until they all run away screaming. How? By asking them to explain why they're afraid of him.
• Through a combination of a poor knowledge of history, general paranoia, and the Aes Sedai tendency to meddle in everything, any people in The Wheel of Time-verse believe the Aes Sedai to be evil and aligned with the Dark One. By and large, the most you could say about them is that they're incompetent.
  • Slightly more justified with male channelers - the Dark One actually did taint Saidin, so the devil actually does make male channelers go crazy and kill everything.

Live-Action TV

• The Whiteadders from Blackadder are devout followers of this trope, believing that everything from mashed turnips to sitting on chairs is the work of the devil.
  • They still giggle when they find a turnip that looks like a "thingy."
• Dana Carvey's Church Lady character from Saturday Night Live was famous for this kind of thing.

Theatre

• In The Music Man, Harold Hill convinces an entire town that a pool table is a tool of Satan to corrupt their children. He lists several "symptoms" that their children are being corrupted, which include a few things that would actually be worrisome if they happened, but also a few which were perfectly normal and harmless behaviors for teenage boys. (Like using slang words like "swell.") In the end, he boils it down to a catchy little chant that runs on circular logic: "We've got trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for pool!" Just like in many real-life cases, this is a ploy to get the gullible townspeople to buy something: Hill proclaims that the way to save this town from falling into the clutches of evil is to start a boys' band... and Hill just happens to be a music professor.
  • To make it even funnier, some of the things he mentions are things that had been out of production for years in 1962.