The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power QUOTES

1 " To my mind, it’s far from accidental that for the past few decades, every presidential election here in the United States has been enlivened by bumper stickers and buttons calling on voters to support the presidential ambitions of Cthulhu, the tentacled primeval horror featured in H. P. Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic dread. I’m sorry to say that the Great Old One’s campaign faces a serious constitutional challenge, as he was spawned on the world of Vhoorl in the twenty-third nebula and currently resides in the drowned corpse-city of R’lyeh, and as far as I know neither of these are U.S. territories. Still, his bids for the White House have gone much further than most other imaginary candidacies, and I’ve long thought that the secret behind that success is Cthulhu’s campaign slogan: “Why settle for the lesser evil? "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power

2 " Perhaps the extreme example of this habit was a lavishly advertised working in 2018, at a Wiccan bookstore in Brooklyn. Participants were encouraged to bring to the event lists of everything they were upset about, so that all those things could be included in the working’s intention! The official purpose of the working was to stop Brett Kavanaugh from being confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. I noted at the time on my online journal that Kavanaugh had nothing to worry about—and of course he didn’t. "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power

3 " As a result, some thousands of young and angry outcasts who were part of the chans and a galaxy of similar online communities took up the intensive study and practice of basic magical workings without any sense of how to manage interactions with nonphysical beings—or, indeed, any notion that such interactions might need to be managed. That, in turn, pretty much guaranteed that if something other than human took an interest in the situation, a lot of the graduates of the chans’ magical boot camps were going to be swept up in something over which they had no control at all. The shortest description of 2016 is that that’s what happened. "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power

4 " Yet another anonymous poster stumbled on a piece of Europop music from the 1980s, a forgettable song titled “Shadilay.” The record label had a cartoon frog on it, waving a magic wand. The band’s name? P.E.P.E. This hit the chans the same day that Hillary Clinton denounced Pepe the Frog and took a tumble. Many people on the chans decided, or ironically pretended to have decided, and at all events acted as though they had decided, that they’d just received a big vote of confidence from Kek the Frog God. "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power

5 " As a result, the facts concerning nearly every significant crisis we face can thus be divided up neatly into two entirely separate categories. The facts that most Americans are willing to talk about belong to one of these categories. The facts that matter belong to the other. "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power

6 " In a certain sense, of course, that’s exactly what was going on. I say “in a certain sense” because it’s very difficult to talk about magic in modern industrial society and be understood clearly. That’s not because magic is innately difficult to understand. It’s because our culture has spent the last two thousand years or so doing its level best not to understand it. "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power

7 " In my early teens, bored out of my wits by the tacky plastic tedium of an American suburban existence, I went looking for something—anything—less dreary than the simulacrum of life that parents, teachers, and the omnipresent mass media insisted I ought to enjoy. Since I was a socially awkward bookworm—the diagnosis “Asperger’s syndrome” wasn’t in wide circulation yet—that search focused on books rather than the drugs, petty crime, and casual promiscuity in which most of my peers took refuge. "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power

8 " That afternoon, as I went to vote and then returned, that impoverished, rundown, ebulliently multiracial neighborhood was also an unbroken forest of pro-Trump signage. Trump’s name and his slogan “Make America Great Again” were everywhere. And Clinton? If you wanted to see any of her signs you had to walk uphill to a different part of town. That way lies one of Cumberland’s few well-to-do neighborhoods, where you won’t see friends tipping back beers on porches or mixed-race couples walking down the street holding hands. That’s where you found the Clinton campaign signs—“ I’m With Her”—on that pleasant November afternoon. They were with her. The workingclass people down the hill, struggling to get by after decades of increasingly bleak times in America’s flyover states, were with Trump. "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power

9 " The point the Left ignored, and has insisted on ignoring ever since, is that not everyone in flyover country is like that. A few years before the election, in fact, a group of Klansmen came to Cumberland to hold a recruitment rally, and the churches in town—white as well as black—held a counter-rally on the other side of the street and drowned the Klansmen out, singing hymns at the top of their lungs until the guys in the white robes got back in their cars and drove away in humiliation. Surprising? Not at all; in a great deal of Middle America, that’s par for the course these days. "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power

10 " Nor was it especially difficult to find out that the things listed above were the issues that American voters cared about, and that they voted for Trump because he seemed more likely to provide them than Clinton did. Yet across this country’s collective conversation in the wake of the election, next to no one other than Trump voters wanted to hear it. Suggest that people voted for Trump because they were worried about the risk of war, afraid that Obamacare would bankrupt their families, hoping a change in policy would bring back full-time jobs at decent wages, or disgusted by the political trickery that kept Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination, and you could count on being shouted down. It became an item of unshakable dogma in the media and the realm of public discourse that every single one of the voters who supported Trump could only have been motivated by sheer evil. "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power

11 " If you’re an operative mage and you allow your magical work to become a matter of public knowledge, you can count on receiving a variety of inquiries. One of the most common is also one of the saddest and most futile. These come from people who have backed themselves into a corner, and want you to use magic to help them avoid the consequences. The nature of the corner they’ve backed into varies across the whole vast spectrum of human folly, but in every case the root of the trouble is the self-defeating conviction that they ought to be able to keep on doing the same thing over and over again, and get different results. "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power

12 " An equivalent set of attitudes could be seen all through the Magic Resistance as it started its campaign to use magic to unseat the Trump administration. Perhaps the clearest expression of that self-defeating approach was the insistence on the part of the movement’s public figureheads that three of the core rules of magical practice didn’t apply to them. Every competently trained mage knows that effective magic requires unity of intention. Every competently trained mage knows that effective magic requires what military personnel like to call OPSEC; for the rest of us, that’s operational security, better known as keeping your mouth shut. Every competently trained mage also knows that it’s much more effective to build your side up than to tear the other side down. The Magic Resistance did none of these things. What’s more, when these issues came up for discussion—and they did, all over the ends of the internet where occultists talk—leading figures of the Magic Resistance insisted angrily that neither of these three rules were valid and their magic was certain to triumph anyway. "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power

13 " That was where Donald Trump came in. In his own way, the man is brilliant, and I say that without the least trace of sarcasm. He figured out very early in his campaign for the nomination that the most effective way to rally voters to his banner was to get himself attacked, in the usual tones of shrill mockery, by the defenders of the status quo. The man had the money to pay for the kind of hairstyle that the salary class finds acceptable, to cite an obvious example. He deliberately chose otherwise, because he knew that every time the media trotted out another round of insults directed at his failure to conform to the fashions of the privileged, another hundred thousand working-class voters recalled the sneering putdowns they experienced from their supposed betters and thought, “Trump’s one of us. "

― John Michael Greer , The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power