Extreme apocalyptic rhetoric is everywhere

Judging by her 100,000-follower X account, Danielle Johnson was a typical astrology influencer. She chided Cancers to stop being chaotic and Tauruses to lay off the carbs. She burned candles, cast spells and peddled energy healing sessions.

It was your standard sunny apolitical pseudo-spiritual shtick, but her tone darkened abruptly in the days leading up to the solar eclipse.

Johnson started sharing antisemitic conspiracy theories and QAnon verbiage. She retweeted far-right conspiracy mogul Alex Jones, antivax loon Naomi Wolf and a Jew-hating flat-earther.

As an astrologer, Johnson was primed to believe that celestial bodies influence daily life, but this was different. She seemed to believe something terrible was coming and that real-life action was needed.

She begged her fellow spiritual healers to keep their people safe. On April 5, she tweeted, “WAKE UP WAKE UP THE APOCALYPSE IS HERE.” The coming eclipse, she said, was the epitome of spiritual warfare. It was time to pick a side.

In the early morning hours of eclipse day, Johnson plunged a knife into the heart of her boyfriend, threw her children from a speeding car, and plowed into a tree at a hundred miles an hour. Johnson is dead, as is her boyfriend and her infant daughter. We are left with grief and questions.

In light of her social media and the tarot cards strewn around the crime scene, investigators initially suspected that the apocalyptic anxiety may have been a factor in the killings, but now they say we’ll never know. Johnson and her boyfriend are dead and it’s hard to explain what went wrong. Neither Johnson nor her partner had a record of domestic violence. Johnson’s mother confirmed that her daughter had a history of postpartum depression.

Johnson’s case isn’t as clear-cut as that of Taylon Celestine who announced that God had commanded her to start shooting people because of the eclipse before she opened fire on I-10 in Florida, hitting two drivers.

Extreme apocalyptic rhetoric is everywhere. Most of us shrug it off and get on with our lives, minding our carbs and keeping the chaos in check, but some people are vulnerable. Maybe they’ve been spiritually or politically radicalized, maybe they’re suffering from mental illness.

Politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, operatives like Steve Bannon and Alex Jones, and clerics like demoted bishop Joseph Strickland flooded the zone with eclipse-related bulls—t. They spoke of martial law, demonic portals and the urgent need to repent before the judgment of God. Donald Trump routinely tells his followers that he is their retribution and promises to lead them in the Battle of Armageddon. This kind of talk has become so normalized it’s hard to draw causal connections between rhetoric and violence. That’s the point.

These far right eclipse influencers probably didn’t mean to incite violence — this time. The eclipse was just more low-effort content. They keep themselves rich and powerful by keeping their audience in a constant state of terror and rage. They’ll exploit whatever’s in the news to do it. Stoking this turmoil is useful because these people can be activated, like when the faithful were called to the Capitol on January 6 for “spiritual warfare” against the seat of American democracy.

Terrified true believers are a fertile field for stochastic terrorism. That’s when a demagogue with a huge platform demonizes an enemy knowing that in a country with any number of disturbed people and who knows how many guns, something terrible could easily happen.

The gym chain Planet Fitness has received bomb threats at 38 locations across the country after the anti-trans Twitter account LibsofTikTok (LoTT) put the establishment on blast for canceling the membership of a patron who photographed another guest in the women’s locker room and shared on to social media, accusing the person of being a man. Schools and hospitals have also been hit with bomb threats after negative attention from LoTT.

If someone follows through on one of these bomb threats, it will probably be impossible to prove that LoTT is to blame. That’s the nature of stochastic terrorism. It creates a climate of fear where people and businesses may not speak out for fear of being targeted.

It’s too late to help Danielle Johnson, or even to fully understand what drove her crime spree. But it’s not too late to repudiate the apocalyptic clout-chasing that she was tapped into.