An exclusive inside look at the Cthulhu campaign on Election Day. Or, as they call it, Summoning Day.
KINGSPORT STAR HERALD – November 8, 2016
KINGSPORT, MA – The season of dread and revulsion is drawing to a close. All presidential campaigns spent the night according to their own style. Trump MC’d wrestling match after wrestling match in the states he hoped to take. Clinton bribed people to see her using all the star-power she could borrow, beg, or steal. The Cthulhu campaign, on the other hand, was busy cross-crossing the country to strategically odd places.
When you talk about winning a presidential campaign, you’re always going to get stuck in jargon of swing states, electoral college votes and demographics. However, when talking to the cultists running the campaign, they speak of those things far less than awakening, mind-share, transference and sympathetic entanglement. This isn’t the billion-dollar technocratic operation run by the Clinton clan. On the surface it appears to be a Silicon Valley startup run by the Addams Family. But they’re not here for laughs, they’re serious about summoning the end of the world.
Like any campaign, young volunteers and old staffers rush about trying to get word of their candidate to all corners of America. There is frequent fighting against a hostile media, trashing other candidates, even infighting over strategies, but there is a calm here at Cthulhu’s Kingsport headquarters in Massachusetts that you won’t find at other campaigns.
Maybe it’s because, institutionally, they’ve been at this a very long time – thousands of years. They are the current generation of the oldest human organization on the planet. Or so they claim, it’s hard to fact-check a group that has spent most of it’s time being invisible to history.
Have they really had a hand in almost every historical turn for the worse?
“Cthulhu dreams in R’lyeh of us. He guides us as his tools and weapons upon the surface to make the way ready for him,” said campaign manager Eminence Waite. “What you see here is a fraction of us. We are the faithful who have emerged from the shadows as his time approaches.”
But when you press them if this will be the year Cthulhu rises, they are less sure.
Ms. Waite explained that outright electing Cthulhu is absurd and not legally possible. Those facts gave rise to the perception that Cthulhu for President was a joke. “The answer is more complex than you know. It all comes down to the American people. Are they strong enough to break their chains? We offer them the proper tool to do so.”
That “tool” is an immortal deity they hope to unleash tonight as millions of Americans sign his name on ballots nationwide. To these cultists, Election Day is the largest communal ritual in the most powerful nation in the world. Similar in function as Ray Stantz’ choice of a giant marshmallow in Ghostbusters, they need a critical mass to write Cthulhu’s name.
They also need a network of ritual activity at various points around the country. This is the “ground game” that Cthulhu plays. It’s not door knocking or phone calls, though they do have volunteers for that, but cult members from around the nation congregating in the forgotten, condemned, private and corporate spaces that have been preserved for the cult’s use. They hope to channel the despair of the nation into breaking the portcullis of R’lyeh and awakening the god.
“We’ve never had a better opportunity,” said Carin Edison, Priestess of of Sherwood Oaks Cult in Minnesota. “Everyone may pretend that Hillary and Trump are ‘great’ but you can feel the malaise in the air that no one is happy with them.”
America has always been a country of rugged individualism and the artificiality of the election is grating on our national character. It’s almost as if some invisible hand was guiding us to ever worsening elections of ever worsening characters. Perhaps tonight it will all end.
