# Dan McClellan — Responding to "Feminism Has Satanic Roots" **Summary.** A short rebuttal video in which biblical scholar Dan McClellan answers a content creator who claims feminism has "satanic roots," tied to a claim that witch-trial victims were midwives killing children in the womb. McClellan dismantles both the history and the rhetorical move. (Source: McClellan video.) --- ## Key claims and arguments **1. The "feminist historians are all biased" move cuts both ways.** McClellan grants no one is bias-free — "you're either a feminist or you're a sexist" in the sense that everyone holds a perspective — but argues feminist scholars are demonstrably more self-critical about data than anti-feminists. He notes the irony: first-wave feminism (property rights, suffrage, education, legal personhood) is what gave the (woman) content creator her stage, microphone, and livelihood. **2. The witch-trials / midwife-abortion claim is false.** The claim that women were burned because they were midwives causing abortions has no good evidentiary support. Two streams converge to spread the misinformation: - The *Malleus Maleficarum* — early modern propaganda alleging midwives used magic to cause sterility, kill babies in the womb, and sacrifice infants to Satan. McClellan: none of this is true; it should not be cited as evidence. - A 20th-century reclaiming of "the witch" (some feminists and neopagans) as a symbol of persecuted female knowledge — e.g., *Witches, Midwives, and Nurses* — whose thesis historians have criticized since publication. People now fuse the early-modern propaganda with the 20th-century reconstruction and treat both as literally true. **3. The real harm is using bad history to justify atrocity.** "The last thing you should be doing with historically dubious claims is using them to defend and validate the persecution, the prosecution, and the execution of innocent women." McClellan names the rhetorical purpose: "to structure power, values, boundaries, and identities in favor of your right-wing authoritarian and social dominance orientation identity politics." --- ## Analysis for this wiki This is a clean example of [[DARVO]] / blame-reversal at the level of historical narrative: women executed as victims are recast as the real aggressors (baby-killing witches), which retroactively justifies the violence done to them. McClellan's frame — bad history weaponized for "right-wing authoritarian and social dominance" politics — links directly to the wiki's [[Christian Nationalism]] coverage and pairs with the WBHR "Jezebel branding" technique (see [[Rededicate 250 and the Revival Rally Machine — WBHR Podcast Ep. 629]]): both name a pattern where biblical/historical material is repurposed to mark a class of people as demonic enemies. > [!note] Tradition > Academic / critical scholarship engaging popular online apologetics. McClellan argues from historiographic method, not from a confessional position.