Watch the video and decide for yourself.
Not convinced? You of course shouldn’t be. But unfortunately, millions of people buy this nonsense. A poll conducted earlier this year found that 24% of Republicans believe that Obama “may be the Antichrist.”
For the record, Obama is hardly the first president to be accused of Satanism by Christian conspiracy theorists. Back in 2004, at a John Kerry meet-up in Salt Lake City, I remember an old man trying to convince me that George W. Bush was the Antichrist. So both parties have their fair share of crazies at the extremes.
There’s also nothing new with people hearing sinister things in reverse audio. It’s like a Rorschach blot—we will hear what we want to or expect to hear. The human brain seeks patterns, and it will often project or discern patterns where none exist. In his 2007 TED presentation, Dr. Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society and editor of Skeptic magazine, discussed why people believe weird things. Below is a short clip from that talk where he primes the audience to hear Satanic messages when Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” is played backwards.
Besides the whole reverse audio idea being completely ridiculous, there’s some dubious editing going on in the first video. I downloaded the clip from Youtube, imported the audio into Audacity, and reversed various parts of the audio, to check it. His “thank you satan” audio does not match the “yes we can” that he plays at the first of the clip. Noticably, a tone has been added right before the “yes”, that becomes the n in “satan” when played backwards. This is something that has been added to the audio after the fact. Otherwise when played backwards it should end with a “y” sound.