There's a particular kind of fog people make when they don't want to look at something. They reach for the ugliest available word and pin it to whoever they've decided is the problem. "Satanic pedophiles." "Reptilians." "Lizard people in suits." It feels like clarity, almost like a discovery, but the label is what you use instead of looking.
Watch what the word is doing. "Satanic" is a verdict dressed up as a description. It closes the case before you've opened it. The people on the other side stop being people and become a category, and the category has already been judged. After that, you don't have to think. You get to feel righteous and call it analysis. Usually after watching some rando's YouTube video stitch random facts into "proof."
Every genocide started this way. Label "the others" with the disgusting word, deny their humanity, then eliminate them.
I'm not defending the people in power. The systems they've built select for the worst available humans, and then everyone acts surprised when the systems produce them. Yes, there are more psychopaths in those rooms than in an ordinary sample. Power attracts a certain kind of empty. But almost nobody, including the genuine psychopaths, wakes up asking what evil thing they can do today. They justify. They postrationalize. They tell themselves a story in which they're the adult in the room making hard choices other people are too squeamish to make. Most of them believe the story. Some of them used to know better and arranged not to know anymore. That's worse than cartoon evil, in a way. Cartoon evil you can defeat. Ordinary self-deception scaled up by institutions is harder, because it lives in everyone, including the people doing the labeling.
The other piece of the fog is the 4D chess fantasy. People imagine a small group of brilliant villains executing a centuries-long plan, and they want this to be true, because a world run by master strategists is at least a world that makes sense. Real power doesn't work like that. Some of them think they're playing 4D chess; the plan breaks two moves later. Central plans meet counter-plans. Your goal is someone else's worst outcome, and they have resources too. The present emerges from conflicting vectors of action, half-informed and mostly postrationalized, colliding in a system nobody actually controls. Real life is harder than 4D chess. 4D chess at least has rules and a chessboard.
If you want to criticize power, criticize what's there. The selection effects. The specific decision the specific person made in the specific room, and the incentive that made it almost inevitable. Reality is damning enough on its own. Adding demons is what people do when reality has stopped being enough for them, and that's a problem about the person doing the labeling, not about the people being labeled.
Hanlon had most of it. Don't attribute to malice what's explained by fear, stupidity, or a person doing what almost anyone would do in the same chair with the same incentives. And don't attribute to demons what's explained by humans doing what humans do when nobody is making them look at themselves.
The fog feels like clarity. That's what makes it fog. Don't fall for it. When you think you've made a discovery about a whole category of people, you are almost always wrong. That's how the worst things in history started, with a category instead of a person. Look at the person.