For a long time, it’s been known that The Satanic Temple’s co-owner Lucien Greaves once went on an antisemitic rant about how the Nazis ruined the word antisemitism for everyone and that it was “OK to hate Jews” so long as you were hating observant Jews.

He was on a 24-hour radio show celebrating and promoting the release of a new edition of Might Is Right that he’d illustrated, so naturally Greaves’ co-hosts and the guest caller then escalated immediately to hatred of all Jews and Holocaust denialism. The famous clip of this conversation cuts off about there.

The following apologia for that rant and subsequent conversation by Satanic blogger Stephen Bradford Long is, uh, creative about its construction of facts.

To be more generous, it is overly credulous toward people who have not earned it, but it’s typical of how TST members continue to utilize willful ignorance to justify their continued support of an organization fundamentally structured to control and extract the free labor of members that its owners can profit off of without those owners having any reciprocal accountability to members, including telling them the truth.

Let’s take a look in more detail at what will be a very long post using Long’s blog post as a guide to examine this aspect of The Satanic Temple and its history.

---

I’ve [Stephen Bradford Long] been a member of The Satanic Temple (TST) since December 2017, and in that time there’ve been occasional accusations of crypto-fascism, alt-rightism, and Nazism against TST by both outsiders and former members. This article is about why I choose to remain in the Satanic Temple despite these accusations, and why I find these accusations lacking in credibility.

Long is not really going to address the full context of crypto-fascism and alt-righterism in his piece—that’s what we’re going to try to do—but Long wants to make you aware that he’s aware of it.

Before I continue with this discussion, though, I need to make a few clarifications:

I am in no way a leader or spokesperson for TST. I’m not even part of a local chapter — I’m a solo Satanist who identifies with the Satanic Temple. This article is not written from a position of official leadership, but from my limited perspective as a rank-and-file member. It’s likely that, due to my limited perspective, that there are details that I miss.

This disclaimer is probably necessary because The Satanic Temple wraps its actual members up in “definitely not a giant red flag for a supposed religious organization” non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). The latest version of the membership agreement they’re rolling out to local chapters, erm, congregations is likely why we’re starting to see another schism now (July 2021), but which specific NDA Long was operating under — or avoiding — in May 2020 when he wrote this, only TST would know.

That said, I do have a bias: I have a fairly popular Satanic blog, podcast, and a big social media presence in the TST community. I consider myself good friends with Penemue, (Director of Ministry, Executive Producer of TST TV, former International Council Member) and we text regularly. I’ve had quite a few TST leaders on my show. My articles are frequently shared by Lucien Greaves and the official TST twitter account, and while I wouldn’t consider Lucien close enough to be called a friend, I do admire him, and he has guested on my podcast twice so far.

Long’s situation has changed. Per his Twitter, as of July 2021, Long is now on the Ordination Council of The Satanic Temple Ministry, so it’s possible that he’s now wrapped up in an even more restrictive NDA than most people. He may not even be able to respond to this if he wanted to.

Going back to “stuff not talked about”, the TST leader “Priest Penemue”, who now openly goes by Greg Stevens again, is a one-time Breitbart contributor who was on very familiar terms with Milo Yiannopolous and Mike Cernovich.

Cernovich was already a #GamerGate veteran, open misogynist, and rape apologist at that point; Cernovich also utilizes far-right attorney, “anti-antifa” and anti-#BlackLivesMatter opinion-haver, eugenics enthusiast Marc Randazza.

Now, Randazza will come up later in Long’s blog for Long’s theory of “contagion”, but it is notable that Randazza isn’t just a piece of shit because he goes out of his way to represent pieces of shit; he’s also, himself, very much a piece of shit.

Back to Long.

Finally, nothing in this article means I won’t be compelled to leave in the future. While I think it’s unlikely, it’s possible that TST will make some extraordinary mishap that will require me to follow my conscience and distance myself from the organization. As a Satanist, that option must always be available to me. While I haven’t seen anything in the organization so far that conflicts with my conscience, that doesn’t mean there won’t be something that does in the future.

With that out of the way, let’s begin.

So, Doubt.gif, but yeah, let’s really begin.

Lucien’s Moment of Cringe

Back in 2003, before he was Lucien Greaves and instead known as Doug Mesner, Lucien had a cringy podcast conversation with Shane Bugbee in which he said some concerning things, and many of the accusations against TST orbit around this moment. Joseph Laycock chronicles the cringiest moments on page 69 in his book Speak of the Devil:

[Book excerpt] The tone of the podcast is sophomoric and intentionally offensive in keeping with Bugbee’s philosophy of Satanism. In the exchange in question, Mesner states, “It’s OK to hate Jews” if this hatred is based in contempt for their supernatural beliefs but that, “It’s not OK to hate Jews” if this hated is based in racism or ideas of eugenics [emphasis added]. Bugbee then asks Mesner, “Do you like Satanic Jews?” Mesner answers, “Satanic Jews are fine.” Bugbee replies, “One drop of Jew blood means you ain’t breaking bread with me, motherfucker.” At this, someone on the podcast can be heard laughing. Mesner starts to respond, at which point Bugbee accuses Mesner of being Jewish himself. In what may have been an attempt to disarm the situation, Mesner then replies, “Look at me, I’m an Aryan king.” This is met with more laughter. This exchange is followed by a more serious discussion by Bugbee’s wife, Amy, about how Jews exaggerated the numbers killed in the Holocaust and have exploited it for political gain, during which Mesner is silent.

Joseph Laycock, Speak of the Devil, Chapter 3, “Satanic Schisms”

“Cringe,” huh?

So, to be clear, Stephen Bradford Long is quoting Joseph Laycock, a researcher of new religious movements who was in the middle of a book about how great neo-Satanism is when news of this broke big again in 2018. Long relies on Laycock to have listened to the clip and lets Laycock characterize an event that Long admits is why so many other accusations “orbit” around TST rather than, apparently, listening to it himself and trying to find out more information.

In lieu of access to any of the primary information for yourself, this would be understandable. But if you read more of that section from the book, it’s immediately apparent that Laycock did some pretty shoddy work.

Now, you may think it’s nitpicking, but this is not a podcast. This is a 24-hour live Internet radio broadcast. People are calling in while listening. More importantly, it didn’t take place Sep. 11, 2002; this was 2003.

You can tell from other things like archived Web posts promoting it and printed materials, but also the other conversations that take place throughout the stream, like arguing about the Democratic presidential primary field and people referring to the current year being “2003”.

So let’s establish two things:

1. Shane Bugbee, Lucien Greaves, and Amy Bugbee talked about a ton of stuff in the course of 24 hours
2. Laycock listened to approximately none of those other things before trying to exculpate Lucien and resorting to “some of Lucien’s best friends are Jewish.”

The fact that Laycock didn’t know which year it was happening might explain why he offers up that little detail in defense of Lucien in regards to eugenics.

Certainly, Lucien is not making eugenics-based arguments, right?

Right?

Ascertaining truth directly

Might Is Right Special : shane bugbee, amy stocky, doug mesner : Internet Archive

The.Satanic.Wiki—Might Is Right 24-Hour Radio Special

Look at me, I’m an Aryan King!

—Lucien Greaves

QueerSatanic Note: For those who don’t know, Lucien Greaves’ real name is “Douglas Alexander Misicko,” which means when he gets himself added as an intervenor in an ACLU court case, he still does so as “Doug Misicko.” Back in 2003 and for some time after, he was using the pseudonym “Doug Mesner”, and he has used at least two others online since then, but since TST people mostly know him as “Lucien Greaves”, we’ll keep using that.

Some caveats: that transcript in the above Wiki link was auto-generated and as of July 2021, has still to be fully manually corrected. While it gets the gist well, please don’t take it on faith that it’s correct. Also, over the course of the 24-hours, the timestamps stay in order but do drift a bit from the Archive.org audio timer.

However, it’s a roadmap for you to find something and follow along with your own ears. You can hear for yourself what grotesquely racist song they put on to close out that segment. You can hear for yourself how they got into that conversation.

It turns out the caller, a Holocaust-denying metal musician from Vancouver named Gerod Staaf a.k.a. Gzerod Von Staaf brings up Lucien’s favorite subject: eugenics.

Lucien agrees that the Nazis ruined the concept for everyone in the Second World War and brings up an apparently practiced phrase: “Threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.”

We know this is not an off-the-cuff remark or merely sleepless thought because in hour nine, the stream plays a pre-recorded interview that Lucien did with conservative radio host Ken Hamblin, “The Black Avenger”, to promote their upcoming stream (starting roughly 08:07:56 in the full audio).

Doug Misicko: Right? Well, I think people kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, after World War Two.

Ken Hamblin: Okay.

Doug Misicko: Ideas like eugenics and social Darwinism. They threw out everything positive that we could have possibly gained from those along with it.

Ken Hamblin: Well, eugenics is, I would think eugenics is a world apart from whatever the philosophy of Might is Right is about. Or does it- Or does it tie in by saying, “Might is right, because I have the power and you’re subhuman” or what?

Doug Misicko: No… Not exactly, I mean, the book takes an anti-totalitarian stance in place- in places, but I think sometimes you have to choose what your brand of totalitarianism is going to be. I mean, right now, we might live in what you would call a mob rule. And we’re becoming overpopulated. There are no rules against breeding. And I don’t think there should be rules, perhaps, on real generalized racial grounds like they were doing in Nazi Germany, but perhaps just merely on qualification grounds.

Hamblin asks for clarification: “How about a person with a low IQ, who is not likely to be able to give a child the quality of husbanding that is necessary for the competitiveness of the 21st century?”

“I do believe that that type of person should not be allowed to breed,” Lucien answers.

So going back to “this moment of cringe” — the famous one where Lucien talks over the caller to be able to assert that “antisemitism is not a dirty word” — before they get to that moment, they’re already having a lovely conversation about how too many stupid people are having kids. The next step is natural.

Gerod Staaf: Now. What about the concept of eugenics? Do we see that being implemented anytime in the US?

Doug Misicko: I don’t know. It would have to be- You know, I think eventually there’s gonna have to be population control. And that’s where it’ll start. Then if you’re going to start controlling the population, then you can start getting into the argument about in what direction you control the population, why don’t you use it towards a eugenics end? Or at least curb dysgenics [emphasis added] which is opposite eugenics. For those who don’t know, the concept being that the stupidest people breed the most. It seems axiomatic at this point, it’s just, hey, a given truism.

We’ve talked before about how cheery Lucien is in his conversation with former California Grand Dragon of the Knights of the KKK and then-White Aryan Resistance (WAR) founder Tom Metzger. In it, Lucien tries to convince Metzger that the best way for Metzger to achieve his genocide of all the Black people would be to institute sterilization based on IQ in the name of eugenics.

Doug Misicko: Well, I tend to feel that racialism can be too general, at times. I think there should be eugenics policy, population control policy, something that ensures quality reproduction. But on racial grounds, I really don’t see it because you got to admit you meet some Black people are smarter than a lot of white people you met and vice versa. And all the rest. And if through the top notch, were the ones breeding, carrying on, that would be the best way to go.

Tom Metzger: Yeah, there are gray areas, there’s overlap. But on the other hand, I’m, you see, you might see a white crow sometime too. But most crows are black. [laughter] I mean, if you judge the Black race by it, by its whole, you got you must come up with the idea that the def- definitely an inferior race.

So this stuff is not incidental to Lucien’s philosophy. And it’s not something you can pretend was just a “moment” of poor judgment or going along with others.

Five years later for his Process.org blog, Lucien utilizes a facetious counterargument but is still writing about how much he hates that stupid people are allowed to have babies.

He also seems to complain that every time he argues in favor of it, people associate him with all of the fucking things eugenics and forced sterilization have actually been used for in history.

Process.org—Mothers Day

[Lucien Greaves, as Doug Mesner writes] One needs to demonstrate proper cognizance to scrub toilets or pick produce, but nobody is too simple to have a child. Motherhood may be the most important job a person could take, and yet nobody is too incompetent to be denied the task. And it’s a good thing, too — for who would decide who is fit to breed and who is not? Selective breeding of any kind is eugenics all over again, and anybody who even mutters that foul word must be ridiculed from discourse as neo-Nazi swine.

Only a fascist could be so vile as to suggest that the laws of heredity could be employed toward the betterment of the gene-pool or — disregarding any such lofty notions of “improvement” — cessation of the propagation of severe dysfunctions from retardations to psychopathy.

Anybody who would recommend that parents who are unable to afford housing, food, or clothing — or is otherwise incapable of caring for a child — should thus abstain from having children is nothing more than a megalomaniacal totalitarian. You have merely to point at her and say aloud, “Hitler!” and your argument is won.

Breeding restrictions are a slippery slope, and it is absolutely inevitable that if the rapist is sterilized, so too will be all non-Aryans. Consensus means nothing here, because in a democracy “all men are created equal” — except when applying for jobs, or being accepting into schools, or looking for a loan….

But breeding is different. You can’t stratify there. An alcoholic inbred could possibly produce the next Einstein, (Though, I suppose, the alcoholic would be unlikely to be an actual inbred. There are laws against inbreeding. Inbreeding is known to propagate genetic defects, but that’s where we need to draw the line, or it’s head first down that slippery slope.) and infertile couples should care nothing of the background details of their sperm donor.

Doug Misicko, Process.org—Mothers Day (2008)

Yeah, but that’s 2008. Surely Lucien changed his mind after that, right?

Well, probably still not by 2013 when Lucien brought in Shane Bugbee to help him launch TST.

That’s Lucien Greaves, Shane Bugbee, and TST co-owner “Malcolm Jarry” (real name, Cevin Soling) standing together in mid-2013.

People like Joseph Laycock and Stephen Bradford Long take great pains to excuse Lucien because he’s not as bad as Shane Bugbee, and Shane was the real racist, antisemite, and absolutely horrible person, right?

Well, despite moving to different parts of the country, Lucien stayed close with Shane for another 10 years after all of that and tried to get Shane work shaping the media-rollout of TST in the beginning.

“Lucien Greaves” and The Satanic Temple have a lot to answer for

By 2013, do you think Lucien and Shane even stopped loving Might Is Right? Do you think they pitched it together to be the foundation of TST?

While this had been long rumored, leaked emails from 2013 and an email correspondence from 2011 that Bugbee himself submitted as evidence to federal district court both demonstrate that this grotesque book was something Greaves continued to think about and actively pursue, overlapping with the setup of The Satanic Temple itself — although note how he presents the idea with his friend Bugbee versus his new business partner, Cevin Soling, a self-described “secular Jew”.

Might is right 2. Let’s do it. We could even call it “the book of satan: might is right” without the “2”. Who’s going to be able to bitch? We have carte blanch, really – it’s in the public domain.
…
The strong theme, of course, should be individual gain and how best to achieve it — but the most successful today are not the violent. It is those who can drive others to do their violence for them… while making them believe it was their own idea. A manual for coercion and manipulation. More evil than the first book by orders of magnitude.

Excerpt from Nov. 9, 2011, email by Doug Misicko as “Doug Mesner” to Shane Bugbee

Sorry, Cevin — I should have given you more context to Might Is Right. MIR is known as “The Book of Satan” and is important in Satanic lore. Anton LaVey did not endorse the book in its entirety, but enjoyed its florid anti-God, anti-Christ poetry and its attempt at a strictly naturalistic philosophy — which to the author of MIR was a Social Darwinistic view. LaVey saw the book as a great leaping off point and pillaged full passages to construct The Satanic Bible. The language of MIR is outdated in that it refers to Jews in an ambiguous fashion that I took to mean religious practitioners, however, certain anti-Catholic segments of neo-Nazism have taken the book as one of their own. Shane’s publication of MIR was a middle finger to the neo-Nazis, and one that did not go unnoticed. Shane received some grim death threats then. LaVey was of Jewish blood, he pillaged the book, and they hated him for it. Shane’s edition has a forward by LaVey explaining how and why he took some passages, discarded others, and created the Satanic Bible. In short, the idea is one of evolution of ideas. Just as LaVey took portions of Might Is Right and converted into something for his time, I think we are evolving Satanism still further by accounting for what’s been confirmed by recent advances in cognitive science — compassion and altruism, selfless actions without tangible benefit — are very real, and they do serve an evolutionary function. Shane and I spoke of writing a MIR II in which we would expound upon an up-to-date naturalistic philosophy will retaining the godless poetic style of the first. A TST version of the book, I felt from the start, should contain an explanation of what MIR is and what we can learn from it today, while being quite clear about what we also disagree with

Excerpt from Jun 13, 2013, email by Doug Misicko as “Doug Mesner” to Shane Bugbee and Cevin Soling

We will spare you the screenshots of extended quotes about “Jew-Bankers”, “hulking thick skulled Negros”, and extermination of inferior breeds unless you want to click on them to read.

“Outdated.” “Ambiguous.” “What we can learn from it today.”

Uh huh.

“When it comes to The Satanic Temple, there’s always more, and it’s always worse.”

In fact, it’s not until mid-2018 that the website Lucien promotes throughout the MIR stream finally goes dark. It was called “dysgenics.com”.

This is the main ad they run for it, a recording of Lucien himself saying:

Natural selection and modern civilization have ceased to exist. Today we live in a world overpopulated with bottom feeders. The pool is overfilled with the dregs, there is no inherent value on human life. The value is earned and most people are running a deficit. They’re worse than worthless. They’re counter-productive. What can be done? www.dysgenics.com.

All right, so that’s a pretty deep dive, but we have not gotten to the worst yet, so let’s jump back into Stephen Bradford Long’s blog.

Let me go ahead and get this out of the way: in my opinion, this whole conversation [ed. Long means just this particular exchange] — including Lucien’s part in it — is gross and unacceptable. I think it’s reasonable to be concerned by this conversation. While Lucien doesn’t take as hard a stance as Shane Bugbee and his wife, he also doesn’t do much to mitigate the rampant bigotry on display in this public conversation, and I personally see that as a failure. I think that when we see racism on display, we should oppose it. Lucien might have attempted to do that by insisting he doesn’t have a problem with Satanic Jews, but it’s a milquetoast attempt at best.

But also, in my opinion, Lucien is not demonstrating deliberate anti-Semitism in this conversation, but poorly articulated anti-theism. It’s all too easy for a broad anti-theist, anti-religion sentiment to be interpreted as anti-specific-ethnic-religious-community. Anti-theists (ideally) don’t object to the ethnic or cultural identity, but to the supernatural beliefs that they deem dangerous. Perhaps I’m being too charitable in my interpretation of Lucien’s words, but I don’t hear him being consciously anti-Jewish, because he clearly specifies that he doesn’t have a problem with Satanic Jews. That suggests it’s the supernatural beliefs he objected to, not the identity. Shane Bugbee and his wife, on the other hand, are unapologetically antisemitic.

While Lucien is expressing poorly articulated anti-theism, that doesn’t make it harmless in impact. He might not have intended to come off as anti-Semitic, but the impact of his words is still dismissive and insensitive to a persecuted religious minority. It’s entirely possible to do something racist even when we don’t consciously mean to. That’s what it means to live in a culture of systemic racism and bigotry.

So, to recap: 1. I think this whole podcast conversation is gross and unacceptable. 2. I think he’s trying to articulate anti-theism, not anti-Semitism. 3. Regardless of his intent, the impact of his words is still anti-semitic.

This entire conversation is made more complicated by the fact that it was recorded to commemorate the release of a new addition of Ragnar Redbeard’s protofascist booklet Might is Right, which Lucien illustrated. I think it’s reasonable to be concerned about this situation. Lucien’s position isn’t exactly clear through this whole episode.

“Complicated”, “concerned”, “position isn’t exactly clear”

They are there. To promote. An antisemitic. White supremacist. Misogynistic. Protofascist. Book.

A book that Lucien Greaves illustrated.

A book that has inspired white supremacists for decades, and was cited by name while the 2019 Gilroy Garlic Festival mass shooter live-streamed himself killing people.

This is the context. The position Lucien is taking throughout the entirety of the 24-hour radio show is that Social Darwinism and eugenics is good, and Lucien clearly does not have a problem with literal Neo-Nazis and white nationalists, including those responsible for assaulting and murdering people because those are the people he sought out to bring on and interview.

If you’re on a desktop browser, this will be easier, but try searching for “Jew” in this (uncorrected) transcript, and if you don’t trust the transcription, listen for yourself.

If you think Lucien’s position isn’t clear, search for the unredacted versions of “n****r”; “r*t*rd”; or “f*g” and find some clarity.

Doug Misicko: You got n****r sodomites on call

Shane Bugbee: God damn right, motherfucker. They’re cheap. Life is cheap bitch. It’s about the cost of a fucking nickel bullet. You remember that motherfucker. And I ain’t talking any shit. I know people everywhere.

And:

Doug Misicko: I don’t want to have a kid if it’s gonna be a r*t*rd or anything like that.

Psychic: You don’t what?!

Doug Misicko: I don’t want to have a kid if it’s gonna be a r*t*rd or anything like that.

Psychic: I can’t understand what you are saying…

Doug Misicko: Well, you know, if I was gonna have a kid, I wouldn’t want to be a r*t*rd or anything. I need some consultation.

And:

Hart Fisher: Been like a little cripple time down here at the RadioFreeSatan.com.

Doug Misicko: Yeah, we love the r*t*rds.

Hart Fisher: Oh, very important. “Kids of Widney High.“

Doug Misicko: Right. Make some beautiful music.

Shane Bugbee: First ones in the fuckin showers. First go the r*t*rds and then go the Jews.

Doug Misicko: The r*t*rds are entertaining.

Shane Bugbee: Next is the n****rs and sp*cs and then more Jews.

Hart Fisher: …right.

Doug Misicko: You can tell a r*t*rd it’s got a bug on the back of its head and watch it spin in violent circles, and everybody has a good time.

Hart Fisher: While I was growing up, I had this friend of mine he had a cousin that had Down syndrome and he moved in with his with- with his grandma and that- the Down syndrome chick, and her bedroom was next to his and he said he used to have to listen or masturbate at night.

Doug Misicko: He had to, huh?

Hart Fisher: Well, yeah, you know, he’s just living in a fucking trailer. Some fuckin’ r*t*rd is masturbating and making all this noise. Ain’t no way…

Doug Misicko: I heard r*t*rds have quite the sexual appetite, too.

Hart Fisher: Oh, yeah. And then I was dating this girl and she had an older aunt that was a, uh, a ‘tard. And she she got knocked up by the mailman. ‘Cause the mailman would come and sweet talk his way in until eventually he knocked her up. And that was in Texas. Friendly.

Doug Misicko: Yeah, it doesn’t even sound like the ‘tards are at a loss to find somebody to do it with them. What is going on!? That’s dysgenics.

It keeps going from there.

If your defense is, “At least Lucien didn’t talk as coarsely as Shane did”, that is an incredibly weird excuse to give someone. Seriously arguing, “We should sterilize all people with low IQs” is actually worse than just the r-slur. But yeah, Lucien did both.

We promise you, no matter how much more context you want to give this stuff, it will make it worse. There is always more, and it’s always worse.

A Horseshit Explanation

But back to Long’s blog:

I reached out to Lucien for comment and he emailed me an internal TST statement that was sent to chapter heads. The statement is long, but I think the whole thing needs to be read and digested in full:

So, apologies for giving you so much information up to this point. Hopefully, you have taken some breaks if you’ve needed it. But having done so, it’s going to be immediately apparent just how much of this statement that Long quotes in-full is absolute horseshit.

Subtly, because you may miss the history, Long is writing this blog in May 2020, but TST just recycled the statement they put out in Lucien’s name back in 2018 as part of that schism, and you can tell by the reference to “15 years”, which would be 2003.

Another subtle but actual falsehood they try to sneak in: “I was an ignorant kid” and “still in my early twenties” — in reality, Lucien was 28. This matches public information, but it’s also what he says himself while prank calling the suicide hotline — because there’s always more and it’s always worse.

But without further ado, the recycled 2018 statement (emphasis added in each case):

Dear Chapter Heads,

It was recently brought to the attention of The Satanic Temple that a snippet from a 15-year old “Might is Right” radio show featuring our co-founder Lucien Greaves (aka Doug Mesner) is being widely distributed via social media. This is not the first time this audio has been shared within the community as a point of concern and Lucien has spoken on the matter each time but given the expansion of our organization, we feel it necessary to provide a more formal communication to be made available for your own edification as well as a helpful reference for addressing the concerns of your members.

This audio, which was heavily edited out of context, was recorded in 2003, well over a decade before the creation of The Satanic Temple (TST). It was taken from a 24-hour radio show featuring Lucien which covered a broad range of topics, music, and interviews with various subversive personalities of the time. In the clip, Lucien disparages Jewish religious practices in a manner that the organization and Lucien acknowledge as both inappropriate and unfortunate; however, he does clarify that it is reprehensible that people would blame a bloodline for the questionable behavior and supernatural beliefs of a religion and we should be especially cognizant of the fact that what our critics are saying he said isn’t actually the point or content of what’s being communicated.

Lucien wishes to communicate the following:

“Even as I may be defending myself against what that material was NOT, I still must admit that I today do not agree with my opinions expressed then in any way. To me, back then, I was speaking of people who would take, say, Leviticus literally and try to impose its laws upon the world. I grew up as ignorant white trash in a deeply divided and violent area which heavily affected my world view. At the time of this recording, while still in my early twenties, I thought that the triumph of Laveyan Satanism was that it de-racialized a “survival of the fittest” productive, merit-based social darwinism. I used to hold the position that religious superstition shouldn’t be “normalized” as I saw it as such a problematic force in the world. My assumption then was that if we scoffed at such expressions openly, those expressing such things might think about their superstitions more clearly and abandon them. The founding of TST was ultimately a refutation of that viewpoint, a product of my complete removal from that mode of thinking. To me, there were “the religious,” and they were the majority, and then there were the beleaguered nonreligious who suffered from the dogmatic impositions of the religious. I would speak of superstitions in equally dismissive terms with unfortunate lack of concern, due to no real understanding, of familial/cultural attachments, or the effect of such rhetoric upon minority religious groups. I was an ignorant kid with a lot of outrage and a big idiot mouth that received just as many threats to my life by Nazis as I do today. TST will always be for anybody, of any background, who identifies with the values we espouse, and today, you can count on me to vigorously defend any religious group’s right to equal representation and expression anywhere.”

As Satanists who are members of the Satanic Temple, we recognize the relevance of our Sixth Tenet in this matter: “People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.”

We ask you to recognize that people do change their opinions over the course of 15 years, and Lucien is no exception. Our organization, its members, and all levels of leadership remain committed to the spirit of equality and compassion in Satanism and reject all forms of bigotry, hatred, and activity that conflicts with our community values and tenets.

2018 statement by The Satanic Temple on behalf of Lucien Greaves

So, end of recycled statement.

And wow, they are really relying on you not knowing jack shit about the rest of that 24-hour broadcast or the circumstances behind it, huh?

But the sort of people that that excuse doesn’t work on don’t stay to tell other people, and the sort of people that the excuse does work on stick around and keep defending it — like Stephen Bradford Long does.

I think Lucien made a mistake in this whole incident. I also accept his apology as reasonable and sincere. I’m content to move on. Yet, despite Lucien’s continued attempts to clarify his positions, TST’s accusers pull this incident out as proof of Lucien’s depravity, and his apparent antisemitism, fascism, Nazism, or what have you.

“Made a mistake.”

It’s interesting how similar this language is to abusive pastors or just men in reactionary evangelical communities, regardless of how those men may have hurt people for years as part of a consistent pattern, and despite no real evidence of change or restitution beyond saying tearfully, “I’m really sorry. Please forgive me.” Except instead of a Bible verse, Lucien — or someone writing for him — pleads the tenets.

The way TST characterizes the exchange that people know about, it’s as though it’s just an oversight in 2003, a lapse, and one solitary conversation where Lucien didn’t “push back against bigotry enough,” or whatever.

But as we’ve talked about, Lucien has continued to do things in the name of “free speech” that consistently only work in one direction: in support of the far-right and their enablers.

Tracking his mindset, as late as 2016, Lucien still thinks it’s terrible for an event to disinvite a violent Neo-Nazi Satanist like Augustus Sol Invictus from a speaking panel they’re both on.

I regret to announce that I have withdrawn from my role as a scheduled speaker at the forthcoming Left Hand Path Consortium to take place in Atlanta early next month. When it was announced that I was to speak at the Consortium, I received a few emails from concerned observers who asked why I would appear at an event alongside a “fascistic” character like Augustus Sol Invictus, who was also scheduled to speak. While I’m not intimately familiar with the works and philosophy of the man in question, I also did not feel that my speaking at the conference constituted an endorsement of his, or anybody else’s, point of view. Further, his perspective, from what I know, legitimately falls somewhere on a broad spectrum of recognized “Left Hand Path” philosophies, whether I find that perspective tenable, consistent, and reasonable, or not (just as Fascism legitimately has a place in discussions upon political philosophies without fear that such a discussion lends undue credibility to its contemporary implementation. Do we truly know what we’re for if we refuse to discuss what we’re against?). From what I know, he’s part of a larger dialogue regarding the Left Hand Path that I feel is worth engaging in.

I am not withdrawing from speaking because Invictus was invited to speak, but rather because he was recently dis-invited. Protesters have harangued the organizers, and the organizers have expressed concerns for the security of their attendees were Invictus to remain on the speaker’s list. I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of the organizers, however, I feel that the dis-invitation sends a harmful message in support of censorship.

I, too, find some of my speaking events besieged by (religious) protesters, and I hope that civil protest can take place without silencing my voice, or anybody else’s.

One might rightly ask if there were any situation in which I might consider not speaking at a conference due to another speaker’s point-of-view. Of course, If I were going to a Science conference and there was scheduled a Creationist lecturer, I would likely find the conference hardly worth attending, much less speaking at. This is because Creationism isn’t taken seriously by around 100% of credible scientists. If, however, Creationism were, against all reason, taken seriously by some 30% or more of scientists, and the conference were going to contain lectures by Evolutionary Biologists who were to offer a rational view, I would think it the duty of those Evolutionary Biologists to attend, share their knowledge, and confront the poor science with hard empiricism.

I do not think that Invictus’s views are in such a disappearingly small minority as to imagine that confronting his opinions give them unwarranted exposure. I think his views are prevalent enough within Left Hand Path communities that it is worth our time to argue them and delineate how and where we differ in the Satanic Reformation of The Satanic Temple.

It’s easy to stand up for Free Speech when you are fighting for your own voice, or for the voice of those you agree with. It’s a completely different fight and, arguably, your loyalty to Free Speech only means anything at all, when you’re willing to fight for the Free Speech of those with whom you disagree.

I’m sorry to those for whom my bowing out will cause any type of inconvenience. Thank you.

Lucien Greaves, Facebook.com (March 14, 2016)

“Fascism legitimately has a place in discussions upon political philosophies,” Greaves says in 2016.

Meanwhile, former TST high priest Brian Werner left the event in solidarity just as Greaves did, explaining, as Atlanta Antifascists documented, at least a few hours earlier than Greaves’ statement his similar reasons for leaving.

It has come to my attention that the organizers of the International Left Hand Path Consortium have given into threats from ANTIFA and will not be allowing Augustus Invictus to give his presentation. This does not sit well with me at all, as I believe in free speech regardless of what that speech may be. As a satanist I find it absurd to give into the demands of those who would threaten us, we do not run away from aggression we meet it head on and destroy it. So I have made the decision to stand in solidarity with Augustus and cancel my presentation at the Consortium in solidarity with him. My apologies to those who were looking forward to seeing me speak, but I cannot and will not stand by as one of our most basic of liberties is tramples on. I cannot support an event that would so easily bend over to the will of a bunch social social justice warriors threatened to protest.

Brian Werner, former TST high priest in a no longer public Facebook post (March 14, 2016)

The Left Hand Path Consortium’s explanation is that they were down to host the neo-Nazi (“The left hand path is full of controversial figures; which is why it is called The Left Hand Path and not your grandmother’s sewing circle”) up until the point that Invictus invited antifascists to come to the event and kill him. “Free speech” had been their excuse, too.

To be clear, this was not a left-wing event.

It’s easy to talk trash when you have nothing to lose; and a few people are posting untrue statements and playing the victim in an effort to boost themselves up by smearing us.

We quietly took Augustus and Brian Werner off of the schedule because of their own statements; not those of Antifa or any others. And out of respect for Augustus, we did it quietly and with as little fanfare as possible. We truly wanted to take the high road on this and even included him in a private discussion and offered a way for Augustus to save face, but he did not respond.

Then after Brian angrily left, they both publicly claimed that we caved in to pressure from outsiders to deny them their right to free speech; mocking the Left Hand Path Consortium in the process.

…

In fact we supported his right to speak at the consortium by standing up to a fascist-terrorist group disguising themselves as anti-fascists. We endured hate-mail and accusations of fascism, racism, and sexism and stood our ground because of our passionate belief in EVERYONE’S right to free speech, regardless of whether or not we agree with them. We were mocked and criticized by people all over the occult community as well as PC and social justice warriors; the loudest being those who never intended to darken our doors to begin with! They just wanted to garner attention for themselves by putting us into a “damned if we do, and damned if we don’t” situation. After all, they had nothing to lose.

…

After he had posted at statement inviting his protesters to stab him in the heart and kill him, we were warned by the Atlanta police and our security staff that they had no legal right to defend him or anyone else caught in the crossfire.

But the main issue is that we don’t want ANYONE hurt at our event!…

Left Hand Path Consortium, “Announcement about Augustus Sol Invictus” (March 2016)

Basically, according to them, this call for violence that they would be responsible for is finally what got the event to disinvite Invictus.

Pagan news blog The Wild Hunt backed up this account independently.

By mid March, several guest speakers, including Immanion Press publisher Taylor Ellwood, canceled their own appearances due to Invictus’ inclusion. In response, Invictus published a Facebook post directly on the LHP event page, calling the protestors “cowards, fools & hypocrites.” Additionally, he invited them to “come to the consortium” to put a “knife in his heart.”

That single post changed the situation considerably for LHP, as it reportedly placed the organization in legal jeopardy. According to one notice, the Atlanta Police had even taken noticed and voiced concerns over possible violence. As a result, LHP canceled Invictus’ engagement and posted the following, “We don’t regret our attempts at featuring a controversial person at our event, however, it would not have been very LHP of us to martyr ourselves for him. We made a decision with the safety of our presenters and guests when he baited the protesters.” Most of the original posts have been deleted from Facebook.

The decision drew both applause and more protests. Lucien Greaves of The Satanic Temple withdrew as a guest speaker, saying that, while he was unfamiliar with Invictus’ work, he felt “that the dis-invitation sends a harmful message in support of censorship.”

WildHunt.org, “Pagan Community Notes” (March 21, 2016)

Another scheduled speaker backed that up as well.

Ultimately, his [August Invictus] removal from the roster came as a result of his own words. He apparently posted a long invective against me and anyone else who was protesting his presence. He acknowledged he was considered a fascist, and rather than deny it, attacked all who didn’t agree with his politics for being afraid of what he represented, comparing us to swine, and sheep. In his rant he called on his detractors to come to the conference armed, with his post culminating in a challenge to actually kill him.

At this point, [Laurie Pneumatikos, the conference organizer] recognized the danger of having this person at her event. His invitation of violence against his person at her conference had legal ramifications that were just too much to accept. His vehement response resulted in her decision to remove him from the list of presenters.

Rufus Opus for HeadForRed.blogspot.com (March 14, 2016)

We can’t know what’s in Greaves’ heart-of-hearts, but throughout his time as the voice of TST, Lucien has continued to publicly speak about how the problem isn’t with “Nazis”, and Greaves has even argued people shouldn’t oppose Nazis with force.

Personally, I think it’s a bad idea to go out looking to punch anybody. I especially think it’s a bad idea to go out looking to punch thick-skulled miscreants who themselves are looking for a pretext for a fight. I also think Nazis are a bit too easy a target to place all of our post-election angst upon. I’m not particularly concerned that the Nazi Party is going to gain prominence in the United States any time in the near or projected future. Even our most oppressive elements on the right probably honestly believe themselves to be entirely unrelated to Nazis. The self-identified Nazis I know of are angry, uneducated, aggressive yokels who run no risk of organizing a national coup. I just don’t run into Nazis in my daily life or when I’m out socializing. I’m not sure where people are living that they can decide to whimsically travel out and go punch a Nazi at will. Rather, I think the anti-Nazi rhetoric is simply a safe and inoffensive exhibition of discontent. It’s something people can rant about and issue threats of violence toward without any real fear of actual confrontation. I think it would be far more poignant and meaningful if people were to confront Evangelical Nationalism and rail against the Theocratic Right. I get sick of hearing people say, “let’s call them what they really are: Nazis.” No. Why don’t you call them what they really are? They are the Theocratic Right. They are Evangelical Nationalists. They are taking over the public offices and overturning Liberal Democracy. When you call people who have no attachment to Nazi-ism Nazis, they don’t know you’re talking about them, and it’s not clear that you know who you’re talking about either.

Lucien Greaves, originally published June 28, 2017, at Haute Macabre

“Actually they’re only Nazis if they come from the interwar period of German history. Otherwise, they’re just sparkling fascists” is an interesting distinction for someone with Lucien’s history to try to make.

He didn’t bother to parse things quite so carefully a little earlier in the same interview when assigning the primary blame:

Troublingly, I feel that the greatest threat to our social stability now comes from those who claim we must do something to stop the imagined increase in violence. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We already see an increased tribalistic zeal, and we see pre-emptive violence in the name of anti-fascism, which will then be used as justification for increased police action. That’s the real downward spiral. 

Lucien Greaves, originally published June 28, 2017, at Haute Macabre

He’s giving this interview just a few weeks before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, by the way.

The problem, according to Lucien, is that certain hapless racists are inbred, stupid rednecks who should be mocked.

I would like to see this go forward in a nonviolent legalistic direction. I really have a problem with this idea that we should all run out and punch Nazis. I mean, you have a militant group of people who feel validated by getting punched in the face. You have the type of white trash, shitheaded thugs who go out to bars looking for a fucking fight. You don’t go out and punch them. It gives them a good time. You know? If anything, I really wish everybody who would show up to counterprotest the Nazis and the KKK tomorrow— they should be met with mockery and ridicule. In an ideal setting, you would have the KKK marching, and you would have the counteprotesters… dressed like them but with the false buck teeth and playing banjos and imitating sodomy with their cousins and everything else. And everybody just laughing their asses off at them because nothing will make them wither away more than that.

Lucien Greaves, Aug. 17, 2017 at Nighttime Podcast

In short, stupidity and trashiness are still the problem for Greaves; dapper and well-spoken genocide, eh, maybe not so much.

Reminder: the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., that led to a white supremacist killing Heather Heyer and dozens more antifascists injured was less than a week before these statements. That statement is Lucien Greaves looking at the situation and operating with hindsight.

But he also thinks that civil courts should be used to bankrupt people for truly unacceptable speech (see: the Haute Macabre interview, but also, um, what they’re doing to us).

“Free speech” also means Greaves and Cevin “Malcolm Jarry” Soling can, as TST, say whatever the fuck reactionary bullshit about opposing public schools (but never cops or prisons) or supporting the Israel state’s violence without asking anybody else. But no one else can say anything without asking them first, including about whether your TST chapter or you as a TST member can apply the seven tenets to oppose white supremacy and police abuse.

What else do you think this section of the new member code is all about?

Members may not, without prior consent from Executive Ministry [QueerSatanic note – just “Lucien Greaves” or “Malcolm Jarry“], engage in activities as agents of TST or participate in any group within TST, where such activities imply or encourage the impression of collaboration or official alliance with non-TST entities, even when the aims and values of those entities appear clearly aligned with those of TST.

A guess: The ex[?]-chapter in Boston got fed up and disregarded TST’s directive from May 29, 2020, about not supporting the Black Lives Matter movement (broken link), so on June 20, 2020, Boston posted to their Facebook that, yeah, the struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions, and that means full, unequivocal support for Black Lives Matter (broken link)(archived) and opposition to white supremacy.

With the new contract, now you’re in violation if you or your chapter speak out in favor of something Cevin and Lucien don’t approve of, and if you think it’s too ambiguous to conclude that’s what it means, the point of the power dynamics is that ambiguity always helps the people who have power and hurts those without it.

If they say you violated it, you violated it. If you want to appeal, you can go through all the proper channels they also control and they can ultimately ignore as it suits them.

“What do the owners of The Satanic Temple care about, and what sort of people do they absolutely not care about?” is actually of critical importance to anyone donating their time, money, and creativity to making Lucien and Cevin’s companies more profitable and influential.

The Conversion Left vs. The Contagion Left

[Stephen Bradford Long writes] This is where shit gets complicated. Let me back up and provide some of my background and thinking on leftist discourse in general. I’m starting to think that the left has two nearly irreconcilable worldviews, and that this rift is causing incalculable upheaval in leftist communities. I will call these two views Contagion and Conversion.

We’ve arrived at what is actually the crux of Long’s whole argument, but after spending a ton of time getting to this point, we’re mostly not going to engage with it for the simple reason that his prior assumptions in this specific situation are demonstrably false, and therefore are irrelevant.

Long says that the Left should include “reformed criminals, Nazis, racists, former white supremacists etc.”; the problem is Long doesn’t seem capable or willing of doing the due diligence to investigate how bad someone was or how much someone has actually changed, and therefore he misunderstands why someone wouldn’t want to be around former(*) racists.

Long admits that he himself used to be a “far right, racist, homophobic, libertarian shitgibbon”, and given his stance on this issue, this is not a surprise. He would go on to interview famous transphobe and alt-lite darling Katie Herzog, before coming to the realization thanks to her: “I’m a Satanist, Not A Leftist”. So if you are a Leftist, he probably was never a great person to listen to for advice.

Take Long here with as much salt as you feel appropriate:

I don’t believe that Lucien was an ideological fascist, but if he was, I would still celebrate his change of heart demonstrated in the statement above. I would see his obvious leftist sentiments as a victory for the left and for minorities, understanding that his conversion means one less bigoted white man who can exact harm on defenseless minorities. I would welcome him into the fold with open arms.

Citation needed on any of those “obvious leftist sentiments” as opposed to “liberal” tending toward “classically liberal.”

It’s all very good to say, “I’m different now. I grew up. I’ve changed” as (paraphrasing) Lucien was quoted in that Breitbart article by TST Director of Ministry Greg Stevens.

But that makes another relevant aspect of the Might Is Right 24-hour stream is they interview George Burdi, who also said he changed his ways.

The SPLC had interviewed Burdi in 2001, too, so a lot of people liked this narrative. After being imprisoned in 1997 for the assault of an antiracist activist woman and avoiding more prison by selling off his Neo-Nazi record company, Burdi claimed he had renounced white supremacy. Burdi had a new band and it wasn’t a reference to The Church of the Creator’s “Racial Holy War” anymore; Burdi had two Black band members and was even engaged to an East Indian woman!

But if you listen to Burdi closely, there’s a lot he doesn’t say, and it sounds a lot less like he came to a realization that he was fundamentally wrong about the way he looked at the world than it does that he was facing tremendous consequences in his life for openly sharing and pursuing those views.

In 2017, Burdi admitted he had never fully left the white nationalist movement (~8:00 in). He still thought “multiculturalism” was bad, “homogenous societies” would be better, and calmly went through his ethno-nationalist screed that would necessitate tremendous violence visited on millions if not billions of people.

Burdi ends that section of the 2017 interview on a note about how he’d either send his children to a private school in Detroit or homeschool them, which is remarkably similar to the things TST owner Cevin Soling once told Russia Today (mirror) about when public schools really went downhill.

[Soling says] What I think the transformation that took- happened, was that we went from a homogeneous population in these schools to a heterogeneous one [emphasis added]. And so where you have a common culture in a school, where everyone sort of comes from the same background, it’s easier to suppress and keep people in line, but when people have different cultures, greater efforts have to be made to basically keep people in line and enforce the conformity that is demanded and required in public schools. They’re not good places to learn and they’re not good places to be.

Cevin Soling on RT America at YouTube.com, “US declares war on kids”, (Jul 10, 2012 )

When you wonder why TST is getting involved in weird stuff like the Mahanoy (Pennsylvania) School Board and selling “Fuck The Mahanoy School Board” merch, it basically comes down to “Cevin Soling really hates public schools.”

Actually, according to Joe Laycock’s book, this is not incidental. Rather, that’s how Soling and Lucien Greaves originally met: talking about their shared opposition to public education. Emphasis added in all cases.

(Note, though, that we have never been able to find evidence that Greaves actually attended — let alone got a degree from — Harvard.)

Malcolm Jarry and Doug Mesner (Lucien Greaves) met in 2012 at a function at the Harvard faculty club. Both men hold degrees from Harvard and were living near Cambridge at the time. Mesner recalls being invited to the function by a female friend to serve as her “wingman” while that she chatted with Harvard-educated bachelors. Mesner and his friend were sitting on a couch when Jarry wandered over. Jarry had met a young woman and was locked in a debate with her about public education. They decided to continue their conversation seated and pulled up chairs in front of Mesner’s couch. Jarry felt public schools were essentially like prisons; their function was not to educate but to inculcate compliance with authority. The woman objected, explaining that her public school experience had been entirely positive. Mesner, who watched the debate unfold, recalled, “Of course I wanted to agree with the beautiful lady, but Malcolm was clearly right.” Mesner finally chimed in, siding with Malcolm and the woman, perhaps feeling outnumbered, made her excuses and walked away. She left Jarry with Mesner, having no comprehension of the chain of events she had just set in motion.

…

Jarry grew up outside of New York City and has described his religious upbringing as atheistic Judaism. He holds multiple graduate degrees and has taken on numerous projects in whatever area interests him, including Japanese martial arts, writing books and articles, and producing musical albums and films. One of his enduring interests has been education reform. In an essay written the year he met Mesner, Jarry wrote, “On prima facie grounds, it is incomprehensibly absurd to place children in a totalitarian environment for 13 years of their lives and to expect them, upon removal, to be able to fulfill the obligations of citizenry in a democracy. The greatest obligation being to oppose the very same manifestations of tyrannical power to which students are acclimated.”³

Joseph Laycock, Speak of the Devil, Chapter 2, “Origins and History of The Satanic Temple”

Importantly, when you follow that last footnote it says:

3. Malcolm Jarry, “Educational mission: A report and plan of action” (December 12, 2012), p. 11.

That document has never been made public, but there is one other reference to it in the same book.

This inspired Jarry, who had experience as a filmmaker, to undertake a political action: he would travel to Florida and hold a rally in which Satanists praised Rick Scott for turning public schools into a platform from which to spread Satanic ideology. He described his intention behind the rally in an essay entitled, “Educational Mission: A Report and Plan of Action” in which he wrote: “Action is based on the theory that when the rules that are used to subjugate a population are applied to the people who create and enforce those rules, constructive changes occur.”¹¹ Jarry’s essay, completed on December 12, 2012, is essentially the birth certificate of TST.

Joseph Laycock, Speak of the Devil, Chapter 3, “Satanic Schisms”

And when you follow the footnote:

11. Jarry, “Educational mission,” p. 12.

So it’s not an exaggeration to say that if Cevin Soling did not hate (integrated) public schools and their heightened level of repression required for “heterogenous” populations versus “homogenous” ones, the Temple would not exist — and that’s apparently true several times over.

A defender of TST and of Soling might want to point out that just because Soling and George Burdi agree on one thing, and have used similar reasoning, doesn’t mean the whole push to end public schools is actually wrong.

But it’s more that the entire modern right wing is built on opposition to public school integration, and the sort of people who call for the abolition of schools because they’re like prisons while still supporting actual prisons are just giving their hand away about what bothers them.

In fact, Soling also had a very long conversation with Stefan Molyneux, yes, that one, about the benefits of homeschooling when promoting his documentary “The War on Kids”. He did an interview with at least one other homeschool right wing libertarian on that extended tour a decade ago, possibly more.

But here’s the SPLC summary of home-school aficionado Molyneux:

A libertarian internet commentator and alleged cult leader who amplifies “scientific racism,” eugenics and white supremacism to a massive new audience, Stefan Molyneux operates within the racist so-called “alt-right” and pro-Trump ranks.

SPLC entry on Stefan Molyneux

“That was a long time ago,” apologists will say.

Ok, sure.

As late as 2015—so now fully in crossover with owning The Satanic Temple—Cevin Soling was out on the anti-public schools circuit talking to right-wing radio’s “High Priestess of Hate” Laura Ingraham.

Even more recently, The Daily Caller quoted Soling about his homeschool initiative in April 2020 in his role as “president of Ideological Diversity”, which describes itself as “a Student Organization at Harvard Kennedy School”. Meanwhile, the other lead in the group is Corey DeAngelis, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, a dark money, right-wing school privatization group.

The only other media covering that April 2020 event was the Foundation for Economic Education, a Koch-funded “right-wing libertarian economic think-tank”.

Turtles, all the way down.

Now, do we have time here to get into Soling’s whole cargo cult messiah thing or anti-Palestinian nonprofit? We do not.

Just remember: “When it comes to The Satanic Temple, there’s always more, and it’s always worse.”

Approaching the End

So as we get into the home-stretch (finally!), let’s look at the sort of things Long has to say in defense of Greaves:

I think that, in Lucien’s case, we see all of the aspects of the Contagion Left at work. We see people assuming he’s a fascist and then expecting that to be disproven, before his fascism was even established as true. Lucien champions diversity and pluralism, yet despite that he is tarnished by some gross comments he made twenty years ago. Even if he was a fascist, I don’t care. In my opinion, his present character speaks for itself. If he was a fascist, I celebrate that he is (clearly) not one any longer. I see his previous attitudes as redeemed by his current convictions, rather than vice-versa.

The theory of contagion applies to other accusations against Lucien and TST. When he hired Marc Randazza, Alex Jones’s attourney, pro bono for a free speech suit [emphasis added], he was suddenly tarnished by that association. The Right Wing cooties infected Lucien, despite the fact that, if Marc is right-wing, he is actively working against his own interests by aiding TST. Again, no one celebrates the possibility of Lucien’s leftism rubbing off on Randazza. The contagion only flows in a single direction, rendering us all fearful and ineffective.

I think that nearly every attack on Lucien Greaves and TST is an example of Contagion Leftism. It’s not about creating a better Temple, it’s about fear of infection. Are there valid critiques of TST? Of course. Those criticisms, more often then not, come from members and leaders who care deeply about the future of TST.

At this point, it’s not clear what there remains to say.

Long minimizes what it was Lucien was actually doing in 2003 — because Long never bothered to investigate it for himself, even though it was fairly easy to have done so.

So, Long says, even if Lucien was a fascist then, clearly he’s changed. However, the great schism in 2018 was related to criticism that Lucien had not changed and continued to be friendlier and more forgiving of virulent bigots and their enablers, and has continued to treat people like Andy fucking Ngo as a credible source, reserving his deeper criticism for antifascists who are “the greatest threat to our social stability.”

And as for Marc Randazza, again, the problem isn’t just that he represents bad clients but that he actively seeks out the likes of Alex Jones, Mike Cernovich, and Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer. He is himself actually a piece of shit, and in bad standing with a lot of state bars as well as the US Patent Office. We are supposed to take TST’s word that Randazza is working for them pro bono on a “free speech suit” when they don’t have open books to demonstrate where money donated to them is and isn’t going, when no one has yet given a good explanation for why TST tried to raise $50,000 for a legal action that they say didn’t involve any legal fees.

Why? Why would you take them at their word? Their “free speech” complaint is specifically about getting Lucien Greaves’ Twitter account a blue checkmark so he and other “political figures” like Laura Loomer and Richard Spencer stop being discriminated against.

Why would you believe that Randazza works for them for free when he’s their go-to to threaten a lawsuit about Mississippi changing its flag away from the Confederate design and help them sue the city of Boston, but also, he’s their go-to guy for patent office work. Maybe because Randazza lets clients use pseudonyms on federal documents and still turns in the paperwork.

Long thinks that Leftists believe in “right-wing cooties” as opposed to Leftists being people who have quite a bit of experience dealing with the far right and who know how dangerous they are to the sort of people they want to assault and abuse.

A Thought Experiment

Just, as a thought experiment mind you, imagine that instead of “right wing” people, we’re talking about a group whose highest leadership just keeps continually palling around, boosting, and defending pedophiles and the sexual assault of young teenage girls. (note: in the Might Is Right stream, Shane Bugbee does literally, repeatedly comes back to this theme.)

But instead of just talking about it, the group’s leaders invite on a bunch of actual, convicted, and unapologetic sexual abusers of children to be interviewed, play hours of rambling pre-recorded speeches by people like Jimmy Savile to fill dead air time (in reality, it’s Charles Manson and others), and the leaders spend the next decades of their life talking about it, and defending the free speech rights of such predators, or minimizing the harm they’ve caused and threat they pose (e.g. “The Catholic Church is way worse”).

Imagine, weirdly, it’s almost exclusively their free speech rights that the group’s leaders are interested in and not anyone with any other interests, like say union organizers, trans people, or folk who criticize police.

Imagine if this hypothetical group utilized a lawyer who disproportionately represented accused pedophiles, but the lawyer himself kept talking about his appreciation for “hot young teens” and such himself, maybe not going all the way to say it, but constantly revealing where his sympathies lay. (In reality, Marc Randazza has argued in favor of legalizing child porn on First Amendment grounds. No, really.)

In this hypothetical, exactly how safe do you think people with children would feel leaving their kids alone with those leaders? Or with any organization whose members repeatedly made excuses for their leaders’ past behavior, even as similar incidents were ongoing around and within the organization?

Would it actually be an important distinction to make whether the leaders felt a certain way about children or just didn’t consider children’s safety a priority?

To be clear: The Satanic Temple has figures who have spent 20 years doing something like that; but instead of abusing children, it’s people who want to enact genocide, create a white ethnostate, pursue “Western Chauvinism”, and so forth.

That was supposed to be the only point to this hypothetical: what’s something absolutely indefensible other than genocidal white supremacists, something no one could possibly defend?

But, there’s always more, and it’s always worse, so in parallel to this thought experiment, as you saw, there are certain examples of literal crossover. It ends up being literally true that Lucien has been defending the shuttered False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), and continues to defend it via the Grey Faction and his personal Patreon posts.

So we’re not saying literally that Lucien has a history of defending child sexual abuse and abusers.

But the FMSF has indeed been accused of that, as recently as having key figure Elizabeth Loftus popping up to provide expert testimony for the defense of the likes of Jerry Sandusky, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby but people all the way back to Ted Bundy, too. Their effect for years was to provide yet another excuse — for cops, courts, and various authority figures — to argue that victims of abuse, particularly children, were not to be trusted.

And of course, back in 1993, two of FMSF’s board members did give an interview to the Dutch pro-pedophilia magazine Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia kinda hyping up the whole… sexual abuse of children thing.

Still, for the better part of three decades, the FMSF continued to — by default — disbelieve that children were victims of abuse they remembered or understood after the fact, and to believe and to welcome in the tens of thousands of adults accused of being abusers. Apparently, Lucien still admins the independent Facebook group “False Memory Syndrome Action Network” that the FMSF newsletter once promoted, under yet another pseudonym of his: “Mikoto Niikura”, and as mentioned previously, he wrote a response attacking the journalist who in 2020 reported critically on the FMSF after its closure.

Lucien and The Grey Faction and The Satanic Temple itself, continue to attack and deride people who experience Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) despite it being in the DSM, but also, as pseudonym “Konrad Josefsson”, Greaves attacked people who claim to have Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) because it’s not in the DSM.

If you have a traumatic sexual experience at, say, a TST-related Lupercalia orgy, but you don’t say anything about it immediately, or if you accuse another member of sexual assault, do you think Lucien or Mike Cernovich’s good friend Greg Stevens or other people those guys trust as leaders are going to believe you? What if another leader is the one who hurt you?

Every time you dig deeper at something, you find more connections, more demonstrations of certain sympathies, lack of sympathy for others, and absolutely no way for the volunteers who make up the organization to make change or hold those in power accountable except by leaving, knowing in their absence they will be misrepresented to remaining members as just another of “The Outraged” or maybe even publicly, anonymously attacked.

Despite what The Satanic Temple told Hemant Mehta in 2018, there’s not really any evidence they ever stopped wrapping people up in Non-Disclosure Agreements or threatening people with violating them and lots of evidence NDAs are still standard operating procedure for their business (or was it religion?), so it is literally impossible to imagine all of the fucked up shit people have experienced and kept quiet about because they fear a rich, financially opaque and utterly unaccountable leadership from going after them with punitive lawsuits.

Speaking of which, if you’ve learned anything new about The Satanic Temple or its leadership from reading this, feel free to tip us so we can keep defending ourselves from their lawsuit

Legal Fund for Victims of Satanic Temple, organized by Leah Fishbaugh

Long asks, “So why do I remain in TST?”

And the answer is pretty clear.

Despite all of the people who have left over the years complaining about how TST leadership doesn’t live up to its own values, how the court cases keep going badly, and how actually there are no signs of any improvement but probably just the opposite given how finances are now even more opaque than before, we cannot find reasons to expect positive change.

The issue is that the people who are in TST and have constructed an identity and social network around it don’t want to believe they bet on the wrong horse again, particularly if they already left an abusive religion of their upbringing.

“Why I haven’t left The Satanic Temple” — because when your mind is already made up, you don’t bother to go looking for any evidence, and it’s a lot easier to stick with your priors no matter how much evidence is shown to you that they’re wrong.

Hail Satan, hail yourself.

You deserve better than these ghouls. You do.

---

Article updated substantively March 2022 with email correspondence and embedded audio/video and July 2022 with more details on Left Hand Path Consortium.

Article updated January 2023 with references to “Educational mission: A report and plan of action” from Speak of the Devil and March 2023 with more embedded video clips.

---

Correction: A previous version of this article linked to a Twitter thread by ISSTD Director Mike Salter, PhD. While the thread is concise and clear, it’s a fair criticism that Salter’s own relationship to the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” conspiracy means he’s not someone who should be referenced uncritically as a source. In its place is an academic article by lawyer Fiona Raitt and psychologist Suzanne Zeedyk covering much of the same ground more thoroughly but less accessibly.