June 5, 2023

Cevin Soling really hates public schools

Newly discovered passages from 2014’s “The Student Resistance Handbook” by Satanic Temple co-owner Cevin “Malcolm Jarry” Soling show that using Satanic student groups to disrupt education isn’t a bug or a side effect of them; it’s the whole point

When Fox News discusses The Satanic Temple’s After School Satan clubs, they are using the issue as a way to promote their agenda of conspiratorial, often antisemitic fear-mongering.

School that hosts ‘Satan Club’ put on lockdown, dismissed early following bomb threat |
Threatening email reportedly accused Virginia elementary school of promoting ‘devil worship and un-Islamic values’ – FoxNews.com (Archive)

However — and crucially — the right-wing media company is also being used by TST to promote the nontheistic satanic organization, to raise the profile of the Temple and its owners, and therefore gain more donations and merchandise sales to profit the owners.

We’ve talked about this dynamic before, and specifically with the Satan clubs.

However, what we didn’t explore in that in depth is how the Satanic Temple’s quieter co-owner Cevin Soling really hates public schools and regularly uses TST to further his purpose of sabotaging them.

It may even be why the Temple was founded and the original ultimate goal of the prank documentary project itself.


While the motivations behind Soling — who also uses the pseudonym “Malcolm Jarry” for TST business — and his anti-(integrated) public school stance is something worse than problematic, it’s not that the stance itself is totally wrong.

“Public schools hurt children” is not terrible or indefensible position to take in a vacuum. It is, truly, a form of abolitionism, and many genuinely decent people have sought youth liberation and education available for everyone without being a model of factory training forced on everyone.

Thus, a lot in The Student Resistance Handbook actually might be useful to students. But most of it won’t be, and that’s because it’s not taking place in a vacuum and because the fundamental flaws and orientation of the author ruin it.

When the first two epigraphs included in the book are of the author quoting himself to start the chapter (Soling does this several more times), you know the sort of mediocre, self-published rich man you’re about to start reading.

But this book also confirms something long suspected about the prominent national campaign After School Satan (ASS) The Satanic Temple has been pursuing off and on for about seven years.

Before we get to that, some background.

“Unschooling” can mean lots of things — from white nationalists like Stefan Molyneux wanting to keep their children away from the pluralistic society they despise to leftists who want to avoid capitalist indoctrination to apolitical people who think they can do a better job at home and self-managed.

Soling a.k.a. “Malcolm Jarry”, did let the mask slip for himself when phrasing the problem this way:

Soling’s documentary “The War on Kids” — which he also promotes in the book without disclosing he made it — got him on “The Colbert Report” as well as chatting with Molyneux on the latter’s podcast, and the subject of hating public schools is how he and future co-owner of The Satanic Temple Doug Misicko a.k.a. “Lucien Greaves” met in 2012, by their own account as dutifully stenographed by Joe Laycock in his history of TST, “Speak of the Devil”.

That “3” footnote goes on to reveal that this is part of the “birth certificate” of The Satanic Temple that Soling wrote in December 2012 just prior to the first publicity stunt in Tallahassee, Fla., the following month.

TST has for years made the false claims that its religious exemptions are already effective, and while abortion is the most prominent of these, before that it was the “Protect Children Project” (PCP).

Starting in April 2014, TST claimed that children could use a religious exemption to escape beatings (“corporal punishment”) — but only in public schools. This explains why TST “The Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities” from that earliest period of PCP also fits this pattern. And so does 2014’s The Student Resistance Handbook. What makes this especially interesting is that it was published by Spectacle Films, Inc., making it potentially part of the same project TST was originally supposed to be.

In regards to the After School Satan clubs announced occasionally to get attention for The Satanic Temple (and therefore merchandise sales and donations), we had long speculated that it might also be because Soling wanted to jam up the public schools and make it harder for them to operate. For that, they often didn’t even need to actually exist, just be announced as existing.

Well, thanks to this recent thrift-shop pickup, we can confirm Cevin Soling was about as explicit as it gets that this is exactly what ASS clubs are supposed to be for.

This is from pages 65-66 then page 70 of Soling’s The Student Resistance Handbook. Of these, “Form a club” is definitely a standout, but there’s a lot here.

Because when it comes to The Satanic Temple…

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