“The Devil’s Pantry”

On Nov. 4, TST announced the launch of its “The Devil’s Pantry” campaign to make it look like the fake information was real the whole time:

I am happy to inform you that The Satanic Temple has launched a national food drive. Thanks to our Satanic Good Works Campaign, congregations, and all of those who will participate. Press release below:

The Satanic Temple Organizes Emergency Food Drive

In response to food insecurity, the Satanic Temple is launching the Devil’s Pantry food drive…

Right now in the United States, millions of people are unsure where their next meal is coming from. In response to this unprecedented level of food insecurity, The Satanic Temple is holding an emergency food drive, The Devil’s Pantry.

Across the country, TST congregations have partnered with food pantries in their area to collect donations in support of their local community. 

Participating TST congregations and their food pantry partners are linked below. All direct donations to this GoFundMe will support the TST mission and ongoing campaigns.   

Credit where it’s due — for the most part, the congregations linked in the campaign page are actually donating directly to various regional food banks through affiliate links. Thousands of dollars are being donated around the country directly to food banks who currently list various congregations as “fundraiser partners” or what have you. And we mean it in all sincerity that that’s great.

But some of the links ostensibly to specific congregations’ food drives actually just go to a local email address, and it’s unclear at time of writing what, if anything, those congregations are actually doing, or who determined that they were.

Moreover, it bears repeating that it should be fairly obvious that this campaign launch was not in response to the impending food insecurity, but rather was a response to the viral moment a few days earlier — an attempt to redirect it to the profit of its owners. That’s why this campaign only launched that day, despite the impending SNAP shortage having been widely reported on for weeks, despite some congregations allegedly doing food drives on a semi-regular basis for multiple years without fanfare from Doug, and despite food insecurity being a year-round threat for millions around the country year after year regardless of who the president is.

All of that said, this is probably the best-case scenario for TST’s potential responses to a viral moment that its central apparatus (Doug and Cevin) had nothing to do with otherwise. After all, it’s not like they were going to debunk it and admit to having no real capacity to feed people in accordance with the memes.

Ultimately, this is more of the same reputation laundering that has served TST’s owners so well for the last decade — soliciting donations from people who found out how cool TST is five minutes ago, padding it out with some breathless stenography from local media, and then graciously taking credit on behalf of the people on the ground investing their own time, sweat, and tears responding to a legitimate crisis.

Pay no attention to what happened to the last batch of true believers. Or the batch before that. Or the batch before that.

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And there is one more thing we want to point out about the “Devil’s Pantry” announcement, that we think is particularly illustrative of the parasitic relationship that Doug and Cevin foist upon both their followers and the general public. Let’s take a look at their announcement page again, particularly on the mobile version:

That big red button on the black background, at the top of the page? That’s a donation button to The Satanic Temple, the national organization. Not to any of the congregations, not to anybody besides Doug and Cevin directly.

This is a great time to be reminded that Doug himself has testified under oath, as the treasurer of TST, that he has no concrete idea where money from the website actually goes.

It’s up to you to decide whether that’s a convincing answer from the guy who announced a national food program supported by people around the country, and then highlights it with a giant DONATE button pointing directly to himself.

Links to the congregations themselves are at the bottom, below the body text. And then you have to click into one of those just to see which food banks are ostensibly involved. This is hardly the best design if your chief concern is getting money into the hands of the food banks you’re ostensibly working with.

To put it as bluntly as possible, we don’t think it’s there to inspire confidence in that sort of goal at all. We think Doug and Cevin are counting on people seeing that big red DONATE link at the top, and immediately sending money that way rather than ever bothering to look for particular congregations or food banks. It cannot be overstated that the Temple’s entire operation relies on the public being ignorant of the disconnect between national and the congregations – how disposable that lay members and congregations are designed to be, and, again, how much contempt that Doug openly shows them for wanting their concerns about TST’s future and goals to be taken seriously.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. You can see it for yourself, hidden right in the middle of the body text:

“All direct donations to this GoFundMe will support the TST mission and ongoing campaigns.”

From where we stand, that’s about as clear of an admission that it gets that if you donate to The Satanic Temple itself via that big red button, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that your money will actually go to any of the food banks discussed, or any of the congregations currently partnering with them.

“The TST mission”? That’s pretty fucking vague. Where do you even go to verify what that’s supposed to be at the time?

“Ongoing campaigns”? At time of writing, TST is currently appealing the dismissal of its SLAPP suit against Newsweek in front of the 2nd Circuit, where it argues that the Satanic Panic of the 80s is of such “doctrinal significance” to TST that it justifies the Temple claiming it was defamed by allegations of internal abuse and coverup, even after admitting that those allegations were true:

The Satanic Temple also admitted that head of the Austin Chapter was accused of sexually assaulting another member, and other members accused The Satanic Temple of “covering up” the incident. According to The Satanic Temple, a friend of the victim told The Satanic Temple National Council about the alleged assault, and the National Council encouraged the victim to report the incident to the police. In the following months, the victim’s friends became unhappy with The Satanic Temple’s lack of a further response to the allegations, and “threatened to go public . . . with the claim that [The Satanic Temple] was covering up these accusations.” Following these threats, the alleged perpetrator “stepped down” from his leadership position. However, the alleged victim and her friends continued to raise the issue at Chapter meetings and were removed from the Austin Chapter as a result (emphasis added).

TST spent over $43,000 on crisis PR management, on invoices addressed to The Satanic Temple specifically, trying to bury a Newsweek article that they ended up suing about anyway. They lost that lawsuit and they’re still fighting it. Does that qualify as an “ongoing campaign”?

That’s not a normal expense for a supposed nonprofit religion to have to make. But then, maybe it is for TST — after all, they confirmed in their own SLAPP suit against us that they also spend money to have at least one contractor around to spy on the Temple’s critics, and gather statements that supposedly look like actionable defamation even after years of demonstrating a flagrant disregard for what the legal standard actually is.

If you threw $1,000 at TST through the big red DONATE button at the top of its “Devil’s Pantry” campaign page, you have no guarantee at all that that money is going to a food bank, or whether it’s actually being funneled into yet another arm of the propaganda machine that Doug and Cevin maintain to pretend that their privately-owned religion is better than it actually is. And as far as they’re concerned, it’s none of your business, even if you spend years of your life contributing to making that image possible.

But hey, at least The Satanic Temple is “doing something”.

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As a button on this, from our Facebook page as a follower interacted with that “Damien Carrion”, the Temu Marilyn Manson who tried to take a victory lap after TST made this announcement:

Our follower:
TST isn’t literally feeding the hungry bud, they’re collecting money. I can’t find any information on where to get food on the website you failed to link, just how to donate…

So I’m not sure what you think this big gotcha is, but pairing with food banks to ask for money isn’t “literally feeding people”, it’s “literally fundraising for the people who are actually literally feeding people” and the issue you’re intentionally missing, because you’re apparently too concerned with which goth you’re compared too, instead of actually discussing the topic at hand.

I understand this is hard for you, but the issue being highlighted is that there’s thousands of people saying TST is feeding people and churches aren’t, which are factually incorrect statements you can go to a lot of churches right now and be handed food, there is nowhere associated with TST that will net these results. If the word had been spread that they were campaigning to raise funds for local food banks no one would have batted an eye, but instead an org that’s notorious for taking money and not yielding results is taking money at a time we really need results.

So unless you can provide a link where people can literally go get the food TST is literally feeding people, then literally shut the fuck up.

Notably, that person responding to “Damien” is not announcing they will feed anyone who needs help, then posting a link to their own Venmo, then lots of fake promises, and finally a link to a food bank, and claiming “mission accomplished”.

That is functionally what TST is doing. That is the grift that TST apologists are supporting.

Unlike TST, we are not tapeworms of progressive causes. Unlike TST, we don’t need to announce every good thing we do as a way to trick people into donating to a general fund with no financial transparency or accountability.

A better world is possible, but you are what you do repeatedly, and you become more of what you practice at. To make ourselves better and make the world better, we have to be actually doing things, not just creating the spectacle of doing something.

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