We’re collaborating with some folk at Ave Satanas Podcast (ASP) and Free Society Satanists to bring you a miniseries looking at Might Is Right — ur-text of Satanism and an infamous work of proto-fascism first published in 1896 by Arthur Desmond a.k.a. “Ragnar Redbeard”.

To be clear: Might Is Right sucks, both as a book and ideology. It’s full of doggerel, bigotry, and contradictions. But we’re gonna talk about it, chapter-by-chapter, from the perspective of modern, anarchist Satanists who feel that racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and tyranny are “bad, actually”.

Livestream to air 9 p.m Eastern / 6 p.m. Pacific this Friday Aug. 8 (0100 UTC Aug. 9), with podcasts released the following Friday, and new recordings taking place every two weeks:

Folk who have thoughts on MIR and want to weigh in are welcome to join us on Twitch.

Assuming we can make the technical stuff work, the idea is for us to talk this week about the background of Arthur Desmond and Might Is Right, and why a piece of shit book like that is even worth investigating almost 130 years later.

(Spoiler: Anton LaVey plagiarized it for The Satanic Bible.)

Since we’re springing this on you suddenly, the chapter-by-chapter stuff won’t start until Friday Aug. 22, giving people time to do their reading and weigh-in. The first one will prolly be messy, but also to do some open table-setting about why we are bothering with this project now.

We’re using the mechanically impressive “Authoritative Edition” that Trevor Blake put together and published in 2019, harmonizing and annotating various versions, but nobody else ought to feel obligated to use that one rather than any of the free versions you can find floating around on the Web.

Frankly, if you follow along reading the 1910 edition published by “14 Words Press”, you are in some ways getting the more genuine and relevant version of this rancid fucking text, what it is all about, and it’s cultural significance than Blake’s version which falls all over itself in apologism.

This is not really a fun book to read, and if you haven’t read it before, maybe it’s not worth your while.

However, the fact that is bad actually helps to explain a lot of the stuff you see around you today, and the continuity of shit like incels and “anti-theist” antisemitism is also useful.