There’s an unfortunate tendency of people to say:

a) “Satanist”/“Satanic” to just mean “thing I don’t like”;
b) “(nazi) SATANISTS? how alarming!” missing what’s truly harmful here;
c) “Those are fake satanists. Only Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan…”; or
d) “Real Satanists are the good guys — more Christlike than Christians, even”

Your mileage may vary on which of these misconceptions is the worst as it likely is highly context dependent. But if you are in liberal and leftist spaces, it’s likely you’re going to be running into Option D most, and yes, that one is also quite bad.

Chrissy Stroop of The Bugbear Dispatch has written extensively about this dynamic vis-à-vis Christianity, and how “real Christians are good progressive beans, actually” normalizes Christian supremacy by treating it as by default good, which preemptively discredits and marginalizes its victims further.

It might even be more accessible of a canard for Satanists, who can — and occasionally have —handwaved away the notion of victims under the premise that it’s just relitigating the Satanic Panic. And because so much of the popular appeal of Satanism is some (often justified) negative partisanship against Christianity, there’s tremendous pressure against acknowledging real bad actors and even real victims lest it “give more ammo to conservatives” or whatever other excuse ends up reinforcing arbitrary hierarchies.

What all of those options have in common, though, is how they engage in wild, knee-jerk and sweeping sentiments with people sometimes swinging back and forth through successive inverted understandings of the world and how people operate in it. At no point is there is no effort to learn more and or deconstruct to be able to suss out the underlying dynamics better.

(For more on exactly this subject and Satanism, see this conversation):

That’s the context for the relatively small but not at all farcical or illegitimate phenomenon of esoteric fascists, and specifically neo-Nazi Satanists.

So make some time for this Bluesky thread by research analyst of far-right extremism Jennefer Harper to get your bearings, and then dive into the Left Coast Right Watch article itself to read the full piece.

jennefer harper ‪@jennefer.bsky.social‬
I wrote a long form piece exploring a network of satanic, neo-Nazi occultist groups connected to the Tempel ov Blood. At the heart of this story is a young man named Anton Blenzig who had ties to this network. Last April he died from an apparent suicide.

Anton McKay Blenzig died of a gunshot wound to his head in the very early hours of 22 April 2024. A Tarrant County prosecutor—the official who performs autopsies—declared his death a suicide. He was 27 years old.

The day after Blenzig died, someone claiming to be a family member took to the social media platform Telegram looking for answers. “People in the Temple [sic] ov Blood wanted him dead,” the supposed family member claimed, suggesting that Blenzig was encouraged to kill himself—or even murdered.

The Tempel ov Blood is a US “nexion”, or branch, of the Order of Nine Angles. Formed in 2003 in the US state of North Carolina, the Tempel ov Blood (ToB) gained members and supporters early on in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Italy, and Brazil.

In late 2004, the group established its headquarters in rural South Carolina where white supremacist Joshua Caleb Sutter, his soon to be wife Jillian Scott Hoy and other key figures would encourage extremism and distribute terror-inspiring propaganda over the next twenty years.

Anton Blenzig used the slogan AWD popularized—“Iron Gates Now” —as his inspiration for a Tempel ov Blood blog site he maintained from mid-2020 to early 2021. Using the alias “Vm32,” Blenzig posted over 30 images of Tempel ov Blood propaganda to the website.

Blenzig uploaded several photos of himself to this blog site along with satanic Nazi propaganda featuring Jarod Hayes Choate and Brennan Jacob Walters- two far-right extremists who organized with Blenzig as Tempel ov Blood and then soon after as Satanic Front.

Indicators suggest, more than anything, that Blenzig spent more time “on the dark web” in COM groups—bleak social networks where people can anonymously share extremely dismal subject matter such as gore, animal abuse, self-harm, and child sexual abuse material.

In the year before Anton Blenzig’s death, several high profile arrests were made of men involved in these spaces.

On 18 November 2020, Joshua Sutter and Jillian Hoy’s 12th wedding anniversary date—and the 42nd anniversary date of the People’s Temple mass murder and suicide—the Martinet Press website published an announcement endorsing long time adherent “Commandant Cultus,” (Anton Blenzig). He was 24 years old.

While LCRW was able to confirm Anton Blenzig’s death, we were unable to confirm the status of any open investigation into it. There are few known answers about the circumstances around his death. The people who radicalized him are still out there.

The full Left Coast Right Watch article, again.

“Nazi Satanists” are real — and they are really Satanists. Just keep in mind that (we’d argue) the aesthetics of Satanism tend to be less important and more interchangeable to this sort of thing than the worldview focused on dominating and hurting others.

Hence “NAZI (satanist)” is a more fair point of emphasis, and sometimes worth point out when people get stuck doing “Option A” stuff.