Spencer Sunshine is an antifascist researcher and the author of Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism. We were one of the sources helping Spencer as he put together the Satanism-inflected parts of that book, and he interviewed us for his Patreon.

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Spencer Sunshine: Before we get into the lawsuit, I’m curious about your view of Satanism. What do you see as inspiring in it and what is its potential? On social media, sometimes you’re quite pessimistic about Satanism, and seem to imply its irrevocably stained—despite the fact that you’ve been key actors in the new wave of left-wing, antifascist Satanism.

David: As I understand it, there’s a tradition in Judaism that someone trying to convert should be turned away by a rabbi three times. I would understand my responsibility as a somewhat prominent Satanist to be to turn away potential new Satanists three hundred times—and then remind them afterward about all the racist and cringe shit still in our history and centralizing texts.

My pessimism has less to do with Satanism as a thing-itself, and more to do with the distance between what people think Satanism is and what Satanism actually is.

In reality, there is no path from Satanism to radical politics. That’s because Satanism is essentially “opposite day,” Christianity, and Christianity is too big to be coherent as a single thing, including opposing it as a single thing. > The complaints about Christianity in Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible—including those plagiarized from Ragnar Redbeard’s 1896 social Darwinist book Might Is Right—can be summarized as Christianity being “too loving and nice.” Which is not my criticism or complaint about Christianity.

But even if you’re inverting a toxic strain like the American slaver’s Christianity and its descendants, you’ve still got something toxic on your hands. It’s just that now the toxicity is upside-down. To get something better out of a thing, you have to deconstruct it, examine it closely, and put it back together carefully. Traumatized ex-Christians, especially when they’re young, tend not to have exposure to good or healthy religious organizations, so it’s not surprising that when they flee to this new, upside-down thing, they don’t recognize what’s harmful in Satanism or their own organizational structures.

Satanists have a tendency to think that wearing all-black or saying “Hail Satan!,” while throwing up the sign of the horns, is radical action—but they are confusing the aesthetics of rebellion for actual rebellion. A Unitarian church sheltering protesters and refusing to give them up to cops is rebellious in a way that a Black Mass or playing “devil’s advocate” for eugenics can never be.

Weirdly, and shamelessly cribbing from Felo de Se of the Capital Area Satanists and the D.C. area, “the great thing about Satanism is that our best days have to be ahead of us because the past has been so bad.”

I am optimistic in the sense that I feel that Satanism can be better going forward than it has been. But it will take a ton of work, and anybody coming into it fresh has to be prepared to do the work to make it suck less. You can’t make it better if you don’t appreciate how shit the starting point is.

Nathan: I don’t have any good answers to this, even for myself. When people ask for Satanic books to read, I tend to tell them to start with decolonial texts (e.g., Frantz Fanon, Assata Shakur) rather than anything explicitly Satanist.

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