Or: “Boy, a hit dog will holler, won’t it?“

Let’s just be up front that despite referencing mainly Church of Satan apostate and Temple of Set founder Michael Aquino, it’s obvious that the “Magister Kevin L. Slaughter” article “Anton LaVey and the Right of Might” was written and published to the Church of Satan website now only as a response to our own piece last month — just too cowardly to reference it directly, much less hyperlink to it for people to examine the criticisms and underlying evidence for themselves.

Anton LaVey plagiarized* “Might Is Right” — here’s the proof

We would say that Slaughter goes well out of his way to invent a bunch of things to argue against, but feel free to read it in full for yourself first before you come back here, including just to yell at us for being unfair to him and/or his reasoning in some way. (Sincerely.)

We think we can actually reply to all his article pretty succinctly, though.

1. Anton LaVey plagiarized Arthur Desmond’s Might Is Right. You can skip the whole first section of Slaughter’s defense because the claim that contemporary intellectual property protections made it legal in 1966 in ways it wouldn’t be today isn’t what’s at issue: copying someone else’s work word-for-word and presenting it as your own without credit is what’s at issue. To make this more clear, copyright law is not what makes it plagiarism when you copy someone else’s homework for class and submit it as your own. Putting your name on a public domain bit of poetry and submitting it as if it’s yours to a collection is still plagiarism. Again, copying word-for-word at length while presenting it as an original work is demonstrably what happened with the “Book of Satan”. You do not need to take our word for it; you can use your own eyes for that.
2. Look at the dedication for yourself. There’s reason the official Church of Satan response on this for years has been to claim and claim and claim that the wrongly-removed dedication at the front of The Satanic Bible would have solved all of this misunderstanding from jump — rather than just show people the referenced dedication. Because this is not how a citation works. No reasonable person would say that sandwiching “Ragnar Redbeard, whose might was right” in between 18 others including Rasputin and Fritz Lang would lead one to believe 5 percent of the book that is to come — its entire first section! — would be the guy named 7th of 19 in the “To” section, with more “And to” people listed after. It is an insult to your intelligence that this is still the excuse being trotted out, and it’s embarrassing if you are a Church of Satan member who repeats this claim without seeing for yourself what they’re talking about. Please, talk to any professional writer or academic about this if you think this is standard or sufficient considering the scale we’re talking about. It is not.
3. Finally: LaVey is not being criticized for being a hypocrite; the Church of Satan is. To be clear: LaVey is criticized for being an intellectually lazy mediocre writer whose best “work” had to come from pillaging someone else, having his wife type and edit it for him, and presenting it without credit as if it were his own. Really, all of this stuff about how the true Satanists SEIZE, etc., etc., is pretty fucking rich from the same Church of Satan that at least as of a decade ago, didn’t even want PDFs of LaVey’s writings being shared. Of course, if the claim being made nowadays is that LaVey taking Desmond’s writing without pay or credit is even more justified because Desmond was also a plagiarist and unoriginal thinker, well, you’d think it’d be pretty obvious where this reasoning would go as far as people treating LaVey’s work as fair game to take for themselves, too.

That’s all it takes to unravel 4400+ words of pretentious slop.

Of course, Slaughter prolly didn’t want to link to our article for his audience to examine for themselves because rather than any argument about “uncomfortable ideas,” as he characterizes it, we made all this explicit: it was people like him, not LaVey, being mocked.

In this context, the sanctity of The Satanic Bible and rejection of ILLEGALITY(!!!) as represented by Church of Satan members is even sillier. Their book literally exists thanks to public domain and not paying for shit…

Like lots of Church of Satan members, Magister Slaughter is a master at making up arguments and calling himself superior to things he hallucinated in order to vanquish, but he is really, really bad at actually being persuasive or making sense except to his own choir. Even then, he can’t trust that his own choir might not utilize and trust their own lying eyes about this stuff.

The fact that the Church of Satan increasingly has to retreat behind Internet architecture hierarchies and annoying social media reply-guys rather than, you know, actually being a force of intimidation or even relevance in the world means that if we are to weigh and measure them by the standards they claim the world is run on, what are we left to conclude about them?

People aren’t talking about what’s permissible to Satanism and saying LaVey is illegitimate, we’re all just saying that LaVeyan Satanism is legitimately bad. That is: Anton LaVey was politically, personally, and literally odious as a person. We criticize and mock him because deserves it, as does anyone who has devoted their lives to apologetics of him.

The reason that nobody gives a shit what the Church of Satan says is permissible and impermissible as True Satanism™ is because it is irrelevant what they say. We have already taken what we please, what little there was to please us, and it is ours to use to our own ends including toss into the fire to our pleasure.

Magisters are free to see this and screech, “No! Everyone else but us are fake Satanists! They’re appropriating our culture!” — but when you say that without a ban button behind you, who listens? Be honest. The reason this is an article instead of just a Reddit comment reply is simply that Church of Satan Rev. Rob Leuthold is so sensitive he blocked our account before sharing this to a curated audience of sycophants, and r/satanism mods cling to one of the last places anywhere that LaVeyans can pretend their Social Darwinist philosophy rewards them: a subreddit hierarchy for posting pictures of tattoos and altars and talking about how no one else is Satanists the right way but the eight of them. When you take survey of it, the whinging and the whimpering and the whining — while simultaneously bemoaning victim culture, naturally — are all that’s left. And boy, it is tiresome. If you’re a Church of Satan official, you can’t even be confident enough to link to what you’re responding to because you’re that frightened of someone seeing for themselves your irrelevance and realizing it. And what would you have left then? An all-black wardrobe, some nifty candles, and a wasted life?

For what it’s worth, Anton LaVey is mainly a coward and a hypocrite because of how he lived his life, the way he moaned constantly about how badly mistreated he was despite being coddled and handed everything his entire life, how things weren’t good like they used to be when he was a kid, and how the actual end of his days was as a sick, smelly, broke man, whose sugar daddy was a real-estate developer and convicted sexual predator of children.

We look forward next to the Church of Satan article defending LaVey’s choice of child bride and all of that stuff, of course, whether from Leuthold or Slaughter or whomever. Maybe they’ll even link back to what they’re talking about. But probably they will be too intimidated by these “fake Satanists” to do even that and just declare victory to no one and basking in imagined glory.

Ave Satanas.