The New Heretics

May 13, 2024

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Good news for TST in Boston invocation appeal, updates on TST HQ arrests, and Spencer Sunshine’s book release


1. [INFORMED DISSENT] Satanic Temple, Inc. v. City of Boston

The First Circuit Court of Appeals is addressing The Satanic Temple’s appeal of TST’s failure at the federal district court level that came down in the middle of last year.

What’s notable about the description of the oral arguments versus the actual federal district judge decision (and the magistrate judge’s upholdings) is that everyone involved seemed to be very sympathetic to The Satanic Temple’s arguments in principle and when looked at from the ten-thousand-foot view. But examined up close, it was the way TST’s lawyers actually pursued the case including repeatedly targeting Michelle Wu specifically at the expense of engaging in more valuable discovery that got them in so much trouble. Local outlet UniversalHub covered all of that process pretty extensively for people who don’t want to read the court docket for themselves.

Weirdly, The Satanic Temple continues to go after Wu personally as well as the district judge Angel Kelley by name, such as in this video TST released and Doug “Lucien Greaves” Misicko on his Substack newsletter.

For those who weren’t following along for the case, The Satanic Temple tried to depose then-city council member Michelle Wu as she was in the middle of running for Boston mayor, and tried to do it by making her come half an hour away to TST’s HQ in Salem, on Election Day.

At the time, Misicko claimed to the press they just hadn’t been paying attention to the calendar:

But TST’s lawyer admitted in writing it was done to maximally inconvenience Wu because he sees litigation as “zero-sum” (for which he was subsequently sanctioned).

By the way, if anyone has any idea what Doug Misicko and/or Cevin Soling have against Wu and Kelley other than not getting their way, please share.

To be clear, this Courthouse News write up of oral arguments is unambiguously good news for The Satanic Temple. The trouble for them is the actual district court case they’re bringing as opposed to the principles they are gesturing at.

One more thing to note since it might be relevant later: First Liberty Institute submitted an amicus curiae brief on the side of the city of Boston, and they make what is, under the present Supreme Court regime, a genuinely clever argument about why TST doesn’t deserve any religious freedom protections in situations like this:

One of the motivations for the decision in the Bladensburg peace cross case was that government cannot be “aggressively hostile towards religion.” For that reason, the destroying of the American Legion’s peace cross or modifying it to make it secular would be construed as hostile, the right-wing dominated U.S. Supreme Court determined.

Here, the argument goes, Boston allowing an invocation that denigrates others for their beliefs would have a similar effect.

It’s an argument not likely to be relevant or persuasive to the First Circuit, but if the case goes any higher, look out for it to be a justification for the U.S. Supreme Court to say Satanists have no religious rights as far as governments go.

Lastly, in an answer to the question, “What has The Satanic Temple done in the community of Boston?”, TST’s lawyer Matt Kezhaya, replied:

This is the same TST Boston chapter/congregation that was somewhat suddenly and mysteriously ejected / opted-out(?) over a dispute with Salem.

TST will use you up, market themselves off you, let you launder their reputation, and even use you for their legal arguments, and what you get in return is “shit” and “all”.

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2. [WE LIVE IN HELL] Michigan alleged bomber update

In addition to the existing state charges announced a few weeks ago, Grant, Mich., resident Luke Isaac Terpstra has been indicted by a federal grand jury in regards to traveling across state lines from Michigan to Salem, Mass.

From the January 2024 coverage of his arrest:

Man arrested for building homemade bombs, making plans to 'blow up' Satanic Temple
Court documents show that Luke Terpstra had tried to throw away evidence of homemade explosives, with police saying some were wrapped in shrapnel and ammunition.

By Jeremiah Brown

And then the follow-up in April when Terpstra was found competent to stand trial:

Grant man charged with making homemade bombs, planning attack found competent for trial
The Grant man was in court Thursday and remains behind bars with a $1 million bond. <photo of bearded white male in orange jumpsuit in a courtroom>

Important details to highlight here are that we have a man who has apparently bought into the Christian Nationalist and anti-queer propaganda conflating queer people with pedophiles and all of those with Satanists, to whom all sort of conspiratorial fantasies of an antisemitic cabal are ascribed. His life is not going well; he’s being evicted. His mother thinks he has “mental issues”, but how distinct that is from falling down the sort of QAnon pipeline tens of millions of Americans have, someone closer to the case would have to say.

Whatever his problems, he’s not an invalid. According to the story told to police, he drove from Michigan to Massachusetts to scope the Satanic Temple headquarters out. But he’s not a mastermind, and it’s not the police or FBI that stop this man, but his own mother and stepfather that he openly admits his desire to engage in what is, by the description of the homemade explosives, a mass casualty event.

From the January story again:

With all of the caveats that all of this information is coming from the cops, and we don’t have any other narrative or evidence to the contrary, this all lines up with someone who believes that there are ontologically evil pedophiles gathering in a certain location who are a threat to children and the very fabric of US society but no one else is willing to do something about.

While we’re very critical of the cynical media game TST is playing, it’s not just because TST’s owners are profiting from playing it. It’s also because of its impact on Christian Nationalists: weakening and challenging them in no significant way while also priming them to attack the people their media tells them — bombards, even — are an existential threat to them and their children, with plenty of help from TST’s national spokesperson “Lucien Greaves”.

It doesn’t even have to be actual Satanists — several states away! — who get targeted by this stuff.

In 2020, a man shot a couple in El Paso, Texas, at their home, one of them fatally.

From a Daily Beast recap in September 2021:

And the El Paso Times following up a few days later:

Joseph Angel Alvarez, who is accused in a fatal shooting at the home of an El Paso lawyer couple, appears in an online teleconference bond hearing from the El Paso County Jail Downtown on Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2021. Daniel Borunda/El Paso Times

And from the trial in 2023 in which Alvarez was ultimately convicted:

The killing took place in November 2020; The Satanic Temple announced its “satanic abortion ritual” in August 2020.

The only update last week to the Terpstra case is that the act of driving across state lines meant it could be elevated to a federal indictment and prosecution. Also, you could be forgiven for getting this case mixed up with several others we’ll cover below.

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3. [WE LIVE IN HELL] Oklahoma alleged bomber update

Back when he was originally arrested in Oklahoma, we talked about this more extensively on stream, but Sean Patrick Palmer of Perkins, Okla., is well, apparently another “not exactly a criminal mastermind”, but just like with Luke Terpstra, that doesn’t mean that what he’s accused of trying to do couldn’t have been potentially deadly.

The original case docket included an affidavit for the warrant for Palmer that had a lot more details, including the handwritten “Crybaby Satan” note.

  1. After landing on the porch, the IED partially detonated causing minor fire and related damage to TST’s exterior. Below is a photograph of the IED. The IED appears to have been constructed from a section of plastic pipe covered with metal nails, which were attached to the pipe with tape. The inside of the pipe was filled with a powder-like substance, preliminarily identified as smokeless gunpowder
  1. The suspect depicted in the TST security footage appears to be somewhat heavy set. He is wearing black pants, a black jacket over a tan-colored tactical vest, black shoes, a black hat, a black face covering, one black glove, and one white glove. The footage shows the suspect approaching TST from the east on foot at approximately 4:14 a.m. He is holding the IED in one hand and what appears to be a lighter in the other hand. The video shows the suspect throwing a small item into a flower bed adjacent to TST, using the lighter to ignite the IED, and then throwing the ignited IED over a fence and onto TST’s porch. The suspect then flees west on foot across Bridge Street, onto Lanthrop Street, and out of view. The following is a still image from the surveillance video showing the suspect just before throwing the IED:
  1. As part of the investigation, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies searched the 64 Bridge Street property on April 8, 2024. During the search, a six-page handwritten note was found in the flower bed depicted in the above photo – the same flower bed into which the suspect appeared to discard a small object just prior to throwing the IED. Among other things, the letter stated:

DEAR SATANIST
ELOHIM SEND ME 7 MONTHS AGO TO GIVE YOU
PEACEFUL MESSAGE TO HOPE YOU REPENT. YOU SAY NO, ELOHIM NOW SEND ME TO SMITE SATAN AND I HAPPY TO OBEY. AND ELOHIM WANT ME TO CONTACT YOU TO TELL YOU REPENT. TURN FROM SIN. ELOHIM NO LIKE THIS PLACE AND PLAN TO DESTROY IT. MAYBE SALEM TOO? ELOHIM SEND ME TO FIGHT CRYBABY SATAN, BUT WANT ME TO MAKE HARD EFFORT SO NO ONE DIES. I OBEY.

  1. Approximately 7 months earlier, on or about September 11, 2023, TST’s 64 Bridge Street property was vandalized with white spray paint. According to a police report of the incident, the painted text referenced the following Biblical verses: “JOHN 3:16-20, PSALM 141, ACTS 3:19.”1 The timing of this incident is consistent with the portion of the handwritten letter that reads, “ELOHIM SEND ME 7 MONTHS AGO TO GIVE YOU PEACEFUL MESSAGE TO HOPE YOU REPENT.” Likewise, the religious nature of the painted text is consistent with overall theme of the handwritten letter, which makes numerous references “Elohim” (a Hebrew word for God). To my knowledge, the September 2023 vandalism was not publicized either on television of newspapers. There is probable cause to believe, therefore, that the person responsible for April

Again, the affidavit by FBI Special Agent Osama Khudari goes into a lot more details, including how they identified him. What’s relevant for our purposes is that for a guy who argues on Facebook things like, “Hate to burst your bubble, my dude, but satan exists. I wish he didn’t, but he does” — this is not someone for whom “you know, if you go onto their website, you can see TST’s tenets really say,” or “actually The Satanic Temple doesn’t worship or believe in a literal supernatural devil” is particularly convincing. That’s not the level that those folk are operating at, and thankfully they so far have been trying to do harm with homemade explosives and arson rather than buying industrially produced firearms and looking to do direct harm that way, which would almost certainly be more deadly and has lots of precedents in modern U.S. history.

While this isn’t TST’s fault in a direct way (for example, the house formerly owned by a Church of Satan member in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., was targeted in an arson in 2021 despite no one in that area seeking more press than a “Halloween House”), it is part of the foreseeable results of whipping up a new Satanic Panic for clout and profit.

Doug Misicko and Cevin Soling are very clear about their support of stochastic terrorists on the far right in the name of free speech, and if they were actually the ones most in danger of being targeted for their grift, there might even be something admirable and brave about what they’re doing, if still foolish.

But some of the people who see TST going out to pick fights with the far right aren’t going to realize the game being played, and they are going to respond “appropriately” to the existential threats being offered up to them.

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4. [WE LIVE IN HELL] 2022 alleged arsonist check-in

No, this is the other attempted attack on the Satanic Temple’s headquarters in Salem, Mass., from almost two years ago now.


Massachusetts	
Man Accused of Setting Salem's Satanic Temple Appears in Court
The fire was caught on surveillance camera, and Salem police have said the footage shows Daniel Damien Lucey pouring a flammable liquid on the building's porch and lighting it on fire

At last check-in, and as of February 2024, alleged repeat arsonist Daniel Damien Lucey was still being held at Bridgewater State Hospital. The website for the facility describes it:

DANIEL LUCEY
Custody Record
GenderMale
Registration disabled
RECORD DETAILS
GET NOTIFIED
ID NumberM140599
Custody Status Date Feb 22, 2024 11:23 AM EST
Custody StatusIn Custody
Custody Detail Bridgewater State Hospital
LOCATION
Bridgewater State Hospital
20 Administration Road
Bridgewater, MA 02324
(508) 279-4500
REPORTING AGENCY
Massachusetts Department of Correction
50 Maple Street
Suite 3
Milford, MA 01757
(866) 684-2846
Vinelink.com

The last public update on the case seems to be from September 2022 when Lucey was indicted on charges related to the arson at TST’s HQ.

All of this might make you think that Lucey is just another Bible-thumper, however, the Salem News story goes on to say, “At the time he [Lucey] had a record of prior incidents, including a charge of throwing a rock through a stained glass window at the Arlington Street Church in 2020, knocking over planters and pushing a luggage cart into a window of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in 2019, and setting fires under or near police cars and luxury vehicles.”

Not all of those seem to have made the news, but some of the 2020 incidents did get contemporary coverage.

Another contemporary police description from a different incident on May 26, 2020, described an altercation as an assault on a police officer (spitting), and said Lucey threw a burning U.S. flag onto a police vehicle as part of a protest.

Which isn’t necessarily what you’d expect from someone with a shirt that says “God” on it and trying to target “devil-worshippers”. The common thread seems to be the “burning things” aspect rather than political coherent political goals, and would make sense why Lucey was still being evaluated for mental competency for a trial almost two years later.

So that no one can be confused, we (“QueerSatanic”, “QS”, etc.) actively don’t like it when people attack TST’s headquarters or attempt to do violent or physical harm to it. Not only is it likely completely undeserving people would get hurt or killed, it also is not likely to actually undermine The Satanic Temple’s operation and grift in any way. They have insurance, and they will definitely fundraise off of the media attention.

Satanic Temple asks for donations for up to $666 after Daniel Lucey admits to starting fire, calling it a ‘hate crime’

    Published: Jun. 13, 2022, 7:24 a.m.

By

    Heather Morrison | hmorrison@masslive.com

The Satanic Temple is asking for donations after a fire caused damage to the front porch area Friday.

“We will fix it. We will clean it up, air out the smoke, and we will reopen,” co-founder Lucien Greaves said in a Tweet.
MassLive.com

If you want to undermine The Satanic Temple, just demand accountability and transparency out of them. If you want to shut down down TST, just apply a minimum level of skepticism to them that involves asking what they’ve actually accomplished specifically and ask who specifically has power in the organization – and ask for proof.

The idea that TST is “Scientology for Mall Goths” is not, actually, an exaggerated or pejorative comparison. But think about how much you dislike Scientology: no matter who little sympathy you have for David Miscavige or the “Religious Technology Center“, you don’t want to see them targeted by mentally unwell rubes primed by right-wing stochastic terrorists who risk nothing and profit everything from priming them.

But, as we’ll likely talk about in the very near future, Doug Misicko and Cevin Soling are inseparable from The Satanic Temple, and they’d rather have a small, tightly controlled, ineffectual organization beneath them than actually accomplish anything worthwhile. The fact that they are stoking a new Satanic Panic to their profit and to the risk of others is actually central to what they see as their mission.

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5. [WE LIVE IN HELL] Iowa vandalism trial update

Very small update here. The failed Mississippi politician Michael Patrick Cassidy was supposed to begin his trial on Monday, May 6, in regards to an alleged hate crime by vandalizing The Satanic Temple of Iowa’s holiday display.

However when we didn’t see anything, we checked in with a local reporter who confirmed there was a “continuance at the last minute,” and the case has been pushed back to June 3.

See last week’s recap for more on that, and also our December article for more a general description of the dynamics.

What makes Cassidy fundamentally different, and therefore fundamentally more dangerous than Terpestra, Palmer, or Lucey, is that he seems to be in possession of his full faculties. The other three men allegedly engaged in plenty of premeditation, what they are accused of is much more immediately dangerous to people, but it’s hard to argue they were well-informed or even “all-there” upstairs. Whereas Cassidy seems like he set himself up pretty well to hit the Christian Nationalist circuit and future political runs regardless of whether he’s convicted or acquitted. 

If Christian Nationalists decide to truly target Satanists for profit, Misicko and Soling may still come out of it well from where they sit at the top of their pyramid, but every other Satanist, Satanist-adjacent, and people falsely given that label cannot say the same.

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6. [PERMANENT SHITTENING] “Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism” by Spencer Sunshine

Antifascist researcher Spencer Sunshine’s book on James Mason’s Siege and its influence on countercultural fascism, specifically Satanism, is out now.

We excerpted the appendix on The Satanic Temple here:

For people who have been following our own work for the past four years, this won’t be exactly new; indeed, Dead Domain covered much the same in their recent video essay on TST.

But, The Satanic Temple wasn’t the focus of Sunshine’s book, so what Sunshine does — in addition to going in deeper to why Feral House publisher Adam Parfey plays an important role in all this — is mainly in providing the authority of an academic and the reinforcement that, however much TST apologists want to try to gaslight you about it, Doug Misicko a.k.a. “Doug Mesner” a.k.a. “Lucien Greaves” did not just say something awkwardly antitheistic about Jewish people that seemed antisemitic; Misicko has run in the same circles for decades with the inheritors and propagators of fascism and neo-Nazi terrorism.

Really wish the even more explicit pro-fascism, racism, and eugenics statements had come to light in time for Sunshine’s interviews with Misicko (and collaborator Shane Bugbee), but that’s just the TST interest talking.

Spencer Sunshine (@transform6789) · May 8, 2024

Book page: Routledge.com

"Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege" by Spencer Sunshine

Publisher’s description

A new wave of aspiring neo-Nazi terrorists has arisen—including the infamous Atomwaffen Division. And they have a bible: James Mason’s Siege, which praises terrorism, serial killers, and Charles Manson. Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism, based on years of archival work and interviews, documents for the first time the origins of Siege.

First, it shows how Mason’s vision arose from debates by 1970s neo-Nazis who splintered off the American Nazi Party/National Socialist White People’s Party and spun off a terrorist faction. Second, it unveils how four 1980s countercultural figures—musicians Boyd Rice and Michael Moynihan, Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey, and Satanist Nikolas Schreck—discovered, promoted, and published Mason. Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism explores a previously overlooked period and unearths the hidden connections between a countercultural clique and violent neo-Nazis—which together have set the template for today’s Neo-nazi terrorist underground.

It is obligatory reading for those interested in contemporary terrorism, postwar countercultures, and the history of the U.S. Far Right and neo-Nazism.

Table of Contents

Introduction 

Part I: #ReadSiege 

  • 1. A Twenty-First Century Siege: How the Rediscovery of an Obscure Neo-Nazi Book Helped Inspire A New Generation of White Supremacist Terrorism 

Part II: Life Among the Sects (1959–1986) 

  • 2. The Party of Rockwell: The American Nazi Party and NSWPP 
  • 3. Joseph Tommasi’s NSLF 
  • 4. A Tangled Web of Neo-Nazis: David Rust’s NSLF, the NSM, the White Confederacy, and the National Socialist Congress 
  • 5. Allen Vincent’s NSWWP and John Duffy’s Shadow NSLF 
  • 6. Karl Hand’s NSLF 

Part III: SIEGE the Newsletter (1980–1986)

  • 7. The SIEGE Itself: Cult of the Extreme
  • 8. Charles Manson as Neo-Nazi “Holy Man”
  • 9. Universal Order as Idea and Organization
  • 10. Life After SIEGE

Part IV: Countercultural Fascism (1986–1995)

  • 11. The Abraxas Clique and Countercultural Fascism
  • 12. Boyd Rice: Neo-Nazi Collaborator
  • 13. Adam Parfrey: A Neo-Nazi’s Best Friend
  • 14. Michael Moynihan: From Mason-Manson-National Socialism to Decentralized Ethno-separatism
  • 15. Nazi-Satanism: Nikolas Schreck and the Church of Satan

Part V: Siege the Book (1989–1995)

  • 16. The Book and the Reception

Part VI: Coda (1995­–­2017)

  • 17. From Prison to Revival
  • 18. The Lessons of Siege

Part VII: Appendices

  • Appendix 1. The NSM After Mason: Brannen, Herrington, Schoep, and Beyond
  • Appendix 2. The Original NSLF and David Duke: Big Nazi on Campus
  • Appendix 3. Gary/John Jewell and Perry “Red” Warthan: From Anarchism to National Socialism
  • Appendix 4. In Praise of Murder Men: Serial Killers, Mass Murderers, and Lone Wolves
  • Appendix 5. Christianity: Jesus, Hitler, Rockwell, Manson, and UFOs
  • Appendix 6. Women, Gay Men, and Extreme Pornography
  • Appendix 7. Against Capitalism and the Liberal State: The Left, Third Positionism, Islamists, and Racial Separatism
  • Appendix 8. Robert N. Taylor and Thomas Thorn
  • Appendix 9. Michael Merritt and Keith Stimely  Appendi
  • 10. Varg Vikernes and the Heathen Front
  • Appendix 11. The Satanic Temple: The Lasting Influence of the Abraxas Circle

Biography

Spencer Sunshine holds a PhD in Sociology and has written extensively on the U.S. Far Right. He is the co-editor—with Pam Chamberlain, Matthew N. Lyons, and Abby Scher—of the Chip Berlet festschrift Exposing the Right and Fighting for Democracy (Routledge, 2022). Sunshine has also written for the Southern Poverty Law Center, Daily Beast, The Forward, and Truthout and has been translated into numerous languages.

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