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• Inciting incident
  • Lucien Greaves “Invitation To Leave” email
  • Canadian TST Minister responds
  • Lucien Greaves “fires” Canadian Minister
  • Memes mocking Lucien Greaves
  • “Internal Nobodies” rebel publicly
  • Lucien Greaves posts “An Apology” on Substack
  • Canadian TST member responds
  • Lucien Greaves goes on a sycophant podcast
  • A second Substack hits the schism
  • An announcement on Slack
• A wave of individual departures
  • Greg Stevens (Head of TST Ministry)
  • Lanzifer Longinus
  • Dex Desjardins
  • Chalice Blythe
  • Tertia Withershins
  • Karl Kasarda (“InRange TV”)
  • Richard Proctor (“The Neurodivergent Satanist”)
• Local Groups leave
  • The Satanic Temple Minnesota
  • The Satanic Temple of Florida
  • The Satanic Temple of Australia
  • The Satanic Temple of Colorado
  • Coalition of Satanic Congregations
  • The Satanic Temple of Alabama
  • The Satanic Temple of North Carolina
  • Friends of The Satanic Temple France
  • The Satanic Temple Nevada
  • Other group defections
  • “Hail Lucien Greaves“
• On Schisms

On Schisms

So it looks like another schism has hit The Satanic Temple — something you can probably set your watch to at this point — and we feel like talking about it and maybe gloating a little too.

After four years of having to defend ourselves in multiple courts from the knowingly false, frivolous, and arguably-illegal allegations of The Satanic Temple and its sycophants, there’s very few things that give us any pleasure, let alone pure joy, these days.

The primary exception to this is when someone reaches out to us after discovering our writing (or more recently, after having seen the excellent video essay by Dead Domain that we contributed to), and thanks us for having warned them about the way that the Temple actually works.

People learn how The Satanic Temple’s priorities have actually come to be, the reactionary history of its owners that extends repeatedly and clearly into the present — and they’re shocked.

People learn what The Satanic Temple has to do to fabricate a reputation as both novel and progressive in pursuit of exploiting a revolving door of the most marginalized and desperate people around the country — and they’re appalled.

People whose worst offense was mistakenly looking for the “one simple (satanic) trick” that will let them protect themselves from the fascists running amok in our country discover that they have been had because the media and atheist/skeptic influencers they trusted let them down.

Regular people who have only heard about The Satanic Temple from regurgitated press releases, or who haven’t been members for long enough to make it a significant part of their personality, come across shit like “Here’s the receipts showing Lucien Greaves has spent most of his adult life enamored with fascist aesthetics.”

“Lucien Greaves” and The Satanic Temple have a lot to answer for

Or “Here’s where Lucien Greaves prank-called a suicide hotline, and has been very quiet as to exactly how he stopped being the guy who recorded himself upselling eugenics to a KKK Grand Dragon.”

Or “Actually Cevin Soling (“Malcolm Jarry”) spent years trying to become a cargo cult leader of a South Pacific island nation, and is a rabid Zionist who owns a nonprofit specifically for targeting college advocates for Palestine.”

And when regular people hear these things about the owners of The Satanic Temple who assert the owners’ opinions are the only ones that matter for what TST is, normal people are rightly horrified.

Sometimes the fact The Satanic Temple thinks it’s necessary to shove NDAs on any of its members can be enough on its own.

And we will never get tired of hearing from those people DMing us to say that they’ve cut ties with their local “congregation,” occasionally with a picture of themselves burning their Satanic Temple membership certificate or card.

You can't get your time and money back from The Satanic Temple, but you can be done with them

Other friends of the Queer Satanic Heresy are always encouraged to send us or tag us in pics/videos of themselves engaging in rituals to put the mistakes of their past behind them pic.twitter.com/MC87E0OOvj

— @QueerSatanic@kolektiva.social (@QueerSatanic) March 29, 2022

If anything could compete with the satisfaction we get from that, it’s seeing other former Satanic Temple members stepping forward with their own stories as to why they actually left.

Sometimes they noticed enough red flags to leave on their own, and were validated by finding our work.

Sometimes, they were victims of more direct forms of abuse and were kicked out for being witnesses or potential whistleblowers, purged by TST as a matter of “safety and control” — the exact words that Leah “Siri Sanguine” Garvais justified our own expulsion from TST Washington State when frantically trying to suppress a complaint of abuse that had been filed entirely within “the proper channels.”

We’re sorry those other former Satanic Temple members suffered, and we’re glad that they’re finally free. But above that, we’re glad they have the space where they could speak up in turn, and so turn their own freedom into a source of liberation for others. We’d argue there’s not much more proudly Satanic than that.

We’re proud of having played some role in creating that space for former Satanic Temple members to get out.

We think one of the most important things to realize is that “TST is organizationally bad and abusive” is not mutually exclusive from “TST’s owners are reactionary grifters who stumbled onto the perfect way to exploit the pathologically anemic state of journalism in our country.”

One of the most common forms of apologia for the Satanic Temple is that we should be gentle in our critique, that TST is just a victim of its own success. Apologists will say that The Satanic Temple merely grew too big, too fast, and we should be nicer to them because it’s just scurrying around trying to accommodate that growth.

But that’s been a fallback excuse for a decade and it’s simply not true.

Actually, you should be suspicious of two guys whose first response to an influx of donations and fawning media coverage was to register a nonprofit with false information. The internal culture of The Satanic Temple, which keeps creating abuse victims and whistleblowers around the country, is a direct downstream consequence of Doug Misicko’s and Cevin Soling’s values. Even the most prolific or recognizable “minister” is ultimately just another disposable battery, something to be plugged into a set of constraints for profit and then discarded.

Doug Misicko and Cevin Soling had no idea who we were either — they claim — right up until the point that they thought it was worth it to drag us through federal court on knowingly false allegations in retaliation for what is otherwise clearly legally protected speech and conduct. Why? Because those things threatened The Brand™ the Satanic Temple’s owners live on, materially and as a matter of continued clout/relevance.

It is utterly unsurprising to see the culture that trickles down from owners who are otherwise completely unconcerned and unaware of the well-being of their “religion’s” flock — a culture that mysteriously keeps rewarding predators and giving them the tools to climb up a tiny corporate ladder inside a religion whose primary target demographic is people consistently marginalized by the rest of US society.

A culture where social interactions are viewed foremost as transactions to uphold The Brand™ is a culture where predators will thrive as long as their contribution to The Brand is a net positive—and where the capacity for victims to speak up is by default a threat to The Brand™

A culture that is recursively paranoid about hearing criticism from without or within, and at this point feels like it has no choice except to overtly threaten the entire demographic of “former members” on its own website and social media.

A culture that wants to be known as “the last hope” against Christian theocracy, but has to keep sputtering and deflecting as to why abortion funds and reproductive justice legal scholars consistently want nothing to do with them.

Doug “Lucien Greaves” Misicko is a greasy, friendless dipshit who has spent most of his life trying to put a pseudo-intellectual veneer on the fascist-adjacent ’90s counterculture he was secreted from.

Photos of Doug Misicko a.k.a. “Doug Mesner” and studio for 24-hour “Might Is Right” Internet radio broadcast circa 2003 (credit Shane Bugbee via Archive.org)

“The Satanic Temple: The Lasting Influence of the Abraxas Circle” by Spencer Sunshine

To us, it’s not at all curious that such a man as Doug Misicko turns out to also be such a thin-skinned dork that he can’t even handle a couple memes being made of him without lashing out at his “ministers” as though memes are a direct assault on The Satanic Temple.

It’s not at all curious that such a man as Misicko announced the need for a wave of “audits” to make sure everyone remaining has the proper understanding of what TST is supposed to be for.

As far as Doug Misicko is concerned, he’s not lashing out at ministers of a serious religion; he might as well be yelling at a printer for jamming. And the sooner you look at TST the same way he does, the easier it is to understand why these schisms keep happening, the easier it is to understand that no amount of devotion to The Brand™ will protect you.

The sooner you look at The Satanic Temple the way Misicko does, the easier it will be to understand why the best thing anyone can do is to stay far the fuck away from TST — both for their own safety and for the safety of everyone the Temple claims to care about.

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