Lawsuits, The Satanic Temple

July 25, 2022

Today is a good day for The Satanic Temple to release its finances

Image of full legal threat [Full text]

As we begin, this is fucking bonkers on its face, right?

Essentially TST says, “Yes, Greg Stevens and Milo Yiannopoulos used to be good anti-feminist friends during GamerGate and play minigolf together. But that was way back in 2016.”

Maybe it’s just a function of getting older, but that sure feels a lot more like “just the other day” for a grown-ass man who was in his 40s when he joined The Sastanic Temple after having been active in the “men’s rights” community since the mid-1990s, based on his own website’s articles.

GREG STEVENS Sorry, "no" doesn't always mean "no" Culture | December 9th, 1994 This article is actually extracted from a Usenet post I made in alt.mens-rights back on December 9, 1994. Although I have edited out the original post that it was in response to, the subject is pretty clear. No, no doesn't always mean no. The problem with the "no means no" slogan is that it simply isn't always true, and everyone knows it.
Screenshot of archived article from GregStevens.com

For those who’ve forgotten, 2016 was the year that Yiannopoulos, then-senior editor of Breitbart, was on his “Dangerous Faggot” tour.

Yiannopoulos, back in that far-off year of 2016 was saying things like:

Greg Stevens also called himself an anti-feminist back around that time, though he likely didn’t go as far as his good friend.

For that and many other reasons, a local Satanic Temple chapter tried to protest Yiannopoulos attending an event at Cal Poly before Doug Misicko a.k.a. “Lucien Greaves” called up Breitbart to let them know The Satanic Temple unequivocally defended Yiannopoulos’s “right to free speech”. Misicko would claim in an interview later that year he didn’t know anything about the guy.

“I’m not sure what danger [Milo Yiannopoulos has] caused to anybody. I’ve never read his material. I’ve never listened to him speak,” Misicko said. “Even still, after having defended his right to speak, I still don’t give a shit about what he’s saying. I defend the principle of Free Speech, and when you defend a principle, you don’t only defend it selectively. If you can’t support it when it incidentally doesn’t benefit you, you’re not supporting it at all. You can’t claim that you believe in Free Speech, only insofar as you agree with what’s being said.”

We’ll come back to this at the end, but for now, for people in their 40s who have decades of history, threatening to sue someone over your definition of “many years” is quite something.

Bonus: The Satanic Housewife didn’t even bring up the Mike Cernovich stuff.

So if you didn’t gather that, Greg “Priest Penemue” Stevens — “longtime leader in The Satanic Temple”, current “Director of Ministry” and “Executive Producer of TST TV” — spent more than 20 years and the vast majority of his adult life being part of the men’s rights, anti-feminist, rape-apologist sphere until some point in his 40s when he claims he woke up and realized the error of his ways.

According to The Satanic Temple’s legal team, referencing that might lead people to the wrong impression about TST’s current Reproductive Rights Campaign, which has brought in a lot of money but has no victories to speak of.

Something we think has been forgotten but is worth emphasizing: Stevens was editing a book for “male supremacist” Mike Cernovich in the “long ago” year of 2015.

Mike Cernovich ‏@Cernovich  1 jul. 2015 Many thanks to my editor @gregstevens for all of his help. He's a gay liberal feminist, but whatever. He is smart and helpful. Thanks Greg!  ‏@gregstevens @Cernovich Gorilla Mindset is a fantastic book. I'll be writing up more thoughts on it later. I am happy to have been a part of the project.

For those of you who need help getting up to speed on this:

Stevens remained friendly with Cernovich for several years after editing the book, which, due to Cernovich nuking his past tweets, means conversations have to be gathered from old-style manual retweets and replies now, and Stevens was shrewd enough to delete many on his end, too. This relationship is likely why the book’s cover is still hosted on Stevens’ website now, though we can’t find record of if it was actually used beyond this stray reference in a “both sides bad” article, which of course doesn’t include disclosure of Stevens’ involvement in the same book.

Mike Cernovich told me that he was called “ableist” for including posture exercises in his self-help book The Gorilla Mindset [QS – link to book removed].

File of book cover at GregStevens.com

Now, maybe Greg Stevens, the Director of Ministry formerly known as “Priest Penemue” has radically changed his life from when he was 40-something, having spent half his life in this political space. We hope he has and is better.

Stevens certainly doesn’t stand behind his “Sorry, ‘no’ doesn’t always mean ‘no’ ” article anymore.

But it does help establish that this wasn’t a passing fancy. He was a grown-ass man, and this is a period of more than 20 years we’re talking about.

Some people are already saying, “Uh, Mike Cernovich is clearly identifying Greg Stevens as a liberal and a feminist. This is just guilt-by-association.”

Yes, it is. Because it’s not a coincidence that Cernovich deleted his old tweets.

Content warning: racism, antisemitism, misogyny, sexual assault.

If references to sexual assault, in particular, is something that deeply affects you, you may want to skip Page 3, too, because it gets even worse.

OK, let’s continue.

Is it just some “edgelord” quotes designed to get attention? It is not. In fact, it would not be much of an overstatement to say that was Cernovich’s entire career.

Just keep reading up until the point where Cernovich’s book “Gorilla Mindset” comes up. Make a note of when you would tap out from professional and personal support of this person.

“Love you too, bb,” Stevens said to Cernovich in 2018, editing his book in 2015, interviewing him on his YouTube channel, and meanwhile writing enlightened centrism articles about how “both sides” go too far sometimes.

The Satanic Temple hasn’t been around that long, and it’s been a home to these sort of people and their friends for a significant part of it.

That is worth calling attention to.

[1][2][3][4][5][6]

  1. […] the Houston Press and QueerSatanic, a group of four Seattle-area Satanists that I also reported on, have to say.) Or do pioneering work on other meaty topics, such as religious persecution and clergy sex abuse, […]

Leave a Reply

The Satanic Temple's Boogeyman

Queer Satanic

The Satanic Temple has been suing us since April 2020, and we are still here.