Preface

“Wait, why is The Satanic Temple suing you?”

The Satanic Temple is suing four former members of the Seattle/Washington State chapter because it is a hierarchical business cum religion owned by two men who cannot stand to be publicly criticized, particularly for their failure to live up to their own stated principles.

Cevin Daniel Soling (“Malcolm Jarry”, “Calvin Soling”) and Douglas Alexander Misicko (“Lucien Greaves”, “Doug Mesner”) have demonstrated repeatedly that what they hate more than anything else is being confronted with the ways their propaganda falls short of reality.

No matter how many human rights crises rage around the country — many manufactured deliberately by self-described fascists and Christian theocrats — the thing that Misicko and Soling feel truly threatened by is having their religion publicly scrutinized on a basis more substantive than on the “heroic Satanist underdogs against mean Christians” narrative that raises hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for them, with merch sale profits tossed in on top.

April 3, 2023, marked three years since this lawsuit began. TST’s legal assault on us is about as old as the Covid-19 pandemic itself, and it persists because The Satanic Temple wants to commit resources to extending it and because its owners are willing to repeatedly demand state-enforced compensation for damages predicated on overtly false allegations.

And we want to be explicit about this in particular:

TST’s decision to sue us on claims they either didn’t know or didn’t care were false — and their multiple attempts to force the court to issue rulings that it had no legal or even constitutional authority to give — is not merely an issue of hypocrisy on TST’s part.

It is far more charitable than TST deserves to say that TST has, or ever had, good intentions about any of this, or has merely been forced into an unfortunate series of decisions out of practicality.

Nobody forced TST to file false allegations against uninvolved people.

Nobody forced TST to repeatedly refuse to substantiate their claims when given multiple opportunities by the judge as a matter of codified law.

Nobody forced TST to voluntarily admit — two years into this legal assault — that they had been making up allegations this entire time just to maximize a payout that they had no interest in demonstrating they were entitled to.

Nobody forced TST to admit that they pay contractors to spy on their critics, using otherwise protected speech as ammunition for frivolous and malicious legal harassment.

And then, when the case was dismissed from federal court, nobody forced TST to simultaneously appeal the dismissal in the Ninth Circuit and also repeat their claims in state court at the same time.

All of these are decisions that TST’s owners have consciously and repeatedly made, and will continue to make as long as they’re allowed to without scrutiny. And there is every reason to believe that they will do it again to other people in the future.

These seem like big claims to make, and maybe even unwise ones to make given that we are currently already being targeted for a lawsuit.

Well, if you stick with us through all of this, you will discover that the Temple and its operatives are both so malicious and incompetent, there is no shortage of receipts and outright admissions for all of these things — but also that the U.S. legal system is not a justice system, and rich people can file all of the lawsuits they want.

This write-up will be much more thorough than most will ever need. That’s fine. But it intends to shed much-needed daylight with every specific we can muster and document on what is possibly The Satanic Temple’s most sustained assault on that speech to date, and on the events that led up to it.

When it comes to The Satanic Temple, there’s always more, and it’s always worse.

If you don’t believe us yet, keep reading because you will.

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Who is this for?

Ultimately, this writeup is intended to be thorough but not necessarily comprehensive, and certainly nothing close to neutral. We want to show what we believe are TST’s actual priorities as an institution, how those priorities reveal themselves in the Temple’s publicly-recorded decisions, who is affected most by the consequences of those decisions, and most importantly, what all of this says about TST’s relationship to the public interest.

Of all of TST’s lawsuits, we naturally know this one the best, and we believe that it is one of the clearest examples we’ll ever have of what TST actually considers to be threats to itself, and what it considers to be a reasonable response to those threats. This writeup, as long as it is, is thus intended to be a sort of highlight reel; we want to focus on the most egregious and bad faith arguments that TST makes in this lawsuit, because we think that the very existence of those claims, and the fact that TST finds them compelling enough to present to multiple judges, highlights the Temple’s fundamentally predatory worldview towards its own members, towards the general public, and towards public institutions like the press and the legal system.

We don’t expect anyone to simply take us at our word, though. We cannot emphasize enough that you should, in fact, examine the primary sources wherever you can: court documents, testimonials from other members and ex-members around the country, TST’s own recorded statements over the last decade of its existence and beyond. All we’ve done is compile them, do our best to make them as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, and then talk about what we believe are the patterns that emerge.

We think you deserve better. We think the entire world deserves better.

If you are a journalist wondering why so much mainstream coverage of The Satanic Temple keeps sounding the same, this article is for you.

If you are an advocate for the separation of church and state, and want to know whether The Satanic Temple can be trusted to be on your side when it comes to religions demanding to wield the power of the state with minimal scrutiny, this article is for you.

If you are an exvangelical or other survivor of religious abuse, and want to know whether The Satanic Temple takes the root causes of that abuse seriously and takes care to avoid repeating them, this article is for you.

If you are rightly horrified by the assaults on reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy by fascist legislators and local reactionaries, and are considering supporting The Satanic Temple as a theoretical counter to them, this article is for you.

And last but not least, if you are a former member of The Satanic Temple:

If you joined with every intention of joining that ongoing struggle for justice — if you poured countless hours, if not years, of your life into helping realize the Satanic Temple’s purported missions only to be used, abused, and then disposed of by its lieutenants or regional leadership, and then harassed or threatened into silence so as to not endanger the Temple’s progressive reputation — if any of that is true, this article is for you.