In short, The Satanic Temple is:
- ineffective at what it promises to do
- opaque in regards to its finances
- structured to be internally authoritarian with unaccountable leadership; and
- its two owners have troubling interests that show up in TST’s work repeatedly
But when it comes to The Satanic Temple, there’s always more and it’s always worse.
Usually—and this is not a joke—when people learn more about The Satanic Temple’s owners Doug Misicko (“Lucien Greaves”) and Cevin Soling (“Malcolm Jarry”), and their business practices, the unprompted comparison folks make is “Scientology” or “Scientology for Mall Goths“.
Former director of The Satanic Temple’s headquarters in Salem Ash Astaroth made the same comparison:
Folks are beginning to see the trends and connections identifying them as a business cult, like Scientology, that I was raising the alarm about when I was excommunicated and when they tried to scrub my history from TST.
Astaroth also said, “The Satanic Temple is a business cult of alt-lite asshole trolls.”
Reproductive access org Texas Equal Access Fund (@teafund) compared them to “crisis pregnancy centers”, though.
Don’t Count on the Satanic Temple for a Legal Abortion — Jezebel
There’s something to that, especially in how shameless and unrepentant The Satanic Temple is in what they’re doing.
The following article has copious receipts about the money aspect in particular, because the fungibility of for-profit and nonprofit funds is a huge problem with The Satanic Temple, and only growing larger as TST’s profile rises among casual observers.
Today is a good day for The Satanic Temple to release its finances — QueerSatanic
Otherwise, if you want sourcing on any of the below, please reference our other articles or just reach out directly:
For the sake of accessibility to lay folk, we’re going to try to restrict this article to just info that is already documented elsewhere.