In full:
To understand what’s going on with The Satanic Temple and why it’s so harmful, you want to look at what The Satanic Temple set out to be and how that changed over time.
Originally, The Satanic Temple was just supposed to be another prank documentary by Soling’s company Spectacle Films, Inc., produced with Soling’s friend and Polemic Media LLC owner David Guinan (“Nicholas Crowe”).
Soling’s cargo cult messiah documentary even has some overlap with TST.
Take this with a grain of salt, but per Joe Laycock’s book Speak of the Devil and other statements, Doug Misicko was supposed to be there advising on Satanic credibility.
Misicko does seems like he was first going to be a character named “Neil Bricke” (sic).
That’s a dig at one of the Satanic ritual abuse conspiracy fantasy guys Misicko had made an enemy of in the decade prior when he was playing at being a gonzo journalist named “Doug Mesner”.
That guy’s name is “Neil Brick”; get it?
TST’s main websites were registered in March 2012, but itseems like the project didn’t really come together till mid-December 2012 when Cevin Soling is credited with writing an essay called “Educational Mission: A Report and Plan of Action” that laid out what TST would try to do, apparently at least partially related to sabotaging public schools based on the one other excerpt Laycock’s book quoted and Soling’s enduring work as an opponent of public schools since his 2009 film “The War on Kids”.
On prima facie grounds, it is incomprehensibly absurd to place children in a totalitarian environment for 13 years of their lives and to expect them, upon removal, to be able to fulfill the obligations of citizenry in a democracy. The greatest obligation being to oppose the very same manifestations of tyrannical power to which students are acclimated.
Cevin Soling as “Malcolm Jarry” in “Educational mission: A report and plan of action” (December 12, 2012), p. 11, per Joseph Laycock
A lot of stuff The Satanic Temple does to this day seems weird when you don’t know that “hating public schools” is a central concern of one of the two owners.
The initial Tallahassee event in January 2013 flopped due to lack of enough unpaid actors signing up to pretend to be TST members; also, the advertisement itself that was looking for those unpaid actors got sniffed out by local media.
So, other than a lecture event at Harvard that spring, TST mostly took a break, re-tooled, and Misicko seems to have been the one to tap his old friends Shane Bugbee and Brian Werner in order to have more charismatic people around in front of microphones.
As part of that, Misicko stepped into the “Lucien Greaves” role full-time. Whereas at the initial event, this was a role occupied by the actor Michael Wiener.
This is all shown in Penny Lane’s Hail Satan? film, so the opposite of a secret.
Now, it’s not proven-proven, but the character seems to have been intended to let Misicko, Soling, and maybe Guinan all share the role when not doing in-person events/interviews.
Archived TST site blog entries with the display name “Lucien Greaves” link to the author url “cevin”.
And Shane Bugbee has subsequently claimed something similar, but specifically that Bugbee was asked to play the character.
(As yet, no supporting documentation for that, however.)
This “Beta” version of The Satanic Temple starting June-July 2013 seems like it was still trying to be a prank film project, at least to Soling and Guinan, but Misicko was already talking about doing something longer term and incorporating as a real church.
In at least one podcast interview he did after he tea-bagged the gravestone of the mother of the Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred Phelps (“the Pink Mass”), Misicko mentioned that more permanent goal of having a real church.
That podcast was with Shane Bugbee’s longtime friend Matt Dwyer, and more generally, Bugbee used his contacts with figures and at places like Vice to get new national attention as if Tallahassee had never happened.
Bugbee soon left over a pay dispute; he may not even have made it to the end of the year.
But TST’s first “High Priest” Brian Werner and the original Portland, Ore., chapter head Zach Black stayed on until December 2014/January 2015 respectively.
Werner’s and Black’s interest at the time, like Bugbee’s, was at least partially motivated by dissatisfaction with the Church of Satan and the direction it took after Anton LaVey’s death.
The Village Voice article from that era by Anna Merlan captures a lot about that iteration of the Temple.
As of late 2022, The Satanic Temple claims more than a million “members” at last count, by which they mean “people who have subscribed to their email.”
If 1,000 of them knew who Brian Werner was let alone that he was that important early on, it would be shocking.
But again, the Beta crew’s job was just to make The Satanic Temple seem like “real Satanists” instead of a startup prank by a couple dudes.
Once they accomplished that, the “authentic” guys weren’t necessary anymore.
See, in December 2013, TST had had its first real success by announcing the fundraiser for their Baphomet statue which they promised to install to counter the Oklahoma 10 Commandments monument.
Now, this never actually happened; the Oklahoma ACLU won its own case, and “Baphomet with Children” is still just a tourist trap at TST’s for-profit HQ.
But in December 2013, the Temple quickly got almost $30,000 in donations for their announced project. That may well have convinced Soling and Guinan there was more to this thing than a movie.
Misicko registered the for-profit corporation “United Federation of Churches LLC dba ‘The Satanic Temple’ ” in February 2014, and at first, they stuck with the Church of Satan line that “churches should pay taxes!”
That’s what that “The Satanic Temple LLC” petition comes out of.
By September 2014, though, Misicko had also registered “Reason Alliance Ltd.”, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with the mission of supporting the for-profit LLC that, remember, Misicko *also* owned.
So TST sure came around on “churches not paying taxes” quick.
That’s around the same time that Jex Blackmore seems to have entered the picture, starting the shift to the current TST era with Blackmore’s Detroit chapter, which quickly grew into The Satanic Temple’s flagship
Why Detroit Has the Largest Satanist Temple Chapter in the US – ABC News
Misicko and Soling were apparently smart enough to recognize that this bodily autonomy/abortion rights stuff was a better sell than “nicest Satanists you’ve ever met” or trolling about monuments, which TST actually had some success with as clients for other, more competent orgs.
Depending on when you start counting, we’re a couple of years into this whole thing before they land on that abortion rights idea.
TST’s first “high priest” Werner actually came out later talking about how he opposed his own romantic partner was able to get an abortion without his approval.
Clearly, this was not a deeply-held value for The Satanic Temple at the jump.
But 2015 is when the first abortion-restrictions cases start up in Missouri with a client named “Mary Doe”.
This would go extremely poorly and TST lost the state-level case after appealing it up to the state supreme court where they lost unanimously but with judges disagreeing on the “why”.
The federal Mary Doe case failed because TST used Cevin Soling’s New Jersey business lawyer W. James MacNaughton to handle an abortion law case in Missouri.
Neither MacNaughton nor anyone else knew that to have standing for a suit, Mary Doe needed to still be pregnant at the time of filing. Instead, she already got her abortion, and the case never had any chance.
That’s another thing many people don’t realize.
The Satanic Temple is very bad at court cases.
Even so, since then, The Satanic Temple has found their groove. The only thing that has changed is the money: there is a lot more of it coming in, there are a lot more corporations receiving it.
While early on, this was Cevin Soling’s and David Guinan’s show as the money men, now Misicko is the face of the organization. Guinan left on his own, maybe after the Harvard Black Mass debacle in 2014, but again, TST had turned into something else instead of a film project.
Jex Blackmore got pushed out in 2018 when they rivaled Misicko in terms of celebrity, and they also seem to have genuinely cared about stuff like bodily autonomy and opposing fascism.
Most of the largest and social justice-oriented chapters also departed in 2018, too, when TST announced it would be suing Twitter for Misicko to get a blue checkmark on his “Lucien Greaves” account.
The Satanic Temple didn’t end up actually suing, but that was what Misicko announced at the time, and then TST tried to raise $50,000 while saying Alex Jones’ favorite lawyer Marc Randazza would represent the Temple.
But the context is much worse.
Antisemitism, yes, but anti-Black racism, eugenics, forcible sterilization based on IQ, white nationalism, a “suicide hotline” prank.
That was important because then as now Misicko, joined by Soling, were officially the owner of all TST corporations and intellectual property registered under their for-profit, so their opinions are all that matter.
The Satanic Temple’s owners do have real principles and concerns; they aren’t entirely venal.
But when you look at them closely, they’re basically right-libertarians, and the community they cultivated had been leftist activists.
When the two owners at the top of the pyramid kept stifling them, ignoring them, taking the fruits of their work and offering nothing in return, then this stuff dropped, it was the last straw,
Internally, TST calls this mass exodus/schism “the Shittening”.
Funny enough, the footage from that failed “prank documentary”-era didn’t end up going to waste
When Penny Lane’s Hail Satan? came out in early 2019, it probably saved The Satanic Temple.
Make no mistake: Hail Satan? was a propaganda film, but because it was made at an arm’s length from the Temple by someone with a respected name, people treated it as reliable.
Didn’t hurt that the time the “Hail Satan?” film covers mostly ends before the 2018 Schism.
Didn’t hurt that Professor Joe Laycock’s book followed a similar pattern, not really grappling with what had happened except to do (inaccurate) apologia for it.
Definitely didn’t hurt that The Satanic Temple’s owners threatened a bunch of the ex-members with lawsuits over supposed NDA violations in order to keep them from speaking out.
So TST got a good narrative and no one who knew otherwise could talk about it.
In 2019, another nonprofit also called “The Satanic Temple” got IRS recognition but this time as a tax-exempt church.
Apparently, the fact that the nonprofit had the same name as the “doing business as” of Misicko and Soling’s for-profit corporation United Federation of Churches LLC was overlooked.
For that reason, when you are reading “The Satanic Temple” somewhere you never know whether they mean the for-profit entity, the tax-exempt church, or something else. Usually, TST wants it to mean whatever is most advantageous in that moment, narrowly.
One of the reasons The Satanic Temple keeps losing in court is that this comes up a lot and TST keeps making contradictory arguments about which entity of theirs is involved in a case and doing what.
Because courts do follow-up questions.
Indeed, the Temple has lost every court case it has been in charge of so far except one favorable settlement from a nuisance suit in 2018 against Netflix/Warner Bros. over a Baphomet statue that appeared in “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”.
But that’s it.
To their credit, what Soling and Misicko seem to have realized is that they don’t actually need to do anything in order to make money because they get all of the news attention and social media shares off of announcing stuff, then there’s no follow-up.
Many fewer people ever come along to go, “Actually, that’s bullshit”, and no one likes hearing Santa Claus isn’t real, so the message doesn’t go as far.
Even if someone does learn all of this, once TST has your money, why would they give a shit anymore? You can’t take it back.
If you get enough attention, maybe Satanic Temple members mass report your video or account and get it taken down.
Or maybe TST itself threatens to sue you.
The Satanic Temple has been compared by abortion access orgs to those fake “crisis pregnancy centers” that take advantage of desperate, vulnerable people by misleading them.
But the evangelical grifter comparison comes in with what is happening with all of this money that accrues to two men via a half-dozen for-profit and nonprofit entities with similar names, headquartered out of the same building while neither of the two owners seem to be able to explain exactly how they differentiate the entities or their funds when those men are asked about it under oath and especially when asked about it with documents demonstrating prior testimony was an outright lie.
Today is a good day for The Satanic Temple to release its finances.
