September 12, 2025
Why does The Satanic Temple care so much about Charlie Kirk?
It’s no mystery: This is just what Lucien Greaves and TST are
The co-owner of The Satanic Temple has an almost infinite number of “no fucks” to give for all kinds of political violence and victims (the enforced silence on TST re: police brutality and George Floyd’s lynching is well-known internally).
But a white bigot gets shots dead, and Lucien Greaves is johnny on the fucking spot.
On Sept. 11, “Lucien Greaves” (also “Doug Mesner” and other pseudonyms, but government name Douglas Misicko) published a Substack article you can read in full if you want.
A taste:
Then Sep. 12, TST pushed out a social media post and email newsletter that supposedly came from TST’s Ministry program but, unsurprisingly after last year’s Ministers purge, the statement had no daylight between it and Misicko’s own thoughts.
In light of the murder of Charlie Kirk, we reaffirm our commitment to the guiding Tenets of The Satanic Temple. The current climate of political violence, accelerationism, and hatred reflects a breakdown in civil discourse—one that has led to loss of life.
As Ministers of Satan, we have a responsibility to foster compassion, empathy, and reason—especially when public tensions rise. Our members, volunteers, supporters, and even detractors deserve clarity: The Satanic Temple condemns political violence in all forms. We reject divisive rhetoric that fuels fear, retaliation, and further harm. And we lend compassion to those that have been traumatized.
We recognize that individuals will hold personal perspectives, and we welcome thoughtful discourse. Yet as an organization, we stand united against violence and the rhetoric that normalizes it. Our mission calls us to lead with empathy and to hold firm to values that protect safety, dignity, and community.
Thank you for your continued dedication to our shared principles.
[-Ministry Council of The Satanic Temple
[Ed. As of Sep. 13, there was another Lucien Greaves Substack post but nothing about the below fundamentally changes except to keep in mind he also replied to and sought out dozens of people to argue with about this after radio silence on all the rest.]
[Ed. As of Sep. 23, there is another and yet another Substack post plus an hour and a half “Metal Blast” interview — even as TST’s subreddit calls the subject off-limits for commenters.]
This probably does come from a deeply sincere place, by the way. “Greaves” (Doug Misicko) is not alone in this sort of reaction, and it’s been pretty widespread among “Gavin Newsom Democrats” and “New York Times liberals“, too. It’s just, with all of them, you see who the sincere sympathy gets extended to — and not.
That [first] Substack post in particular is a wonderful case study in how important to reactionary centrism’s fascist project is lying by omission. Misicko is in such a hurry to sanitize Charlie Kirk as just a “First Amendment debate bro” that he skips over Kirk’s role in, say, vetting Trump staffers and… ferrying people to Jan 6.
The Cleveland Jewish News retrospective included how much Kirk supported the state of Israel but also what this paragon of “free speech” said and did with his life in respect to Jewish people, for example.
Some conservatives decried his comments. Erick Erickson, a Christian radio host, posted on X that Turning Point USA was “looking like not just a grifting operation, but an anti-Semitic grifting operation.” Ben Domenech, the editor of The Spectator, wrote that if Kirk remained the head of his organization, “the right has an anti-Semite problem that will follow them into the coming elections.”
The next month, Kirk defended Elon Musk on his show after the tech mogul responded “you have said the actual truth” to a user who had posted a reference to the “Great Replacement” theory, writing that Jews were “coming to the disturbing realization” that immigrants to the United States “don’t exactly like them too much.”
“Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” said Kirk on his show, later adding that “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”
Kirk’s concerns about the erosion of status for white Americans were central to his politics, and he also railed against what he called “Marxism,” efforts to curtail gun rights, and transgender people, about whom he was answering a question when he was shot.
In April 2024, as pro-Palestinian protests spread through American campuses, Kirk backed Republican crackdowns and urged them also to confront what he called “institutional hatred of white people.”
…
In a backgrounder about Turning Point USA from the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL accused Kirk of creating a “vast platform for extremists and far-right conspiracy theorists” and promoting “Christian nationalism.”
Charlie Kirk’s last chapter was as an ally of the Trump regime, working to end civil rights in the USA, and literally died in the middle of stoking more stochastic terrorism against trans people and engaging in a racist dogwhistle. That’s who he was and all that was lost, which is nothing of value.
It’s true: as that TST Ministry post says, there’s a lot of violence in the current climate. And Kirk was one of the primary figures pushing it, feeding it, making it worse and more inevitable.
All of this is worse because, if you’re in The Satanic Temple or have been following them for a while, you are well aware how little TST has had to say about all sorts of political assassinations in the USA, utterly silent on the genocide in Gaza, and censorship by the right, including state censorship. It is not a surprise to us, but we haven’t been able to find anything about the government’s ongoing and violent targeting of immigrants specifically when they exercise free speech rights to criticize Israel, for example.
So why is Charlie Kirk different?
Folks are getting banned from social media, losing jobs, and the U.S. government is trying to identify and directly punish people such as immigrants with legal repercussions if they are publicly too insufficiently heartbroken about the death of a white supremacist Christian nationalist. Look at where “free speech champions” are focused, though: the death of a bigot who falsely claimed to care about free speech while his actions did the opposite.
Misicko usually has a sneering contempt for members of The Satanic Temple who expect him to denounce frivolous stuff unrelated to TST’s mission (as Misicko defines it). It would’ve been fine for them to let the Charlie Kirk death pass by, too.
But they didn’t.
Again: this makes sense given Misicko’s (Lucien Greaves’) personal history. In recent years, there’s been the row over Misicko’s atheist transphobe David Silverman, continued work with alt-right lawyer Marc Randazza, and their first failed lawsuit against us where they claimed, “’Antifa’ is a left-wing political movement with a penchant for violence.“
In 2019, Misicko believed without evidence the myth that fascist propagandist Andy Ngo had been hit with a “cement milkshake”.
“When you advocate violence don’t feign horror when a hit lands,” huh?
On Twitter in 2018, Lucien Greaves defended dead cryptofascist publisher Adam Parfrey by making the bizarre claim the original fascist dictator Benito Mussolini could join TST and be converted by the experience (though note “un-fascist” here since Lucien is explicitly anti-antifascist).
We don’t need to talk about Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, or Augustus Sol Invictus, but they’re all in that history, too.
There aren’t great explanations for what might going on in terms of Misicko’s and therefore TST’s reflexive desire to stand with bigots, white nationalists, fascists, and their ilk so often when contrasted with how they stand with or speak out for everyone else. At best, you’d have to say that Misicko’s understanding of his own org and how fascism operates could be characterized as “naive”.
But there is no need to grant any “at best” here, given a further understanding of his history and how effusively and explicitly positive TST co-owner and co-founder Doug Misicko once was.
CW: anti-Black racism, n-word slur, white nationalist symbolism, fascism
Doug Misicko: I was in a fascist neighborhood, right outside the Vatican, and it was a real nice, clean area, but you would see swastikas spraypainted. You know, like the crosshairs. I don’t know what you call that, you know, but it was a fascist symbol. A circle with just the crosshairs in it. With… little fascist logos or anything else. It was a clean area, nice area. If you went to the shitty side of town on the wrong side of the tracks in Rome, saw little hammers and sickles painted on the walls and shit like that. That was the difference.
…
Amy Bugbee: And you bought that T-shirt. What did your T-shirt say?
Doug Misicko: Uh, in Italian it says “you’re with us, or you’re against us.” And it was- it’s a- It’s a fascist shirt. It was a fascist logo on it. I actually got it at a little fascist kiosk outside of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s palace.
Shane Bugbee: And who is that again?
Doug Misicko: He was a- y’know- he was like the first fascist. He was the godfather of fascism. Italian World War One hero that occupied the promised territories, after the First World War. With the Blackshirts. One of those- One of those hidden heroes. People should look him up. Look him up on the internet… Good deal.
He’s talking about this white nationalist symbol.
So these statements about how much Lucien Greaves and The Satanic Temple disagree with Charlie Kirk but still defend his rights to free speech are coming from someone who was once so enamored with fascism he made a pilgrimage to the home of “the godfather of fascism” (Gabriele D’Annunzio), effusively praised the civic cleanliness of fascism in contrast to communism, and bought a racist shirt from a fascist kiosk in the neighborhood, which he bragged about on a multi-hour Internet radio show of “edgelord” shock material but actually white nationalist content.
Actually, there is one even less charitable explanation for all this: maybe Misicko is just specifically still a huge fan of stochastic terrorism and manipulating other people into doing violence for you but is better about keeping it under wraps these days.
See, back when the “Temple of Satan crew” was bumping around, Doug Misicko (a.k.a. “Doug Mesner” a.k.a. “Lucien Greaves”) pitched a “Might Is Right” sequel to his collaborator and friend, Shane Bugbee.
Might is right 2. Let’s do it. We could even call it “the book of satan: might is right” without the “2”. Who’s going to be able to bitch? We have carte blanch, really – it’s in the public domain.
…
The strong theme, of course, should be individual gain and how best to achieve it — but the most successful today are not the violent. It is those who can drive others to do their violence for them… while making them believe it was their own idea. A manual for coercion and manipulation. More evil than the first book by orders of magnitude.
—Excerpt from Nov. 9, 2011, email by Doug Misicko as “Doug Mesner” to Shane Bugbee
More context around all of that here.
TST started up a few months later in 2012, going public in January 2013. So maybe he changed in those few months or actually has since. But as we’ve shown, this email to a longtime friend that he expected to stay private is not an isolated statement, and it’s smack in the middle of a lot of examples in the years before and after. You can’t point to a time when it stopped happening, even before considering that Misicko continues to make people close to him sign Non-Disclosure Agreements with non-disparagement clauses that he only occasionally and performatively declares he’s releasing them from about some narrow subject and has cultivated a reputation for suing critics.
It actually becomes much less of a mystery why TST didn’t want to say anything against police brutality or speak up for George Floyd in 2020, haven’t bothered to say anything about nearly any victims of state violence or assassinations by fascists, have nothing to say about actual government or corporate censorship and retaliation of truly unpopular speech (e.g. “Free Palestine”). It becomes clear why they continually, selectively go out of their way for these far-right figures in the name of “free speech” if you accept the possibility Misicko didn’t actually change that much over the past two decades. But he does need you to think he has for his ongoing grift of liberals and leftists to work.
It isn’t that it was “all a long time ago”; it isn’t that people keep “digging it up”. It’s that there is an unbroken history with this org and its leaders going back a very long time, and it’s all the same stuff the whole time.
Now, to be clear: is Kirk’s slaying good antifascist praxis?
It’s hard to see how.
That is, we still don’t know the motivation behind the act (it’s looking like a right-on-right crime as of Sep. 12 – [Ed. much less so nearly a week later]), but if it had been motivated by leftist politics, does this “move the ball forward” for leftist politics in some way?
Kirk was a ghoul who added nothing of value to the world but was a mediocre, eminently replaceable ghoul. Rush Limbaugh was crucial to the rise and mainstreaming of the far right in the 1980s and ’90s; Bill O’Reilly was a giant on cable news in the 2000s and 2010s, and Tucker Carlson and pushed white nationalism further than it had been in decades when he took over the same time slot until 2023. Dead or outcast, the machine plugged in the next person after them, and it all went on as before. Until you have a way to stop the machine from calling up the next mediocre ghoul to do the same heinous work as their predecessor, you aren’t really accomplishing much. These aren’t ontologically evil demons; they’re ordinary people albeit ordinary people doing horrendous stuff.
If, unlikely as it may be, the shooter turns out to have a coherent leftist ideology, it’s not like that will be something others can take up to achieve leftist political ends.
Bad stuff was going to happen before this; it’s going to happen now, too. We have all the same antifascist work as before.
And yet this is distinct from the argument that you need to feel bad or express public grief or commit yourself to solidarity with a horrible person whose life’s work was horrible things with the promise of only worse and more horrible things. It’s distinct from the argument that you debate people who work toward your eradication and submit yourself or others to that question.
You cannot destroy stochastic terrorists with debate, and nothing is accomplished from trying to.
Anyway, it should be clear this is just who Doug Misicko/”Lucien Greaves” is and what he will always turn the resources of organization he controls and co-owns toward with no mechanism for change or for replacing him.
Unfortunately for the thousands of people still giving him and TST money, this is still not clear, however.
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