July 17, 2021

Why You Haven’t Left The Satanic Temple

For a long time, it’s been known that The Satanic Temple’s co-owner Lucien Greaves once went on an antisemitic rant about how the Nazis ruined the word antisemitism for everyone and that it was “OK to hate Jews” so long as you were hating observant Jews.

He was on a 24-hour radio show celebrating and promoting the release of a new edition of Might Is Right that he’d illustrated, so naturally Greaves’ co-hosts and the guest caller then escalated immediately to hatred of all Jews and Holocaust denialism. The famous clip of this conversation cuts off about there.

Lucien Greaves: “I’m an Aryan king!

The following apologia for that rant and subsequent conversation by Satanic blogger Stephen Bradford Long is, uh, creative about its construction of facts.

To be more generous, it is overly credulous toward people who have not earned it, but it’s typical of how TST members continue to utilize willful ignorance to justify their continued support of an organization fundamentally structured to control and extract the free labor of members that its owners can profit off of without those owners having any reciprocal accountability to members, including telling them the truth.

Let’s take a look in more detail at what will be a very long post using Long’s blog post as a guide to examine this aspect of The Satanic Temple and its history.

screenshot of article "Why I haven't Left the Satanic Temple" by Stephen Bradford Long (May 21, 2020)
stephenbradfordlong.com

Long is not really going to address the full context of crypto-fascism and alt-righterism in his piece—that’s what we’re going to try to do—but Long wants to make you aware that he’s aware of it.

This disclaimer is probably necessary because The Satanic Temple wraps its actual members up in “definitely not a giant red flag for a supposed religious organization” non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). The latest version of the membership agreement they’re rolling out to local chapters, erm, congregations is likely why we’re starting to see another schism now (July 2021), but which specific NDA Long was operating under — or avoiding — in May 2020 when he wrote this, only TST would know.

Long’s situation has changed. Per his Twitter, as of July 2021, Long is now on the Ordination Council of The Satanic Temple Ministry, so it’s possible that he’s now wrapped up in an even more restrictive NDA than most people. He may not even be able to respond to this if he wanted to.

Going back to “stuff not talked about”, the TST leader “Priest Penemue”, who now openly goes by Greg Stevens again, is a one-time Breitbart contributor who was on very familiar terms with Milo Yiannopolous and Mike Cernovich.

Cernovich was already a #GamerGate veteran, open misogynist, and rape apologist at that point; Cernovich also utilizes far-right attorney, “anti-antifa” and anti-#BlackLivesMatter opinion-haver, eugenics enthusiast Marc Randazza.

Now, Randazza will come up later in Long’s blog for Long’s theory of “contagion”, but it is notable that Randazza isn’t just a piece of shit because he goes out of his way to represent pieces of shit; he’s also, himself, very much a piece of shit.

Alex Jones’ Lawyer Violated Legal Ethics By Soliciting Porn Bribes. Just How Dirty Is Marc Randazza? America’s foremost attorney for far-right extremists wanted “a little gravy,” then lied to cover it up. That’s just part of his twisted journey through a lax legal system. By Luke O'Brien (Dec 27, 2018)

Back to Long.

So, Doubt.gif, but yeah, let’s really begin.

“Cringe,” huh?

So, to be clear, Stephen Bradford Long is quoting Joseph Laycock, a researcher of new religious movements who was in the middle of a book about how great neo-Satanism is when news of this broke big again in 2018. Long relies on Laycock to have listened to the clip and lets Laycock characterize an event that Long admits is why so many other accusations “orbit” around TST rather than, apparently, listening to it himself and trying to find out more information.

In lieu of access to any of the primary information for yourself, this would be understandable. But if you read more of that section from the book, it’s immediately apparent that Laycock did some pretty shoddy work.

Now, you may think it’s nitpicking, but this is not a podcast. This is a 24-hour live Internet radio broadcast. People are calling in while listening. More importantly, it didn’t take place Sep. 11, 2002; this was 2003.

You can tell from other things like archived Web posts promoting it and printed materials, but also the other conversations that take place throughout the stream, like arguing about the Democratic presidential primary field and people referring to the current year being “2003”.

So let’s establish two things:

  1. Shane Bugbee, Lucien Greaves, and Amy Bugbee talked about a ton of stuff in the course of 24 hours
  2. Laycock listened to approximately none of those other things before trying to exculpate Lucien and resorting to “some of Lucien’s best friends are Jewish.”

The fact that Laycock didn’t know which year it was happening might explain why he offers up that little detail in defense of Lucien in regards to eugenics.

Certainly, Lucien is not making eugenics-based arguments, right?

Right?

Ascertaining truth directly

Might Is Right Special : shane bugbee, amy stocky, doug mesner : Internet Archive

The.Satanic.Wiki—Might Is Right 24-Hour Radio Special

QueerSatanic Note: For those who don’t know, Lucien Greaves’ real name is “Douglas Alexander Misicko,” which means when he gets himself added as an intervenor in an ACLU court case, he still does so as “Doug Misicko.” Back in 2003 and for some time after, he was using the pseudonym “Doug Mesner”, and he has used at least two others online since then, but since TST people mostly know him as “Lucien Greaves”, we’ll keep using that.

Some caveats: that transcript in the above Wiki link was auto-generated and as of July 2021, has still to be fully manually corrected. While it gets the gist well, please don’t take it on faith that it’s correct. Also, over the course of the 24-hours, the timestamps stay in order but do drift a bit from the Archive.org audio timer.

However, it’s a roadmap for you to find something and follow along with your own ears. You can hear for yourself what grotesquely racist song they put on to close out that segment. You can hear for yourself how they got into that conversation.

It turns out the caller, a Holocaust-denying metal musician from Vancouver named Gerod Staaf a.k.a. Gzerod Von Staaf brings up Lucien’s favorite subject: eugenics.

Lucien agrees that the Nazis ruined the concept for everyone in the Second World War and brings up an apparently practiced phrase: “Threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.”

We know this is not an off-the-cuff remark or merely sleepless thought because in hour nine, the stream plays a pre-recorded interview that Lucien did with conservative radio host Ken Hamblin, “The Black Avenger”, to promote their upcoming stream (starting roughly 08:07:56 in the full audio).

Hamblin asks for clarification: “How about a person with a low IQ, who is not likely to be able to give a child the quality of husbanding that is necessary for the competitiveness of the 21st century?”

I do believe that that type of person should not be allowed to breed,” Lucien answers.

So going back to “this moment of cringe” — the famous one where Lucien talks over the caller to be able to assert that “antisemitism is not a dirty word” — before they get to that moment, they’re already having a lovely conversation about how too many stupid people are having kids. The next step is natural.

We’ve talked before about how cheery Lucien is in his conversation with former California Grand Dragon of the Knights of the KKK and then-White Aryan Resistance (WAR) founder Tom Metzger. In it, Lucien tries to convince Metzger that the best way for Metzger to achieve his genocide of all the Black people would be to institute sterilization based on IQ in the name of eugenics.

So this stuff is not incidental to Lucien’s philosophy. And it’s not something you can pretend was just a “moment” of poor judgment or going along with others.

Five years later for his Process.org blog, Lucien utilizes a facetious counterargument but is still writing about how much he hates that stupid people are allowed to have babies.

He also seems to complain that every time he argues in favor of it, people associate him with all of the fucking things eugenics and forced sterilization have actually been used for in history.

Screenshot of "Process.org": THE PROCESS IS… The blog for Loki der Quaeler, Doug Mesner and William Morrison — it's where we air our dirty laundry, yak about whatever comes to mind, and of course...change the course of history!… Article headline: "Mother’s Day" by doug (January 21, 2008)

Process.org—Mothers Day

Yeah, but that’s 2008. Surely Lucien changed his mind after that, right?

Well, probably still not by 2013 when Lucien brought in Shane Bugbee to help him launch TST.

That’s Lucien Greaves, Shane Bugbee, and TST co-owner “Malcolm Jarry” (real name, Cevin Soling) standing together in mid-2013.

People like Joseph Laycock and Stephen Bradford Long take great pains to excuse Lucien because he’s not as bad as Shane Bugbee, and Shane was the real racist, antisemite, and absolutely horrible person, right?

Well, despite moving to different parts of the country, Lucien stayed close with Shane for another 10 years after all of that and tried to get Shane work shaping the media-rollout of TST in the beginning.

More clips and transcripts of “Lucien Greaves” and Shane Bugbee working together

By 2013, do you think Lucien and Shane even stopped loving Might Is Right? Do you think they pitched it together to be the foundation of TST?

While this had been long rumored, leaked emails from 2013 and an email correspondence from 2011 that Bugbee himself submitted as evidence to federal district court both demonstrate that this grotesque book was something Greaves continued to think about and actively pursue, overlapping with the setup of The Satanic Temple itself — although note how he presents the idea with his friend Bugbee versus his new business partner, Cevin Soling, a self-described “secular Jew”.

We will spare you the screenshots of extended quotes about “Jew-Bankers”, “hulking thick skulled Negros”, and extermination of inferior breeds unless you want to click on them to read.

“Outdated.” “Ambiguous.” “What we can learn from it today.”

Uh huh.

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

In fact, it’s not until mid-2018 that the website Lucien promotes throughout the MIR stream finally goes dark. It was called “dysgenics.com”.

This is the main ad they run for it, a recording of Lucien himself saying:

Pre-recorded Dysgenics.com ad

All right, so that’s a pretty deep dive, but we have not gotten to the worst yet, so let’s jump back into Stephen Bradford Long’s blog.

via “The Man In The High Temple” by Black Light Catechism

“Complicated”, “concerned”, “position isn’t exactly clear”

They are there. To promote. An antisemitic. White supremacist. Misogynistic. Protofascist. Book.

A book that Lucien Greaves illustrated.

A book that has inspired white supremacists for decades, and was cited by name while the 2019 Gilroy Garlic Festival mass shooter live-streamed himself killing people.

This is the context. The position Lucien is taking throughout the entirety of the 24-hour radio show is that Social Darwinism and eugenics is good, and Lucien clearly does not have a problem with literal Neo-Nazis and white nationalists, including those responsible for assaulting and murdering people because those are the people he sought out to bring on and interview.

If you’re on a desktop browser, this will be easier, but try searching for “Jew” in this (uncorrected) transcript, and if you don’t trust the transcription, listen for yourself.

If you think Lucien’s position isn’t clear, search for the unredacted versions of “n****r”; “r*t*rd”; or “f*g” and find some clarity.

“Lucien Greaves” with Shane and Amy Bugbee complaining about Thomas Thorn (CW: homophobia and racism)

And:

“Lucien Greaves” prank calling a psychic (re: disabled offspring)

And:

“Lucien Greaves” wants to write a “r*t*rd story”

It keeps going from there.

If your defense is, “At least Lucien didn’t talk as coarsely as Shane did”, that is an incredibly weird excuse to give someone. Seriously arguing, “We should sterilize all people with low IQs” is actually worse than just the r-slur. But yeah, Lucien did both.

We promise you, no matter how much more context you want to give this stuff, it will make it worse. There is always more, and it’s always worse.

A Horseshit Explanation

But back to Long’s blog:

So, apologies for giving you so much information up to this point. Hopefully, you have taken some breaks if you’ve needed it. But having done so, it’s going to be immediately apparent just how much of this statement that Long quotes in-full is absolute horseshit.

Subtly, because you may miss the history, Long is writing this blog in May 2020, but TST just recycled the statement they put out in Lucien’s name back in 2018 as part of that schism, and you can tell by the reference to “15 years”, which would be 2003.

Another subtle but actual falsehood they try to sneak in: “I was an ignorant kid” and “still in my early twenties” — in reality, Lucien was 28. This matches public information, but it’s also what he says himself while prank calling the suicide hotline — because there’s always more and it’s always worse.

But without further ado, the recycled 2018 statement (emphasis added in each case):

So, end of recycled statement.

And wow, they are really relying on you not knowing jack shit about the rest of that 24-hour broadcast or the circumstances behind it, huh?

But the sort of people that that excuse doesn’t work on don’t stay to tell other people, and the sort of people that the excuse does work on stick around and keep defending it — like Stephen Bradford Long does.

“Made a mistake.”

It’s interesting how similar this language is to abusive pastors or just men in reactionary evangelical communities, regardless of how those men may have hurt people for years as part of a consistent pattern, and despite no real evidence of change or restitution beyond saying tearfully, “I’m really sorry. Please forgive me.” Except instead of a Bible verse, Lucien — or someone writing for him — pleads the tenets.

The way TST characterizes the exchange that people know about, it’s as though it’s just an oversight in 2003, a lapse, and one solitary conversation where Lucien didn’t “push back against bigotry enough,” or whatever.

But as we’ve talked about, Lucien has continued to do things in the name of “free speech” that consistently only work in one direction: in support of the far-right and their enablers.

Tracking his mindset, as late as 2016, Lucien still thinks it’s terrible for an event to disinvite a violent Neo-Nazi Satanist like Augustus Sol Invictus from a speaking panel they’re both on.

Fascism legitimately has a place in discussions upon political philosophies,” Greaves says in 2016.

Meanwhile, former TST high priest Brian Werner left the event in solidarity just as Greaves did, explaining, as Atlanta Antifascists documented, at least a few hours earlier than Greaves’ statement his similar reasons for leaving.

Announcement of future Trump supporter Brian Werner as TST’s first “High Priest” in 2013 on Twitter and Facebook


The Left Hand Path Consortium’s explanation is that they were down to host the neo-Nazi (“The left hand path is full of controversial figures; which is why it is called The Left Hand Path and not your grandmother’s sewing circle”) up until the point that Invictus invited antifascists to come to the event and kill him. “Free speech” had been their excuse, too.

To be clear, this was not a left-wing event.

White male Augustus Sol Invictus stands at podium in a suit and tie with a USA flag behind him
August Sol Invictus circa 2016. Miami Herald article: “Goat-blood-drinking candidate considers himself friend of white supremacists

Basically, according to them, this call for violence that they would be responsible for is finally what got the event to disinvite Invictus.

Pagan news blog The Wild Hunt backed up this account independently.

By mid March, several guest speakers, including Immanion Press publisher Taylor Ellwood, canceled their own appearances due to Invictus’ inclusion. In response, Invictus published a Facebook post directly on the LHP event page, calling the protestors “cowards, fools & hypocrites.” Additionally, he invited them to “come to the consortium” to put a “knife in his heart.”

That single post changed the situation considerably for LHP, as it reportedly placed the organization in legal jeopardy. According to one notice, the Atlanta Police had even taken noticed and voiced concerns over possible violence. As a result, LHP canceled Invictus’ engagement and posted the following, “We don’t regret our attempts at featuring a controversial person at our event, however, it would not have been very LHP of us to martyr ourselves for him. We made a decision with the safety of our presenters and guests when he baited the protesters.” Most of the original posts have been deleted from Facebook.

The decision drew both applause and more protests. Lucien Greaves of The Satanic Temple withdrew as a guest speaker, saying that, while he was unfamiliar with Invictus’ work, he felt “that the dis-invitation sends a harmful message in support of censorship.”

WildHunt.org, “Pagan Community Notes” (March 21, 2016)

Another scheduled speaker backed that up as well.

We can’t know what’s in Greaves’ heart-of-hearts, but throughout his time as the voice of TST, Lucien has continued to publicly speak about how the problem isn’t with “Nazis”, and Greaves has even argued people shouldn’t oppose Nazis with force.

“Actually they’re only Nazis if they come from the interwar period of German history. Otherwise, they’re just sparkling fascists” is an interesting distinction for someone with Lucien’s history to try to make.

He didn’t bother to parse things quite so carefully a little earlier in the same interview when assigning the primary blame:

He’s giving this interview just a few weeks before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, by the way.

The problem, according to Lucien, is that certain hapless racists are inbred, stupid rednecks who should be mocked.

via Trident Antifascism

In short, stupidity and trashiness are still the problem for Greaves; dapper and well-spoken genocide, eh, maybe not so much.

Reminder: the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., that led to a white supremacist killing Heather Heyer and dozens more antifascists injured was less than a week before these statements. That statement is Lucien Greaves looking at the situation and operating with hindsight.

But he also thinks that civil courts should be used to bankrupt people for truly unacceptable speech (see: the Haute Macabre interview, but also, um, what they’re doing to us).

“Free speech” also means Greaves and Cevin “Malcolm Jarry” Soling can, as TST, say whatever the fuck reactionary bullshit about opposing public schools (but never cops or prisons) or supporting the Israel state’s violence without asking anybody else. But no one else can say anything without asking them first, including about whether your TST chapter or you as a TST member can apply the seven tenets to oppose white supremacy and police abuse.

What else do you think this section of the new member code is all about?

A guess: The ex[?]-chapter in Boston got fed up and disregarded TST’s directive from May 29, 2020, about not supporting the Black Lives Matter movement (broken link), so on June 20, 2020, Boston posted to their Facebook that, yeah, the struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions, and that means full, unequivocal support for Black Lives Matter (broken link)(archived) and opposition to white supremacy.

With the new contract, now you’re in violation if you or your chapter speak out in favor of something Cevin and Lucien don’t approve of, and if you think it’s too ambiguous to conclude that’s what it means, the point of the power dynamics is that ambiguity always helps the people who have power and hurts those without it.

If they say you violated it, you violated it. If you want to appeal, you can go through all the proper channels they also control and they can ultimately ignore as it suits them.

“What do the owners of The Satanic Temple care about, and what sort of people do they absolutely not care about?” is actually of critical importance to anyone donating their time, money, and creativity to making Lucien and Cevin’s companies more profitable and influential.

The Conversion Left vs. The Contagion Left

We’ve arrived at what is actually the crux of Long’s whole argument, but after spending a ton of time getting to this point, we’re mostly not going to engage with it for the simple reason that his prior assumptions in this specific situation are demonstrably false, and therefore are irrelevant.

Long says that the Left should include “reformed criminals, Nazis, racists, former white supremacists etc.”; the problem is Long doesn’t seem capable or willing of doing the due diligence to investigate how bad someone was or how much someone has actually changed, and therefore he misunderstands why someone wouldn’t want to be around former(*) racists.

Long admits that he himself used to be a “far right, racist, homophobic, libertarian shitgibbon”, and given his stance on this issue, this is not a surprise. He would go on to interview famous transphobe and alt-lite darling Katie Herzog, before coming to the realization thanks to her: “I’m a Satanist, Not A Leftist”. So if you are a Leftist, he probably was never a great person to listen to for advice.

Take Long here with as much salt as you feel appropriate:

Citation needed on any of those “obvious leftist sentiments” as opposed to “liberal” tending toward “classically liberal.”

It’s all very good to say, “I’m different now. I grew up. I’ve changed” as (paraphrasing) Lucien was quoted in that Breitbart article by TST Director of Ministry Greg Stevens.

But that makes another relevant aspect of the Might Is Right 24-hour stream is they interview George Burdi, who also said he changed his ways.

The SPLC had interviewed Burdi in 2001, too, so a lot of people liked this narrative. After being imprisoned in 1997 for the assault of an antiracist activist woman and avoiding more prison by selling off his Neo-Nazi record company, Burdi claimed he had renounced white supremacy. Burdi had a new band and it wasn’t a reference to The Church of the Creator’s “Racial Holy War” anymore; Burdi had two Black band members and was even engaged to an East Indian woman!

But if you listen to Burdi closely, there’s a lot he doesn’t say, and it sounds a lot less like he came to a realization that he was fundamentally wrong about the way he looked at the world than it does that he was facing tremendous consequences in his life for openly sharing and pursuing those views.

In 2017, Burdi admitted he had never fully left the white nationalist movement (~8:00 in). He still thought “multiculturalism” was bad, “homogenous societies” would be better, and calmly went through his ethno-nationalist screed that would necessitate tremendous violence visited on millions if not billions of people.

Burdi ends that section of the 2017 interview on a note about how he’d either send his children to a private school in Detroit or homeschool them, which is remarkably similar to the things TST owner Cevin Soling once told Russia Today (mirror) about when public schools really went downhill.


Quote beginning 16:52

When you wonder why TST is getting involved in weird stuff like the Mahanoy (Pennsylvania) School Board and selling “Fuck The Mahanoy School Board” merch, it basically comes down to “Cevin Soling really hates public schools.”

Actually, according to Joe Laycock’s book, this is not incidental. Rather, that’s how Soling and Lucien Greaves originally met: talking about their shared opposition to public education. Emphasis added in all cases.

(Note, though, that we have never been able to find evidence that Greaves actually attended — let alone got a degree from — Harvard.)

Importantly, when you follow that last footnote it says:

That document has never been made public, but there is one other reference to it in the same book.

And when you follow the footnote:

So it’s not an exaggeration to say that if Cevin Soling did not hate (integrated) public schools and their heightened level of repression required for “heterogenous” populations versus “homogenous” ones, the Temple would not exist — and that’s apparently true several times over.

A defender of TST and of Soling might want to point out that just because Soling and George Burdi agree on one thing, and have used similar reasoning, doesn’t mean the whole push to end public schools is actually wrong.

But it’s more that the entire modern right wing is built on opposition to public school integration, and the sort of people who call for the abolition of schools because they’re like prisons while still supporting actual prisons are just giving their hand away about what bothers them.

In fact, Soling also had a very long conversation with Stefan Molyneux, yes, that one, about the benefits of homeschooling when promoting his documentary “The War on Kids”. He did an interview with at least one other homeschool right wing libertarian on that extended tour a decade ago, possibly more.

But here’s the SPLC summary of home-school aficionado Molyneux:

“That was a long time ago,” apologists will say.

Ok, sure.

[Facebook screenshot] The War On Kids
May 31, 2015Tomorrow June 1st Cevin Soling will be on the Laura Ingraham show at 11:30am EST! Don't miss to tune in!
Find your local radio station broadcasting the show here!
“The War on Kinds” Facebook page post announcing Soling’s interview with Laura Ingraham

As late as 2015—so now fully in crossover with owning The Satanic Temple—Cevin Soling was out on the anti-public schools circuit talking to right-wing radio’s “High Priestess of Hate” Laura Ingraham.

Even more recently, The Daily Caller quoted Soling about his homeschool initiative in April 2020 in his role as “president of Ideological Diversity”, which describes itself as “a Student Organization at Harvard Kennedy School”. Meanwhile, the other lead in the group is Corey DeAngelis, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, a dark money, right-wing school privatization group.

Screenshot of Ideological Diversity, a Student Organization at Harvard Kennedy School
Cevin Soling (admin) and Corey DeAngelis (moderator)

The only other media covering that April 2020 event was the Foundation for Economic Education, a Koch-funded “right-wing libertarian economic think-tank”.

Turtles, all the way down.

Now, do we have time here to get into Soling’s whole cargo cult messiah thing or anti-Palestinian nonprofit? We do not.

Just remember: “When it comes to The Satanic Temple, there’s always more, and it’s always worse.”

Approaching the End

So as we get into the home-stretch (finally!), let’s look at the sort of things Long has to say in defense of Greaves:

At this point, it’s not clear what there remains to say.

Long minimizes what it was Lucien was actually doing in 2003 — because Long never bothered to investigate it for himself, even though it was fairly easy to have done so.

So, Long says, even if Lucien was a fascist then, clearly he’s changed. However, the great schism in 2018 was related to criticism that Lucien had not changed and continued to be friendlier and more forgiving of virulent bigots and their enablers, and has continued to treat people like Andy fucking Ngo as a credible source, reserving his deeper criticism for antifascists who are “the greatest threat to our social stability.”

And as for Marc Randazza, again, the problem isn’t just that he represents bad clients but that he actively seeks out the likes of Alex Jones, Mike Cernovich, and Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer. He is himself actually a piece of shit, and in bad standing with a lot of state bars as well as the US Patent Office. We are supposed to take TST’s word that Randazza is working for them pro bono on a “free speech suit” when they don’t have open books to demonstrate where money donated to them is and isn’t going, when no one has yet given a good explanation for why TST tried to raise $50,000 for a legal action that they say didn’t involve any legal fees.

Why? Why would you take them at their word? Their “free speech” complaint is specifically about getting Lucien Greaves’ Twitter account a blue checkmark so he and other “political figures” like Laura Loomer and Richard Spencer stop being discriminated against.

Why would you believe that Randazza works for them for free when he’s their go-to to threaten a lawsuit about Mississippi changing its flag away from the Confederate design and help them sue the city of Boston, but also, he’s their go-to guy for patent office work. Maybe because Randazza lets clients use pseudonyms on federal documents and still turns in the paperwork.

Long thinks that Leftists believe in “right-wing cooties” as opposed to Leftists being people who have quite a bit of experience dealing with the far right and who know how dangerous they are to the sort of people they want to assault and abuse.

A Thought Experiment

Just, as a thought experiment mind you, imagine that instead of “right wing” people, we’re talking about a group whose highest leadership just keeps continually palling around, boosting, and defending pedophiles and the sexual assault of young teenage girls. (note: in the Might Is Right stream, Shane Bugbee does literally, repeatedly comes back to this theme.)

Early 2000s studio recording space with "Confederate flag" lamp cover on desk, "Might Is Right" books, and on wall, a Confederate flag with Charles Manson's face in the middle
Hammond, Ind., recording studio for 24-hour “Might Is Right” Internet radio stream in 2003

But instead of just talking about it, the group’s leaders invite on a bunch of actual, convicted, and unapologetic sexual abusers of children to be interviewed, play hours of rambling pre-recorded speeches by people like Jimmy Savile to fill dead air time (in reality, it’s Charles Manson and others), and the leaders spend the next decades of their life talking about it, and defending the free speech rights of such predators, or minimizing the harm they’ve caused and threat they pose (e.g. “The Catholic Church is way worse”).

Imagine, weirdly, it’s almost exclusively their free speech rights that the group’s leaders are interested in and not anyone with any other interests, like say union organizers, trans people, or folk who criticize police.

Imagine if this hypothetical group utilized a lawyer who disproportionately represented accused pedophiles, but the lawyer himself kept talking about his appreciation for “hot young teens” and such himself, maybe not going all the way to say it, but constantly revealing where his sympathies lay. (In reality, Marc Randazza has argued in favor of legalizing child porn on First Amendment grounds. No, really.)

In this hypothetical, exactly how safe do you think people with children would feel leaving their kids alone with those leaders? Or with any organization whose members repeatedly made excuses for their leaders’ past behavior, even as similar incidents were ongoing around and within the organization?

Would it actually be an important distinction to make whether the leaders felt a certain way about children or just didn’t consider children’s safety a priority?

To be clear: The Satanic Temple has figures who have spent 20 years doing something like that; but instead of abusing children, it’s people who want to enact genocide, create a white ethnostate, pursue “Western Chauvinism”, and so forth.

That was supposed to be the only point to this hypothetical: what’s something absolutely indefensible other than genocidal white supremacists, something no one could possibly defend?

But, there’s always more, and it’s always worse, so in parallel to this thought experiment, as you saw, there are certain examples of literal crossover. It ends up being literally true that Lucien has been defending the shuttered False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), and continues to defend it via the Grey Faction and his personal Patreon posts.

So we’re not saying literally that Lucien has a history of defending child sexual abuse and abusers.

But the FMSF has indeed been accused of that, as recently as having key figure Elizabeth Loftus popping up to provide expert testimony for the defense of the likes of Jerry Sandusky, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby but people all the way back to Ted Bundy, too. Their effect for years was to provide yet another excuse — for cops, courts, and various authority figures — to argue that victims of abuse, particularly children, were not to be trusted.

And of course, back in 1993, two of FMSF’s board members did give an interview to the Dutch pro-pedophilia magazine Paidika: The Journal of Paedophilia kinda hyping up the whole… sexual abuse of children thing.

Screenshot of "False Memory Syndrome Action Network" Facebook group, including "Mikoto Niikura"
False Memory Syndrome Action Network” Facebook group, with admin “Mikoto Niikura

Still, for the better part of three decades, the FMSF continued to — by default — disbelieve that children were victims of abuse they remembered or understood after the fact, and to believe and to welcome in the tens of thousands of adults accused of being abusers. Apparently, Lucien still admins the independent Facebook group “False Memory Syndrome Action Network” that the FMSF newsletter once promoted, under yet another pseudonym of his: “Mikoto Niikura”, and as mentioned previously, he wrote a response attacking the journalist who in 2020 reported critically on the FMSF after its closure.

Lucien and The Grey Faction and The Satanic Temple itself, continue to attack and deride people who experience Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) despite it being in the DSM, but also, as pseudonym “Konrad Josefsson”, Greaves attacked people who claim to have Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) because it’s not in the DSM.

If you have a traumatic sexual experience at, say, a TST-related Lupercalia orgy, but you don’t say anything about it immediately, or if you accuse another member of sexual assault, do you think Lucien or Mike Cernovich’s good friend Greg Stevens or other people those guys trust as leaders are going to believe you? What if another leader is the one who hurt you?

Every time you dig deeper at something, you find more connections, more demonstrations of certain sympathies, lack of sympathy for others, and absolutely no way for the volunteers who make up the organization to make change or hold those in power accountable except by leaving, knowing in their absence they will be misrepresented to remaining members as just another of “The Outraged” or maybe even publicly, anonymously attacked.

Despite what The Satanic Temple told Hemant Mehta in 2018, there’s not really any evidence they ever stopped wrapping people up in Non-Disclosure Agreements or threatening people with violating them and lots of evidence NDAs are still standard operating procedure for their business (or was it religion?), so it is literally impossible to imagine all of the fucked up shit people have experienced and kept quiet about because they fear a rich, financially opaque and utterly unaccountable leadership from going after them with punitive lawsuits.

Speaking of which, if you’ve learned anything new about The Satanic Temple or its leadership from reading this, feel free to tip us so we can keep defending ourselves from their lawsuit

Legal Fund for Victims of Satanic Temple, organized by Leah Fishbaugh

Long asks, “So why do I remain in TST?”

Satanists: Wow! I can’t believe members of The Satanic Temple continue to defend it after all this TST membership: Survivor bias plane diagram

And the answer is pretty clear.

Despite all of the people who have left over the years complaining about how TST leadership doesn’t live up to its own values, how the court cases keep going badly, and how actually there are no signs of any improvement but probably just the opposite given how finances are now even more opaque than before, we cannot find reasons to expect positive change.

The issue is that the people who are in TST and have constructed an identity and social network around it don’t want to believe they bet on the wrong horse again, particularly if they already left an abusive religion of their upbringing.

Why I haven’t left The Satanic Temple” — because when your mind is already made up, you don’t bother to go looking for any evidence, and it’s a lot easier to stick with your priors no matter how much evidence is shown to you that they’re wrong.

Hail Satan, hail yourself.

You deserve better than these ghouls. You do.


Article updated substantively March 2022 with email correspondence and embedded audio/video and July 2022 with more details on Left Hand Path Consortium.

Article updated January 2023 with references to “Educational mission: A report and plan of action” from Speak of the Devil and March 2023 with more embedded video clips.


Correction: A previous version of this article linked to a Twitter thread by ISSTD Director Mike Salter, PhD. While the thread is concise and clear, it’s a fair criticism that Salter’s own relationship to the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” conspiracy means he’s not someone who should be referenced uncritically as a source. In its place is an academic article by lawyer Fiona Raitt and psychologist Suzanne Zeedyk covering much of the same ground more thoroughly but less accessibly.

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TST sued us from April 2020 to September 2024, and we are still here.