I finished off the Might Ain't Right series on the Ave Satanas podcast tonight, and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to examine the history of Satanism (ICYMI LaVey took big chunks of Might Is Right for The Satanic Bible). @queersatanic and the Ave Satanas team do a great job of breaking down this book and highlighting what LaVey did and didn't adopt.
I still plan on reading it because I like to really examine primary sources for myself, but I need a break from Ragnar Redbeard's/Arthur Desmond's bullshit before I do, but I can say...
At best, MIR is half-cooked; a half-assed collection of poorly considered opinions.
At worst, it's blatantly racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, poorly written, and overall, a waste of ink from an angry, jealous, pathetic man who really needed to get out more.
And LaVey would have created something better if he had used his own thoughts and writings instead of taking from MIR. But props to him for cutting out the most heinously bigoted shit.
We're collaborating with some folk at Ave Satanas Podcast (ASP) and Free Society Satanists to bring you a miniseries looking at Might Is Rig
It hasn't fully sunk in yet, but we did just get some truly joyful news.
The Satanic Temple lost AGAIN, and ours is a full victory here
The King County Superior Court just granted our motion for summary judgment in full, dismissing all claims with prejudice and ruling on our declaratory judgment counterclaim we have the right to use "the Memes Page".
facebook.com/queersatanic
It has been 1635 DAYS since The Satanic Temple filed their case against us in federal district court. We got it dismissed there once in February 2021; we got it dismissed again in January 2023 after TST re-filed.
For the second time in nearly three years of litigation, a federal district court in Washington State dismissed all claims made by The Satan
The Satanic Temple appealed the second loss to the Ninth Circuit and also re-filed part of the case in state court in April 2023 — notably after the three-year statute of limitations had run out.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed most of the lower federal court decision but allowed TST to revive their defamation claims if they could specify what exactly had been said about them that was false and defamatory.
Federal appellate court affirms that failed cyberpiracy accusations were bogus but grants TST another chance to make defamation claim agains
Apparently unable to do so, The Satanic Temple voluntarily dismissed the federal case against us.
We have a voluntary dismissal of what remained of The Satanic Temple's federal court case against four former members of TST's Washington St
Meanwhile, in 2022, TST sued Newsweek for writing about our case back in October 2021. The Satanic Temple dragged us into those proceedings to give depositions, but Newsweek seems to be prevailing with just one claim remaining and a bunch of embarrassing stuff coming out about TST.
TST sued a woman in Texas for making TikTok videos critical of them, after first forcing her to record a pretty upsetting retraction. This is despite the fact that she was right.
TST has threatened more people than we can make a reliable count of with litigation both before and after us.
The Satanic Temple's agents have stalked and harassed us and our loved ones, and there have been long periods of misery and where it seemed like the courts would let them keep doing this sort of thing indefinitely.
But today we won.
The Satanic Temple has lost every step of the way and shown themselves to be a toxic, abusive religious organization to everyone who has bothered to pay attention — tho unfortunately, too few people have.
Thank you all for your support over these long 4+ years.
Moreover, we've been getting sued by The Satanic Temple since April 2020. And we're still here.
Based on their pattern of behavior, The Satanic Temple is likely to appeal this loss or perhaps invent a new pretext to continue this SLAPP in a new venue. We know that.
The Satanic Temple, its owners, and lawyers have had had no argument justifying the last 1635 days beyond their wealth and desire to hurt and intimidate people. But TST also should have much bigger issues to deal with than lighting money on fire by continuing to come after us.
So, maybe The Satanic Temple will finally walk away now. They're definitely more vulnerable now than they have been in a long time.
Satanic Temple members and local TST groups begin another mass departure as Doug "Lucien Greaves" Misicko clarifies once again that the “fre
Please let people know what The Satanic Temple is and how they behave, and also that however scary they seem, if you stand up to them you can win.
When it comes to The Satanic Temple, there's always more, and it's always worse, but they are at least as incompetent as they are malicious. They are ghouls, to be sure, but not ones who can survive any light on their actions.
// long ramble TLDR just me discussing how I found my politics at the beginning
When I was a baby leftist the final push for me into anarchism wasn't when I learned what anarchy actually was, it was 1 event leading to a culmination of recognizing one of the biggest problems in social and economic systems was people having power over each other.
When I first got into leftism there was nothing on Anarchism when I tried to lookup "beginner leftist books". It was The Communist Manifesto, State and Revolution, The ABCs of Socialism, etc. Nothing about Anarchism though.
I tried to connect to Communism through reading and content creators but it couldn't stick for me. Not to say I'm not a communist now but my communism is different, and more inherent to my Anarchism. A lot of communist creators I watched talk were very intelligent on the system and helped me realize some positives, but they never could talk about the negatives of past communist ideologies.
When people addressed genuinely negative things that communist regimes did, like their treatment of disabled people or the genocide campaigns, they responded with facts about literacy rates going up. Obviously something like literacy rates going up IS a positive that should be addressed, but they could never just say "Yeah that was fucked up, we don't condone that bullshit, here's how we are going to stop that from happening". (Hell a ton of communists idolize and have pfps of some of the dudes that did horrible shit).
Even if I disagree I'll respect a communist who will say "These regimes did xyz fucked up shit, We can do better and learn from this fucked up shit tho", and I have met some that do that, but I couldn't click into the communism being fed to me because it once again felt like blind worship and just redoing the past rather than striving for something that would fit our modern society.
Ironically the first time I thought "Power corrupts people always" was when I found out TST founders were gross and Fascistic. I was getting into Satanism and was excited by the idea of TST fighting for religious freedoms within the system (lib moment), and how they were gay friendly and had posts about respecting lgbt ppl unlike COS who just said summarized "who cares what you feel about them as long as no one tells you you can't do that :)".
But when I found out about Queer Satanic and actually dove into the history of TST it was kinda this Camel Straw moment. I was angry I had supported a shitty organization and I was angry that something that could be good was controlled by shitty people who could just do fuck all bc they had power. It made me realize that as long as there was a person in power over others that there would be problems. It made me think of my childhood and how when parents have complete authority over their children it causes harm more often than not just by the nature of Exploitation that comes with holding power.
I didn't know what Anarchism was yet or that it was a real leftist ideology, I just thought it meant Chaos and Warmonger, but I took the steps into it without knowing just from the realization I had.
When I did find out about Anarchism it clicked for me. A style of communism and workers unions that won't hold power over individuals. And then I just began to learn more and it makes sense for me. It doesn't matter how many times other people told me it was unrealistic, my brain can conceive Anarchism better than systems that call for few people to hold power over entire populations.
Too be fair, I've always had anarchistic tendencies growing up, but once I found it the pieces just fell into place.
* This isn't for debating if you come into my comments with some USSR bullshit I'll just tell you to walk somewhere dangerous and block you *
For years, The Satanic Temple has been a hub of abuse. This is the story of how that happened.
The video essayist Dead Domain (also @DomainDead) finally released the video on The Satanic Temple and its owners Cevin Soling (a.k.a. "Malcolm Jarry") and Doug Misicko (a.k.a. "Doug Mesner", "Lucien Greaves").
This might be the most ambitious project ever to detail the actual history and structure of The Satanic Temple (it's about two hours long), and why its owners' interests will make sure that the Temple will always pose the greatest threat not to the Christian right, but to its own members and the most marginalized people in this country.
The Satanic Temple is a threat to the earnest struggle for religious freedom and civil rights, and it must be stopped.
If you aren't already subscribed to Dead Domain on YouTube and/or Twitch, you might like their other stuff. But if you like their video, please also send them a thank you. It is highly likely that TST will send them some kind of legal threat as well as a swarm of online harassment, and having people counter that could be much appreciated.
It was our pleasure and privilege to be interviewed for this piece and to be able to put some light on the predatory "religion" that we have spent four years fighting across as many courts. The creator has done a magnificent job pulling all these threads together in a way that we've never been capable of doing merely over text.
Might Ain't Right: A Livestream + Podcast miniseries
We're collaborating with some folk at Ave Satanas Podcast (ASP) and Free Society Satanists to bring you a miniseries looking at Might Is Right — ur-text of Satanism and an infamous work of proto-fascism first published in 1896 by Arthur Desmond a.k.a. "Ragnar Redbeard".
To be clear: Might Is Right sucks, both as a book and ideology. It's full of doggerel, bigotry, and contradictions. But we're gonna talk about it, chapter-by-chapter, from the perspective of modern, anarchist Satanists who feel that racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and tyranny are "bad, actually".
Livestream to air 9 p.m Eastern / 6 p.m. Pacific this Friday Aug. 8 (0100 UTC Aug. 9), with podcasts released the following Friday, and new recordings taking place every two weeks: www.twitch.tv/queersatanic
Folk who have thoughts on MIR and want to weigh in are welcome to join us on Twitch.
Assuming we can make the technical stuff work, the idea is for us to talk this week about the background of Arthur Desmond and Might Is Right, and why a piece of shit book like that is even worth investigating almost 130 years later.
(Spoiler: Anton LaVey plagiarized it for The Satanic Bible.)
Since we're springing this on you suddenly, the chapter-by-chapter stuff won't start until Friday Aug. 22, giving people time to do their reading and weigh-in. The first one will prolly be messy, but also to do some open table-setting about why we are bothering with this project now.
We're using the mechanically impressive "Authoritative Edition" that Trevor Blake put together and published in 2019, harmonizing and annotating various versions, but nobody else ought to feel obligated to use that one rather than any of the free versions you can find floating around on the Web.
Frankly, if you follow along reading the 1910 edition published by “14 Words Press”, you are in some ways getting the more genuine and relevant version of this rancid fucking text, what it is all about, and it's cultural significance than Blake's version which falls all over itself in apologism.
This is not really a fun book to read, and if you haven't read it before, maybe it's not worth your while.
However, the fact that is bad actually helps to explain a lot of the stuff you see around you today, and the continuity of shit like incels and "anti-theist" antisemitism is also useful.
If The Satanic Temple were going to appeal its loss against the defendants it called “Queer Satanic”, the notice of appeal was due in King County Superior Court by 4:30 p.m. today. We have received no electronic notice of a filing, so we are very pleased to say that the case is finally concluded.
The nontheistic religious organization used its for-profit corporation “United Federation of Churches LLC d/b/a ‘The Satanic Temple’ ” to sue four former members of its Washington State chapter from April 2020 till September 2024. They sued us in federal court, the Ninth Circuit Court, dragged us into giving depositions for the Southern District of New York, and sued us in King County Superior Court, but TST has lost everywhere it went. The claims that we always maintained were frivolous and without merit have been found so in every court TST made those claims by every judge who has looked at them. Now, a month after TST’s most recent loss, the deadline for the Temple’s appeal has come and gone, and so we’re done.
King County judge determines TST "has no rights to or interest" to Facebook memes page the national for-profit Satanic corporation has been
Years ago in dark times where it seemed like there would be no end to this and The Satanic Temple and its owners would never stop being vexatious litigants against us, we wrote the bottom section. The website’s administrator was supposed to add some sort of explainer and then publish it, keeping the site up and running for as long as that was feasible for them since we would be in no position to be involved anymore.
What it talks about has not come to pass — but in other ways, it certainly has. This was not sustainable indefinitely. The machine was breaking down for a long time, grinding metal on metal without pause, but it can be turned off now. “Non serviam” — until further notice, this machine is out of service.
Certainly, there is still research to be done and still other articles to be written about The Satanic Temple, its owners, and how they actually operate in contrast to how they present themselves. But to be done by us? That’s less clear.
We don’t plan to completely disappear, and there is still some tidying up to do, but mostly, there’s some much needed rest. Just as likely, there will be other fights that now we can focus on, given the way the world is going. In either case, this sabbatical may be indefinite.
“Queer Satanic” was never an organization, never a hierarchy, only a vibe. We were Heretical Satanists, heretics of heretics, so in the midst of defending ourselves from a lawsuit, we tried to put forward positive ideas and examples about what a more useful Satanism might look like; we tried to show a radical and rebellious way of approaching and acting in the world beyond just aesthetics of painting it black or upside-down Christianity slapped on bog-standard reactionary and liberal politics.
We didn’t do enough of it, and there is still so much more to be done.
For now at least, we leave you to it.
If you’re reading this, it means we lost.
Maybe a judge ruled against us. More likely, we ran out of money to keep paying for our own legal defense and had to capitulate. Or, after more than two years — and the devil only knows how much more if you’re reading this — of assault in and outside of the courtroom, we wore down and could not find resilience between us all to go on.
For whatever reason, if you’re reading this, we lost. And we’re sorry. For whatever reason, we were not strong enough and good enough to win this fight. Maybe we weren’t even good enough to see it through to the end.
And yet the work continues. We will not be able to continue it, or at least not all of us, but the work is the work, and it never depended solely on us anyway. The Satanic Temple is a horrid, abusive organization. If we say something otherwise because we can no longer defend ourselves to prevent it, it should be obvious this was a statement made under duress. Fuck our future selves for what they say, but have compassion for them as well. Literally years and tens of thousands of dollars must separate us from each other; bravery is much easier on this side of the chasm of time.
The work continues, and you’ll have to do it. Yes, you. No one else can build what you want to see. Certainly not us anymore.
You are Queer Satanic just as you always have been.
A queer satanic antifascist is someone who detests and opposes fascism, white supremacy, cishetropatriarchy, clericalism, and capitalism. A queer satanic antifascist looks on all forms of domination and hierarchy and chooses to oppose them — actually — even if it seems the structures they oppose are omnipotent.
Lucifer fought all of heaven; can you not fight an egregore of capitalism?
Find people who want the same things you do. Work with those people to create the world you want around you. Sometimes, that is petty resistance to hegemony — vandalism, graffiti, a heckle. Sometimes it’s filling potholes or cleaning pots after a free feeding. Sometimes it’s open carrying at a queer protest. Sometimes it’s things not to be talked about digitally at all.
Be the insurrection you want to see. Be Lucifer the Light-Bringer, rebelling against ineffable tyranny at all costs.
Push grifters like the The Satanic Temple out of radical spaces with your teeth bared, call out their leaders for abuses everywhere so no one is fooled. Feed people. Shelter people. Protect people. Do it actually, not just for clout or to funnel money up a pyramid.
Use any symbol or meme or paragraph of ours that’s ever inspired you. Make your own new things to inspire others.
We are done. If you’re reading this, we lost.
But if you continue to do the work we did, we will never, ever lose.
