Thread by @QueerSatanic

We're still being sued by #TheSatanicTemple in federal court.

This is something a lot of people don't know b/c TST has not considered it worth including on their website or newsletter roundups yet

But some members have found out or know about other history of at least one of the founders.

Still, they've decided not to care.

This is a meme seen in the wild after it was shared by an apologist of The Satanic Temple. Let's take a look at it in more detail.

We have an image of scale. On the left side, heavier, decades reactionary Christianity: sexually abusive preachers & priests, the Catholic Church & its history with Nazism, "The Base", and a reference to reactionary Christians' awful legislative work at home & abroad

This outweighs the other scale representing TST problems

-Lucien saying fucked up shit and drawing pictures in [an] admittedly fucked up book
-they make money?? (I don't know that but it's been said)
-Penemue having conversations and a pic with controversial people

Before we delve any further into this, it's important to see the dynamic being set up and what an insight this is into TST apologists.

Because truly, what sort of organization could you not justify when you are taking hundreds of millions or—given the inclusion of the Catholic Church in the 1930s and '40s—billions of people and counting the worst of them to compare yourself against?

While claiming to have hundreds of thousands of members, really TST is something like a few hundred volunteers across the whole country, with a tight circle of maybe a dozen or so up at the top and two people in control. They've been around for less than a decade.

There are a lot of truly grotesque, dangerous cults who have done horrendous things but would still manage not to outweigh all of the worst sins of Christendom over the last 80 years.

But why would an honest person seek to make that comparison in the first place?

If you're willing to take that dynamic, then yeah, nothing anyone says to you will ever change your mind. You're a true believer, and there will always be a reason you'll find to excuse abuse so long as it doesn't rise to "materially assisting continent-wide genocide."

Even so, the sorts of things being put on the right side of the scale are not given their full weight.

When they talk about Greg Stevens a.k.a. Priest Penemue having "conversations" or "taking pictures" with "controversial" people, wow, each one of those terms is doing some work.

You don't just play minigolf with Milo Yiannopoulus in 2016 because y'all kinda know each other.
queersatanic.tumblr.com/post/653822703…

You don't repeatedly interview Mike Cernovich just because y'all kinda know each other.

https://twitter.com/heresysquad/status/1135697645484118016

Milo literally put together a media guide to help launder Nazi groups and get them into the mainstream.
buzzfeednews.com/article/joseph…

Cernovich came up through the misogynistic harassment campaign of GameGate before continuing even further right.
splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…

This is stuff that keeps happening, and it only happens in one direction because antifascists and Black liberation activists are considered something The Satanic Temple doesn't want to associate itself with, but Marc Randazza? Sure huffpost.com/entry/alex-jon…

Sure, why not use Randazza as a lawyer to sue Twitter for discriminating against Lucien Greaves by not giving him a blue checkmark.

If Randazza's not too busy working for Alex Jones or Andrew Anglin, that is.
vox.com/2018/8/9/17669…

There is a dismissiveness to that meme as though these sorts of things are just isolated incidents that don't mean anything, that don't connect back to a pattern of behavior, and don't keep happening among people at the highest levels.

Might Is Right is not just "fucked up". It is a protofascist work of extraordinarily intense hatred for Jews, Black people, all women, and anyone who believes in things like "equality for all humans."

stuff.co.nz/national/11827…

You don't get try to convince Tom Fucking Metzger—Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan & founder of the White Aryan Resistance—that a eugenics policy based on IQ is the best way to rid the world of Black people, and talk about the sorts of Jews you hate...
queersatanic.tumblr.com/post/653299047…

then stay buddies for the next 10 years with the guy who argued with you that actually ALL Jews are terrible, then have all of your later incidents of going out of your way to speak up for the free speech rights of reactionary bigots looked at as just "interesting coincidences."

Even in the complaint that TST had Marc Randazza file over Twitter verification of the Lucien Greaves account, this is the example they choose to give of Twitter's unfair censoriousness:
popehat.com/wp-content/upl…

"Political figures." Are you fucking kidding me.

Now, I don't know what's in their hearts or what their motivation is for all of this stuff. They could sincerely think that they have to be out there defending free speech and the most unpopular speech around is fascist, racist shit.

But as writer Johnny Silvercloud points out, "if you have an infinite amount of no-fucks to give and you exclusively give them all to radicalized white supremacists in name of their defense“ people are not wrong to come to their own conclusion about you.
medium.com/afrosapiophile…

This has already been a lot, but there's still one more thing to cover, and that's money.

To be clear, the accusation is not that "they make money" but that one of the owners, Cevin Soling, owns a shit ton of companies both related to and supposedly distinct from The Satanic Temple...
the.satanic.wiki/index.php?titl…

...nd the only entity that ever had to have disclosure about how much money was coming in or going out for TST was a nonprofit they largely stopped using once they had a nonprofit church that didn't have to release any of its financials.
the.satanic.wiki/index.php?titl…

But before that happened, it was clear that they were taking money given to a nonprofit and turning around to give it directly to a for-profit company owned by the same two people in the same building (a building also owned by Soling through another shell company).

If your reaction to all that is, "So? Show me where they're making all the money," the point is kinda that it's not actually possible to do that? Members just don't seem to have the sort of demands of financial transparency or accountability of an average Southern Baptist Church.

This is just the public stuff. Despite what this Patheos article says (friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2018/09/04/aft…), TST has reportedly continued to push NDAs on people since 2018 (ariadnedesatanas.com/2021/02/02/why…)...

and if we're getting into stuff like sexual abuse, do you think an organization that has someone like Greg Stevens near the top is going to care about creating a culture where people are safe from sexual assault?

(CW: Austin TST member and sexual assault victim describes their experiences before being expelled for making the accusation publicly on their Facebook)
facebook.com/KileyFLowe/pos…

There is never a good way, from the outside, to know just how much abuse is taking place at rigidly hierarchical organizations with powerful people at the top willing and able to target others for punishment.

So to go back to that meme at the start, no, TST is not as bad as helping facilitate the Holocaust.

But it's clearly something a bit worse than finding a worm—or even half a worm—in your apple.

If you'd rather read this all in one place with links embedded, here you are.

queersatanic.tumblr.com/post/654934667…