21st Century Proletarian Literature - Daniel K. Buntovnik - Selected Quotes - The Satanic Temple, Grey Faction, Doug Mesner, Lucien Greaves

Daniel K. Buntovnik
21st Century Proletarian Literature
https://danielkbuntovnik.wordpress.com/

Note:  All accusations are alleged. The views, facts and opinions mentioned in this article are solely the opinions of the author and are not necessarily the opinions of this blog or blog authors.

Selected quotes:

A “Literary” Satanism? Decrypting Proto-Fascist and Antisemitic Themes in The Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France

"In the attempt by The Satanic Temple’s leadership to construct a new, coherent idea of “Satan” which they calculate will be an acceptable exoteric ideological façade to present to the world, the sect has a program of two “Primary Readings” for new members. These readings are The Revolt of the Angels (1914, originally La Révolte des anges) by Anatole France (1844–1924, born Jacques Anatole François Thibault) and The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) by Steven Pinker (1954–present)"

 "The kind of antisemitism promoted in the work of Anatole France is that found in some strains of the primitive, pre-Marxian “utopian” or unscientific socialist movement. French historian Laurent Joly describes the origins of the antisemitic “Jewish banker” trope which can be found in Anatole France’s The Revolt of the Angels in a review of fellow historian Michel Dreyfus’ book L’antisémitisme à gauche. Histoire d’un paradoxe, de 1830 à nos jours (or Antisemitism on the Left: History of a Paradox from 1830 until Today)"

Pinkwashing: How “The Satanic Temple” Exploits LGBTQ+ Causes as a “Progressive” Fig Leaf
 
"The Satanic Temple’s claims to represent a “progressive” or “left-leaning” tendency within modern Satanism is constituted by the group’s efforts to attach itself to LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, etc.) causes. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that in recent years, contingents of TST members have made appearances in Pride marches (TST AZ, Satanic Temple Seattle). TST’s supporters often cite their support for “LGBTQ+ rights” as a way of derailing conscientization of their underlying ties to white supremacism and neo-fascism.

We see an example of this in Satanic Temple co-founder Douglas Misicko’s essay “Down the Spiral of Purity,” written in response to the secession of the Los Angeles chapter of TST in an act of protest against his decision to associate TST with Marc Randazza, a lawyer who habitually defends right wing extremists in court and has been involved in the case Sines et al v. Kessler et al, whose defendants include members of the neo-Nazi terrorist groups that orchestrated the violent attacks on anti-racists during the infamous August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia."

"We can observe that Misicko’s application of the “But We Are Inclusive” trope appears to be executed with a noticeably higher level of sloppiness than Aquino’s however, due to the impoverishment of his argument in terms of intersectionality theory. In “Down the Spiral of Purity,” Misicko demonstrates some awareness of the fact that having TST members who “are in the LGBTQ+ community” means nothing in terms of disproving the fact of the group’s lack of diversity in terms of “race,” noting that “[i]t is true that People of Color have been slow to embrace Satanism.”

Witchy Protests and Fake Feminists: The “Satanic Panic”-cum-“Burning Times” as Völkisch Myth and its Basis in Antiziganism

"Despite the fact that The Satanic Temple has openly made a spectacle of symbolically perpetrating male sexual violence against a woman’s corpse, its leader having rubbed his genitals on a woman’s grave under the nonsensical pretense of pretending to turn her into a lesbian (7.2), the sect nevertheless attempts to portray itself as being aligned with feminism and women’s liberation movements by posturing as a group engaged in pro-choice activism and which defends the rights to abortion and access to contraception."

"Part of what makes it possible for cryptic neo-fascists to use the aesthetics of “Satanism” as an entryist vehicle into left-wing political causes is the fact that there is some scattered precedent for the use of quasi-“Satanic” aesthetics by the political Left, although these have generally fallen short of actually claiming to uphold “Satanism” as a religion."

"By examining the “Burning Times” myth and seeing that it fails to measure up to the reality of witch-hunting in the early modern era, we will see that, in a completely analogous way, the “Satanic Panic” myth fails to measure up to the reality of the “moral panic” narrative’s status as a meme for those eager to dismiss concerns about neo-fascist operations and the organized aspects of sexual abuse as “exaggerated.”

"Earlier (6.2 and 6.2.1), we saw how the desire to dismiss contemporary concerns about sexual abuse (concerns which have found expression in recent years via the #MeToo movement) as “exaggerated” are read through the falsified historical lens of the “Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s,” the term “moral panic” often being invoked to suggest that false accusations of sexual abuse are a much bigger problem than actual sexual abuse."

"Instead of treating Satanic sects’ ideological pretensions with suspicion, such “moral panic” narrative true-believers use the ahistorical claims of rape culture-permeated groups against the victims of sexual abuse, using the absurdity of the claims of occultist sects to represent “ancient traditions” to sow disbelief in the existence or extent of organized “intergenerational” sexual abuse. That is, the “SRA skeptics” who shriek on about “the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s” would sooner take the ONA’s claim to represent the continuation of an occult tradition going back to ancient Britannia at face value than acknowledge its obvious roots in “US intelligence community” operations."

"If the so-called “Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s” was a “modern day witch-hunt,” then the attempt of The Satanic Temple to represent Satanists as the actual victims of the “Satanic Panic” represents the “modern day Burning Times” myth: a time when innocent Satanists were persecuted by an oppressive Judeo-Christian society, bent on wiping out the benign religion of “Satanism.”

"Nevertheless, we can see that this is an absurdity in that, even if we do acknowledge that false accusations of sexual abuse do sometimes occur, of those who were accused of sexual abuse during the 1980s and 1990s and were actually Satanists (or “Setians” or “Magickians” or whatever they want to call themselves), such as Michael Aquino (accused in 1986/1987) and Genesis P-Orridge (accused in 1992), there is enough evidence to cast a reasonable amount of suspicion on these individuals."

"This is compounded by the fact that the meme of “Satanic Panic” is often invoked to sow disbelief in disclosures of sexual abuse having zero connection to Satanism, as we have seen with the frequent comparisons made by reactionaries between “Satanic Panic” and the #MeToo movement in their efforts to paint the latter as a “moral panic” (discussed in 6.2 and 6.2.1).

A number of additional factors contribute further to the assessment that the attempt to portray the so-called “Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s” as a “modern day Burning Times” is a farce:

    Unlike the witch-hunts of the early modern era, a perusal of reports on “Satanic ritual abuse” cases indicates that most persons accused of perpetrating sexual abuse within the context of Satanic rituals have been male.
    Contrary to the construction of the “Burning Times” as a völkisch “feminist” myth, the “moral panic” narrative of “the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s” never had any pretense of being a “feminist” narrative. On the contrary, the Satanic “moral panic” narrative was constructed by rabid anti-feminists such as “False Memory Syndrome Foundation” leader Ralph Underwager, who blamed feminist psychotherapists and psychiatric social workers for the alleged implanting of “false memories,” contending that “radical feminism” causes “child sexuality hysteria” because “men […] say[ing] that maleness can include the intimacy and closeness of [‘male bonding’] and [‘paedophile sex’] may make women jealous [and say,] ‘Wait a minute, we’re not going to let you do that!’” (Underwager).
    Given former “False Memory Syndrome Action Network” administrator Douglas Misicko’s history of recruiting actors to speak on behalf of “The Satanic Temple,” including an actress who spoke about being “an aspiring pre-school teacher” (alluding to the concept of “day-care sex abuse hysteria” expounded by rape culture apologist proponents of the “moral panic” narrative [see Van Sickler; Chapter 2; and 5.1]), we may suspect that women speaking on behalf of The Satanic Temple’s “Grey Faction” are pawns in a male-dominated, crypto-fascist organization’s efforts to promote rape culture and sexual abuse negationism."

The Satanic Temple’s Engagement with the Theme (and in the Act) of “Ritualistic” Sexual Abuse: Vicarious Necrophilia as a Weapon of Psychological Warfare

"While we have seen that The Satanic Temple and other purveyors of the “moral panic” narrative attempt to create much ado about “false allegations” of sexual abuse, assimilating them to “ritual abuse” and maximally farfetched conspiracist claims and generally working to promote the (false) “belief that we live in a society where men are constantly at risk from a false rape claim epidemic” (de Gallier), it may come as somewhat of a shock to learn that The Satanic Temple has itself engaged in and attempted to make a public spectacle out of a form of sexually abusive Satanic ritual.

In 2013, Satanic Temple co-founder and principal spokesperson Douglas Misicko was charged with “grave desecration” (a misdemeanor offense) after posing for a photograph (shown below, censored) in which he can be seen rubbing his genitals on the grave marker of a dead woman, during what The Satanic Temple portrayed as a “gay conversion” ritual, which the group called a “pink mass.”"

"Douglas Misicko engages in an act of vicarious necrophilia, ostensibly (and nonsensically) turning a dead woman into a lesbian by rubbing his genitals on her grave, located in Mississippi (thegauntlet.com)."

“Satanic” Statues and the Priapic Model of Masculinity: From Ancient Phallic Symbolism to Modern Fascist Rape Culture

"In the introduction to the present study, it was mentioned that a significant amount of phallic and sexual symbolism is displayed by The Satanic Temple’s monumental “Baphomet” sculpture (shown below), which has been central to a substantial portion of the media coverage surrounding the Satanist sect due to the group’s persistent lobbying for the statue to be permanently erected in a public location." 

Reactionary Sexual Politics of “The Satanic Temple”

"....from The War on Kids’ promotion of petit-bourgeois social enclosure through anti-psychiatry and anti-pedagogy conspiracy theories about ADHD medication and the trumped up hazards of public education or “compulsory schooling” (3.2.2), to The Process’s anti-“Grey” conspiracy theories about the inherent evil of psychiatrists encouraging individuals to remember their childhood (5.1.1); from the misogynistic and openly rape-encouraging Satanic elements of the so-called “Alt-Right,” which, rooted in The Process, are the ideological cousins of The Satanic Temple (5.2), to the pedophilia-condoning arguments of “False Memory Syndrome” advocates Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield (3.1);"

 On the Psychological Projection of Antisemitism by Satanists

"These constatations invite further analysis of the relation between antisemitism and The Satanic Temple, including the latter’s anti-psychiatry and gaslighting campaigns and the group’s political interpretation of Satanism in general."

"Front matter displaying neo-Nazi symbolism from the 1999 edition of the book Might is Right, published by “14 Word Press.” This edition was edited by Katja Lane, who also contributed to the “Bugbee Books” edition published in 2003 alongside Douglas Misicko, the co-founder of The Satanic Temple. Her husband, David Lane, was a neo-Nazi terrorist who coined the “14 words” slogan, which is featured at the bottom of the image. The “14 word” slogan has gained widespread usage within white supremacist, neo-fascist movements."

"The Satanic Temple’s spokesman Douglas Misicko sums it up this way:

“Like, I think it’s okay to hate Jews if you hate them because they’re Jewish and they wear a stupid fuckin’ frisbie on their head [correct term: yarmulke or kippah] and walk around [and] think their God’s chosen people, but it’s not okay to hate somebody [‘born of Jewish blood’] just because their parents were stupid fuckin’ Jews and wore stupid frisbies on their head and thought the Jews were God’s chosen people […] Not everybody of Jewish blood is okay with me, it depends on if they follow the Jewish, uh… […] Satanic Jews are fine,” (Adam, “Doug Mesner [Lucien Greaves/Douglas Misicko] Satanic Temple Anti-Semitic Rant” [transcribed, bold added for emphasis])."

"Photos published in the L.A. Weekly of a “Black Mass” event hosted by The Satanic Temple in January 2017 at a nightclub in Los Angeles show that the crypto-fascist sect’s penchant for Nazi aesthetics becomes noticeably less cryptic when members and supporters of the group gather together in large numbers"

"Another method to shift blame for antisemitism onto proponents of anti-Satanism is to paint discursive speculation by mental health workers about the connection of some of their patients’ trauma to abuse perpetrated under the aegis of the CIA’s “Project MK Ultra” as antisemitic. The accusation of antisemitism on the part of the medical community that specializes in mental disorders related to trauma and dissociation (namely the ISSTD) has been leveled by The Satanic Temple’s “Grey Faction” particularly with regard to a speech titled “Hypnosis in MPD: Ritual Abuse” (note that MPD stands for multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder), also known as the “Greenbaum speech,” which was delivered by a psychotherapist named D. Corydon Hammond at a 1992 conference and which posited that there had been a Jewish inmate in a Nazi extermination camp who, having been “raised in a Hasidic Jewish tradition,” knew about Kabbalah and was therefore spared death and instead recruited to assist the Nazis in conducting “mind-control research” before being brought to the United States after the Second World War to work on the CIA’s mind control or “behavioral modification” program (“Project MK Ultra”), becoming known to victims as “Dr. Greenbaum” (Hammond , Hammond [text]).

In April 2018, The Satanic Temple’s anti-psychiatry operation “Grey Faction” produced and published a short video titled “The Greenbaum Speech: The Satanic Panic’s Central Folklore.” By presenting clips from the “Grey Force”-advocating psychologist’s speech in a lurid way, with “spooky,” old-timey footage of creepy-looking people holding a seance, the video attempts to portray discursive exploration of links between Satanic psychological operations and the CIA’s “Project MK Ultra” as quasi-psychotic, irrational, and, moreover, antisemitic. The “Grey Faction” video falsely asserts that the so-called “Greenbaum Speech” makes “wildly implausible claims” which “lack corroboration.” Taking into consideration the following arguments, we will see that although the narrative associated with the so-called “Greenbaum speech” may well contain some distortions or corruptions, the essential elements of the historical narrative summarized above (involving the recruitment of Jewish concentration camp inmates for participation in Nazi research and experimentation—not only as human guinea pigs, but as researchers—and the recuperation of Nazi research by the post-WWII CIA “behavioral modification” program[s] known as “Project MK Ultra”) are plausible and can in fact be corroborated by a wide variety of reliable sources.

Let’s examine the “Grey Faction” video’s first claim, which is the assertion that “the story of ‘Dr. Greenbaum’” is the story of “a folkloric villain who manages to fulfill nearly all conspiracy theory stereotypes by being a Jewish Satanist Nazi brought to the U.S. by the CIA to conduct mind control experiments.” One of the main objectives of this statement seems seems to be to make the viewer respond, “A Jewish Nazi? How absurd! What an outlandish conspiracy theory!” It is pretty clear that the idea which The Satanic Temple’s “Grey Faction” wants to plant in our heads is that the “Greenbaum” narrative, by “fulfilling all the conspiracy theory stereotypes” with its allegations that Greenbaum was not only a Jew and a Nazi-collaborator, but a Satanist, taps into antisemitism."

"But what exactly is “Grey Faction” claiming is “wildly implausible” and lacking in corroboration? That Nazi scientists came to America after the Second World War? The establishment of significant numbers of Nazi war criminals in all parts of the Americas after the war (many through “Operation Paperclip”) is a well-known fact and has already been covered in the preface to this work and need not be re-examined here.

Is it possible that The Satanic Temple’s “Grey Faction” is trying to say that it is “wildly implausible” to claim that the Nazis would have been interested in acquiring knowledge about “Kabbalistic mysticism” from a Jew or that a Jewish inmate in a Nazi concentration camp could have become an active participant in unethical human experimentation? Yes, those do indeed seem to be the parts of the narrative which TST would like us to think are “fantastic” and “wildly implausible.” An examination of the historical record demonstrates otherwise, however."

"But what exactly is “Grey Faction” claiming is “wildly implausible” and lacking in corroboration? That Nazi scientists came to America after the Second World War? The establishment of significant numbers of Nazi war criminals in all parts of the Americas after the war (many through “Operation Paperclip”) is a well-known fact and has already been covered in the preface to this work and need not be re-examined here.

Is it possible that The Satanic Temple’s “Grey Faction” is trying to say that it is “wildly implausible” to claim that the Nazis would have been interested in acquiring knowledge about “Kabbalistic mysticism” from a Jew or that a Jewish inmate in a Nazi concentration camp could have become an active participant in unethical human experimentation? Yes, those do indeed seem to be the parts of the narrative which TST would like us to think are “fantastic” and “wildly implausible.” An examination of the historical record demonstrates otherwise, however."

"But what about the more “esoteric” aspects of the “Greenbaum speech”? It is plain to see that the “Grey Faction” desires to discredit the historicity of the narrative (of a [coerced] Jewish contribution to Nazi research conducted during the Holocaust that would later be recuperated by the US military and implemented under the aegis of the CIA’s “Project MK Ultra”), but behind or in parallel to this first desire there is also a desire to discredit the validity of dissociative identity disorder (DID) as a medical diagnosis. While these two things—(1) the historicity of (aspects of) the Holocaust and (2) the validity of DID as a medical diagnosis—are separate from one another, we nevertheless find them conflated with one another in terms of “Grey Faction” desire. It seems that, for “Grey Faction,” if people can be convinced to doubt and dismiss the “Greenbaum” narrative as nonsense, so too will they doubt and dismiss as nonsense the validity of DID as a medical diagnosis (and, by extension, so too will they doubt and dismiss the legitimacy of psychiatry, practitioners of which are labelled “Doctors Inventing Demons” by members of the so-called “Grey Faction”)."


Cultural Gaslighting; or, “Falsified History Syndrome”

"The concern of The Satanic Temple’s “Grey Faction” with spreading the “moral panic of the 1980s and ’90s” and “witch-hunt” memes under the label of “Satanic Panic” throughout mass media (often shallowly buried under the pretext of leading a “separation of church and state” fight) has as much to do with trying to harass the medical community into altering science to match the group’s pseudo-rationalistic religious beliefs (e.g., by revising positions on the existence, prevalence, and/or treatment of various mental disorders, implying the ultimate negation of the medical model of mental health care) as it does with sowing doubt in the public mind about matters of 20th century history which continue to have important political implications today. In this way, it is possible to speak of the problem of gaslighting not only in terms of pushing individual victims of abuse to question how sound the perception of their atomized personal experience is, but also in terms of a broader phenomenon of collective or cultural gaslighting, pushing society at large to question the sanity of its members who perceive politics counter-hegemonically and question the falsified historiographies of the ruling class.

A linchpin of this societal gaslighting is formed by mechanisms which trigger the attribution of the “conspiracist ideation” label to certain discourses and by efforts to cause certain discourses to become dominated by or associated with faulty conspiracist ideational reasoning. Much like the labelling of an historical episode as “moral panic,” the labelling of the interpretation of an historical episode as “conspiracy theory” has taken on pejorative connotations, despite the phrase “conspiracy theory” having, just like the phrase “moral panic,” no intrinsic sense of being “based on fantasy, hysteria, delusion and illusion” (Cohen vii). In other words, the allegation that someone is a “conspiracy theorist” is almost always a figurative way to charge them with faulty reasoning or, at the very least, to imply skepticism of their claims."

"n examining the links between the anti-psychiatry activism of The Satanic Temple and the Process Church and their roots in the conspiracy theories of the Church of Scientology about Judeo-Bolshevik “psychs,” we have been led to the CIA’s “Project MK Ultra,” which, we have seen, can be supposed to have benefited from the Church of Scientology’s anti-psychiatry discourse because the latter disseminated a false motive for the widespread psychiatric abuse occurring under the aegis of “Project MK Ultra” (i.e., they aided CIA blame-shifting operations by attributing responsibility for psychiatric abuse to Communists—the enemies of the CIA—rather than the actual culprits: the CIA and US imperialism). Any semi-deductive discourse relating to “MK Ultra” (which all “MK Ultra” discourse necessarily is, due to the level of secrecy surrounding the program and the cover-up evinced by the destruction of records) appears to run a high risk of being subjected to gaslighting. Indeed, we have seen that Misicko often ridicules his opponents as believers in conspiracy theories related to “MK Ultra,” comparing them to believers in “UFO’s” and “Past Life Regression” (3.1)."

"Whereas we have seen that there is a sound basis upon which to infer that the Church of Scientology effectively helped to cover up “Project MK Ultra” during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s by making itself—insofar as it prominently positioned itself as an “opponent” of “psychiatric abuse”—likely to attract and recruit victims of “MK Ultra” experiments while nevertheless aligning itself with the same Red Scare politics which were (and still are) quintessential to the whole CIA enterprise, we now see that it is equally reasonable to affirm that The Satanic Temple does the same thing today, playing its part in the covering up of not only the full historical significance of the CIA’s “Project MK Ultra” (i.e., its connections to religiously-inclined psychological operations making use of, besides drugs, many semiotic trappings of Satanism, such as witchcraft and ritual sacrifice [6.3.1]) but also its subsequent and ongoing legacy, including, for example, the so-called “enhanced interrogation” program of CIA torture and human experimentation (PHR, Soldz)."

"Ironically, the historical negationists’ invariable delimitation of the “Satanic Panic” to the decades of “the 1980s and 1990s” is indicative of the fact that it is this “moral panic” narrative itself which is apt to be viewed as an attempt to implant false memories. By getting enough major media outlets to repetitively broadcast enough times that steady refrain of Satanic Temple spokesman Douglas Misicko (i.e., “the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s”), the public may thus begin to falsely “remember” that the “Satanic Panic” began in the 1980s."

"We thus observe another example of cultural gaslighting and psychological projection; The Satanic Temple’s “Grey Faction” accuses psychiatrists, particularly those working with dissociative patients, of implanting “false memories” into their patients, although it is the “Grey Faction” which attempts to do exactly this to the public at large by continually repeating the historical negationist phrase “Satanic Panic of the 1980s (and ’90s).” Moreover, if “False Memory Syndrome” is, as the “Grey Faction”-linked False Memory Syndrome Action Network claims, “appropriately descriptive terminology” for individuals who “[come] to believe an untrue memory and re-structur[e their lives] around that false memory,” then we are absolutely justified in saying that, if Douglas Misicko and other individuals caught up in the “Grey Faction” operation believe their own falsified historical narrative, then it is they who suffer from “False Memory Syndrome.” When history and collective memory are falsified and gaslighting is applied to entire cultures and societies, bringing physical, mental, and emotional harm to their members, it may be possible to speak of a “Falsified History Syndrome,” or perhaps a “False Ideology Syndrome.”

Furthermore, by virtue of The Satanic Temple adopting an ostensibly “politically progressive” and “scientific rationalist” façade and having its “anti-conspiracist” message propagated far and wide by ruling class mass media, “Project MK Ultra” is covered up from “both sides”: historical and political."