What Would Satan Do: Knowing When to Pull Anchor and Sail Away.

The cat has been out of the bag for a hot minute now: the members of The Los Angeles chapter of The Satanic Temple (TST) left and formed some satanic collective. We’ve been mostly tight-lipped about the ordeal, originally not speaking to the media until we all had time to process things. Of course, that wasn’t to be, as word got to us that members of TST were talking about it to the press. I guess we were a bit naive in that regard. But it’s been two weeks since the flounce heard ‘round the world, and since everyone else seems to be in the spirit of giving their personal reasons for jumping off the bandwagon, I guess I’ll give mine.

First off, I’ll say that these always sound sanctimonious, and I assure you that mine will be no different. However, you have to consider the energy and emotion that would cause a rift large enough to make someone leave an organization they’ve publicly affiliated with, as well as defended to people. The following statement hurts me not because it describes my reasons for leaving TST, but because I protested these types of accusations toward TST in the past; to family, friends, and even in my first Medium post (now edited). So while it feels good to get this off my chest, I ate some crow while writing it.

So let’s assume that John Stuart Mill is right and that not only does everyone have a right to free speech, but that particularly offensive speech deserves special protection. The sad fact of reality is that we only have so many days on this earth, and so much time and energy to expend on things that we feel are worthwhile. This limitation causes us to prioritize certain things ahead of others, and in the case of free speech, it causes us to prioritize certain instances of speech over others. In the Temple, I couldn’t help but notice that a certain kind of speech gets the spotlight while other kinds wind up staying in the shadows. It seems that every instance where someone is facing censor and/or censure for being racist, transphobic, or in the latest iteration, spreading conspiracy theories that led to the harassment of the families of massacred children and teachers, the Temple spokesman seems to be able to swallow that bitter pill and defend those people’s right to say those things, even though he personally disagrees with them. Which many people find admirable and see as the essence of the apocryphal Voltaire quote: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” However, when you search his tweets or Google for such statements about Colin Kaepernick being blackballed by the NFL, such occurrences are non-existent. And all this isn’t to say that he’s a racist or anything. I’m sure plenty of people could pull him in different directions as far as their own gripes with society go, and it would be unreasonable to think he should be all things to all people. Regardless, it illustrates how in making it a point to champion offensive speech no matter its content or value to society, you can unintentionally amplify speech that is repulsive and adds negative value to society over speech, that while offensive to some, makes our society more just. I’m sure he values each instance the same as far as them all being free speech to him, but again, there’s only so much time in the day and he’s only one man. As am I.

I too, only have so much time, so much energy, so many resources I can pull in support of a goal. The understanding of these limitations causes me to think about what my personal goals are, how best to achieve them, and where to minimize wasted energy. Personally, I want a society where people can be free to just be, without some hate monger undermining their right to exist as they choose or were born, and whose input and perspectives are valued for what they add to society. Where waste comes in is where I have to allocate any effort to the advancement of agendas that are counter to those goals, even if indirectly, because every little bit counts. In this sense, a position like the exercise of viewpoint neutrality writ large are antithetical to my stated goals because making it a point that hate speech comes with a free society, and treating it as a canary in a coal mine for free speech, they add artificial value to hate speech. This leads to hate speech being advantaged over logical, reasoned speech because the rhetoric mixes pro-free speech overtones with a message that is itself, anti-free speech. This is done intentionally to play on the biases and emotions of free speech advocates and centrists. When you leave the door open you let flies in.

And with that being the position of the spokesperson for TST, and by association the position of TST, and given my thoughts on allocating effort to causes that are counter to my goals, this created a cognitive dissonance during those few months when I was holding out and trying to reason with members of the National Council (NC) about everything from issues of transparency to the Twitter complaint and the problems we have with their legal counsel (yes I know how lawyers work; the issues are with how this lawyer works). Then with the stabbing death of Nia Wilson and the hospitalization of her sister Letifah, the dissonance was broken. I couldn’t allow my time and energy to be lent to the legitimizing of the speech of people who think like their attacker and build their hateful worldview on the rhetoric and propaganda that TST has made a point of lending its begrudging sympathies to on the basis of free speech. With this and my complaints about these issues not only falling on deaf ears, but also being mocked by the people who were supposed to hear them out, and the whitesplaining of the Ku Klux Klan in my NC interview, I felt like a straight up token. Like I would’ve been a counterexample when people brought up how white the Temple is, sort of how Marc Randazza does with that Muslim Women’s PAC whenever someone brings up his tweets or connections to the alt-right.

Though it was a big decision for me to finally throw in the towel on TST, I don’t think it was as much of an ordeal for me as it has been for many of the people who have left in the last week or so. I honestly never felt that I was completely a member. I had a connection with my chapter and with the chapter heads with whom I raised hell for the past two months, but not with the Temple. One reason was the sociological distance created by the stratification implemented in the organization over the last couple of years, and the inevitable alienation that followed from that. It always felt like TST was somebody else’s thing that I was helping out with, like I was a guest in my own house. And part of it is a callback to the implicit priorities I mentioned earlier: the free speech that gets defended and amplified by the organization via its spokesman is of the people who want me ethnically cleansed. This view affects the atmosphere of the organization as it’s an instance of TST interpreting itself via the Fourth Tenet, which as you can imagine, was counter to my own interpretation. My interpretation of the Fourth Tenet was always in context of the First and Sixth, and it affects how I handle microaggressions, and is one of the reasons I’ve been dubbed “St Jeremy of Patience and Giving People More Slack Than They Deserve.” I know you meant it as a compliment when you said I “speak well” so I’m not going to chew your head off (even though that has seriously bad undertones and you should really stop saying that to Black people). Yet my saintly constitution gets worn down dealing with the casual racism that pops up in the organization by way of the racial numerical inequality inherit in Satanic and atheist communities. Which I could get past if not for the mocking responses to my concerns, and if not for the fourth Guideline for Effective Protest, which dismisses what I’m talking about right now as unvirtuous and defines it out of its list of things to be concerned about as an organization.

This is white liberalism with a goat’s head: with the lack of diverse representation at the national level, the national initiatives address things that filter through biases of an all white, mostly male, governing body. And while it’s understandable that a Satanic religion that doesn’t proselytize would have numerical diversity issues, the point of talking about diversity (at least for me) was always about making TST better for people of color who were already members. You could do that by amplifying their voices so that they aren’t drowned out by the sheer number of white people in TST. By doing so, more POCs would be attracted to TST because they see diversity in action, not just words, through national initiatives. Without the conscious enfranchising of underrepresented members, there can be no reciprocity of their efforts; they’ll give more to the organization than they get back, and the fruits of the collective labor will only trickle down to them after the numerical majority gets theirs.

With that said, in my last chapter head meeting some members of NC did seem receptive to the idea of a diversity council. So maybe in parting, the seeds of change we sowed will start to germinate.

So that’s that. At some point you just have to call it a day, because if Satan isn’t about anything else, he’s about dissent and going your own way if you have to. I feel like I need to put a disclaimer here that I don’t speak for all Black people nor all Black Satanists. These are my reasons for leaving TST, and if people happen to agree then great. And if not, that’s cool, too. But it ain’t about you; it’s about me living in accordance with my convictions:

• Hate speech isn’t free speech and its propagators shouldn’t be treated with kid gloves. They should be deplatformed. They should be made to feel unwelcome and if you think that will start us down some slippery slope where calling someone an asshole gets you locked up, then you’ve already jumped the Millsian shark as far as the faith in people as reasonable creatures, capable of discerning right ideas in a vacuum.
• My right to free speech means I don’t have to listen to racist, misogynistic, transphobic, or homophobic tripe, and I have a responsibility to defend my society against people who, through subversive tactics, would undermine my liberty and that of other people.
• The idea that all speech deserves a platform and that all speakers deserve to be heard assumes the existence of a rational audience that takes in what’s being said and judges it objectively. But, if you’ve ever been on the internet or had a conversation with a particularly religious person, you know that people aren’t rational. All information passes through the filters of our biases and life experiences. And, whether or not something is right isn’t the thing that affects us the most; it’s how that stimulus makes us feel, because viral ideas spread by targeting our emotions, bypassing logic. So it doesn’t matter if Bill Dwyer the Holocaust Denier’s manifold theories about what really happened at Auschwitz are self-contradictory; they feed a validation loop that is more valuable to people than the truth.

My convictions run counter to the those of the leadership of TST and came to a head with Randazza. If nothing else, I have a better understanding of what I want out off any activism I take part in and how to better economize my dwindling time here with you all. I’ll leave you with a quote that’s been haunting me for the past few days:

“… freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.” — Humberto Eco, Ur-Fascism

Fuck Nazis.

Hail Satan!