Podcasts/Sacred Tension-STReconciliation of Opposites98dag

STReconciliation_of_Opposites98dag SUMMARY KEYWORDS people, tst, process, satanists, satanism, satanic temple, baphomet, scientology, tucker carlson, church, swastika, feel, thought, satan, called, religious, christianity, robert de, question, dinosaur SPEAKERS Doug Misicko, Stephen Bradford Long

Stephen Bradford Long 00:00 You're listening to a rock candy podcast this is sacred tension, the podcast about the discipline of asking questions. My name is Steven Bradford long we are here on the rock candy Podcast Network. For more shows like this one, go to rock candy recordings.com All right, well, I am here once again with Lucian grieves, the co founder and spokesperson of the Satanic Temple. But before we get to that, I have to thank my patrons. My patrons are my personal lords and saviors and they keep me from doing unspeakably disgusting things on the streets to fund my crippling content creation addiction. So for this week, I have to thank cane Nevermore. Scott de naam. Van winter. And Kelly, thank you so much. I truly could not do this without you. And for listeners who want to join their number, just go to patreon.com forward slash Steven Bradford long for $1 A month or $5 a month. You get extra content every single week. All right, Lucien, welcome back.

Doug Misicko 01:16 Great to be on.

Stephen Bradford Long 01:17 So before we get into it, we just had our first Satan con in Arizona. I was not there. I will try to be there at the next one. But how was it? How did it go? By all

Doug Misicko 01:29 accounts? It went very well. And I know there's more coverage coming still there were people putting together fuller mini documentary style type reports from it. I mean, outside of the TST camp, but I have Oh, interesting, you know, high hopes that they'll make a quality product one can hope. Next year. Yeah. Next year. I assume we'll have less concern regarding COVID. And it'll be our 10 year anniversary. So that should be lit.

Stephen Bradford Long 02:05 Are you trying to fit in with the kids? Yeah. Because the kids would say, Do the kids even say lit anymore? I feel like that was very three years ago, or four years ago. I don't I don't.

Doug Misicko 02:15 I'm catching up with the Catholic Church. Pardon Galileo. I'm doing pretty good.

Stephen Bradford Long 02:21 Absolutely. Fair enough. Yeah. So as usual, whenever you come on, I put out some feelers on Twitter and my Discord to see what people might want us to talk about. And we did get a question that I thought was really really interesting. Which is Oh, hold on where the fuck did it

Doug Misicko 02:40 go? But you only got one question. No, I got one that you thought was interesting.

Stephen Bradford Long 02:45 Precisely. So no, I get way too many questions whenever you come on, and it's always stupid shit. So hold on. Let me let me find one. There's, there have been some really, it's always how has Satan mingle made an impact in his life? How does Satan mingle? Yes. made an impact on your life. Let's see here. Why did the guy with the dinosaur claw rip that lady's tid off? Oh,

Doug Misicko 03:14 I know what that's about.

Stephen Bradford Long 03:16 Let's see. Ask him if he's wearing pants. Are you wearing pants solution?

Doug Misicko 03:21 You don't donate donate are wearing me.

Stephen Bradford Long 03:23 Okay, good. What's your favorite type of cookie?

Doug Misicko 03:27 Now let's get back to the dinosaur ripping. Okay, let's talk about let's talk about the dinosaur. It's a reference to last night's movie nights massacre in dinosaur Valley. And dinosaur only ripped open Halford tip so that another bare breasted woman could suck the wound. I mean, of course, why not? It was it's a good movie. It sounds like it wasn't any. There wasn't actually any dinosaurs to be seen either. Kind of going back and forth it couldn't decide whether it wanted to be this white knuckled tents escaped from Amazonian cannibal movie, or if it just wanted to be softcore porn, so it kind of did the did both of them run from cannibals, and then they would just hit the ground and start having making out with boobs.

Stephen Bradford Long 04:18 Have you heard of or watched the movie a nymphomaniac and dinosaur? Hell?

Doug Misicko 04:23 No, it sounds like it sounds it sounds

Stephen Bradford Long 04:26 right up your alley for people who are who are completely lost. You have a regular movie night every Wednesday night and it's a lot of fun. I have popped in there every now and then.

Doug Misicko 04:39 Yeah, true triple feature every time and I gotta say, after a couple of solid years of doing it, we're still not. I still feel like I haven't scratched the surface of the archive of bad movies.

Stephen Bradford Long 04:52 Absolutely. It's endless. Alright, so now that we've gotten through some of the stupid questions Not that they're stupid. I mean, I'm glad that people love you enough to just regale my Twitter feed with lots of questions. So yeah, giving those questions enough credit, fair. But there is one question that I thought that we could spend some time on, which is from ilium shadows. And they say I was curious to find out if at all, his interest and research into the process church influenced how he approached the development of tst. If there was anything he took inspiration from after watching the process doc on tst. TV, I was curious. So perhaps before we answer that question, you could say some about what the process church or the final judgment was?

Doug Misicko 05:45 Well, my interest in the process really came from my earlier interest in the Satanic Panic and trying to figure out why people believe these crazy things. And if you started exploring the notions that were put forward, related to the Satanic Panic, that there were these cults operating in silence all throughout society and trying to undermine everything that we hold dear to our Christian morals in the United States, and beyond. The process was kind of isolated as this satanic cult that was responsible for it all by some of the conspiracy theorists, and you can see that narrative come up again, in the sons of Sam documentary came out recently on Netflix, you know, to be fair, I should mention, I gave some shit publicly to the director of that documentary, who did reach out to me and say that I got the wrong message from the documentary that the documentary wasn't, I

Stephen Bradford Long 06:53 don't know how you got the wrong message, because that's also the message that I got.

Doug Misicko 06:57 Right, right. But I, I think it was very inept at doing anything that would have attempted to not to give that message. But I don't doubt that the director, I honestly feel like he was just kind of naive as to how the audience would receive it, and thought that it was good enough to put the idea out there and people would, you know, have have a sense that, that this was the story of a conspiracy theorist going too far down a rabbit hole, or whatever. And the

Stephen Bradford Long 07:30 end, the idea that we're discussing is that the process church or the final judgment, which was this new religious movement in the 60s, had a hand in, like the Son of Sam murderers. I've also seen them linked to the Manson murders, I've seen them linked to all kinds of terrible things that happened during that period of time. And so all of it was, was not true. They they were wrongly linked, and well, they

Doug Misicko 08:07 Stetic and that really helped create this, this pattern of illusion around them that they were responsible for these, these mythic crimes that we could never find any evidence for. But it could, they could at least point to a cult in the process very much was a cult. And the idea that they did all kinds of horrific things in that they were Satanists sin, even calling them Satanists is kind of an abuse of the term because they certainly wouldn't have considered themselves to be Satanists, though. They did venerate Christ and Satan as opposing opposites. And they have this idea of the reconciliation of the opposites that transcended its component parts kind of thing. And you might see shades of that already in descriptions of the Baphomet monument when we started putting that together. And as for the question of how the see the process church, inspired the Satanic Temple, I would say earlier on in, it inspired the Satanic Temple in similar ways that groups like the Church of Satan inspired the Satanic Temple, which is that we could see what we felt they had done wrong, and did not want to repeat those things. And I mean, that's not even to, to throw shade, as the kids might say, at the the process or the Church of Satan, but the the process, like I said, was very much a cult. And when I say that, I mean I know that pejorative term is thrown at Any religious group that's ever started, including us without thoughts, just because it sounds good. And it sounds like the proper criticism to put towards a religious organization that you don't like. But the process inner circle very much did dictate the minutia of everybody's lives within it, you know, in, they even paired people up sexually and had these bizarre kinds of episodes where they would, you know, do do these things that were they're very, like very much micromanaging each other's lives and living very much in a communal setting, amongst one another. But like I said, their belief system was far more complicated than this idea that they were merely Satanists, and that they are, not to say merely Satanists, but, but they, they had a more complex kind of theology with many, many deities, they had Christ Satan, Lucifer and Jehovah. And that the core idea was this idea of transcending these conflicts and the reconciliation of opposites. But they kind of changed shape over time, they changed ideas over time, they never really kind of settled on one thing, the organizational structure of the process changed throughout time in before they kind of fell apart. They were a bit of an embarrassment, sending cult members out onto the street to beg for donations and try to sell magazines and things like that. Definitely not something we want to emulate after they disbanded. The nobody really wanted to own up to having ownership of the process. So the conspiracy theorists were free to say what they will, you know, the Satanic Temple is an existing organization right now, I think if we if we disbanded, people would say, you know, so many more horrific things about us for feeling that nobody would, nobody would try to correct them, at least not in the courts, you know, and that's kind of what happened to the process, it was fair game to say whatever you wanted about any of them, because I think it's kind of fair to say that a lot of them somewhat went into hiding over it, because there was such a panic at the time about the idea of satanic cults and things like that. So many of them just wanted to be left alone. They were blamed for the Manson murders by conspiracy theorists as well. And this came about because members of the process did visit Charles Manson in prison. And despite what the conspiracy theorists say, they tried to make it sound like they visited Manson that the essence of the conversation is unknown, or that they were otherwise giving him instruction or that they had prior affiliation with him. There's no evidence of that. The process very much openly went there to interview him for a magazine they were doing. And if you can do that at the time, why wouldn't you write I mean, worse was, yeah, this was very much dominant in the news. And they felt that there was a perspective to get straight from the horse's mouth. So when you see these conspiracy theorists acting like, this is something they try to conceal. It's not like that at all the process themselves intentionally published this, this fact and I have copies of their old magazines, I have the little article that they wrote up after visiting Charles Manson and things like that. So their intention for B, their intentions for being there aren't unknown. So that being you know, put forward is like this missing link to prove the connection between the process and Charles Manson is fairly ludicrous, and there's no evidence that they were ever involved in any of these crimes that anybody say that they're involved in, but still nobody really wanted to talk talk about it. So at some point, I started tracking down former members of the process church to try to get an idea of their actual history because very little had been written about who they really were and miles of reams of text had been written, elaborating these bizarre conspiracy theories and part of that was the processes own fault they didn't do much to archive their information in fact when they disbanded they were supposed to burn their their books they had for their priests and things like that. We have a copy of one though at the at our headquarters in Salem did

Stephen Bradford Long 14:37 so they had so they had a clergy they had a priesthood.

Doug Misicko 14:41 Oh yeah, they had a pretty good and they had they had chapters throughout the United States and and beyond. They originated from United Kingdom in London, and they started as a schism group from the Church of Scientology. The Robert degree I'm standing his wife, Marianne Moore. They met as auditors within the Church of Scientology. And ironically, it was the hierarchical structure, oppressive hierarchical structure of the Church of Scientology that they wanted to leave to do something that they felt liberated their membership more to act according to their own will. And I say ironically, because they became a call that did micromanage other people's other people's lives. So they started out as this kind of psychotherapy called, as the sociologist William Bainbridge called them

Stephen Bradford Long 15:36 didn't they call themselves a deviant psychotherapy Colt.

Doug Misicko 15:40 They didn't call themselves that. Bainbridge. Okay. William Bainbridge was a was a sociologist to became a member of the process, church to write about them. And he ended up being a roommate to Robert De grimston, for a time after, after he's he split with Marianne Moore, and in the process started to kind of fall apart. But he, he wrote a book called Satan's power is something like a history of a deviant psychotherapy called,

Stephen Bradford Long 16:12 oh, that's where that comes from. Okay, yeah. But

Doug Misicko 16:15 in order to try to maintain that liberation, they did it in the psychotherapeutic context where they had, they were still using E meters in the way that Scientology does. And Scientology, they do these auditing sessions, where they have what are essentially these lie detectors where they have the metal cans that that measure,

Stephen Bradford Long 16:38 you know, the electro magnetic pulses, or where are your psycho

Doug Misicko 16:43 physiological response, surprisingly, but how psychophysiological that is unclear when you actually play around with a e meter.

Stephen Bradford Long 16:52 Because the dial just floats around like the the dial will just drift.

16:57 We have an e reader in our headquarters, and I played with it. And I thought, there's no way that you can actually get a reading on somebody's state of mind from this because I've noticed that if you squeeze it a little harder, the needle jumps and you can it doesn't take much you know, there

Stephen Bradford Long 17:15 are there are ex Scientologists who still swear by it. I mean, there there are Scientologists who have completely disavowed Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, they say Scientology as a destructive cold, but they're like, but auditing is legit, and they still live for it. And

Doug Misicko 17:33 I know, I still hold out some thought that maybe, you know, maybe I could find a way to use it better to Yeah, I gotta say, I'm not there. I played around with it, and I can't get a fucking thing where if anything out of it, and it seems more like you're just, you know, I, I lean towards the idea that it's just a superfluous tool to make it look like your psychotherapy session is going somewhere that it's not the setting has more value, or that it has more empirical evidence to support, you know that, that the reaction is going one way or another than is actually actually true. It could be you know, I mean, I also feel like it could be similar to the pendulum trick, you know, where you have, yes, on the top and a no on the bottom, and you hold the pendulum and whether it swings up and down. We're on the Yes axis or across on the no axis, you have your answer. And of course, that's just your own.

Stephen Bradford Long 18:39 I have my pendulum here somewhere, it's fun to play with it. It's the ideomotor effect where you will, your your body will subconsciously move it to to give you an answer that you think is there or whatever. And the same is true of of Legion boards and so on. Yeah, it's fascinating.

Doug Misicko 19:03 Yeah, it's exactly that. And I feel like, I feel it's quite possible that that's what the E meter is to like those, those almost imperceptible squeezes you do and things like that are just you betraying what you think the response should be at the E meter. So I mean, in that way, it could kind of work but in a way, it's not really supposed to. Yeah, exactly, in a roundabout way. Anyways, enough about the E meters. In any case, they started out doing that, but they did it a lot differently than the Church of Scientology would do it. They broke down those barriers of distinction between auditor and client or whatever the Church of Scientology would call the person being audited, the auditor and audited and they would just do with these kinds of back and forth communications and they would follow, you know, the needle the E meter to figure out where they needed to go deeper into an explorer. in greater detail, and in that way, they kind of became more uprooted from reality even maybe then Church of Scientology and went off into different, different directions and created this whole kind of collective narrative that they were, they were building in the grimston was clearly a very brilliant man, and did a lot of writing that I think has some merit. But when you investigate the process more deeply, you find out that he wasn't really that important to the inner circle of the process church or the final judgment, at least according to it was his wife. Right? Yeah, it was. She was definitely the the cult mastermind. She was the one who would pair people up sexually. She was the one who was really dictating people's lives to them. And by the accounts, I've heard from people who are in the process, Robert De grimston, was more of a bummer to them kind of a nerd who just did a lot of writing and whether they took his writings terribly seriously or not, who knows. But in any case, I was doing this level of investigation, I started talking to Timothy Wiley, who was, you know, part of the process, inner circle work with Robert De grimston, Maryam went, went to architecture school with Robert De grimston really had some insights as to how things ran on the inside. That said, his he wasn't necessarily the best witness to his own life. You know, he was also part of that whole kind of Timothy Leary, psychedelics, everyday crowd and very much had a supernatural perspective upon the world and did believe I think in reptilians, and David Icke type stuff and things like that Hellboy? Yeah. But he was, he was a nice guy, I visited him in his house in, in New Mexico. And it was in investigating the process Church of the final judgment that I met William Morrison, who is now head of tst. TV, who I've known ever since then has been a close friend of mine. So now we're, we're both doing this whole, the Satanic Temple thing. But you only asked one question. It's been this long.

Stephen Bradford Long 22:19 No worries. I mean, for something like the process church, this level of detail is necessary a because people have just my cat is pushing the mic. A because people have just never heard of the process. And be it's a super fucking weird cold. Like, it's a very, very weird moment, like thing phenomenon in the history of new religious movements. So yeah, no, I mean, I feel like all of this background is necessary.

Doug Misicko 22:46 Well, if you're part of an organization like this, it behooves you to know the history of any possible analogous organization, right and know which directions you want to take and which directions you don't want to take. Because at a certain point, even if you're the top leader of an organization, in a certain sense, you're also a cog in a machine. And there's certain demands that are put upon you by your membership followers, or whatever. And if you don't set appropriate expectations up front, where if you make promises you can't deliver on or if you lock yourself into an unprovable belief system, or whatever else who knows how that plays out for you, right? And I don't think Robert grimston, or Marianne, went into what they did, with the intention of becoming called leaders, I think they went in with the opposite intention. So that's why I say, when we first started, it was more me looking to organizations like the process to figure out what not to do. And then when we were discussing the symbolism behind the Baphomet monument, that's when you can see a lot of borrowing of process perspectives, because you do have all those binary elements on Baphomet. And I do think the strongest message related to Baphomet is the same message that was kind of the core philosophy of the process church in the final judgment, the reconciliation of opposites, and I thought it fit really well with the idea that we were putting a religious monument on public grounds, not to usurp the place of another religion in anybody else's minds. But in order to engage publicly by upholding pluralism in showing that the two can coexist, even if they're, you know, ostensibly diametrically opposed, but we could transcend that and there can be a reconciliation of the opposites.

Stephen Bradford Long 24:56 So I have a theory and I want to run it by you because was one of the experiences. One of the experiences that I had when I first joined TST was a surprise at the lack of pushback at how for lack of a better term, Christian I was, I see my you know, I come from the Christian world, I did not convert from, you know, I didn't D convert from Christianity to atheism, I converted from Christianity, like directly into Satanism. And I took a lot of Christianity with me. And one of the things that appealed to me about TST was that I felt like I could do that I felt like I could retain a love for the symbol of Jesus, but while rejecting the supernaturalism, while rejecting the unfounded claims, while rejecting the toxicity, the homophobia, the sexism, the transphobia, just all of the bullshit, but take but but that I didn't have to remove the Christianity from myself wholesale. And I think that the reason why I was able to do that is because maybe of the influence of the process church that this is about the reconciliation of opposites, and that there is a much greater openness to like dual religious identities within TST there is a much greater openness towards towards reconciling something like my past in Christianity with my current Satanism, and, and kind of celebrating both. And so feeling perfectly at home in TST, as someone who I think culturally is still very Christian, you know, and I feel like that that influence or I feel like that might be due to the influence of the process church and I, I've never felt pressured within TST to be anything other than what I am, which is this weird syncretistic to you Satanist, who has borrowed a lot from Christianity, and still really loves a lot of my Christian background. What do you think of that theory? Do you? Because I don't feel like that would be true in church of Satan?

Doug Misicko 27:17 Well, no, clearly, it's not there. They're there. As far as I can tell, their only purpose is to advance the idea that they have sole ownership over, yes, over Satanism. And I honestly don't feel like I'm insulting them by saying that I honestly feel that that serves their soul.

Stephen Bradford Long 27:35 They have said that to me, people they have they have told me I don't think that's a distortion at all, they have legit said those words.

Doug Misicko 27:43 Right, right. And so I think, I mean, if you have, if you have nothing else to do, if you have nothing else to claim for your, your activities, I guess that's going to be primary and important. But it's not to us, I feel like we have, I feel like that's another benefit to us being very active, and in the real world, to the point that we don't have to really care that much about, you know, whether people are looking to assess as the truth. I mean, if they want to go to the church of Satan, go ahead, you know, if they want to go elsewhere, fine. You know, really, like, if you're not sure about TST, don't don't come, you know, like, we we don't have membership fees, we don't have tithing, we don't have, you know, we don't have this mission to proselytize to people. So, to that end, you know, we might as well have a membership that fully embraces what we really are truly understands it. And that'll be more of a credit to us than, than anything else. But what's kind of remarkable is how we've gotten pushback from the courts for be for that kind of openness, and how people have tried to use that openness to discredit us as a religion, which we saw during the Scottsdale case. The fact that we would accept allies to work with us who weren't, who weren't self identified. Satanists was being used as an argument that well, maybe none of them are satanists. Maybe there's no such thing as Satanism, that kind of thing. And I thought it was a really I thought it was a really cheap kind of argument

Stephen Bradford Long 29:26 really elemental it like it that's that's like a toddler trick like that. That's just a very childish approach to religion.

Doug Misicko 29:35 Don't make me go off on a tangent about what a dickhead that lawyer was.

Stephen Bradford Long 29:40 Well, I think so I just recently interviewed Matt because i Who's legal counsel for the Satanic Temple.

Doug Misicko 29:47 We knows what a decade back Ed? Yes.

Stephen Bradford Long 29:49 I think he alluded sub to that in the episode but

Doug Misicko 29:53 that guy was that guy was an incredible dickhead. He was like a caricature of a dickhead like the character Okay, I can type it was.

Stephen Bradford Long 30:04 That's hilarious. Yeah. So, so I, I definitely see the influence of like the reconciliation of opposites, pluralism, the, you know, the fact that in the process church there was such an emphasis on the reconciliation of opposites and the the veneration of God, Satan, Jehovah and Lucifer or Jesus, which was Lucifer, there's Jesus, Jehovah Lucifer

Doug Misicko 30:37 and Satan, Jesus and Jehovah

Stephen Bradford Long 30:39 and I, that really resonated with me when, because I even though I didn't know about the process, church, and I didn't really know those intellectual underpinnings at the time. One of the things that really connected with me back in 2017, when I was exploring TSP, and it just clicked was, oh, this, I can be the Baphomet I can contain within my being night and day, light and dark Christianity and Satanism. And I consider

Doug Misicko 31:11 my edits best Yeah, at its best. That's what the process was teaching. But there seemed to be oscillation and confusion as to whether they considered themselves even internally there was this confusion, it seemed as to whether they were theistic and thought of these entities as literal beings out in the cosmos, or whether these were different components within each of ourselves, whether we each contained, or if it was both of those things. You know, we contain a Jehovah Jesus is Satan and Lucifer. And these are the different components of ourselves that we, we need to understand and have sympathy for, and balance those things against each other, like amongst the satanic Luciferian side, you'd have your carnal self, that kind of thing. And then, you know, on the Jehovah Jesus side, you'd have your more spiritual self.

Stephen Bradford Long 32:08 Yeah, yeah, kind of thing. But there was there was like, but there was constant confusion is what I'm hearing between whether those were like internal archetypes and kind of a union sense, or if they were actual literal deities out in the universe that had like personalities and stuff.

32:25 It appears to me that there was that confusion. There's, I mean, academics always depart on these things. And I've seen other academic writings that seem to take a hard stance on the process being clear about this one way or the other. And I think they're just taking a snapshot in time, and they're not realizing how, how iffy that was, how convoluted the process was, well, if you see over time, I think you you know, if you probably went to certain events, certain sermons, looked at certain documents and stuff like that, you'd say they're very clear about what they are, but then you'd see something else that contradicts that later on.

Stephen Bradford Long 33:06 So yeah, and you know, just to be clear to listeners, I I consider, you know, my my primary religious identity is satanist right now, but there was like this very fuzzy period, in Windows, it was almost like I was a planet orbiting two sons. And there was like, one son was Christianity and then the was like, nontheistic Christianity, and then the other son was Satanism. And it was like, you know, going back and forth between these two symbolic universes and it was honestly a, a kind of really cool mental exercise and in in cognitive flexibility, and then eventually I realized that no, you know, my my home really is in Satanism, but I don't hate my I don't hate my Christian background. I hate the abuses within Christianity. I hate the abuses that come from theocracy that come from supernaturalism that come from superstitious belief. I despise all of that. But in a lot of ways, I still love the figure of Jesus the Met depending on which figure depending on which myth of Jesus, and but also none of this is to like, Oh, this is what I was going to say none of this is to discredit the importance of blasphemy as like a form of catharsis like I have no problem with you know, a black mass and desecrating the Eucharist and all that kind of amazing stuff because that's like important to overcome religious trauma. So just for anyone listening who might who might, I don't know feel judged about their blasphemous practices against Christianity. I think it's totally developmentally appropriate to do those things.

Doug Misicko 34:52 Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, yeah, me too. And like you say it's a it's lashing out against religious trauma I think exactly bar are doing Right. In any case, it's not necessarily this mean spirited thing, but it's more like, you know, casting out your abuser from your mind. And you can do that while still recognizing that other people see it a completely different way. And now you're getting a bit too nuanced I think for a lot of the people protest us in here, yes, type of thing.

Stephen Bradford Long 35:24 Well, I like I really like what my friend Miss Ida says, she's a satanic drag queen, and she's one of my best friends. And she says, blasphemy, not blast for you. It's glad it's blasphemy. It is. I'm doing blasphemy for my own catharsis. I'm not doing it for anyone else. I'm not doing it to piss anyone off. It is for my own cathartic emotional release. And I I really liked the way she put that.

Doug Misicko 35:56 Yeah, we're a long way from that being generally recognized. So and Robin, right. Even when you see some of the treatments of us that are inclined to our favor. Sometimes they've tried to whitewash the blasphemous elements from the from public view. When Lisa Ling first did a documentary piece about us for CNN, back in I think 2016 or something like that on the show. This is life. It was it was notable that they edited out some of the blasphemous elements that I think they anticipated the general CNN audience would would find too disturbing.

Stephen Bradford Long 36:41 So you have a process tattoo, and you told me before we started recording that it frequently gets confused for a swastika. Talk

Doug Misicko 36:50 about I don't think it I don't think it actually honestly ever gets confused for as well. I think

Stephen Bradford Long 36:55 people are just being deliberately Sorry, go on finit finish.

Doug Misicko 37:00 I think I think that's people Yeah, deliberately trying to misrepresent and trying to cast aspersions and I mean, if you don't know what a swastika looks like, I doubt you have any rights to claim your for or against it to be to be honest. Yeah,

Stephen Bradford Long 37:18 it's like if your history it would be a very derpy swastika. If it was a swastika, it would be like a bullet

37:25 in reality, straight from the person who created the symbol who Timothy Wiley told me it was four P's overlapping one another interlocking. So you know that's that's the design. It's it's symmetrical with four angles, like the like the swastika, but there the similarity ends and it's clearly not a swastika. But even in the in the Arkansas case, where we're putting the where we're fighting to have the Baphomet monument erected on the public grounds because they put a 10 commandments monument there. Their argument against us has gone so far away from the legal argument, that they're even trying to make the case about me in trying to make the case that I have a swastika tattoo, and that the process tattoo is a swastika tattoo and I went for depositions. Two days, seven hours a fucking day. And at one point, this another dickhead lawyer, Mike Cantrell, in Arkansas, little fuck that he is, was sitting there asking me about this tattoo, insisting it was a swastika, and I was telling him quite plainly, it is not can you not see this tattoo? swastika tattoo is I told him that it's for peace overlapping. I told him that he can look in any book and compare it against the swastika. It's clearly not that and that he was barking up the wrong tree. This asshole lied in a recent motion in the state of Arkansas, and he actually put into this motion that I admitted in deposition that it is a swastika and oh my god, I feel like I don't know maybe we should should motion for sanctions or something like that because now they're clearly lying to the courts. And it's infuriating.

Stephen Bradford Long 39:25 Also, you would be the worst neo Nazi ever since like you believe in plurality. You you believe in in core liberal principles like free speech and your and you believe in compassion and honoring all people's bodily autonomy like you just be a really fucking bad neo Nazi.

Doug Misicko 39:49 I'm also I'm also part Jewish, the ancestry the Are you willing, that I didn't I didn't know it until more recently tell you Family. Oh, nice. Okay, cool. Yeah, took the test. And

40:05 I mean, there you go. I, well, I'm so not a neo Nazi that this was that this kind of meant nothing to me like I hear sometimes people take these ancestral tests and they hear that they're, you know, some ethnic mix that they had no idea and it's a total upheaval to their sense of self. Yeah. I mean, they could have told me literally anything they could have told me I was 80% African and I would have said, Okay, I mean, it doesn't.

Stephen Bradford Long 40:34 Yeah, no, I get that, like I, there are people whose whose identity is very rooted in the fact that, you know, back in the day, their ancestors were Scottish rapists and pillagers. And it's like, that really fucking matters to them. And then they take a DNA test and their entire self conception is ruined. But okay, so speaking of Neo Nazis, you went on Tucker Carlson. This was the third time you were on Tucker Carlson, right? Or third, fourth time, third time. Right. Okay. So for how, from your perspective? How did that conversation go? So it was about the it was about the after school Satan club, from your perspective? How, how did that conversation go down?

Doug Misicko 41:26 Well, it's amazing how many miles of difference what years away, a first appearance can be from a third appearance when it comes to national, or international televised events, like, you know, Primetime Fox News. In that the first time I was gonna go on Tucker Carlson, I had that anticipation all day long, you typically only find out the day off, that you're gonna go out, they reach out in there you go. And, you know, you'll find out around noon, and then that evening, you'll be in the studio, doing your interview. And I didn't know enough about Tucker Carlson first time I went on, and I looked him up. And, you know, there was a lot of there was a lot online, talking about his actual credibility as a journalist and how he had really ruined people in debates. And he was supposed to be really good at just demolishing his opponents to the point.

Stephen Bradford Long 42:22 Now this was back. This was back in like, 2016 or 2017. Right? When you did your first

Doug Misicko 42:30 2018, I think around there, I think you in the second time I was on was pretty close on the heels of that one. But, you know, the second time, I felt more confident this time, I hardly thought about it at all, you know, I was on my way to the studio, and I was doing other things and just thinking I gotta get this out of the way. But I was also thinking that this time, he just needed to give me the most, most basic opening, and I was going to tear him a new asshole, you know, because he had been such a prick the last time I was on. And he he broke that barrier. When, at the end of the second interview with me, he just yelled at me that I should go crawl back into my hole. So this time, I was thinking like, I am not going to get insulted with I'm not going to get be insulted by this guy without answering it, you know, so I was really ready for the verbal sparring. I was ready for a fight. And I got on. And there just wasn't the availability for that I was on So briefly, I thought, you know, we talked a little bit, I pushed him to define what he was talking about at some point, which is when I was opening the door for getting aggressive at him. And he shut it down right away, just kind of thanked me for coming on and called it at that. And I thought well, this was worth nothing. You know, I thought I was really gonna get a chance to go Adam, it didn't happen. And I thought, well, this isn't gonna, you know, this isn't gonna get any attention. But this seems to be the one of maybe people were able to read my mood or attitude or whatever. But it seems like people really felt I did put them in its place. And that, you know, this was definitely how you handle hostile media. And there was even some Reddit group that were holding this up. I guess it was the anti work movement because some of their spokespeople did so poorly.

Stephen Bradford Long 44:31 Oh, that's right. They had they had their media kerfuffle debacle on Fox News.

Doug Misicko 44:38 I'm not saying they and I'm not saying they did poorly by myself. Oh,

Stephen Bradford Long 44:41 no, no, and I'm not I'm not these interviews. And I'm not criticizing. Yeah,

Doug Misicko 44:45 from a lot of their camp was that their spokespeople had done poorly and they were actually upholding my interview as like emblematic of the way to handle hostile media.

Stephen Bradford Long 44:57 That's interesting. Yeah, yeah. The whole anti work thing is really interesting. And honestly, the person that Fox News had on from anti work seemed really cool. Like I would hang out with them that it was just like not maybe not the best person to appear on Fox News. But yeah, all that aside, it was I watched it, and

Doug Misicko 45:17 you have to focus on the right message, you know, and you have to know when a message goes wrong, regardless of its merits, and what people will take from it, what people distill from sometimes even the right message, and I think at at their best, that's what they meant by looking to what I do when I go on. I mean, for instance, like there were ways I could have rebutted certain things Tucker Carlson was saying, but I'm very reticent to go into arguments regarding situations, case studies, or whatever, that I have no prior knowledge of. And that's what Tucker Carlson was trying to throw at me when I was on his show. And I just said, I don't know what case you're talking about. He was talking about somebody not being allowed to read from the Bible at school or whatever. Oh, yeah, topic anyways,

Stephen Bradford Long 46:07 I remember that it was so stupid. So So basically, what you're saying is to not take the bait like to stay on point to just like not let yourself be pushed around or be baited into something where you might, you know, be made to look like an idiot by editing and by the interviewer. In other words,

Doug Misicko 46:27 this is the essence of the talk I gave with Satan con two, which is now available on tst. TV, but I was talking about how, if you go into a situation like that, there's especially the first time you're going to go on, I wouldn't even wish that upon it. That's Nagant amazing bit of stress, to know that millions of people are going to be watching you that night, in front of a hostile interviewer and a mostly hostile, regular audience. And it they're going to be trying to trip you up. And you're only as good as your last performance. And when your performance has that big of an audience. You're unfortunately just not going to live it down if you fuck it off. Now you have know that going in, and all the while you have to be trying to not get agitated or paranoid about it, because that's going to ruin your performance more than anything if you go in very close. That's a

Stephen Bradford Long 47:24 that's a very distressing state of mind to be in. Yeah, that's very, very, very,

Doug Misicko 47:31 in all humility, I have to say it takes I think it takes a lot of self discipline to be in the right mindset to be able to do that. Because sure it takes it takes focusing on. It takes narrowing your focus it while you have such weight in the background of that focus that you're ignoring, right? You have to ignore that the the potential hazards that are very real and very potentially long term reputational ly damaging, because you know, fair not, you know that. That's it. And you could see Tucker Carlson's tactic. The first time I was on we were talking about the Belle Plaine monument, which was a similar argument to the Baphomet monument case where there was a Christian monument on public grounds. So we offered a satanic monument to maintain pluralism. And Tucker Carlson, of course, wanted me on because he wants to stoke outrage amongst his audience that Satanists could have a have a monument on public grounds at all. And who the hell are they? However, I did see about him, which I predicted before I started looking up material, you know, that he would toe the FoxNews line, that he's really a defender of religious liberty and free speech, and that it's the liberals and progressives that are trying to take that away. So I was dedicated to making him forcing him to reconcile that cognitive dissonance and not being pulled into a trap where I was trying to justify Satanism in all of two minutes, you know, to a Fox News audience. So I took the position that I didn't care what he thought about Satanism. And, yeah, I mean, this pissed some people off who identified as Satanists within the Satanic Temple, because they, I think, had I don't want to say delusional idea, but I just think the misinformed idea that I would have ever had a chance to truly elaborate upon our beliefs. For instance, Tucker Carlson asked me to explain what the eight pillars of Satanism are, which clearly had nothing to do with us and was, you know, a kind of indirect attempt at disparagement already but I told them that you could look them up, it didn't really matter in this case. So because the point was, is that we had a right to be there, we have a right to free expression and to express our point of views, and that we had a right to the public grounds and the government, no government agency had a right to pick and choose between modes of religious expression. And I had to force him to agree with that, which I think really pissed him off the first time, because he ended up having to agree, you know, and he started calling into question. The numbers. You know, he asked how many members the Satanic Temple has? I told him at the time, what are, what the most accurate estimate was? And then he started saying he didn't believe that at all. And then I said, it doesn't matter. It was actually with us in and then he had to agree and say, well, it could be one of you. And so it went great. Yeah, and we're in agreement. So...

Stephen Bradford Long 51:07 ...and I found that I found it really refreshing actually, because, you know, I, because that's actually a line that I have taken when it comes to a lot of conversations lately, where because I find myself in kind of interfaith situations all the time. For me, the answer is always well, it doesn't matter. What matters is that the, the state, the federal government recognizes us as a religion that matters. But it also matters that for me, in my day to day life, and my fellow Satanists, we see this, and we live it as a religion. And so regardless of whatever definition of religion you have in your head, the fact is, we're living it as a religion. It's a religion to me, it really doesn't matter what you think of it, it isn't going to make the reality go away.

Doug Misicko 52:00 Right. And if the government didn't recognize us, it still it would still, the satanists, congregations would still be doing rituals, where do you categorize that? You know, what do you what do you call it, then? I mean, I guess then they would just insist that we stop.

Stephen Bradford Long 52:18 Yes. And I don't mean to...

Doug Misicko 52:21

Like it or not, you know, this is where we're at. And this is what we're doing.

Stephen Bradford Long 52:24 Yeah, exactly. And I always just, I find that cognitive dissonance always so interesting, how people have such a hard time accepting that Satanists might be real, and all of the ways in and Joseph Laycock says, well, one of the reasons why is because we are politically active. And maybe one of the reasons why Anton LaVey, was never really questioned as to whether he was a real religious person or not, was well, he stayed in his place. He stayed in the shadows, he stayed out of politics and social activist, he never asserted himself into the the, quote, unquote, mainstream the way TST is doing. And so it's, it's like we can we can accept certain religious identities as long as they stay within their hierarchical place. Does that make sense?

Doug Misicko 53:26 I mean, that bed said, look at our opposition, they explicitly identify as religious. And they make, you know, great efforts to put people of their religious faith and their deeply held beliefs into offices of political presence to pass legislation that's in line with their religious moral code. And that's just kind of taken as a given, you know, this evangelical movement, nobody questions whether that's actually religious or not. So that's when it becomes more confusing to me. It's like, why is it difficult for people to see that this idea that religion isn't politically active? And yet when we do these things, in contrast to somebody else doing, you know, political, religious activities in the name of evangelical theocratic efforts, I find it bizarre that more people can accept that. You know, a lot of religions have notions about how an ordered society is run and develops. Yeah,

Stephen Bradford Long 54:36 definitely. Well, I think that's a great note to end on. I would, I would keep going with you. But honestly, daylight savings has completely fucked me up and I am exhausted. lately. I've

Doug Misicko 54:49 been waking up early. And I was thinking like, oh, it's because of the time change. I'm waking up earlier now and then I wait a minute, I should be waking up.

Stephen Bradford Long 54:58 It's because it's because you're now in Old Man who uses the word lit and try to you know, fit in with the kids. No, I'm kidding. But ya know, like, like every year, I'm like, Okay, it's gonna hit me really hard. I need to like prepare for this and then I'm never prepared for it and it always just completely fucks me up for about a week and a half and it feels like I'm, I have jet lag and it's just one hour. It's just one hour difference and I'm like Jesus Christ. I'm my brain is such a goddamn princess. But anyway, so I'm super tired. I need to head to bed soon. But this has been great. And we will talk again soon. Great. Thank you so much. All right, that is it for this show. The theme song is wild by eleventy seven. You can find it on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to music. This show is written, produced and edited by me Steven Bradford long and it is made possible by my patrons and it is a production of rock candy recordings, as always Hail Satan. And thanks for listening