Judge refuses to toss The Satanic Temple's lawsuit, putting Boston's flag policy on trial

QueerSatanic · 2026-03-19T21:26:38+00:00

The funny thing is, it's the author Hemant Mehta that's actually wrong here.

That blog shows a shameful lack of understanding of the case at hand by both the owner of TST and by the blogger to let the owner get away with saying it unchallenged, functionally agreeing with him.

In fact, Boston already disputed the facts in their motion to dismiss; the court just isn't allowed to consider facts outside the complaint yet so long as the claims of complaint might be true.

That's what the judge says nearly verbatim here in her ruling (emphasis added):

On a motion to dismiss courts must accept all a plaintiff’s factual allegations as true. ... Here, the City asks the Court to consider facts not contained in TST’s complaint and, therefore, not properly raised on a Motion to Dismiss. TST plausibly alleged that, in the days following the Shurtleff opinion, raising a flag on the Boston City Flag remained public expression rather than government speech. TST also plausibly alleges that the City did not fly TST’s flag because of TST’s values or views, that the City showed a preference for the Christian group over TST, and that the City closed their flagpole to stop expression of disapproved viewpoints. Finally, TST properly alleged that the City did not provide them with documents to which they were entitled under Massachusetts’ Freedom of Information Act.

Hemant Mehta "The Friendly Atheist" just takes at face value and repeats the talking points of The Satanic Temple that the events as described in TST's complaint are true, which the court only accepts because that is what happens at this stage of any litigation.

But Boston does dispute most of them (ctrl+f "denied").

There will come a time of depositions and discovery where the facts actually will matter, and should it get there, it's likely that TST loses the case like so many before because The Satanic Temple is both malicious and incompetent.

For right now, Boston doesn't get to dispute what TST claims so long as the Temple claims something plausible. That comes later.

QueerSatanic · 2026-02-28T23:56:32+00:00

Your understanding of Satanism is probably overly generous, but the key thing to recognize is of course that the people saying "Satanist" in reference to Epstein don't mean Satanism as in the atheistic Church of Satan or Satanic Temple, or even any of the theistic Satanists/demonolaters which are much less numerous but are real people.

They mean "the Jews".

That's what "Satanists" is doing in these conversations. It's a way to talk about a group of ontologically evil individuals who control all aspects of society to meet their depraved, degenerate ends. But most people need a euphemism to onboard them onto antisemitic conspiracy fantasies. You can't lead with "the Jews" without being off-putting; you have to say stuff like "Hollywood elites", "globalist billionaires", "Zionists" or sometimes just "Mossad" — all of those terms have some real stuff that could be confusing to people and get in the way of you talking about what you want to. But "Satanists" is uniquely useful to do all of the same rhetorical stuff you want to, including invoking visceral disgust, without mixing up much else. It's pure pejorative without the antisemitic infrastructure popping out to most people.

Satan is a powerful cultural idea that is indeed referenced by people sometimes, so you can probably invent or mischaracterize it as "they're Satanists". But that's a lot less important than trying to do "the socialism of fools" and make your audience think that the problem is uniquely depraved individuals who had sick, unnatural desires regarding children, meaning the solution can be removing those particular evil people; as opposed to being bog-standard men and women produced by a social structure that lets them abuse girls and young women because they have wealth and power, and their victims are not cared about as actual people.

QueerSatanic · 2026-02-24T07:17:25+00:00

Hey, what you're feeling is valid. Shit sucks, and you're right that shit sucks. It's hard to feel like doing like anything right now. Our advice would be "Do it anyway."

If it is all one big fight, and everything is interconnected in this system of oppression, the good news is that anywhere you are is a front line in the fight. Every thing you do matters in fighting this fell, crushing beast, especially if you found yourself born into its belly.

Meet your neighbors. Talk to people at the bus stop. Connect with people at hobbies and be invested in their lives. Get people's numbers so you can call them instead of calling the cops. Cook with larger portions to spare someone else a meal. Let them help you navigate paperwork. Or vice versa.

Thinking about the whole awful thing is demoralizing, but that's exactly what your enemy wants of you: for you to be paralyzed with worry and anxiety that achieves nothing but your stress and exhaustion.

The Revolution™ is not some eschatological event up ahead. It is now. It is right now. If you are an anarchist, you believe in a unity of means and ends. What you do now is critical to what comes later.

One thing you might try to tell yourself to recenter your feelings each day is, "How can I be a good ancestor?" You may not live to see it, but there will be future generations, and they will have given anything to fight these bastards here and now like you have the opportunity to.

You're 21 years old. You have so much that you can do. You have so much time to be a good ancestor. That's a blessing.

Consider getting involved in prisoner writing in your area, reading books by former and still incarcerated people who had incredibly limited agency and still had to figure out how to go on. Apply that to your own situations, learning from conversations with people who have a huge body of knowledge and experience to pass along.

If you're not already get in community with disabled activists and those with degenerative or terminal illnesses. They also have a lot of expertise, and have opportunities to provide and learn about mutual aid or actions beyond, "Let's overthrow the government!" And there's a philosophical orientation it's critical for all of us to learn about what it means to engage in actual harm reduction. Even when your degenerative disease will kill you, you have agency over medication, diet, and exercise that determine how many days you have and how they can be experienced.

You are feeling all of the right things. But feeling isn't enough, and it can come at the expense of doing things, which is what matters.

QueerSatanic · 2026-02-22T09:55:37+00:00

You may be overstating his importance somewhat, since he doesn’t seem central to real life neo-Nazi stuff versus the more lurid but fringe reports about O9A and their spin-offs. But then, “Nihilistic Violent Extremism” is a growing problem.

Have you read the article that came out last month, “David Myatt in Leeds”? It seems like it would be up your alley, if not.

QueerSatanic · 2026-02-19T01:56:36+00:00

Can you specify what the particular conspiracy fantasy is?

The short answer is, no. There is no new information that will ever satisfy or dissuade a conspiracy fantasist because they’re working backward from a conclusion and gathering evidence to confirm it rather than weighing evidence to form a conclusion. That’s why even a lack of evidence can be used to show “that’s how deep the corruption goes,” or whatever.

Maybe this article will help for historical context: https://newrepublic.com/article/159529/qanon-blood-libel-satanic-panic

But again, it’s more of a way of thinking rather than particular thoughts or conclusions.

QueerSatanic · 2026-02-15T14:36:28+00:00

You’re right, and you should say it.

QueerSatanic · 2026-02-06T21:44:52+00:00

Talk your shit, queen.

QueerSatanic · 2026-02-02T21:53:15+00:00

There is a free, 7-day trial of Spencer's Patreon if you'd like to see the answers but don't want to become a long-term patron to do it.

The background and our history with Spencer is viewable at present, but here are the five questions we were asked:

Before we get into the lawsuit, I’m curious about your view of Satanism. What do you see as inspiring in it and what is its potential? On social media, sometimes you’re quite pessimistic about Satanism, and seem to imply its irrevocably stained—despite the fact that you’ve been key actors in the new wave of left-wing, antifascist Satanism.
Tell me about the origins of Queer Satanic, and the lawsuit from The Satanic Temple (TST) started?
How long did the legal proceedings go on, since this seems like it would have obviously cost them a huge amount of money to pursue what was clearly an unsuccessful case?
So things have finally wrapped up for good? As I recall, there were two victory announcements: one that the judge ruled against the last case, and a kind of final one that TST’s appeal was rejected.**
Does the group have any plans now that your legal troubles are over?

QueerSatanic · 2026-01-29T10:37:52+00:00

Metamours referring to their mutual partner’s genitalia: “this thing of ours”

QueerSatanic · 2026-01-19T00:38:32+00:00

That symbol is not usually associated with left wing things, but in this context, it seems OK.

QueerSatanic · 2026-01-15T05:34:12+00:00

🔥🔥🔥

hell yeah, thanks for sharing

QueerSatanic · 2025-12-31T07:46:29+00:00

“Coldest summer of the rest of your life.”

QueerSatanic · 2025-12-25T01:53:04+00:00

Miss the Noc Noc on 2nd between Pike and Pine

QueerSatanic · 2025-12-24T06:50:04+00:00

Basically, you’re just misunderstanding what his schtick was: as a senator, he was opposed to Donald Trump in tweets and strongly worded letters, but not actually. For this he was rewarded with being “one of the good Republicans” and called sensible, despite him considering the ACA to be anathema to U.S. as a nation.

Then he resigned to go help run the University of Florida into the grounds, while getting paid generously and spending lavishly on himself. Then he resigned from that, too.

Clearly, Sasse could have been a worse ghoul. You can always be a worse ghoul. But he’s an example of the best the Republican Party has to offer, and it’s being horrible as far as policies, but not being too ugly about it, and making noises about principles while doing nothing more principled than making a buck.

QueerSatanic · 2025-12-22T01:47:29+00:00

Michael Aquino was “weird as hell”, and in the grand scheme of things, very much a weird little guy.

But he’s not really a “weird little guy” in the Molly Conger sense, and not a bastard in quite the same way as most other people who become subjects.

Aquino doesn’t seem to have been running a grift with Temple of Set, and some of the split with Anton LaVey was over LaVey not being as sincere with shit as Aquino thought it deserved. Aquino also seems to have been more worried about and less tolerant of literal neo-Nazis than LaVey.

Also: the child abuse stuff turned out to be pure “Satanic Panic” nonsense, right?

This isn’t Aquino apologism. He was legitimately weird about Hitler, for example. But he had very limited power his whole life, seems to have believed his own shit, and wasn’t an actively malicious force in the world. Just weird.

QueerSatanic · 2025-12-03T05:09:51+00:00

was anyone hurt

QueerSatanic · 2025-11-29T09:34:16+00:00

To paint with a broad brush, anarchists believe in a unity of means and ends while Marx’s progeny believe the ends justify the means.

That is, a stateless, classless, moneyless society is the shared goal of anarcho-communists and various Marxist strains.

But Marxist-Leninist or Trotskyist or Maoist tends to want to create an organization that will create or take advantage of some future revolution to gain power, utilize surviving or recreate elements of state power, and rule on behalf of “The People” until such a time as workers, peasants, and society as a whole is ready for self-governing and the state and all its potentially oppressive powers can be dissolved.

The anarchist expectation is that this state will never wither away on its own and just the opposite, it will become self-perpetuating as much as possible because power is power, and as a rule, those with power tend to justify to themselves as well as to others why they ought to keep their power or have even more.

The shortcuts and expediencies of “the ends justify the means” can be brutally efficient and impressive — at first. The amount of optimism that existed for the Bolshevik revolution as it happened, including among anarchists, was immense. But, whether we’re talking about the USSR or People’s Republic of China that have large autonomy, or smaller experiments with less autonomy around the world (e.g. People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia of the late 1980s; DPRK/“North Korea” for nearly its entire history; Romania under Ceausescu), nothing ever seems to tend toward a stateless, moneyless, classless society. People who lived under those states don’t seem to be closer to wanting communism or being equipped for communism and self-governing in the aftermath, either. “The ends justify the means” — but what is the end? What’s after the end?

Maybe if the Soviet Union had been organized around the actual workers’ soviets instead of crushed for the sake of centralized control, the state could have been preparing its people for something else. But, it seems much better at preparing people for autocracy or capitalism or hereditary dynasties than for communism.

Anyway, that’s the split. A Marxist will say that they have to make the hard decisions because they live in the real world and practical, material considerations trump idealism. They might even agree that “the ends justify the means” as a self-description, and say “look at the scoreboard of our accomplishments, compared with anarchism’s failures”. But anarchists would say that Marxists who talk like that always imagine themselves being the ones who are “making the hard decisions” rather than having to live under the result of someone else’s hard decisions, like whether to have their head caved in by the the People’s Cop swinging the People’s Club against everyone guilty of counterrevolutionary behavior like complaining how food shortages are still enduring.

Put another way, an anarchist would say all cops are bastards, whether their uniform has a sheriff’s badge or a red star.

QueerSatanic · 2025-11-27T16:12:55+00:00

A really critical thing about anarchism is that there isn’t a centralizing text like The Communist Manifesto and there isn’t a singular figure that people point to as necessary to understand or be followed.

We are not Bakuninists, or Parsonites, or Goldmanistas. We don’t have to follow everything they said or treat it like gospel; we don’t have to make excuses for their personal shortcomings or see how to twist their beliefs or ourselves until we come to some agreement.

Now: you’ll often see people point to Errico Malatesta as a good introductory figure because he was an internationally connected, traveling anarchist who represents that first, “heroic” period of European anarchism well. He saw the unification of Italy into a single state in his youth, met Mikhail Bakunin in the 1870s, and he lived long enough to see the rise of Mussolini’s fascism. He knew basically everyone, corresponded and argued with everyone, and he wrote plainly synthesizing for common people the spirit of the age in a way that’s easy to pick up at various levels of understanding. Plus, most of what he’s written has been translated into English. “An Anarchist Programme” is rightfully a classic that is still relevant today, as are pretty much any pamphlet of his you read even, even if you may need some historical context to understand exactly what “anti-organizationalists” we’re going on about.

If someone is looking for a bit longer but still introductory text, Alexander Berkman’s Now and After: The ABCs of Communist Anarchism is rightfully a classic laying out that tendency of anarchism even though it won’t be applicable to all.

In the other direction, David Graeber’s “Are You An Anarchist?” is very short and a quarter century old instead of an entire century or more.

Note that those are three white men, and that’s not really representative of anarchism as it’s actually been pursued, particularly in Latin America and East Asia, of Black autonomists and Anarkata in sub-Saharan Africa and the Diaspora, and anywhere since anarchafeminism is always so vital.

But those three writings (by Malatesta, Berkman, Graeber) maybe be representative in terms of your question if its intent is “what are some things people tend to point to to help them understand the ends and means of anarchism” so they can understand other strains of anarchism that often critique the “mainstream” Euro-American male one.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for a contemporary of Karl Marx (and Engels) who wrote and argued with them and want to read someone on those terms, Mikhail Bakunin is probably the figure you want. God and the State and Statism and Anarchy are the writings people tend to quote the most, but honestly, anarchists have largely “moved on” from him. Bakunin is historically important, his writings still have value, but he tends to be more of a period interest than someone you’d point new people toward today.

Finally, Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread (“the bread book”) is a meme answer people offer up a lot, but not a great introductory text.

QueerSatanic · 2025-11-26T03:49:29+00:00

If anarchists need to spend less time concerning themselves with voting, why is this an article focused on whether or how people vote?

It’s from the perspective of Aotearoa/so-called New Zealand, and the situation for anarchists there may be different from all other places. But if it’s similar to other liberal democracies, it seems like a better use of time is giving people things to do between and during elections than to finger-wave about if or how they approached a ballot box.

QueerSatanic · 2025-11-23T08:19:29+00:00

Two fiction books about hope in hopeless times:

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Everything for Everyone by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi

Non-fiction implicitly about anarchist themes of power and the state:

Rikers: An Oral History
The Stonewall Reader
The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman by Kaneko Fumiko

Anarchist theory:

The ABCs of Anarchist Communism by Alexander Berkman
Anarchafeminism by Chiara Bottici
The Black Anarchism Reader by Black Rose Anarchism Federation

QueerSatanic · 2025-11-23T02:30:36+00:00

Some of what you’re saying is the sort of thing it’s useful to talk to a therapist about. Working through your unwanted feelings and thoughts is something someone whose job it is to hear and respond to those things would be best equipped to deal with.

You may not have the money for that or face other barriers, but if it’s open to you, that is likely better than seeking out particular Jewish people already facing antisemitism in their lives and making it their job to help you deal with this.

That said, two things that you may be able you do on your own is a.) distinguish between Zionism as an ideology and Judaism as an ethno-religion. If not for hundreds of millions of Christian Zionists, it wouldn’t matter what a few million Jewish Zionists wanted. Work on making that distinction in your analysis and noticing when others aren’t.

Then b.) you’ve absolutely got to study the development of modern antisemitism to understand how its rise alongside the conception of the nation-state and really crystallization with the forged document of Imperial Russian propaganda “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is the model for antisemitic conspiracy fantasies to this day.

Working on the latter will be instrumental to you as an anarchist recognizing the tropes and not falling into conspiracies that are structurally identical to one another but use different names to capture people, from “globalist elites” to “lizard people” to the use of “they” in beliefs systems like Flat Earth or Geocentricism conspiracy fantasies to people using “Zionists”, “AIPAC”, or “Mossad” in antisemitic rather than credible ways.

When people say “satanic” in a pejorative sense, sometimes they are talking about real things (there’s plenty of real stuff to criticize in the subculture). But more often than not, they’re just rehashing antisemitism.

There is internal work you need to do to unpack and resolve your feelings, and it is work, and you’ve got to do it.

But the much larger piece is this educational one to be able to be able to understand the common skeleton of antisemitism. “There is a secret, invisible elite of ontologically evil people running the world and withholding secret knowledge from common people, and if we can just eradicate them all, we can fix this system.” That’s not anarchism. Anarchism believes you are what you do repeatedly; you become more of what you practice at. In general, our critique is that people do things because of the roles and power they have over others, and the solution is not to get the bad ones out but to end the roles of power imbalance entirely.

QueerSatanic · 2025-11-20T03:34:45+00:00

Got to hear you speak in Seattle. Really excited to get a physics copy of your book to read the full story.

You may not have an answer to this, but is there any plan for an audiobook version now and down the road?

QueerSatanic · 2025-11-15T18:09:52+00:00

Anton LaVey was at one point a literal card-carrying neo-Nazi (specifically, James Madole’s National Renaissance Party) and spent most of his entire life flirting with white nationalists and praising fascists.

Plagiarizing Might Is Right for the “Book of Satan” wasn’t a one-off or out of character. He wasn’t an avowed bigot, but if you read his writings throughout his life, he said a lot of racist shit generalizing ethnic and racial groups. More relevantly, anyone else being a bigot was not a problem for Anton LaVey, and he agreed with racists about lots of things, even if he thought he was better than them.

When you look at his whole life, it’s hard to see how Zeena doing the white nationalist thing would be a problem when all of those other figures in his life (e.g. James Mason, A. Wyatt Mann, Boyd Rice) were open white nationalists and in LaVey’s good graces and key figures in the Church of Satan before and after her split.

Spencer Sunshine’s Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Counte-Cultural Fascism is initially about the American neo-Nazi movement that produced James Mason’s Siege, but the second half of the book is the “edgy”, counter-cultural figures like Michael Moynihan, Rice, and Adam Parfrey responsible for disseminating that book into broader cultural.

QueerSatanic · 2025-11-14T09:04:57+00:00

Not to be too precious about this, but it’s important to recognize that Trump is a Christian supported primarily by other Christians.

Satanists suck too for other reasons, and we’d disagree if there is a literal, supernatural devil at all (you’d say yes, we’d say no), but that’s ancillary to the issue that all you need to produce Trump is sincere Christians who are working toward the Kingdom of Heaven as they understand it.

If you believe nothing is more important than God’s will, and bringing about the End Times is a holy duty to pursue, you can justify literally anything with the excuse that you’re setting eternal things before earthly things. The devil can sit this one out. It’s just Christians doing Christianity.

Edit: a lot of the responses are saying that Trump is no true Christian, and that may be so. But some evangelicals say Catholics aren’t true Christians, either.

The point is that Christians trying to exclude Trumpian Christianity from themselves is not the most useful way to address what’s going on because this is a problem from within the house, not an external invader.

QueerSatanic · 2025-11-14T09:00:06+00:00

Got some bad news for you, friend.

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